The Rosenkavalier, 1982
Acrylic on canvas
69" x 44"

Pandora's Box, 1994
Acrylic on wood
18" x 36" x 18"

Pandora's Box (detail), 1994
Acrylic on wood
18" x 36" x 18"

Monika Misslbeck's
Garden of Eden
By Lisa Collado

Monika Misslbeck is a painter of nostalgia who longs for a freer, more innocent world. She dreams of a garden of earthly delights—hortus conclusus—where her protagonists can indulge every sensual whim and explore all desires. Just as our dreams seem more vivid, concentrated, and intense than the fabric of ordinary life, so each painting appears brighter, juicier, and richer, with a riveting embrace of the viewer. The tactility of the work is palpable. She believes that in order for a painting to be successful, those who view it have to be able to practically “taste” it. The thick, layered impasto suggests the “edibility” of the pieces. A comparable environment would be the lush Brazilian rain-forest, where each natural object is larger, raucously colorful, and abundant. Misslbeck paints excess and the heady air of “almost too much without being too much.” Hers is a world of archetypes summoned to replace the blurred familiarity of postmodernity. Evoking ancient stelae and bacchantic processions, her arrangements of shapes are intended to remind the viewer of life, of the body and its part with archetypical memory preserved in refracted images. Misslbeck’s “Fairy Tales” series and Pandora’s Box portray her halcyon Eden before and with no conception of the forthcoming fall and expulsion. A pristine clarity pervades scenes of cavorting figures immersed in unfettered pleasure. The light seems purer and direct, enveloping those figures in a quasi-sacral ambience. The Golden Bough and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring come quickly to mind. The raw exuberance of her palette is sensitized with subtle nuances of shading. These shadings become transformed as they fade and bleach with a relentless impact to divest themselves of substance in order to reveal their essence. This transformation results in a rigorous, radical taking apart and reconstructing of form. Semi-abstraction leads to abstraction, and abstraction as nonrepresentational figuration yields to a vision that abandons all painterly vocabulary in the attempt to create a new harmony. The result is not a display of crude imagery but testament to the soul and consciousness of a transcendental harmony, Ariel and Caliban are married by an omniscient Prospero in an edenic paradise on earth, a state which we striving but frequently misguided mortals yearn to regain.

Our task is not to solve enigmas, but to be aware of them, to bow our heads before them and also to prepare the eyes for never ending delight and wonder. If you absolutely require discoveries, however, I will tell you that I am proud to have succeeded in combining a particularly intense cobalt with a luminous lemonlike yellow, as well as recording the reflection of southern light that strikes through thick glass on to a grey well....Allow us to continue our archaic procedure, to tell the world of reconciliation and to speak of joy from recovered harmony, of the eternal desire for reciprocated love.

— attributed to Jan Vermeer

Although Misslbeck’s actors engage lustily in every conceivable sexual activity, her art surpasses pornography with its single-minded focus and lack of layers of meaning beyond the obvious. Hers is a prelapsarian epoch where temptation and sin have no entry. These exuberant couplings could not be more natural and should not provoke shame or revulsion in the viewer condemned to the oppressive grip of judgmental edicts stemming from two millennia of a morality based on the essential evil nature of human beings. Misslbeck’s pantheistic paganism proclaims the oneness of creation and that each part enhances the whole. Her paintings would strike a sympathetic chord in the like of a Friedrich Nietzshe, that harbinger philosopher of modernity and loosener of the bonds placed by the church and the social institutions based on its rule of authority. Nietzsche’s Superman would feel very much at home in one of these canvases. Misslbeck captures the precise moment, suspended seemingly for eternity, before Adam and Eve confront the serpent and must pay the consequences for succumbing to its enticements. The desire to know and to experience more and more, uncondemned by Misslbeck, will ultimately be punished as the divine spark must be restrained and trimmed back. Such joie de vivre will no longer be permitted to suffuse all our doings, nor can the freedom to savor every carnal aspect of one another be unchecked. This easy back and forth flow must be constrained and regulated. The prelucid sentiments expressed in the transsexual Rosenkavalier and the sexual playground of Pandora’s Box are now programmed to bring out scorn rather than delectation. Misslbeck shows in her later series such as “Catacombs” and “Battlefields” what happens where superego replaces id. The devastation caused by the relentless progress of technology leaves the viewer no ray of hope of deliverance after annihilation. The
burden of 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq preceded by the horrors of the Balkan wars and Rwanda crushes Misslbeck as it crushes the hap-less viewer. Beautifully and mas-terfully constructed, these works leave no room for remorse or compassion. This artist, however, is not a despairing pessimist but a caring, loving humanist. Recently, she has returned to devising more edenic, archetypical paintings as she seeks to once again confront joy, and hope paradise has not been lost forever but someday may be regained.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sin.
They do not make me sick
discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied….

—Walt Whitman

Lesbians and gays will find a kindred spirit in this artist and her work. Though happily married in a heterosexual relationship, there is never a whisper of homophobia but rather an understanding and appreciation of the special gay world which flourishes in spite of misinterpretation and even persecution. She is happy that in Canada, Spain, and Vermont and at times in New York City and San Francisco gay couples can marry and enter into the marital experiences that so many other couples can. It is not the business of government to adjudicate any form
of expression of love or to deny gays and lesbians benefits and rights that all other groups are entitled to receive. There can never be enough love and caring to go around, and no one should be castigated for one’s sexual orientation and manner of expressing these sentiments. As in so many things artists are in the vanguard of a more just way of seeing and doing things. Shame and guilt have no place in any healthy, open relationship. We perhaps may never return to that earthly paradise so affectionately depicted by Misslbeck, but we need to work toward creating—politically and individually— a safe haven where everyone, no matter what his or her sexual persuasion, can flourish and prosper. Misslbeck’s vision of a tolerant paradise should offer both solace and inspiration to all those who struggle to make things better. Defeat and lies find no room in her art nor should they in our daily lives. Misslbeck’s special universe beckons with its innocence, honesty, and goodness. There is no right way of being, only acceptance of each person’s reality. Diversity makes for a better world as well as for better art. Misslbeck’s luscious paintings act as a bridge from an idyllic Eden to the activities and concerns of postmodern man and woman, bringing out the best in all of us. Hopefully, these paintings with their jewel-like and riotous color will uplift each viewer with their beauty and simple truth.

I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

— Adrienne Rich

Monika Misslbeck, was born in Passau, Germany in 1945. She has exhibited her work internationally since 1966. Monika exhibited Pandora’s Box in the 1995 LLGAF Lesbian Biennial: Vulvavision. She most recently exhibited at LLGAF in Marry Me, a Lesbian exhibition of small works.