Philips Alfons
Germany, 1937-1987
An Eastern German, Alfons Philips stopped over in Lebanon on his way to India in the late 1950s, and decided to settle there. To earn a living, he worked as a window dresser and scene painter for the theatre. Part of his work corresponds to a material realisation of Paul Klee’s atmosphere : a poetic craft stamped with humor, where drawing and painting become the model of expression.
Close to Klee, but also to all modern research, and to humorous and literary diversions, Philips was an often effective critic of the modern world, seen in the small picture. He suspected, but did not dare say, that the world itself could be a found object. He also had that sense of tired but poetic complaint linked to German heaviness – which with Beuys becomes a radical refusal.
Using the humorous diversion of utilitarian objects as the only possible ruse, Philips was like the Don Quixote of wasted effort.
In the history of artistic pedagogues, Guvder provided the sense of form and line and the actual work of the drawing, while Philips’ fundamental contribution was that he deciphered the vocabulary and different meanings. He achieved this by rejecting the traditional means of painting and, in his eyes, the poetry of art consisted of this diversion.
Philips questioned German artistic pedagogy and Modernism’s sequels in a country – Lebanon – where he felt life should be poetic. But Lebanon did not live up to his expectations and his idyllic dreams, and this silence was cruel. He then had to conjure and maintain the nascent depression that he felt was necessary for his work, and occupied himself in a deafening and compulsive tinkering.
To reintroduce Klee, with buttons and metal, was a way of politely reproaching Germany for having rejected them both. Klee, in a distant country, with poetry, death and oblivion ; and Philips, whose nostalgia became more cruel, in the only country where the poetry of life took no more effort than forgetting. But Germany’s systematic spirit always relieved his weakness and self-imposed wandering, whether his mood was doubt or anguish, appeasement or joy.
Though Philips was marginal on the Lebanese cultural scene, his pedagogy was important – even though it was limited to his pupils in the different institutes and fine art schools where he taught.
He represents a mysticism of the earth and color: he brought his students to the countryside to research pigments, in a communion where the sense poverty exalted the sensuality of the earth made into matter and color.
He had two exhibitions in Beirut, from 20th to 29th January 1972 at Dar el Fan and from 4th to 10th May 1974 at Centre d’Art II.