As if there wasn't enough Bob Dylan about already, the first public exhibition of his paintings has just opened in the east German city of Chemnitz. In a startling coup for this former grim outpost of Soviet-style town planning (known in GDR days as Karl-Marx-Stadt), Dylan has even produced over 300 works this year specifically for the three-month show.
Ingrid Mössinger, Director of Chemnitz's 100-year-old municipal art galleries, may not be the biggest fan of Dylan's music, writes Ute Ballay - she confesses to owning just the one album. But her pursuit of Bob the Painter dates from a 2006 stay in New York, where she came across images from his Drawn Blank series in the Morgan Library show 'Bob Dylan's American Journey.' Drawn Blank is a selection of 92 pencil and charcoal sketches, made on travels in Europe, Mexico, the U.S. and Asia from 1989-92 and published by Random House in 1994. Mössinger contacted Dylan via the publisher, asking to display the originals for the first time in Chemnitz - maybe she missed his famous Sixties line that, 'Museums are cemeteries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men's rooms...it's not the bomb that has to go, man, it's the museums.' In fact the notoriously wary singer proved happy to oblige. Two years later Dylan finds himself the subject of a major exhibition, and a weighty German catalogue tracing his artistic ties to Max Beckmann and Toulouse Lautrec. In typical style Dylan has now recycled the original Drawn Blank sketches to create entirely fresh material. Photo-lithographs of the works were first transferred onto hand-made paper using digital technology. Dylan then painted these images in watercolours and gouache, adding vibrant colours that bring their figures and landscapes to life. 170 of these new paintings are now on display in Chemnitz. 'Bob Dylan has personally selected the works on view here,' confirms Mössinger. Many were clearly sketched on tour - backstage dressing rooms and views from hotel windows abound. More interesting are the character studies and cityscapes - street scenes of Stockholm, Brussels, Chicago and pre-Katrina New Orleans ('my favourite city,') nude studies, a gypsy woman, beach scenes, fishermen and taxi drivers. The mixture of melancholy and eroticism in series such as 'Cassandra' or 'Girl in Red Lion Pub' is another Dylan hallmark. It all amounts to a Basement Tapes-style Hobo's Universe that will keep Dylanologists busy for years to come. Dylan has painted steadily since his schooldays, and took art lessons in New York's Carnegie Hall through the Seventies. He writes in Chronicles of painting's appeal as a way to create order out of chaos. The quality of these works will certainly surprise fans old enough to remember his early album sleeve art. Things have changed from the child-like crayoning on the Band's landmark Music from Big Pink. Dylan also seems to take his art more seriously these days - 'I knew somebody who had some paints and a square canvas, and I did the cover up in about five minutes,' was his slightly shame-faced explanation to Rolling Stone for the dodgy artwork on Self Portrait. Crowds in Chemnitz have been more than respectable - 1100 on opening day, around a thousand per day since. Dylan passed on the opening of his own world premiere, spending the day warming up for the latest swing through America's Mid-West on his Never Ending tour - no sign there of the burn-out that threatened to ground fellow 60-something legend Meat Loaf . Dylan's art may be much more than a celebratory vanity project, but the day job still comes first.
'Bob Dylan; The Drawn Blank Series' is at Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz until February 3.
