The Berliner

For years the late Werner Heldt was called "the Utrillo of Berlin," a tag that enraged him all the more because it was based on the shallow observation that both he and Utrillo painted city streets. Both also drank. Yet that deprecatory comparison was about the measure of Heldt's renown at the time of his death seven years ago. This week Heldt is enjoying a sudden spurt of fame as the key figure of a new, nonabstract "Berlin School." The critical applause comes from a show in Wiesbaden of the collection of rich Machine-tool Maker Kurt Brandes.

Seamy Side. A pastor's son, Heldt took early in life to the seamy back streets of Berlin of the '20s, where blank-faced men and women stood bathed in the ghostly light of a single street lamp or hung around restaurants and bars that were tense and joyless, as if the whole city knew of the dark days just ahead. After Hitler came to power, Heldt quit painting, became a kind of vagabond doing whatever jobs he could find. He was drafted into the army in World War II, and spent three months as a British prisoner. It was not until 1945 that he took up his brushes again.

His subject was still his native city, but now his paintings became "rubble-scapes." Like the generation of expressionists before him, he painted a world that was half real and half dream, but always supercharged with emotion. Violet waves of rubble might in one canvas wash up upon some imaginary shore in the heart of the city; in another canvas a lone fisherman rows slowly down the River Spree as scores of dark windows stare blankly out of vacant interiors. In Heldt's final canvases, the city itself broke up into childlike chunks of color that teetered and lurched crazily against one another. The color was bright but shadowless, and the streets were eerily still.

Life of the Party. Heldt lived out his life in one cluttered rented room in the musty West Berlin apartment of two old women. He was cultivated and witty, the author of innumerable nonsense rhymes, the life of any party; but his favorite haunts were the seedy back-street beer halls (Berliner Kneipen) frequented by taxi drivers, petty criminals and superannuated prostitutes. Though he talked year after year of going off to Italy to visit his friend Artist Werner Gilles on the island of Ischia, he let year after year go by before he could bring himself to apply for a passport. He loved West Berlin with a passion, had not budged from it since 1945, and his mythical trip to Ischia became a standing joke among his friends.

At last, one day in 1954, Heldt got a passport. The night before his departure for Italy, he made the rounds of his Kneipen to say goodbye, later wrote from Ischia that he wondered whether he would ever see his old haunts again. He never did. At Ischia, after a bibulous evening with his friends, he died in his sleep at the age of 49. The end was so peaceful that Werner Gilles cried out in a mixture of grief and envy: "He stole the death I had planned for myself."

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