The Academic Curriculum: KAKUAKMO

…according to the artist’s deepest conviction, these are always inextricably linked to the school of perception. 

Following a distinguished and long-standing career as an independent fine artist, Bernhard Karlowitz teaches the discipline of Fine Art. Within his own oeuvre, he has formulated figurative tempera painting, the dimension of the painterly gesture, and a contemporary application of visual-linguistic composition and form into an unmistakable, modern artistic position. 

The mummy portraits of antiquity and the portrait traditions of the Quattrocento and Cinquecento, the painterly liberation by elemental artistic forces such as Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), and subsequently the search for meaning and form within Modernism constitute the cornerstones of a positioning within the art of the painted portrait—far beyond political symbolism, mere decoration, or the superficial copying of a photograph. 

Artists portray the moment, the encounter, and the true dimension of the sitter.

Bernhard Karlowitz graduated from the Kassel State Academy of Art with a widely acclaimed portrait exhibition, for which he received an award from the academy and a grant from the State of Hesse. 

He consistently developed his portrait painting through independent projects and commissions, even executing real-time, life-size, full-length portrait commissions within the gardens of his clients, as well as a major live portrait project with the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. 

Bernhard Karlowitz teaches portraiture from the foundation of his modern artistic position, which continues the tradition of portrait art while simultaneously defining a painterly answer to the questions of Classical Modernism through its formal consequence.

The observation of landscape and the desire to possess its image “within the cave” or “inside the home” spring from a primal human longing that evolutionarily redirects domesticated humanity back to its origins. 

As early as the Bronze Age, landscape motifs were painted into living spaces.

The paysage intime marks a fundamental thematic correction in art history at the threshold of Classical Modernism: here, nature is intended to be neither decorative wallpaper, an idealized divine depiction, nor a psychologized symbol of a soul-landscape in the manner of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840).

The landscape is conceptualized as an autonomous counterpart, whose situational authenticity we account for on a painterly level through the immediate experience of the location—by thoroughly living and painting through the encounter. 

In modern painting, figuration signifies that a certain something takes shape within the creative process: it “figures” itself into existence. This premise presupposes a physical material out of which the figure can constitute itself in the first place. 

This concept, which was profoundly problematized by Hans Platschek (1923–2000), marks a fundamental rupture with the conventional notion that an object can be placed in isolation against a background.

The classical pictorial idea—as developed during the Quattrocento (15th century) and Cinquecento (16th century) to master monumental painting projects of immense narrative density—systemically subdivided the creative process into units of preparatory drafting and final execution. Confronted with the modern artistic position, this traditional order collapses.

Today, the genesis of a painting unfolds within the dialectical dynamic between material, pictorial surface, and the artist.

The painterly form and the chromatic discourse dominate the arena as independent, formal elements, forcing the artist into the reactive role of a moderator. Figuration only emerges when the painterly confrontation solidifies into form and the chromatic pictorial space productively opposes it.

In this sense, figuration is far more than merely “painting a figure,” “working representationaly,” or “depicting something recognizably.”

It is the very quintessence of what modern painting means at its core.

As a student at the Kassel State Academy of Art (within the class for “New Painting (+ Media)” under Professor Rolf Lobeck), I had the privilege of participating in a guest seminar led by Hans Platschek. 

He shared numerous anecdotes from the 1950s art scene, of which he had been an active part, and demonstrated painterly tricks, only to unmask them as such.

During a group critique in front of my studio wall, he examined one of my works that focused on the decay of form, structure, and color within the muddy gray-green of the autumn soil. He told me that the painterly-creative unity of the pictorial space constituted my true foundation—and that the “foreground-background-foreground-background” tension I was exploring was the vital key to what I do.

At the time, this was an oracle’s riddle to me, one I never forgot. 

Nearly twenty years later, while writing an essay on figuration, I suddenly reflected back on Hans Platschek and our encounter.

Today, it appears to me as the anchor for many of my artistic inquiries, a moment for which I remain profoundly grateful.

Ingeborg Scheibler (b. 1929), a scholar of ancient painting highly revered within the fields of archaeology and art alike, demonstrates in her monographs that we may safely assume an advanced concept of color, as we know it today, did not exist during Homeric times—specifically between 1200 and 800 BC. Just as a wine connoisseur can only distinguish flavor nuances once they are conceptually defined, we today are subject to the tabular notion of color as a purely rational concept.

Around the year 2012, Bernhard Karlowitz began to immerse himself intensively in the register of earth pigments, developing from it a new, chromatic-conceptual approach for his painting. From these practical experiences emerged an instructional module for higher academies of art and design, which he introduced in 2015 as a guest lecturer within seminars and academic correspondence: “The Sequential Chromatic Conception within the Earth Pigment Register versus the Opposing Chromatic Conception for Painting.”

Within this context, painting conceptually intervenes at the exact point where it originates in accordance with the studio tradition. Chromatic conception becomes the aesthetic scaffolding of pictorial design within this school. It not only introduces the tonally painterly logic of the figurative composition found in the Quattrocento and Cinquecento—it endows the painter with freedom in the modernist sense, while simultaneously granting a formal-aesthetic stability akin to the harmonic predisposition for composition within the creative act of music.

