Marcus Reichert


Marcus Reichert is an American painter, poet, author, photographer, and film writer/director.
He was given his first exhibition of paintings at the age of twenty-one at the Gotham Book Mart and Art Gallery, New York,. In 1990, he was honored with a retrospective organised by the Hatton Gallery of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne which toured in various forms to Glasgow, London, Paris, and the United States. His Crucifixion paintings have been described by Richard Harries, the Bishop of Oxford, as being among the most disturbing painted in the 20th Century, while the American critic Donald Kuspit has written that both Picasso's and Bacon's pale in comparison. Reichert's neo-noir film Union City, which premiered at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival, was described by Lawrence O'Toole, film critic for Time magazine, as "an unqualified masterpiece." Union City is held in the Film Archive of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and his complete film works and his poetry and prose comprise the Marcus Reichert Archive at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

Painting

From 'Mirages, Transformations, Miracles: Marcus Reichert's Paintings' by Donald Kuspit
Figure or object, face or flower, body or vase, Marcus Reichert's images seem to exist somewhere in the limbo between hallucination and perception. In a hallucination, there's no external object to be observed, however much something seems sensed and present; in a perception, there is such an object, experienced as a “hard fact,” indisputably separate from oneself. There are two kinds of hallucination, the French psychiatrist Jules Baillarger tells us, one psychosensorial, involving the combined action of the imagination and some sense organ, the other psychic, entirely a product of the imagination, with no sensory stimulus. Reichert's hallucinations are of the first kind: his eye is stimulated by the perception of some object external to him, which is then imaginatively transformed into a painted image, producing what Baudelaire famously called a “sensation of the new,” the sort of sensation, as he also said, that a child might have when it saw something for the first time, spontaneously and without preconceptions. The resulting lived experience, as some philosophers would call it, or existential encounter, as others call it, seems miraculous—a sort of miraculous revelation, in which the thing intensely lived seems fresh and wonderful, because one has invested one's own freshness and wonder in it. It is this sense of hallucinatory freshness, combined with a sense that the marvelous is always convulsive, as Breton wrote at the end of Nadja, his account of his relations with a madwoman he met, that we experience in Reichert's paintings. Some are colorful and bright—startlingly luminous, for example in Orange Blossoms, 2008, with its dazzling sky-blue field; others somewhat dark and morbid, which many of the vessel paintings are. The vessel contains the “spirits of the dead,” Reichert writes, suggesting that it is an urn, even when it contains flame-like flowers, suggesting that the dead may be powerful geniis ready to escape from it, bringing life with them. Death and resurrection seem a subtheme of Reichert's art, adding to their imaginative aura. The imaginative unconscious, which re-conceives one's perceptions according to “the deepest laws of the soul,” to allude to Baudelaire's classical definition, is clearly hyperactive in Reichert's art...
Whether resolved or unresolved, the contradictions that inform Reichert's art give it an absurd vitality. Indeed, there is an air of “immediate absurdity” to Reichert's works, a sign of surreality – the fusion of dream and reality – as Breton said. Sometimes it has a satirical, caricaturing, ridiculing edge, adding to the sense of disharmony said to be characteristic of modern beauty, as distinct from the harmony of traditional beauty. It always involves what modern philosopher-psychologists call absurdism, involving the sense of isolation that comes with the feeling of living in an irrational world in which one must create one's own reason for being. It is a shaky, groundless world in which catastrophe, personal and social, seems imminent – a godless world in which there is no net to catch one after one falls from grace. The sense of gracelessness become peculiarly graceful pervades Reichert's eccentric lines and forms, adding to the feeling of absurdity that informs Reichert's works. But however one might categorize them stylistically and expressively, what strikes me as particularly meaningful is their uncanny abstractness, self-evident in the Mechanics of the Universe, 2012, subtly evident in the figural works, be the figure a naked body, as in the wraith-like Yellow Nude, 2002, or a vessel, which has a body of its own, and is a symbol of the human body at its most intact. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that abstraction is a “process of emphasis, and emphasis vivifies life,” which is certainly what Reichert's art does. More pointedly, he said that it is “a stripping bare…in order to intensify,” and Reichert's paintings are certainly intense. The Jungian psychoanalyst Anthony Storr argues that one tends to get more pithy as one gets older – wisely reflect on essences, rather than continue to futilely suffer—and the Mechanics of the Universe seem particularly pithy, suggesting that Reichert's art has gotten more essentialist and less existentialist as he has aged. Epitomizing the abstract mechanics of the universe he in effect epitomizes himself in the eternal abstract terms to which all too human existence can be reduced...
But I happen to be particularly fond of certain existentially inclined works, perhaps most of all Statues, 2012, a late work which epitomizes the war of the sexes, with a certain frank brutality, and Woman with Green Hair, also 2012, which epitomizes the femme fatale, and echoes Matisse's fauvist Woman with the Hat and Portrait of Mme Matisse/The Green Line, 1905, painted more than a century earlier. Scandalously audacious, the former because it was painted with “seemingly wild abandon,” the latter because of its face, which resembled a “primitive mask,” as art historians have noted, both were among the visually violent – some say barbaric – works that inaugurated modernism. Reichert's paintings show that traumatizing audacity can still make a strong psychoaesthetic point.

Films

Filmography

Selected films of Marcus Reichert:
2004 SUNDAY EVENING, photography, design, and direction by Marcus Reichert for high definition surround sound music DVD; Lazy Curtis, Final Touch Productions Ltd., London
1998 THE SEAWALL MURAL, design and direction by Marcus Reichert for public works fine art project; The Renaissance Project, Thanet Arts Development Office
1991 PEOPLE, production design and direction for music video by Marcus Reichert; The Cutaways, Ragin’ Records, Iris Sound / Metropolis Film Studios, Philadelphia - MTV Selection
1980 UNION CITY, written and directed by Marcus Reichert; The Tuxedo Company Inc., New York ; owned by Marcus Reichert & Co. and The Museum of Modern Art, New York
1978 WINGS OF ASH, pilot for feature film, written and directed by Marcus Reichert; Silver Screen Productions Inc., New York and Mick Jagger, London Available for private viewing: Marcus Reichert Archive, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
1977 LE GRAND SILENCE, written, produced, and directed by Marcus Reichert; Silver Screen Productions Inc., New York
1968 SILENT SONATA, written and directed by Marcus Reichert and Akira Arita; Rhode Island School of Design

Photography

Monographs (photography)

Books about or by Marcus Reichert: