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Graphic Overtures
Pierre Mendell’s Posters Mark the Visual Image of the Bavarian State Opera
By Karl Michael Armer
The opera goes out on the street. Munich has it good. All over the world, the only place you’ll find Pierre Mendell’s wonderful opera posters is in the museum – in Munich they hang on the street. For over 12 years they have enriched the urban image, inspiring, unmistakable and with a downright inexhaustible wealth of ideas.
This achieves exactly what Peter Jonas chose as a leitmotiv for his directorship right from the beginning: making opera accessible, that is to say arousing curiosity, opening up the art form to new audiences and not being a fortressed enclave for culture vultures but rather an integral part of the city.
Here, the visual image plays an inestimable role in the concert of activities, because the posters, the programs and the banners are the first impression people acquire from a new production. They are the first harbingers of an operatic experience. Long before the curtain goes up, the poster has already set a fundamental mood, an attitude of expectation – like an overture, which, under ideal circumstances, sets the scene, makes people curious, and opens the heart and mind for what is to come.
Pierre Mendell’s works achieve this with a lightness and density of quality that commands admiration. He has created some 100 poster motifs for the Bavarian State Opera since 1993, and virtually every one has succeeded not only in informing, convincing and winning over the beholder, but also, in Peter Jonas’s words: “conveying the lust for adventure and the excitement of the State Opera”. Pierre Mendell’s opera posters are like pulsars in the white noise of the urban signal cosmos. They attract attention clear across the social spectrum. Artistically savvy individuals like them as much as do casual strollers on the street or the expert design panels throughout the world, which keep heaping them with awards.
Through Reduction to Reflection. How is it possible to address so many different kinds of people, to accomplish so many tasks – and all this on a topic as difficult as opera, which undeniably ranks among the most complex products of human creativity? The answer lies in Pierre Mendell’s rock-solid talent for reducing everything to bare essentials. He can free any subject from its ballast until it stands so naked before us that we see it with new eyes.
Like hardly anyone else, he commands the difficult art of illustrating complex contents with simple forms. How he does this is a fascinating, protracted process of deconstruction and reconstruction. First he breaks down the plot to its emotional essence. And that is simple, indeed downright archaic. Pierre Mendell has recognized that in the final analysis opera is about the fundamental things of life: love, hate, loyalty, betrayal, freedom, subjugation, fear, death. Striving for happiness.
He visualizes these deep emotions and high ideals with the simplest symbols. Church=cross. Egypt=pyramid. Ruler=crown. Violence=blood. Love=heart. But the surprising contexts he places these simple symbols in, the way he takes these core concepts he has reduced to their essence and reloads them with new, amazing cross references, associations, irritations – that is the actual mastery and the distinctive signature of Pierre Mendell. Just look at the poster for Così fan tutte. A heart – but not just that. A corset. A décolleté. A mask. Exposure. Disguise. The thoughts get caught up in the flow and try to produce new connections. Pierre Mendell knows how to unite the obvious and the enigmatic in a single motif. His posters are straightforward, and then again they are not, often embodying something ambiguous. Forebodings of complex subtexts flash like will-o’-the-wisps behind the visible elements. As in a Japanese haiku, in which things not said are at least as important as things said, controlled emptiness is more meaningful than uncontrolled abundance. This quality is exemplarily embodied in Pierre Mendell’s personal favorite motif, the opera poster for Don Carlo. It shows us the black soul of the Inquisition. More than that – a nothingness, a lurking emptiness, a vacuum. And all at once we understand. Here is a virulence at work, which is as monstrous as it is because it no longer seeks to injure, but has rather already moved beyond all emotion. We recognize the businesslike, casual, inwardly calm brutality of concentration camp guards for which murder and torture are not conscious acts of barbarity but rather collateral damage in the service of their ideology. We comprehend the total indifference of the evildoers, the negation of every value, the facelessness of terror – evoked by the simple stratagem of leaving out the Grand Inquisitor’s face.
Many motifs possess a disarming charm. Die Zauberflöte – what a gracious gleefulness! Many have a feather-light irony in them, such as Don Giovanni, where the cross is placed right on the spot where pleasure and transgression meet. And many motifs are keenly incisive. The Rape of Lucretia, a torn sheet of paper. Quite simple – but is there any better way of illustrating the rift of elemental human confidence the victim is forced to suffer?
That is what makes Pierre Mendell’s works so rewarding for the beholder. The first glance is followed by another glance. The first thought is followed by another thought. Then a third, a fourth one. Unawares (what a paradoxical word in this context) we have entered into a dialogue. The deep current below the surface has captured us. This is the earmark of great art, which is also always intensive communication. The more it demands, the more it provides.
Beyond the day. Peter Jonas has very tellingly characterized the essence of Mendell’s work when beside the “freedom of unending variety” he points out the “virtue of perpetuity”. This latter quality is often overlooked. But the never-changing position of the text block on the posters, the never-changing typography (a timelessly beautiful Bodoni) give the appearance an exemplary calm and constancy, a frame of reference in which the individual motifs with their colored silhouettes all the more radiantly come into their own.
There are many cultural institutions in Munich, but none has such an distinct visual image as the State Opera. There are many good cultural posters in Munich, but only a very few have such striking recognizability. One look, a fraction of a second suffices, and it is clear: ah, a new poster from the State Opera.
The unmistakability and vitality of appearance, uninfested by any compromises, is an expression of an inner attitude, in other words Corporate Identity in the best sense of the word. It is, however, concurrently a protest in graphic form against the interchangeability of the arbitrary and the endless, zombie-like revivification of the success formulas of putative chart-toppers all of which have been done to death ages ago. Everything in life is transitory – stagings, theatre directorships, posters in any case. But the best ones succeed in providing something very special: they compress an evanescent event into an everlasting remembrance.
The writer is active as an author, a journalist and a free-lance creative director in the advertising industry.
The Pinakothek der Moderne will be showing the exhibition “Pierre Mendell – Opera Posters” from 6/21/2006 to 9/3/2006.
Così fan tutte
Don Carlo
Die Zauberflöte
Don Giovanni
The Rape of Lucretia
Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria
Elektra
Der fliegende Holländer
Alcina
Lulu
