What Bernard Schultze Painted Again and Again

Schultze rarely painted a subject in the conventional sense. His recurring motifs were hybrid creatures and organic growths, and understanding them explains most of his pictures.

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The short answer

Bernard Schultze most often painted invented hybrid forms he called Migofs, part plant, part animal, part figure. Around these he built dense abstract fields of growth, underwater worlds and landscape-like spaces. From the 1950s until his death in 2005, these imaginary organisms, rather than any real subject, remained his central theme.

The Migofs and Their Meaning

The honest answer to what Bernard Schultze painted most often is a word he made himself. From the late 1950s he called his recurring creatures Migofs, hybrid organisms that suggest insects, roots, shells and human limbs at once. They are not depictions of anything observed. They are inventions, arrived at through spontaneous painting, and they gave a name to what had already been his subject for a decade.

The significance lies in what the Migofs replaced. Schultze came out of the German postwar Informel movement, a period when figuration was widely distrusted and gesture stood in for content. The Migofs were his way back to imagery without surrendering to realism. A creature half root and half torso could carry anxiety, growth and decay in one shape. Readers weighing a print of his work should know that the subject is the form itself, and that this is the point rather than a limitation.

Growth, Water and Landscape

Around the Migofs, certain settings recur. Schultze painted dense fields of vegetation that read as underwater, as jungle, or as growth seen through a microscope. The distinction matters less than the effect. His pictures tend to feel like spaces where organic life multiplies without restraint, in palettes that shift between earthy ochres and acid greens, sometimes with blues that push the scene toward the ocean floor.

Later in his career the creatures often loosen back into pure landscape and atmosphere, with forms dissolving into washes of color. This gives his work a rough arc, from tightly wound postwar abstraction toward freer, more spacious pictures. Anyone comparing a dense early composition with a looser late one, perhaps while choosing between canvas and framed poster formats, should treat them as two phases of the same preoccupation rather than different subjects.

Recurring motifs in Schultze

Hybrid Migof creatures combining plant, animal and human traits
Dense fields of imaginary vegetation and undergrowth
Underwater or dreamlike spaces without horizon or scale
Late freer compositions where forms dissolve into color

Why He Avoided Real Subjects

It is worth being clear about what is absent. Schultze did not paint still lifes, portraits, biblical scenes or city views in any sustained way. The human figure appears, but fragmented and absorbed into the organism, never as a sitter. This refusal was deliberate and consistent across roughly five decades of work, which is why a thematic list of his subjects is short.

For someone deciding whether his work suits a room, the practical consequence is that his pictures behave like abstractions even when creatures are visible. They set mood through texture and color rather than narrative. A dense Migof painting reads differently across a room than up close, where the forms separate and multiply. That double reading, distant atmosphere and close detail, is the most useful thing to know before choosing a format or a wall.

Schultze did not paint things he saw. He painted organisms that had never existed, and made them feel inevitable.

Motif	What it looks like	Period tendency
Migofs	Hybrid creatures, part plant, part animal, part figure	Central from the late 1950s onward
Vegetation and growth	Dense thickets, roots and organic multiplication	Throughout, often framing the creatures
Underwater and dream spaces	Blue and green fields without horizon or scale	Recurring, more open in later work

The main strands of Schultze's subject matter

Key takeaways

Schultze's most common subject was the Migof, an invented hybrid organism he named in the late 1950s.
His settings recur as dense growth, underwater fields and landscape-like abstraction rather than real places.
The human figure appears only in fragments, absorbed into the organism.
His pictures function like abstractions at a distance and reveal creatures up close.

Related questions

Was Bernard Schultze an abstract painter?

Mostly, with a twist. He worked within postwar Informel abstraction, but from the late 1950s he populated his abstract fields with recognizable if invented creatures, the Migofs. So his work sits between pure abstraction and figuration, and the balance shifts across his career toward looser, more atmospheric pictures.

What does Migof mean?

It is a word Schultze coined himself, and it carries no dictionary meaning. He used it to name the hybrid beings that recur across his paintings, part root, part shell, part body. The invented term suited work that was itself about forms that exist nowhere in nature.

Did Bernard Schultze paint landscapes?

Only in an extended sense. His pictures often suggest landscapes, seafloors or jungles, but without horizon, scale or a specific place. The setting is always a space for organic growth rather than a view. Treating them as imaginary terrain rather than landscape painting is the more accurate reading.

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