Enrique Luft-Pavlata was born near Linz, Austria, on August 9, 1931. His original name was Gerold Heinz Luft-Pavlata.
Born into a wealthy Czech-Germanic family, he received a privileged education and, despite the difficulties during the time of the Second World War, his childhood and youth prospered with ample intellectual development. In 1946 his family returned to Germany, where Luft-Pavlata studied mathematics and physics at the Technical University of Munich. Deciding that he wanted to be an artist instead, he ventured to Berlin in the post-war period, presenting his admission exam and being accepted at what was then The Berlin Academy of Arts. His talent and integrity attracted the attention of his professors, among them the renowned Hans Jaenisch and Max Kaus. The latter recommended him for "Die Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes" scholarship of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation.
Later, between 1959 and 1960, he was awarded a scholarship by the French government to study engraving at the legendary Atelier 17 in Paris with Stanley William Hayter. During this period he participated in group exhibitions in Paris, Berlin, Munich, Wolfsburg, and Hannover, sometimes along with his friends and colleagues Peter Klasen and Georg Baselitz.
After the success of the exhibition curated by Fernando Gamboa called “Masterpieces of Mexican Art” at the Mexican Pavilion of the International Fair of Brussels in 1958, Gamboa prepared a version entitled “Art of Mexico and Mesoamerica,” which toured several cities in Europe, including Berlin in 1959. The headquarters was the Berlin Academy of Arts, where Luft-Pavlata was studying. He was invited to collaborate in the assembly of the exhibition. There he met Teresa Dávalos, a Mexican museologist and ethnologist who was in charge of the nucleus of Popular Art in that exhibition. After a brief courtship, they were married in Vienna.
The couple decided to settle in Mexico, which the teachers of Luft-Pavlata, especially Max Kaus, considered madness because his career in Europe had taken off with the power of an artist who was expected to go far. After disembarking in Veracruz, Luft-Pavlata commented that when he saw children and adults in the May 5th parade playing the roles of soldiers and armed warriors, he thought, both amused and nervous: I'm not going to last very long here. On the other hand, he said he also believed he had "trod on holy ground" when he arrived in this country. He often mentioned that when he arrived in Mexico, he felt "at home." Luft-Pavlata maintained close friendships with Fernando Gamboa and many of the artists and intellectuals from Teresa's circle in Mexico City.
On July 21, 1961, the couple began living in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, where Teresa served as director of the Museum of Arts and Crafts of the INAH, the National Institute of Anthropology and History. He became conservator-curator of historical monuments and cultural property in the Directorate of Historical Monuments of INAH, participating in the excavation of the Yácata discovered within the museum's facilities. Later, Luft-Pavlata was also director of this institution and adviser on works of restoration.
During this period, Gerold Heinz Mexicanized his name somewhat becoming known from then on in Mexico as don Enrique Luft-Pavlata. With this act, he declared his integration into Mexican culture, specifically that of Michoacán, while retaining his own unique personality.
Teresa Dávalos died in 1985, but Enrique Luft-Pavlata decided to stay in Patzcuaro, where he had already taken root. Luft-Pavlata used to say with pride, "I am the only and best German - P'urhépecha in the world.” To his great good fortune, he found himself in the region among colleagues who became fast friends: Ralph Gray, James Thomas, Bridget Bate Tichenor, James Metcalf, Ana Pellicer, and Maria Luisa Puga, among others. He also became friends with masons, carpenters, stonemasons, saying that he felt very comfortable among these workers and that he was considered one of them. In those circles he had his first contact with mezcal, a drink that he valued and promoted long before it was accepted by more favored social classes.
Along with his work as an employee of INAH, he continued creating his own personal art, experimenting with various plastic techniques and concepts that were foreign to the provincial environment where he lived, at the same time incorporating in it regional and everyday references. He had decided to work away from the urbane and sophisticated centers of art, faithful to his own aesthetic pursuits, allowing him to forge his career in a way that was honest with himself. There is no way to know how his career would have developed had he stayed in Europe, but probably his work would have been recognized internationally, thanks to the advantages and notoriety available to artists living in large cosmopolitan cities. He, though, preferred and defended anonymity, admiring medieval creators who were conceived of not as artists but rather as artisans. Still, he enjoyed the many compliments paid to his work.
Enrique Luft-Pavlata turned out to be a great conservator, restorer, and architect. He protected at all costs the colonial architecture in the lakeside region, dating from the sixteenth century onwards. He participated actively in the Conservation Board; his work included physical labor and protection of the integrity of the sites from the owners of the buildings and from the young priests who sought to change the appearance of the churches by "modernizing" them. He restored multiple buildings and spaces, such as the atrium of the Old Jesuit College and the Museum of Arts and Crafts, once called The Primitive and Royal College of San Nicolás Obispo. His most arduous and brilliant restoration, of the Temple of Santiago Apóstol in Tupátaro, known as the "Sistine Chapel of America," which had been practically in ruins, took twenty years.
The designs of Luft-Pavlata’s buildings combine elegance, innovation, and tradition. Enrique followed the advice of his friend the architect Eduardo Pareyón Moreno, who told him: "Architects are born, not made. You learn by doing. Do not worry about studying.” Thus encouraged, he designed and built several houses in Patzcuaro, including both of his own. Still not satisfied with building them, he also designed most of the furniture that his carpenter friend Gregorio Perez made with impeccable technique.
