Derek Root
"Derek Root" by Bill Clarke, Spring 2007, p. 95
One June evening in 1939, a 31-year-old Austrian conductor named Herbert von Karajan was leading an orchestra through a performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the Berlin Opera. Among those in the audience watching “Das Wunder Karajan” (as a newspaper headline once called him) were Adolf Hitler and the king and queen of Yugoslavia.
When Karajan, who was conducting without a score, at one point momentarily lost his way, the führer was furious (it was a state gala). As a consequence, while Karajan continued to work regularly in Berlin until 1942 and less frequently until 1945, he was, for the most part, out of favour until 1947. By the end of the 1950s, however, Karajan was one of the most famous, highly paid and frequently recorded conductors in the world, and remained so until his death in 1989. Karajan’s stardom, and the portrait images that supported it, provided the underlying theme for the Vancouver painter Derek Root’s recently exhibited suite of nine paintings of the conductor, Pictures of von Karajan.
Root’s interest was spawned by this photographic Karajan. He found the manner in which Karajan portrayed himself comical; others had reacted differently. Werner Tharichen, a timpanist with the Berlin Philharmonic and an unsympathetic commentator on the conductor, once suggested that Karajan wasn’t so much a creator as a fantastic salesman who sold not only music but also himself. Karajan’s highly controlled image helped create a public persona that was authoritative, sophisticated and enigmatic. As luck would have it, he was strikingly handsome, too.
Root based his paintings on various press photographs, rendering them in rich black, grey and white. The best are those in which Karajan is the only figure on the canvas. In the nearly life-size portrait Complete Beauty Appears Only in the Face of He Whose Mind is Serene and Exempt of All Agitation, the tuxedoed conductor is seen poised in performance. Behind him, stars twinkle. His expression seems to betray his awareness of being in absolute control. In the equally large My Arms, Your Hearse, the conductor is posed in front of a dark studio curtain, his face and hands brightly spotlit. One hand is thrust upward and outward like a grasping claw, raising sound to a crescendo. He appears to stare at this hand intensely, seemingly mesmerized and terrified by the power it possesses.
In a smaller painting, based on a formal head-and- shoulders portrait from 1955, Karajan looks beatific; the canvas is dominated by pure white and soft grey tones that make the conductor seem lit from within. Perhaps not surprisingly, Karajan was considered extremely controlling. One wonders how he would have reacted to Root’s sly deconstruction of his carefully cultivated image.
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
