Heinrich Maria Seck-Carton

(Flörsheim 1888 – 1972 Finthen)

The Dream

Signed and dated lower center H. SECK-CARTON 1920

Oil on canvas

48 x 62 inches (212 x 161 cm)

The Mainz painter Heinrich Maria Seck-Carton began his artistic training in graphic arts at the Mainz School of Applied Arts in 1908.  He went on to develop a unique self-taught style, merging elements of Art Nouveau and Romanticism. In his early career he experimented with landscape paintings, venturing out of Mainz to visit Wiesbaden and Darmstadt for inspiration. Seck-Carton enlisted in the army in 1916 and returned home from the war two years later. Back in Mainz he was able to make a living as an artist, enrolling in artist groups including the National Association of Visual Artists of Germany and the Frankfurt Artists’ Society (FKG). Both organizations dedicated their resources to finding work for German artists after WWI, focusing on the procurement of funding and public projects for its members. Seck-Carton was granted several commissions to paint frescoes in the churches around Mainz.

Seck-Carton maintained an interest in the romantic landscape throughout the interwar period. However, life would again take a terrible turn when World War II broke out in 1939. The multiple bombings of Mainz left numerous victims and terrible damage to its landmarks. Seck-Carton took on the destroyed city as his emotional subject matter, creating a series of cityscapes that illustrated the remains of Saint Stephen’s Church and the Mainz Cathedral. In his depictions of these horrific scenes the artist abandons any sense of Romanticism, turning to abstraction as a tool to convey destruction and desolation.

The current painting is an enigmatic and impactful largescale canvas of two kneeling figures looking out over a strange, symmetrical mountainous landscape. The dynamic, sharp rocks seem to part away from the center of the painting, where a perfectly round crater holds a pool of still, reflective water. The female figure on the right lifts her face to the fiery sun, her hands clasped at her heart, while her male counterpart buries his face in his hands, shielding himself from the bright rays. It is likely that these pilgrims are worshipping the Sacred Heart, a commonly practiced Catholic devotion. This religious reading is also conceivable because the Neo-Gothic Church of the Sacred Heart was built in Mainz beginning in 1911. Construction was delayed due to the war, but the church was later completed in 1913 and survives today.   

This painting evokes a feeling of mysticism in addition to its religious reading. The horizontal lines that separate the foreground from the mountainous landscape and the sky relate to the geometrically abstracted aquamarine paintings of Lake Geneva that Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) created towards the end of his life (Fig. 1). Hodler painted a series of sunsets over Lake Geneva after the death of his model and mistress, Valentine Godé-Darel. He experienced the horizontal, coffin-like sections of the works as the meeting point of life and death, time and eternity. This concept of duality is also central to the Jungian theory of the universal consciousness. There is no evidence that Seck-Carton would have been familiar with the still early philosophies of Carl Jung, but it is true that Jung’s paternal family was originally from Mainz. Jung believe that humans contain a universal layer of consciousness, an objective and inherited part of the psyche that expresses itself through archetypes, or mental images. In The Dream, the heart inside the sun encircled by a number of layers functions as a primordial motif, a type of mandala that aids in the therapeutic practice of individuation. Jung asserted that individuation occurs when a person can integrate the opposites within them, ascending to the fulfilment of one’s unique potential. The elements in Seck-Carton’s painting - man and woman, earth and sky, hidden and exposed - suggest an awareness of our inherent opposites, working in tandem to compose the complex and nuanced human experience.