A Renaissance man, Enrique Luft-Pavlata was also a writer and translator, composing more than a thousand Haikus and punk poems. He called them "literary scribbles." In 1992, the National Pedagogical University published his book The Lunar Boat at the Service Entrance, as part of the series The Accordion Notebooks. The writer Maria Luisa Puga wrote the introduction; Alain Derbez, the epilogue. Luft-Pavlata translated the book-length essay “The White Goddess, “by Robert Graves, with whom he maintained a friendship through correspondence. He shared with Graves an interest in Alchemy; for years he researched and experimented with all kinds of so-called pseudo-scientific materials. His workshop, due to his experiments in and taste for alchemy, had that same laboratory aura of the workshops in old paintings. He had an almost sacred respect for the materials he used, considering that the materials contributed to the work depending on their inherent characteristics, and that the architect of the work had to be fused with the materials in order to achieve a good result.
Luft-Pavlata had no problem in showing himself to the world as a restorer or architect, but his plastic work became almost private, and not because he distrusted his talent. He knew very well that his work had great merit, but he enjoyed remaining internationally anonymous,—while creating a plastic collection of hundreds of pieces in different techniques and writing his still- unpublished Haikus.
Enrique's oeuvre is characterized by the freedom of those who do not create to please or to sell. Because of the high quality of his work, however, it is found in private collections in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. He created drawings in pencil and charcoal, lithographs, metal engravings, oil paintings, glass paintings (interglass or hinterglas in German), installations, collages, and ready-made art, for which he used wood, metals, threads, figures, and a huge number of found objects and decontextualized common objects. One of his favorite techniques was a very popular one among painters of the Fifteenth Century: the tempera to casein, which he came to dominate to perfection.
The broad series of his work, roughly speaking, can be divided in stages, beginning with the work he did in Berlin, closer to Expressionism, and sometimes to Mannerism. Later came his Surrealist stage, of which there are very few pieces since most were given, sold, or painted over. During the 1980s he began his erotic series, in which he used clippings from adult magazines and brought them to an aesthetic degree, highly refined, colorful, and erotic. Next is his series depicting American football players, which he called "modern bullfighting." Luft-Pavlata here uses the pretext of movement, united with the static nature of the decontextualized objects, to project an attractive and disturbing contradiction. In these two series we see an advanced degree of mastery of the stroke and color management as well as great compositional maturity. Thus was Enrique Luft-Pavlata: He combined the Medieval, Renaissance, Modern and Contemporary in both his personal life and in his work. He was admirer of the medieval artisans, of Leonardo da Vinci, and of Picasso, mainly. He was also inspired by Dadaists, whose concepts he integrated into his personal style.
Luft-Pavlata also explored concepts and figures using more than one technique. These include the bread-board, which would become a persistent figure in his paintings, sculptural installations, wood-based glass painting, painting, and mixed media. Also, the twisted clips, nails, and wires, very common in the rubble of Mexican constructions, where Luft-Pavlata collaborated as an architect and restorer, constitute a recurrent motif. These subjects can be seen in lithographs and in a large number of paintings with green background, some with phrases in Gothic German, which convert each work into a Poster Painting. In this regard, Luft-Pavlata recounted that during his basic education, in boxes containing very fine sand, he performed calligraphic exercises over and over again. Sometimes the phrases are directly related to what is represented, while in others it has no direct correspondence. Enrique gave personality to these found nails and wires, anthropomorphizing or zoomorphizing them, not figuratively, but conceptually. He also painted them just as they were, without such conceptualization, yet with some symbolic suggestion. He made sketches on paper, placing the wires or nails on top, and when he was satisfied with a composition, he painted them. He also painted found objects, placing them in diverse contexts, on a green background characteristic of the entire last stage of production. Some titles of his works are mysterious. Sometimes it seems that they have no relationship with the representation or that their relationship is very intimate, almost secret, as if he were sharing a thought that cannot be revealed in its totality; but such titles give us clues, inviting us to enter the world that he creates and recreates in his work.
After the death of Teresa Dávalos, Luft-Pavlata married Lucy Carpentieri, who knew how to accompany and care for Enrique until his death. She has managed and organized several exhibitions in Mexico and the United States, highlighted by a major retrospective exhibition at the Clavijero Cultural Center in Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico, in 2011.
A polyglot, creative, intelligent, cultured, critical, ironic, playful, Enrique Luft-Pavlata died on January 17, 2014 in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán. Continuing the support she gave him in life, his widow Lucy Carpentieri and her family work for the international diffusion of the life and work of this important European artist who came to find his home in Mexico. This year Ambassadors Press will publish a book written by Miriam de Uriarte on the work of Luft-Pavlata. They are also preparing the publication of an investigation of his life and work carried out by Elisa Garduño. Exhibitions are being managed in various museums and cultural centers in Mexico and abroad. His work is being acquired by international collectors.
Finally, Enrique Luft-Pavlata, who on meeting his old friend Georg Baselitz once said, "The best-known German artist comes to visit the least-known German artist," is now finally beginning to take his rightful place in the History of Art.
Erandi Avalos
Summer 2018