The Hinterside of Life

One day in 1944, a ragged column of Nazi conscripts marching toward Poland was suddenly startled when a middle-aged recruit dropped out of line, turned around, and started marching homeward at the same tempo. A sergeant barked at him to stop, but Painter Werner Gilles replied mildly and matter-of-factly, "That blackbird up in that tree just told me, 'No, no, Gilles, this can come to no good.' " In time, Adolf Hitler's army psychiatrists sent Gilles back to the safety of civilian life, but for the painter the talking blackbird had been as real as the barking sergeant.

Old friends of Werner Gilles, who died last year at the age of 66, recalled this story last week not to do his memory injury but simply to help explain the large retrospective on display at the Academy of Arts in West Berlin. The colors Gilles used were often crazy-quilt bright; but the apparent gaiety of his paintings is deceptive, for the glowing landscapes and childlike figures are always haunted. To Gilles, fantasy and reality were one and the same thing. Gilles was, says an old friend, "on everyday terms with the hinterside of life."

Every Shadow a Dragon. Until he began winning praise and prizes a few years ago, Gilles was one of the most chronically unsuccessful painters of his generation --and also one of the most enigmatic. He had been a favorite pupil of Lyonel Feininger at the Bauhaus, yet he showed no trace of Feininger's misty geometry. As a colorist, Gilles was a descendant of the expressionists; he also borrowed from Klee, Miro, Munch, and even Picasso.

But his way of looking at things was always his own. He did not paint mountains, but their inner anatomy; he could see demons in the cheeriest of scenes, could find menace lurking inside the most ordinary object. His world was like the nursery of an overimaginative child to whom every fleeting shadow on the wall is a dragon or a ghost.

He spent half of almost every year on the Mediterranean island of Ischia. His Ischia landscapes are among his best works, but they were more the landscapes of a dream than of nature. No sun bathed them; they seemed to be lit from within. And sometimes a tree or a mountainside would take on the shape of a bird, a face or a giant eye. Gilles painted Ischia's fishermen, but they were as lonely as his gods, as tortured as his Ophelia and Lear. Whatever his subject, it was thick with melancholy.

Gilles loved music, Rimbaud and Verlaine. He suffered from occasional bleeding of the palms, probably caused by the turpentine he used while at work. It is said that he drank at least three liters of wine after dinner. But the wine never dimmed his eye or dulled his fantasies. He would return from an afternoon of painting and quietly announce. "I have been talking to the butterflies." Or he would report, on arising in the morning, "I spent the whole night with the Devil." He never lost his grip on reality, but it was obvious that he had access to another world.

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