Michael Buthe, cel­e­brated twice in 2019 on the 75th anniver­sary of his birth and 25th anniver­sary of his death, is one of the most fas­cinat­ing char­ac­ters in post-war Ger­man art. Sculp­tures and space-con­sum­ing installa­tions, highly inno­va­tive assem­blages and spir­i­tu­ally charged paint­ings by this four-time doc­u­menta par­tic­ipant have found their way into the col­lec­tions of many Ger­man muse­ums and major institu­tions abroad, includ­ing Tate Mod­ern and the Centre Georges Pom­pidou.

Buthe’s brightly hued oeuvre, far from being a casual, aes­thet­ically moti­vated response to the “Ori­ent”, was rooted in a con­ceptual approach to art, and no aspect of his work illus­trates this as pow­erfully and mov­ingly as what he called his “diar­ies”. These artists’ books—for which Buthe used draw­ing, paint­ing, collage, assem­blage, but almost never writ­ing—not only pro­vide us with abun­dant insights into the artist’s work in gen­eral, but mirror to the story of his life: the forma­tive years as a teenager and stu­dent in Höxter and Kas­sel (until 1968), the open stu­dio in Cologne where artist friends came and went at all times (until his death in 1994), his sec­ond home in Marrakesh (from 1986), and, of course, his adventur­ous glo­be­trott­ing.

Indeed, these diar­ies and book objects tes­tify to how intricately interwo­ven art and life were for Buthe, a principle that many of his con­tem­po­rar­ies proclaimed but few pursued with such rigor.

As the diar­ies are such a seismo­graphic record of his artis­tic and bio­graph­ical devel­op­ment, he sold or gave away only a handful of them: most remained in his pos­ses­sion until his early death and can now be exhib­ited for the first time, almost in their entirety, thanks to the gen­er­ous sup­port of the Michael Buthe Estate in Cologne.

The first book objects date from the early 1960s. Buthe wrapped tape around note­books he had found or acquired sec­ond-hand so that their con­tents were no longer revealed but mys­ti­fied. Other diar­ies from this early per­iod tes­tify to his roots in con­ceptual art and arte povera: the mate­r­i­als are cheap, rudi­mentary, yet voluptuous.

Buthe’s noto­ri­ous trips to Morocco in 1970 and 1972 were an artis­tic turn­ing point with implica­tions for his motifs, his style, and the mate­r­i­als he used. His work became more playful, more col­orful, more opu­lent, and richer in con­trasts. Grad­u­ally he lib­er­ated his paint­ings and draw­ings from the rigid con­s­traints of their sub­s­trate: his lit­er­ally sculptural use of collage and assem­blage started to invade the space beyond the two-dimen­sional surface—the pic­ture acquired a body. The collage-based diar­ies, which often fold out into objects many times the size of the orig­inal book, grew out of Buthe’s intense curios­ity about the cre­ative poten­tial of collage in the 1970s. Their gen­e­sis relates inextrica­bly to those lengthy jour­neys which took Buthe to countries out­side Europe, includ­ing Nige­ria, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Kuwait, Tunisia, Israel, Jordan, and Iran. Here Buthe resorted to collage as a faster technique than draw­ing or paint­ing to cap­ture the flood of fleet­ing visual impres­sions: the diar­ies became portable stu­dios, enabling Buthe to work on a train or at an air­port. The artist and his diar­ies became insep­a­ra­ble and trav­elled with him at all times: for the biggest book in this exhi­bi­tion, his compan­ion Hannelore Kunert cre­ated a tai­lor-made bag.The diar­ies, thus, form an integral part of the Michael Buthe cosmos. They illus­trate the full spectrum of his impres­sions, expe­r­i­ences, encounters, artis­tic con­cerns, and threads of evo­lu­tion. They pro­vide a key to the work and life of an excep­tional artist. Actor Udo Kier, close friend and occa­sional collab­o­rator of Buthe, puts it nicely: “There are ways to recon­struct what Michael Buthe expe­r­i­enced. But how he felt about it can only be under­stood through the diar­ies.”

The exhibits, unless oth­er­wise indicated, belong to the Michael Buthe Estate. They are not for sale. 

Publications

An elab­o­rate facsim­ile edi­tion of the diary Der Vorfall mit dem Körbchen [The Inci­dent with the Bas­ket] (1989—91) will be pub­lished in a lim­ited and numbered edi­tion to mark the exhi­bi­tion. It can be pur­chased at the gallery.This summer, Verlag der Buchhand­lung Walther König will pub­lish­ing the first vol­ume of the Buthe Cat­a­logue Raisonné. It is devoted to the artist’s diar­ies and book objects.