Bernhard Karlowitz bridges this conceptual approach with the valeur discourse, which served as the relentless touchstone of painting during his studies within the “Class for New Painting + Media” under Prof. Rolf Lobeck at the Kassel State Academy of Art in the 1990s.

Out of this educational context, Bernhard Karlowitz fosters the emergence of tempera application techniques and the painterly gestures they permit—integrally conveyed, and conceptually as well as creatively synthesized.

The human figure constitutes an evolutionary watershed and the visual manifestation of ancient philosophy.

The “Sign of Man” in prehistoric art—as encountered in Australian Arnhem Land, the Serra da Capivara in South America, or the caves of Lascaux—transmits the message that humanity recognized itself in its very essence as human, positioning itself within the context of its lived reality: Man and the inquiry into his existence, his destiny, his potency to act out of his own strength, or to simply submit passively to the gravitation of fate and the reality of being.

The ancient Greek tragic poet Sophocles (c. 497–406 BC) poetically advanced the thesis that while man cannot escape the trials of destiny, he possesses the capacity to comport himself with dignity and honor, or conversely, with cowardice and depravity—thereby giving rise to a moral framework of human conduct. Socrates (469–399 BC) championed the fundamental philosophical stance that through continuous questioning, man must navigate an honorable path (arete) through the decisive moments of life, without claiming the absolute knowledge to grasp as a whole what is right or wrong. He thus extended the philosophical foundations of his older contemporary Parmenides (c. 515–445 BC) into the complex discourse of everyday dilemmas and social conflicts, shaping the bedrock of our moral, social, and political thought.

The symbol for the exertion to bring oneself into this honorable form of a moral being is the perfect human figure of antiquity. It reflects man confronting his condition: suffering, bending, surging—man finds himself “in states” of wrestling for his very being.

The human figure, the human body, was the absolute supreme discipline of ancient art. The mandate was to render these states vividly and authentically. This demand escalated from the requirements of complex figurative compositions or choreographies to the challenge of the flawlessly resolved problem of incarnat (flesh tones) in painting.

According to Ingeborg Scheibler (b. 1929) and Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli (1900–1975), painting was by no means an art subordinate to sculpture, as was long presumed; rather, it was the central artistic medium, subject to qualitatively intricate discourse.
Artistic personalities such as Zeuxis of Heraclea (5th century BC), Apelles of Colophon (4th century BC), and Nicias of Athens (4th century BC) were legendary masters of antiquity who each advanced the representation of the human figure while simultaneously establishing the very “persona of the artist” that remains familiar to us today.
Apelles, court painter to Alexander the Great, is said to have told a cobbler who criticized the rendering of the sandals: “Cobbler, stick to your last.” Nicias is credited as the pioneer of figurative polychromy, while Zeuxis was celebrated for his technical breakthroughs in the interplay of light and shadow (skiagraphia).

The foundation for any qualitative discourse on painting originates precisely here.

Michelangelo was capable of elevating art to unprecedented heights because he humbly recognized the necessity of anchoring his work within the achievements of antiquity, respecting the philosophical meaning inherent within them. Had Michelangelo not defended and fought to the absolute limit for the nakedness of the figure as the expression of man confronting fate, we would not be who we are today.

Within the context of art, the human figure is never an expression of sensual seduction or superficial aesthetics. It is the visual plane of ancient philosophy. Within the context of the Modern, the questions do not alter—only the position from which we confront them.

Paul Cézanne drew with graphite and operated monoinstrumentally.

The monoinstrumental graphite study technique constitutes the most vital medium of modern Fine Art. Through the deliberate use of only a single graphite pencil of one specific grade of hardness, Paul Cézanne transmits to us not only his modern artistic position, but also the precise manner in which it crystallizes into artistic form.

The directly executed line is the seismographic medium that charts his artistic sensibility; it captures the very moment of artistic genesis—the creation of his art. It possesses an inherent chronology that graphically mirrors the process of artistic genesis, endowing art with a new, additional layer as a formal criterion.

Paul Cézanne thereby introduces the standard that separates the classically artistic drawing of the Old Masters from that of the modern painter.

The Cézannesque idea marks the definitive moment when the self-medialization of the artist is demanded within the creative process.

Independently of any specific definition of artistic form, the subsequent artists of Classical Modernism live this idea, breathing it, enduring it, or driving it through their work with ferocious intensity.

Within the œuvre of Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), artistic-formal expression is elevated above the traditional concept of the painting as a mere image. His brushstroke, his radical line, transforms into a nervous, dissecting psychogram.

Egon Schiele’s (1890–1918) hyper-precise draftsmanship is equivalent to the documentation of a physical touch; we find ourselves tracing along the contours of his models’ bodies.

In her graphic work, Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) explores the very limitations of portraying human suffering, her artistic empathy visibly breathing within every single cross-hatching.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) defies any attempt to force an artist into submission or silence. Even while isolated and impoverished within the Swiss mountains, he documents his destiny with an uncompromisingly open and authentic resolve.

Drawing, study technique, and the immediate rendering of artistic observational sensitivity constitute the true credential of a modern artistic position.