Word: sseldorf
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...opening reception at Düsseldorf's glossy new Kunsthalle was mobbed by Ruhr Valley heiresses, bearded intellectuals, and art dealers from all over Europe. In the crush, nearly everyone failed to recognize the artist, Günter Haese, 43, a slender, shy man with an assembly-line haircut and an inexpensive suit. No one, however, could ignore the 27 works on display. Built of watch springs, mesh, tiny cogs and spirals, the small, precisely balanced wire constructions fluttered and danced at the slightest breath. Bearing cryptic names, such as Hermit, Flirt...
Called the International Commercial Bank, the new institution was formed by London's Westminster Bank, Manhattan's Irving Trust Co., Chicago's First National Bank, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp., and Düsseldorf's Commerzbank. As an offspring of the rich (the five banks control resources totaling $18.8 billion), I.C.B. will start life with $8,800,000 capital plus another $16.4 million in loans from its parents. For deposits, it counts on tapping the volatile pool of Eurodollars -U.S. funds held in European hands -which has swelled from nothing to close...
...visitor to West Germany might logically assume that cheery, beery Munich, with its renowned art galleries and swinging student quarter, or perhaps the hothouse glitter of West Berlin, might offer the most congenial milieu for artists. Hardly anyone would think of busy Düsseldorf, a conglomeration of shimmering steel-and-glass office buildings on the Rhine that epitomizes the commercial hubbub of the Wirtschaftswunder. Nonetheless, the lion's share of West Germany's most adventurous artists today find in Düsseldorf just the setting they need. Says Munich's grand old man of art, onetime...
Forward to Zero. To most artists, however, the real lure is Düsseldorfs tantalizing whiff of Zeitgeist. The city's brusque hurly-burly provides both their modern subject matter and technological means for expressing their art. Gotthard Graubner, an abstractionist, for example, paints on huge, cloudlike formations of polyester produced at nearby factories. Peter Brüning, who like Winfred Gaul, is fascinated with traffic and touring maps, points out that he lives in Düsseldorf because it is the geographical center of a "seemingly endless area where roads become the interconnecting arteries between every possible manifestation...
...city's very impersonality acts as a magnet for today's less flamboyant, more businesslike variety of artist. Gerhard Richter observes that "in Munich, the artist is too easily corrupted by the pleasant life. In Düsseldorf, the intellectual air is clean." For artists like Joseph Beuys, this is just the atmosphere for fresh beginnings. "What all of us have been doing," he says, "is trying to return to the zero points, to seek new essentials, to engage in meditations to lead us to the rediscovery of what lies behind our thwarted existence...