Incantations in Color

His first love was music. Even today, at 69, Julius Bissier plays the cello and loves chamber music. And the tiny, delicate paintings that he creates, small magical incantations of color, are in his fond word "songs."

Bissier prizes his little songs and feels lonely when they are absent. But absent they were last week: 130 of his recent works, 88 of them straight from his tidy chest of portfolios, went on show in the new quarters of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art (see opposite page). Two years ago, few people outside his native Germany had ever heard of Bissier; it took a major prize at the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1961 to establish him abroad as the leading abstractionist of small harmonies.

Zen German. Bissier's fragile modes had rude beginnings. Son of a French-descended blacksmith whose forebears moved to the Black Forest from Toulouse, Bissier first explored landscape. Gold medals came his way, but after the Third Reich banned him from exhibiting in 1933 and a disastrous fire at his Freiburg University studio destroyed all his work the next year, he cast aside the past.

"You are Chinese!" a famous German Sinologist, Ernst Grosse, had exclaimed when he bought 16 of Bissier's works in 1919. "I was puzzled," says Bissier, but in 1920 he began studying Zen Buddhism, and at length saw what Grosse meant. "The key element of my work is the balance of contrasting things," he says. He seeks with the brevity of his brushstroke what he calls the "concept of bipolarity": the yin-yang principle of gentle seesawing between the male and female, the calm and the restless, always seeking the ultimate equation that man can never quite strike.

Breathing Brushstroke. Bissier's art is in a sense torn literally off the fabric of the world. Working from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. in his studio on the Swiss end of Lake Maggiore, he prepares thready-edged linen canvas or irregular pieces of batiste shirting. Over these loose, unframed scraps, he lays on slick sizing so that subsequent brushstrokes in oil tempera seem to float above the surface. He paints where the bristles of his soft, often home-made brushes lead him. He says he is "listening to the brush--I want my colors to breathe, not to cover up."

So his colors go on in spontaneous strokes that evoke the pages of an aging sage's diary; he signs and dates them in scrawly calligraphy before he begins. Each day's entry seems much the same, but some entries are too personal or too imperfect to be seen, and are destroyed. Others add to the meditative melodies of Bissier's world, and to the greater world he so patiently has survived.

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