Micromegas II

The abstract work of Fritz Winter: 1928-1971

The Micromégas principle with its changes in perspective between the microcosm and the macrocosm, this being the basic concept behind the parallel exhibition of the abstract works of  Bott, Hartung, Schultze, Thieler etc., may also be readily applied to the works of Fritz Winter. Here, too, the Micromégas principle – as in Voltaire’s story of the same name – forces us to relativize our own existential position: just like the “specks of dust” – the human beings in Voltaire’s story – Winter is, to use his own words, “but a grain of sand in the cosmos, full of reverence for the universe and its thousands upon thousands of worlds.”

Born in 1905, Fritz Winter first trained as an electrician and worked as a miner before enrolling as a student at the Bauhaus in Dessau, precisely at the time when painting – as a pure, unapplied art – was struggling to free itself from the clutches of architecture: “The more  the Bauhaus architects sought to achieve a utility and design oriented objectivity governed by standardized mass production, the more radically the Bauhaus painters sought the opposite extreme: individualistic, imaginative subjectivity, mystical, metaphysical.” (Ernst Kalla)  This was certainly the case with Fritz Winter, for his teacher was Paul Klee, who spoke out vehemently against the use of painting in architecture. Like Klee, Winter was not simply concerned with showing “what was there” but rather with showing “what was also there”.  It was in this sense that Winter saw himself as a visionary.