Herbert Siebner: Dualities, May 2-June 17, 1984

Virgil Hammock is head of the Canadian section of the International
Association of Art Critics and chair of the Department of Fine Arts at
Mount Allison University.

Dualities is the title of a 1984 exhibition catalogue of the work of Victoria painter Herbert Siebner. The exhibition illustrates the theme of duality in the artist’s work. Simply put, there are two related subjects in each of the paintings in the exhibition. The earliest dated work in the show is from 1948 and the newest is from 1984. Nicholas Tuele, a curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, where the exhibition was organized and shown, opens his short essay in the catalogue with the remark that: “Herbert Siebner enjoys an international reputation as an expressionist artist.” I’m afraid that there is more to it than that. An artist is either internationally known or he is not; Siebner is not, and it takes more than a comment by a curator in a catalogue to make it happen.

Herbert Siebner is a 60-year-old German-born artist who has lived for the past 30 years in Victoria, B.C., and who fancies himself, and is evidently fancied by others, who should know better, in Victoria, as the heir to German Expressionism. German Expressionism was a movement that peaked in Europe on the eve of World War I, some eleven years before Siebner was born. The catalogue states that Siebner was a student of a student of the Expressionists (Max Kaus). The original artists in the German Expressionists movement of The Bridge and the Blue Rider with whom Siebner is so glibly compared, were bold pioneers in the history of the art of this century, but Siebner is at least twice removed from this boldness. I find the work reproduced in this catalogue to be dull, derivative, and without merit of any kind. The kind of so-called Expressionism that Siebner employs is safe and decorative and takes none of the risks the original German Expressionists did some 70 years ago.