Gotthelf Fritz 

Berlin, 1912-Munich, 1984

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Fritz Gotthelf was born in Berlin in 1912, he studied in a German military college, and left Germany in 1933 for France, and then Great Britain. Detained in a camp in Ethiopia during the Second World War as a German national, he ended up in Beirut at the beginning of the 1950s, after several years of wandering around the Middle East. He opened an art gallery and a furniture factory funded by two young architects and a Lebanese amateur artist.

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In Lebanon in the 1950s, the applied decorative were linked to the cultures and craft practices of the different communities. Production went from copies of the 1930s to variations of French styles. It reflected an art of living that was drawn, at best, from Ottoman social decorum, when it was not an “Ottomanisation” of taste, that is to say a reinterpretation of the Baroque or Rococo. From signification without function to social decorum without purpose, the history of applied decorative arts of the period remains to be written. It can only be said that it represented what was, rightly or wrongly, the most overrated element of the social code, affected by a reference that may be Ottoman or European.

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Gotthelf challenged the concept of taste, and therefore the truth of perception and of beauty. He introduced the inevitable question of form to Lebanese society. For him, the extreme answer was that form had to follow function. This certainly went much further than the first reading of the influence of the Bauhaus. But he believed the question and the answer were devoid of history, without a past, unaware that by injecting the Bauhaus and the 1930s German avant-garde into the Beirut of 1950, his work was also off-centre.

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In a larger way, he also questioned artistic perception and the notion of taste. He lacked the means to perceive himself as anything other than the exporter of a few ideas in the two fields that seemed the most urgent to him: furniture manufacturing and painting.

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His approach to painting could be seen in the exhibitions at his gallery, which was devoted to German painters, Carzou, Japanese prints, and Lebanese painters of the 1950s : Abboud, Aouad, Kanaan and Rayess. His approach seems more important than his discoveries or his creations. Affected by nervous depression, he left Lebanon in a great hurry in 1956. 

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Gotthelf is interesting for the cultural sociologisation of painting in Lebanon, which  previous step covered the end of the 1920s and 1930s, with the exhibitions at the Cercle de l’Union francaise and the first painting salons of the Amis des Arts and the Lebanese Parliament. With Georges Cyr, whom he would exhibit, Gotthelf understood that he could not ask questions about modernity without questioning how the Lebanese society perceived it. The problem was not about popularisation, but about real life in its relationship to art. Cyr turned the page of his watercolor period, and wondered about his potention place in post-Cubism and in the history of painting in France. He had not understood that the young Lebanese, in the way they saw the avant-garde, could not keep him as a point of reference or as the founding father of their modernity. They naturally turned towards Paris, Metzinger and André Lhote for the understanding of neo-Cubism as one of the expressions of this modernity. For them, neo-Cubism was, in fact, the only means of disassembling the modernity of the European canvas while attempting to understand it ; since they could not do so with the realism of Onsi and Farroukh, who represented a tradition they rejected – which was seriously questioned by Manetti’s teaching at ALBA. 

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After leaving Lebanon, Gotthelf worked in Paris and then in Germany. He committed suicide in Berlin the day before the private view of a posthumous exhibition for Farid Aouad, in 1984. His friendship with Aouad had enlightened his existence.