SOME CRITICS' COMMENTS ON HERBERT FIEDLER

"Anyone who sees style as a varied, inexhaustible and spontaneous concentration on the thing itself as Fiedler did, the only constant being the charisma of the man making the drawing and his unmistakable attitude to life, will not have any problems. For he will recognise on every sheet that it was Fiedler who was happy, smiled, felt annoyed or alone. [...] His originality was of an entirely distinctive kind. With the exception of a small group, it would remain for a later generation to recognise his true greatness: Fiedler or the future of painting, quite apart from the art of drawing."
Hans Redeker in: Kunstbeeld, September 1982

"His world radiates a warm completeness in which the erotic plays as great a part as passion and death. Fiedler was searching for life and reality, and his style, his own Baroque Expressionism, was inextricably linked with it. Through his works he will survive amongst us as a man who is a unified whole: an exceptionally unscathed, pure and independent artist."
Algemeen Handelsblad, 27 February 1962

"Today there is no painter apart from Herbert Fiedler who possesses so strong a sense of reality that it could give rise to so powerful a realism. Most of those who paint from nature nowadays are unwillingly confirming the right of abstract art to exist. The things that ought to indicate life in their works attest of its absence. In Fiedler's works, in contrast, reality is echoed in a large and unbroken vitality. It enables the painting to convey an emotion which one feels inclined to hold in unreservedly high esteem."
Charles Wentinck in: Elsevier's Weekblad, 24 January 1959

"Whether one looks at his interesting ‘Eve’ triptych with the symbolism of the eternally feminine, his emotional still life with the horrific Aztec head, or his dramatic Descent from the Cross (distantly reminiscent of Grünewald), his ballet girl or the woman trying her hat on in front of the mirror – his power and conscious struggle with the problem is always palpable. It is as if one were listening to music by Hindemith: a struggle with the spirit and the material, and at the same time a profoundly i nternalized and by no means superficial beauty."
Jan Engelman in: De Tijd, 26 October 1950

"An extensive collective show of Herbert Fiedler's works enables us to recognise the personality of a painter who is interested less in colourist refinement than in a fundamental penetration of painting by things that are elementally and humanly valid, such as in the ‘Woman in a Field’ which is strongly reminiscent of the great Millet's pastoral scenes. The artist is just as expressive in a new artistic form and technique. He ‘paints’ with the natural colours of ground stones onto cement slabs, thus creating a weatherproof work of art [...]. The exhibited ‘Entombment’ from a Golgotha picture is an excellent, convincing test of this technical invention."
Das kleine Journal (Berlin), 21 October 1932