In 1953 the Institute of Contemporary Art in London held an exhibition called The Wonder and Horror of the Human Head. This had a lasting impact, even in countries outside Britain. In 2006, more than fifty years after the event, there was even a small capsuled exhibition at the Cubitt Gallery, also in London, which attempted to reconstruct some aspects of the ICA show.

It is relevant to mention this here because such a large proportion of Martin Heinig’s production deals with this subject – it is only rarely that he strays from it, and generally the heads he portrays are shown in isolation, in tight close up.

The ICA show was related to a grand literary and art-historical project that was going forward in Paris at exactly the same period – a series of books by the multi-faceted André Malraux, novelist, art historian and politician, later to be de Gaulle’s minister of culture for eleven years. The first of these was Le Musée Imaginaire [1947]. Revised and expanded as Les Voix du Silence1 [1951], a synthesis of world art history of a kind that had never been attempted previously. This was followed by the two-volume, lavishly-illustrated Le Musée Imaginaire de la Sculpture Mondiale [1952-54]. In turn, all of these enterprises were closely related to new ideas about Modernism – that, far from representing a violent break with the past, it was a recuperation of ideas about the function of art familiar to ‘primitive’ peoples. Both Malraux and Roland Penrose, who organized the exhibition at the ICA, were friends of Picasso. During his period as minister of culture, Malraux was responsible for a great retrospective exhibition that completed Picasso’s transition from rebel to official artist.

It is a good thing to keep these snippets of recent history in mind when one looks at Heinig’s work. It was, for example, the researches undertaken by men like Malraux and Penrose that freed artists from the last vestiges of obligation to the classical tradition. To use classical forms was now a matter of choice, but never an obligation. A study of the objects reproduced in Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire reinforced a perception that had already been stated in different forms in the art of the pre-1914 German Expressionists, and in that of the inter-war Surrealists. This was that artists had much greater difficulty in confronting the reality of the human form, and in particular that of the human face, with its myriad expressions, than they had with anything else they encountered in nature. This instinctive frisson can be detected in art from the very earliest period known to us – in Paleolithic cave-paintings, for instance, the rare human figures are always very much more stylized than the representations of animals.

From the time of the Renaissance onwards artists paid more and more attention to the nuances of facial expression, not least because paintings came to be thought of as dramas frozen at a particular point in their development. Textbooks were produced, showing a standardized range of expressions in diagrammatic form. These textbooks still exist today, only now the diagrams have been replaced by stock photographs.

Heinig’s work represents a rebellion against this external approach, a rebellion that is rooted in the history of German Modernism. The artist to whom he comes closest is Alexei Jawlensky [1864-1941]. Russian by birth but German by adoption. A large part of Jawlensky’s production consists of single heads, and essentially he uses these in the same fashion as Heinig, as vehicles for poetic emotion.

Jawlensky, though associated with the Blaue Vier in Munich, often looks more like a Cubist artist than an Expressionist one. Some of his most effective ‘head’ images are arrangements of planes, which seem to take their inspiration from African masks. Heinig moves even more freely from one stylistic language to another. Sometimes the form of the head is built up with broad gestures. Sometimes, on the contrary, it is created from a multitudes of tiny, evanescent strokes. Some of the heads verge on caricature, somewhat in the manner of George Grosz, others seem to allude to elegant Art Deco magazine illustrations.

What Heinig is doing here is creating a cast of imaginary characters, rather in the manner of a theatre director who is casting a play. He looks for a visage that fits his own emotional mood. The heads are not objective representations of something observed, they are masks, through which a single individual speaks in many voices. Their diversity [but essential unity] reminds me of a famous line from Whitman – the most quoted saying from an often quoted poet who anticipated the Modernist sensibility: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” Everything Heinig paints is distinctively his, and everything is different.

Edward Lucie Smith