Alexander Camaro - who he, and where? His name does appear in most dictionaries of 20th-century art, but it still conveys relatively little to people outside Germany. It meant almost nothing to me at the time of my only meeting with him, in Berlin on a grey, icy day in December 1968. The meeting had been arranged by an older and much respected German art critic, who then lived in Dublin. Since my German was utterly inadequate for conversation in depth, and Camaro did not speak English, I had an interpreter with me.
It did not take long to realise that I was in the studio, and in the presence, of an utterly original painter and a very remarkable man. Camaro was born in 1901 and had studied art under Otto "Gypsy" Muller, one of the Brucke group in Dresden. He had also studied dancing under Mary Wigman, virtually the creator of the modern dance in Germany, and he moved among the big canvases stacked around the studio walls with a lithe, gliding step. He was also, I discovered, a natural clown and in fact he had worked professionally in stage and cabaret, as well as dancing in ballet.
Inevitably, he had been banned under the Nazis and had suffered the dreaded Malverbot. In the last years of the second World War Camaro led a nomadic, semi-underground existence; but worst of all, nearly all his work of two decades was destroyed, partly from Allied bombing and partly from inadequate storage. It was, of course, the wartime fate of most German artists. He had salvaged a series of large gouaches which he kept beside him in a specially made wooden box with a sliding lid; he called them The Wooden Theatre and took them out, one by one, to show me. They were quite magical, though very different in style from the large abstract or semi-abstract paintings on which he was currently working.
Camaro belonged to a core of dedicated people who had worked energetically to resuscitate artistic life in the rubble of bombed-out post-war Berlin. He was one of the co-founders of a famous artists' cabaret, in which he himself performed. But West Berlin (as it was then) was an island deep in the communist East, and artists living there were largely cut off from the busy art life of Munich and Dusseldorf and Cologne. To earn a living, Camaro taught in the Berlin fine-arts college, but his career suffered from his isolation - as he himself was well aware. More than a decade later, the (heavily promoted) Wild Ones and the New Expressionists put Berlin on the map again as an art capital, but his generation was pushed aside in the process.
It was only in his last years (he lived into his 90s) that official recognition came, even if his work has never yet travelled to the English-speaking world. He married a talented pupil of his, Renate Gentner, and together they spent their summers on the North Sea island of Sylt, where he had built a studio-home. Camaro's spare, imagistic, slightly cryptic style is that of a visual poet, akin in certain ways to the poetry of Celan and Bobrowski. Like them, too, he grew up in a world where Germanic and Slav cultures overlapped to create new and haunting resonances.