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Rolf Cavael
(1898 - 1979) |
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Cavael, who studied at the Städel school in Frankfurt starting in 1924, initially earned his living doing work for the film industry as an advertising graphic artist and instructor for applied graphic arts. His first exhibit in the year 1933 in Braunschweig, which he conducted together with Josef Albers, was the event that prompted the National Socialists to prohibit him from painting. As a pioneer of the abstract, Cavael strongly supported the theoretical post-war controversy concerning the polarisation of abstract and objective art. Together with Gerhard Fietz, Rupprecht Geiger, Willy Hempel, Brigitte Meier-Denninghof and Fritz Winter, Rolf Cavael founded one of the most significant artists' groups after 1945, the Group ZEN 49 in Munich, under the patronage of Willi Baumeister. One motivational force behind Cavael's work is his fascination for microbiology and his study of the laws of nature. In fact, his "floating forms" of the early 1950's are indeed reminiscent of cells seen through a microscope, compact geometrical forms which seem to develop lives of their own and correspond against monochrome-coloured backgrounds. The effect of the precision and static tranquillity of this phase of his work gave way to strongly gestic works full of dynamics in the 1960's and 1970's. Scrutiny of these works reveals Cavael's affinity to music. Compositions took shape in which Cavael, using the means of painting, found an "inner sound", comparable to Kandinsky. In comparison to Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, in whose lineal labyrinths the line is reduced to a product of coincidence, Cavael's lines become increasingly independent and advance to the most important means of expression. Colour plays a contrapuntal role, allowing whirlpools of lines to swell to brilliant crescendi or pitting against the staccati and the fermate, suggested by the brush. |
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