The Centre Dürrenmatt
by Charlotte Kerr Dürrenmatt

In September this year the Centre Dürrenmatt, a beautiful complex lovingly created in tribute to a great writer and artist, will open its doors to his admirers. Built on top of the hill where he lived, looking down on the Lake of Neuchâtel and across to the distant chain of the Swiss Alps, it will house the paintings and drawings of Friedrich Dürrenmatt.

'My pictures and drawings are not sidelines, but the drawn and painted battlefields on which I fight my literary campaigns, where I experience my adventures, experiments and defeats', Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote in Labyrinth, a weave of autobiography and work in progress. 'I paint like a child, but I do not think like a child. I paint and draw like I think.' Thus one could say that his pictures and drawings are materialised thoughts. But hardly anybody knows them.

The name Friedrich Dürrenmatt stands for one of the great authors and thinkers of the twentieth century. Nobody has held a mirror up to Swiss society quite as he has. Hidden behind exciting crime writing was a social criticism which did not spare any grand institution of state or church, bank, army or judiciary. His œuvre has been translated into forty-two languages. His plays, first staged in Zurich and Munich, then taking over the great houses of the world, dominated the theatre of the 1950s and 1960s. The Visit, directed by Peter Brook and Giorgio Strehler, became an evergreen. So did The Physicists.

Less well known internationally is the magnificent prose of Dürrenmatt's last seven years: the two volumes of Die Stoffe I-IX (Labyrinth and Building a Tower), a collage of autobiographical writing, early drafts of his work and undeveloped ideas which he called 'the dramaturgy of my fantasy', Minotaurus, Justiz, The Assignment and Durcheinandertal (Valley of Towers).

Even fewer people know that he was also a great painter. Up to the age of twenty he could not decide whether to become a painter or an author. He was studying philosophy at the time. One day he boarded a trolley-bus and on the instant made up his mind: 'I'll give up the studies and become a writer.' This is how he described the way in which writing became his profession as well as his passion. All his life, however, he stayed true to his other passion, painting and drawing.

When he was seventeen Dürrenmatt went from Zurich to Munich on his bicycle. In Munich he went to the Haus der Kunst Gallery, where, at that time, there was the exhibition Entartete Kunst. In this exhibition the Nazis showed what they considered depraved and degenerate art, before they banned the artists. The young Dürrenmatt saw works of Otto Dix, George Grosz and the Munich expressionist movement known as Der blaue Reiter. 'They paint like I do', he thought, 'only better!' Later he found his own style - the style of his thinking.

He was never taught how to paint or to draw. He was an autodidact, an amateur in the true sense of the word. Painting for him was release from his self-imposed shackles, from the Sisyphean task of writing.

He published his literary œuvre, exposed it to the criticism which goes along with publication. His pictures by contrast he kept hidden, just as Cadillac, the goldsmith, concealed his precious jewellery and killed clients who bought it and took it away. Dürrenmatt did not go so far. But only his closest friends knew of his passion. Only twice did he allow his paintings to be exhibited: once at the small gallery owned by his publisher, another time in Neuchâtel, when the town he had then lived in for thirty-five years awarded him with an honorary doctorate. But then he locked the pictures away again. Only in his last will and testament did he release them.

'My pictures and drawings belong to my œuvre. They should stay together, should be exhibited and made accessible to the public.' So that is what I did. I donated his first house and its grounds - on which, financed by the federal government, the Canton, the city of Neuchâtel and private donations, Mario Botta, the sympathetic architect from the Swiss region Ticino, has designed a museum, all in grey shimmering slate. Through a tower one reaches the semi-circular subterranean exhibition space illuminated by skylights built into the terrace above. The light from above, the seemingly weightless ceiling, the light shafts on the side - the room is light and airy. A change of weather or time of day will mean that the light will vary in the exhibition space. The house itself, which stood there before and is now integrated into the museum, will contain Dürrenmatt's library, a cafeteria and a bookshop, and provide accommodation for one or two students. The Centre will be run by the Swiss Literary Archive (SLA) and a managing director. The SLA was founded in nearby Bern when Dürrenmatt left his literary estate to the Confédération Suisse.

Nothing has been changed in his study. Through the window one can see the terrace where he stood in the mornings, at half past four, when he had worked through the night, looking down to the Lake of Neuchâtel or up to the stars, which fascinated him from childhood onwards. His desk, a huge five-metre long table, dominates the room itself. On it, two pristine white blotters, one metre by one metre twenty, three red sharpened Faber Castell pencils, white A4 writing paper and a rubber on one, heavy drawing paper on the other; behind it two glasses with quills of various strengths, a scalpel and ink. On the one side Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote the plays and books which made him famous far beyond the boundaries of his native Switzerland; on the other he created something which he hid from all but his closest friends.

One example of this hidden part of Dürrenmatt's œuvre hangs on the wall. Last General Assembly of Confederate Swiss Banking Association is the title of this dark apocalyptic scene, painted in oil, full of biting satirical black humour which was the trademark of his plays and drawings alike: some bankers are holding guns to their heads during the dessert, while their more dynamic colleagues have hung themselves already from the chandeliers or lie under the table, dead drunk.

The quill drawings, a technique developed by him, Dürrenmatt created sitting at this desk. He used the scalpel to scrape away excess ink. This he called 'modelling' the white. Night after night he worked on the quill-drawings. Sometimes three to four weeks on each drawing.

All his late literary work Dürrenmatt wrote by hand. The rows of neat small letters appear to be a work of art, they are like his drawings, and at the same time are as clear as on a printed page. He corrected, cut out, pasted, wrote anew. Eight to ten versions of one and the same idea. Of a hundred pages written, ten remained. This was the life-long Sisyphean labour he loved.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 'release' from both the writing and the drawing was painting on an easel, in his studio, with colours, mostly gouache. The climax was the stepping back from the easel, 'the seeing of the whole', impossible at the desk. Here, in the studio, in front of his easel, he could paint himself into a trance.

After his death in December 1990 I produced a film about Dürrenmatt's pictures and drawings called Between Passion and Profession. The title was meant to describe the energy field created by his genius suspended between these two poles of writing and painting. From late summer on they may both be enjoyed and studied here in Centre Dürrenmatt in Neuchâtel.

The Minotaur was one of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's main motifs. Again and again he drew this mythical creature, half man, half bull, who spent a lonely life in the labyrinth of Knossos in Crete. Again and again he analysed the Minotaur and his labyrinth in his writting. For Dürrenmatt the Minotaur represented the uniqueness of man. And the labyrinth for him was a metaphor of human existence. Minotaur was also the title of one of his late works of literature, a ballad Labyrinth that of the first volume of Die Stoffe. Together with the second volume, Building a Tower, it is the key to Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The Minotaur depicted here is toasting the world around him and all its failings by raising a glass of Dürrenmatt's favourite Bordeaux, either Cheval Blanc or Château Palmer. It is an example of author and artist's all-embracing humour.

Charlotte Kerr Dürrenmatt was married to Friedrich Dürrenmatt for seven years. The journalist and film-maker met the author when she was filming a documentary on his life. Since his death she has fought for seven years for the realisation of Centre Dürrenmatt.