Exit Dieter Kopp (1939–2022)
Giorgio Agamben,
Quodlibet, March 14, 2022
Villa Balestra, Via Benaglia 10, Via di Grotta Pinta 10, Via della Penitenza, Via del Governo Vecchio 115, Via Arenula 21, Via Paolo II 1 (his last home) — these are some of the addresses that I remember, among the many where he has resided as he was wandering in
Rome — too many to put, as indeed it should be, a tombstone, like the one in Via del Mascherone in the house where lived
Wilhelm Waiblinger, the biographer of
Hölderlin, “here finally happy”. Because somehow Dieter has always been happy, without caring about poverty or money (when it occurred) or success (when it occurred) or disavowal.
Laura, the daughter he lived with when I knew him, and still for many years after, did not have toys. One day, almost as if she wanted to reveal to me the mystery of the game of life and art, she said to me: “let’s pretend that this real water is fake”.
He had come from the
Upper Bavaria at first to
Florence and afterwards since 1966 to Rome, which he never left, except for a time period — in many respects decisive — between 1972 and 1974, spent with Laura in
Paros island. Among those I have known, he alone was truly Roman, even though he had never complied with a long-stay or residence permit. His was an inhabitant life, which hence was fading more and more away, as in the late verse of Hölderlin: “When into the distance fades the mortal life of human beings...”. Far, in
die Ferne, where “Nature completes the image of the seasons, / That while it lingers, they pass by quickly, / Is something of perfection...”. Far away — for him, who wanted “to represent things as they are — or as they would be if I were not there”, for him who said that the only time that exists in art is the absence of time.
The time spent in Paros coincides with the impetuous advent of colour, with the hallucinatory landscapes glimpsed from the wide open window of the studio and, above all, with the painting that I cannot forget: an almost skyless landscape, just razed to a red ground sprinkled with stones and moss.
“The height of the sky shines down / On mankind then, as flow’rs on trees put a crown”. Thus Hölderlin’s poem ends. It had been a tree in Rome, a slender tall pine that revealed to him “the beginning of a new manner”, after the early “hazy paintings which only gradually were to acquire concrete appearances”.
The colours of Paros resurface timeless in the great Roman nudes of the early Eighties. In the ecstatic lying nude of 1981 I recognise the stern face of Bettina, the girl who was his model, that I often met with him. In the still enchanted and reticent Rome of those years we met almost every day at the bar of
Porta Settimiana, that still had a billiard room, which by now no longer exists. I still hear the stroke of the balls in the games we used to play in the early afternoon, before getting back to where we belonged — he to paint and I to write.
I knew Dieter because of the other dominant thought — along with painting — in his life. In the spring of 1968 we were sitting at bar Navona with
Ginevra and
Elsa Morante in the semi-deserted square that we had chosen as our meeting place, when a tall young man, elegant in his slightly worn double-breasted suit, came close and, with a sort of shy nonchalance, asked Ginevra if she would allow him to speak to her. We have since become friends and almost companions and I got to know all women of his life one after another, in
Circe’s island where we used to spend summer or on the
Monti Cimini, where in those years we had shared a hut next to a stable. At night one could hear the horses’ hooves pounding as well as their loud and anguished neighs.
Painting is a matter of gestures. The painter’s hand does not represent the objects, but rather it grasps its form, “not the reality achieved, but the reality to be achieved”. Hence Dieter’s gesture is both peremptory and nuanced (
flou,
effacé,
Jean Clair wrote). Once he’s grasped the form, it seems that his hand hesitates slowly towards the gradual release of its grip, until letting it slip through his fingers.
As a boy, Dieter was enrolled by his father in the
Hofkunstanstalt of Munich, as a mosaic apprentice. “I was afraid to fail the colour test, that is essential for such a job”. Something of the mosaic was imprinted in his gesture, the minute fragmentation of colours that when one looks at it from the right distance fades into a priceless integrity.
I don’t think Dieter cared too much for the polemical battles which he loved to kindle. Certainly he did not receive the recognition he deserved. However, I believe the appreciation of
Balthus and Jean Clair and his early appointment as an
academician of San Luca were more than enough for him. He paid infinitely more attention to the quality of his breakfast croissants than to his career.
He loved pastel, as every true painter. The
Roman Lungoteveres at dawn and sunset of 2000 constitute a pinnacle of this technique, where the gesture stubbornly pursues an indeterminacy that tends to halo and glory. Pastels are also, starting from the end of the Nineties, the bowls on the checkered tablecloth, one of which has been with me for years and never ceases to amaze me: the brown bowl, almost turned on a lathe, stands out on a bright Pompeian red, whilst in the foreground the grid of the tablecloth punctuates an unmistakable musical counterpoint.
Exit Dieter. But whatever the fate of his works in the dark times we are living in, even if the wretched archives of culture should lose memory of it, the gesture of his painting remains unforgettable. It does not demand to be remembered, but to remain forever unforgettable.
