Colourful canvas

THE EXHIBITION ``Gunter Grass — about drawing and writing'' was on recently at the Vinyasa art gallery. Organised by the Max Muller Bhavan, this travelling show revealed another facet of the Nobel Prize winning author. We were given a tantalising glimpse of Grass' drawings, watercolours and prints. That these were reproductions did not really matter. In fact, it was better that each piece was presented in the way it was, in a poster format; each picture accompanied by documentary photographs and texts that placed them in their historical context. The concern was less an attempt to show the development of his visual art than to show through pictures Grass' development as a man who cannot really be reduced to a writer of fiction and point to the interdependence of his writings and pictures. It was a veritable pictorial biography.

Chronological in direction, the display began with Grass' formative influences. Born in 1927 when the national socialist (Nazi) movement gained popularity, Grass grew up in a Germany taken in by the Third Reich. As a 17-year-old, fighting at the front, he hoped that the German's would achieve ``final victory", only to be wounded by the Russians and later taken prisoner by the Americans. As part of the ``re-education'' process Grass and other Germans were taken on a tour of the concentration camp at Dachau. That such atrocities were committed in the name of Germany did not sink in till much later and very slowly. Grass talks about the significance of this period of his life and its influence. It's worth quoting at length: "Whoever was born in the 20's of this century, whoever, like myself, survived the end of the war only by chance, whoever cannot be dissuaded from feeling partly responsible — despite his being quite young — for the huge crimes committed, whoever knows from the German experience that no amount of entertaining chatter in the present can make the past disappear, that person's narrative thread is already spun, he is not free in the choice of his material, there are too many dead people watching him while he writes." Write, he will have to, or draw or paint whatever. As in the ``Stone of Sisyphus" a picture poem, that represents Grass' reading of Albert Camus, the stone, has to be pushed uphill eternally no matter how futile an act it is — you have to act. The poem shows his ironic and affirmative attitude to this determinism. This poem along with some others in the show are part of a series of water colours titled, ``Found objects for non-readers'' made in 1997. After a blanket negative reaction to his novel ``The wide field'' Grass retired, hurt to the forest to look back and illustrate the pivotal moments of his life, using things that surrounded him there. Garden implements, kitchen utensils, his writing equipment and the landscape provide the visual material. He combines them with short verses written with the brush. The show gives an idea of Grass' dependence on the image for the enlargement of his ideas for writing. We see the famous motifs of the rat, the snail, the flounder etc which all became novels.

There are examples of his pictorial plans for particular novels and even writings on terracotta. The show was a primer — on October 9 begins another show at the Max Mueller, of etchings made by Grass for his novel ``The Flounder". It should not be missed.

SHANKAR NATARAJAN

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