ArtistGerman
Horst Janssen
7 active items
Few artists in postwar Germany left behind a body of work as compulsively personal as Horst Janssen. Born in Hamburg on 14 November 1929 and raised in Oldenburg by his mother and grandparents after his father was absent from his life, Janssen found his way into art early. After the deaths of his mother and grandfather during the early years of World War II, he was housed at a National Political Institute of Education in Haselünne, returning to Hamburg in 1945. From 1946 to 1951 he studied at the Landeskunstschule Hamburg under Alfred Mahlau, a teacher whose grounding in graphic craft would shape Janssen's practice for decades.
A formative stint at Guido Dessauer's decorative paper factory in Aschaffenburg (1952-1956) introduced him to lithography. It was Paul Wunderlich, however, who taught him etching, and that technique became the medium Janssen would push furthest. His graphic output eventually ran to roughly 3,000 etchings and around 20,000 drawings, with 47 distinct etching series in his catalogue. The sheer volume is striking, but more striking still is the coherence: across decades of work, Janssen returned obsessively to a small number of preoccupations - self-portraiture, erotic fantasy, death and transience, still life, and landscape - working through them with a precision that critics compared to Rembrandt and Albrecht Dürer.
His self-portraits in particular became a signature. Janssen drew his own face from extreme close-up and unusual angles, magnifying the skin's texture until every wrinkle and blemish was both hyperreally precise and strangely hallucinatory. The effect oscillates between unflinching documentary record and something nearly grotesque, always resisting the flattery that portraiture so often courts. Alongside these were the erotic works - drawings and prints with an explicit sensuality rooted in his personal relationships and in a frank engagement with desire, vulnerability, and the body.
Recognition arrived steadily. Hamburg's Edwin Scharff Prize came in 1966, followed two years later by the Grand Prize for graphic art at the 1968 Venice Biennale, one of the most significant endorsements of his career. His first major retrospective, held at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover in 1965, prompted the museum's director to describe him as "the greatest draughtsman apart from Picasso" - a remark that circulated widely and positioned Janssen as something apart from the prevailing currents of postwar German abstraction. He was, in a real sense, a counter-current: committed to drawing, to figuration, to the hand, at a moment when much of the European art world was moving away from all three.
Janssen died in Hamburg on 31 August 1995 and was buried in Oldenburg. Five years after his death, the city opened the Horst Janssen Museum in Oldenburg, now the principal repository of his legacy. The Hamburg Kunsthalle also maintains a dedicated Janssen cabinet. His market is active primarily at German auction houses such as Ketterer Kunst, Grisebach, and Lempertz, where works on paper regularly change hands; recent averages place his works on paper around 2,000-2,500 USD, with rare prints reaching significantly higher. On Auctionist, Janssen appears across 40 items, with the strongest presence at Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo (13 lots), reflecting genuine Nordic collector interest, followed by Stockholms Auktionsverk Hamburg and Düsseldorf/Neuss. Top recorded sales on the platform include a 1981 figure composition and a self-portrait from the same year, both sold in Norway.