In 1994, four years after Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s death, the Kunsthaus in Zurich held an exhibition of his drawings, paintings and engravings that prove that the choice made in his twenties was not an exclusive one. The work displayed (I have the catalogues in front of me) has the convincing vividness of a nightmare. Ghostly figures, wide-mouthed faces, flocks of black birds in crowded landscapes, violence of all sorts, haunt the viewer in black and white and garish colour; for someone who has read Dürrenmatt’s fiction or seen the plays, his artwork has the familiar madness but lacks the method. Its power seems anarchic: nothing frames the terrifying visions on canvas and paper as it does on stage or in print. It is as if G. E. Lessing’s ancient dichotomy that attributed the power of unleashed emotion to writing and contained emotion to the visual arts were here blatantly contradicted, if not simply proved wrong. Dürrenmatt’s writing, however outrageous the plot, is always suspensefully measured, maddeningly reasonable, light in appearance. Not the art.
There is one piece in the exhibition that seems, mysteriously, to connect the wild hallucinatory images with the rational brisk stories. It is a pen and ink drawing called ‘Apokalypse IV’, made less than 12 months before his death. It depicts a herd of wide-eyed horses, each with six or more legs, galloping down the slope of a wind-blown plain against the backdrop of a night sky. Above them, several immense cubes loom threateningly, carried along by the wind. The freely drawn beasts contrast with the straight-edged cubes, their frenzy kept in check by the airborne geometrical volumes. ‘Literature,’ wrote Dürrenmatt early on in his career, in the 1954 essay ‘Theatre Problems’, ‘must become so light that it will weigh nothing on the scale of today’s literary criticism: that is the only way it will regain its true weight.’
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