Wolfgang Balk, born in Munich in 1949, completed an apprenticeship as a publishing bookseller in the Carl Hanser Verlag before studying German Studies, Philosophy and Art History in Munich. After completing his studies he worked at Hirmer Verlag, Munich. Thereafter he was the director of Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag in Frankfurt for ten years and then publisher at Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (dtv) in Munich for twenty years. Since 2016 he has lived most of the time in a village near Montalcino.
A Window on the Interior
Is Wolfgang Balk actually an Impressionist?
by Martin Tschechne
On the morning of 13 November 1872, it could have been shortly after half-past seven — the time can be reconstructed by means of the tide tables —, Claude Monet was standing by a window of the Hôtel de l’Amirauté above the Grand Quai of Le Havre, gazing out to the east. An autumn mist lay across the water; the quays and cranes of the harbour became blurred in the milky light just after sunrise. The painting that was created on Monet’s easel at this early hour, Impression, soleil levant, not only acquired a place in the annals of art history. It also left its mark on an entire era, evoking a new image of the artist, of seeing and reality. And it even gave the movement its name.
Now Wolfgang Balk is far from calling himself an Impressionist. Firstly, that would be unoriginal, and such an attitude would contradict his belief in a free art which arises from its own innate strength. And secondly, Balk is a modest man (although admittedly: he is entitled to evince a certain pride in his work). And thirdly, why painting? Throughout his professional life he was successful — very successful! — as a publisher who discovered and encouraged young authors, and also as a book designer and businessman. He took the bold step from licensed paperback editions to original editions, soon also with cloth binding and attractive covers, and as the head of Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (dtv) he was instrumental in the apotheosis of an outdated model into a lively laboratory for new literature. Yes indeed, Wolfgang Balk brought about considerable change in the publishing world.
So he was a book person, through and through. His father was a bookseller in the Munich district of Schwabing, and the first books he bought himself were, of course, paperbacks: Aristophanes and the Iliad. He was later awarded the title of “Publisher of the Year 2000”. His unit of currency is the written word: verse and story, novel and essay. The friends who share his home are Epictetes and Paul Celan, Martin Mosebach and Michel de Montaigne, Mascha Kaléko and Hans Magnus Enzensberger — in summa: the ancient philosophers, modern poets, the young avant-garde of the time and the heroes of a business which for a few more years would be able to revel in self-confidence and baroque extravagance.
But the fine arts, painting — that was always a thing apart: silent and noble, seductive, secretive, a refuge. Almost sacred. And very private.
And yet there is at least one place where Wolfgang Balk and his great predecessor, the founder of Impressionism, seem to meet: it is the window. For the book person from Munich the gaze goes southwards from the walls of a house near Montalcino across the rolling hills of Tuscany as far as the volcanic cone of Monte Amiata. It is here that he spends most of his time. The decades of restless bustle lie behind him, and only seldom does he decide to travel the endless eight hundred kilometres over the Apennines, across the plain of the Po and across the Alps to the pompous theatrics of the culture scene. He much prefers standing alone by his Tuscan window and gazing out.
And then, sometimes, the late sun bathes the horizon in a glowing red and colours blend in the glaring light of summer. Sometimes heavy clouds hang low from the sky. A shower of rain cleaves the grey, wraiths of mist rise from the hollows and a steaming moistness blurs the contours. The painter eagerly absorbs every season and every hour of the day, and it is as if he has thereby finally freed himself from the abstraction of word and line. The path from the eye to the canvas permits no metaphor, no reflective formulation. His pictures do not really need a title, because any title, any hint at literature, no matter how brief, might restrict them in their freedom. Does the mountain in the painting stand for the mountain before his window, or does it represent all mountains? Is it about mountains anyway? The question is never posed. This painting is all light and colour. It represents only itself.
So it seems slightly surprising when Balk says that he feels an affinity in particular with the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi and his tranquil arrangements of bottles or jugs. Is that not a highly literary form of painting?
No it isn’t, says Balk, and explains that it is by no means a matter of reproducing an external reality, but rather the autonomy and profundity of a composition. He admires the American painter Mark Rothko with his vibrating, inscrutable colour fields, and the late works of William Turner with his dancing light. And also the abstract gestures of the Italian artist Alberto Burri, gaunt and fierce, and again and again the mystic figures and signs and tiny formats of Julius Bissier, adapted from Zen Buddhism. Balk cultivates these friendships; he enjoys the proximity, although he avoids the word “models”, see above, see Impressionism.
He pays homage to the poet Paul Celan with one of his own pictures on the cover of a volume of lyric poetry, a work in which an artist like Bissier or Paul Klee can be detected from afar. And yet the artist carefully preserves the distance which the respect and the need for autonomy demand. On his bookshelves you will find the Stoics and the Structuralists, Erich Kästner and Gottfried Benn, Primo Levi and the Irisches Tagebuch of Heinrich Böll. Wealth requires a big heart. What it also demands is knowledge of where it belongs.
Autumn has arrived: it is mid-November. The dark patch of grass in the garden is sprinkled with yellow and red leaves; the last foliage on the trees seems to light up again before dusk falls. Wolfgang Balk has left Italy to spend a few days in his house in Schwabing, in which he is surrounded by the annual rings of his own history, the books, the memories. He looks out.
A painting table is positioned in front of the window in the sloping section of the roof; there is an easel on the right, and painted canvases hang all around on the ceiling beams: an unquiet sky, earth, the outlines of Monte Amiata. What was that? The Tuscan mountain? Here in Munich? What I paint are inner landscapes, says Balk. I paint what I see when I close my eyes.
Martin Tschechne lives and works as a journalist and author in Hamburg. His doctoral thesis in psychology was a study of highly gifted individuals. He was Editor-in-Chief of Weltkunst and a reporter for the art magazine Art. He has produced features for radio and has written numerous books on art and artists as well as on scientists like William Stern, the inventor of IQ.