"13 Attempts to Become a Rooster" 1977/78

The series "13 Attempts to Become a Rooster" may be considered a surreal Curriculum Vitae.
The bottom half of this first image shows Wolfgang Lettl's index finger breaking through an eggshell and pointing straight up.

At the left upper edge of the image there is a figure whose whole arm is pointing in one direction. Upon closer examination it turns out to be Lenin as he is often depicted, pointing left.

In 1919, the year of Wolfgang Lettl's birth, the Communist International was founded on Lenin's initiative and Lenin was at the pinnacle of his authority. The appearance of Lenin in this image clearly shows that Wolfgang Lettl's life was greatly influenced by political circumstances.

In this third image a lath structure is the rooster, a red windmill represents his comb, and green and purple ribbons form his tail. These two elements combined with the snow flurries summon up childhood memories.
Groups of garbage cans standing around serve as a contrast to the almost dainty rooster protruding into the image.

Wolfgang Lettl writes about his childhood: As for the question why I am painting such crazy pictures, I think my psychiatrist is the competent authority. He told me that it is a relatively often observed phenomenon for people whose imagination may initially be considered quite normal, to suddenly find that in an environment that is monotonous and uninteresting in every respect and devoid of any incentive for a measured and harmonious development, their imagination starts to grow rampant like a cancer, and to boil over, so to speak.

Such an exuberant imagination tends to lead its owner astray, producing mostly sex killers and ideologues, as well as the occasional surrealist.
 
If I spent my childhood in a smug, square small town?
"No way," I said, "our school class once even visited the Golden Hall inside Augsburg City Hall."

The fourth image shown here recreates the fantasy world of a child with his toys in a cheerful hilly landscape. The rooster's rump is reminiscent of cloth diapers, but the other brightly coloured body parts are made of wood. Even the sun and the moon become wooden toys. Only the hole and cracks in the little hill at left in the foreground point towards the fragility of this world.

Wolfgang Lettl remembers: "I don't know how old I was, maybe ten, when my father took me to the Alte Pinakothek. I was fascinated with the glorious colours of the medieval altar paintings. I had never seen anything like it.

I don't know if the wish to become a painter had its first secret stirrings in me then. It seemed inconceivable to me that I would ever be able to create anything like that. Later on I learned that in art you always have to do what you really don't know how to do, or it gets boring.

In Image Five Wolfgang Lettl uses the portrait painted by François Gérard (1770-1837) of Napoleon I in front of the Chateau de Malmaison, and attaches a rooster's head, a common symbol for France, to Napoleon's body.

The background he painted is more stately than that in Gérard's picture.

 The story of Wolfgang Lettl's relationship with Napoleon is as follows:
"Even in my earliest youth I felt connected to Napoleon. He was my idol. I knew him from a colourful little picture which showed the emperor with his child-like face looking at me blue-eyed and majestically, and I imagined that there was some resemblance between our features.

Whenever I had to have my hair cut at the barber's I contemplated my face in his large mirror to check to what extent I had succeeded in matching my features to those of the great Napoleon.

My fascination with the emperor began to pale at the same time as I began to realize that my features were gradually, but more and more unmistakably, taking a different direction than Napeleon's. He finally ceased to be a suitable role model, and as my knowledge of history progressed he actually turned out to be more and more unappealing.

Nevertheless I have not forgotten Napoleon completely, and I give him credit for one thing: He is said to have stated once: "Whoever robs someone of his time should be locked up just like a common thief."

Here in Image Six the rooster is strutting along the beach. The young rooster finds himself confronted with the topic of sexuality.

  Three elements are assigned in a seemingly arbitrary manner to the three figures, man, woman, and rooster: the axle of a wheel, a cube that is  open at the top and painted in the primary colours yellow, blue, and red, and the setting sun plunging into the sea. Leisure time, freedom, being footloose and fancy-free - a 
cheerful picture that tells of the adventure of becoming an adult.
 
The contrast with the following four images could not be greater.

In Image Seven the rooster loses his colours. Locked up inside a dark room and deprived of his freedom to move, he casts a dark shadow.

His head is missing, revealing that he is just a hollow empty shell now. Life and spirit have abandoned the rooster.

Hitler needs soldiers.

Image Eight shows a Cubist figure in front of a grey wall. The figure bears only a vague resemblance to a rooster. There is no perspective.

Life is monotonous. But a little red and the yellow half-shell bring some colour 
into the gloominess. Wolfgang Lettl is a soldier. Out of boredom he begins to paint.

In Image Nine the rooster erupts from a mountain. The Great Dictator makes his appearance. He tries to carve his nationalist ideologies into everyone's brains.

At the foot of the volcano people are wandering through the area. Clouds are darkening the sky, a strip of light appears on the horizon.

Is there a glimmer of hope or is the sky getting darker and darker?

Image Tenshows an interior space. The rooster is in colour once more, although flat and leaning against the wall.

The powers that threaten his existence are now clearly visible and thus predictable and defeatable.

The scene in Image Eleven takes place at a beach; the hills on the left in the background might be alluding to the Gulf of Manfredonia (Apulia), Wolfgang Lettl’s second home from the seventies onwards.

A figure posing as a nude model is sitting on a wooden crate, severed shark heads are lying scattered on the ground.
A new era has dawned, the dangers of war are over, that might be a possible interpretation of the severed shark heads.

The rooster's head lets out a pained cry, in the process of which its maggot-like body transforms into car tires. The nude model sitting on a wooden crate observes the rooster's metamorphosis. Wolfgang Lettl becomes a surrealist.

The original working title of this series was:
"12 Attempts to Paint a Rooster“.
 
And thus the cycle ends logically for now, with the death of the rooster, shown in this image as the burning rooster crashing into the flowery meadow below, which in Lettl’s iconography, and following Henri Rousseau, somehow represents the original paradise.

But just as he is convinced that one's being does not end with one's death, this series does not end with Image 12. As a Surrealist he learns that other realities exist behind this reality.

The series ends with a self-portrait, not because Wolfgang Lettl enjoyed looking at or even painting himself; looking at himself in the mirror every morning while shaving was enough for him.

His opus of 1000 works created over more than 60 years includes just six self-portraits.
The self-portrait with a rooster's beak resulted from an inescapable interpretation of this series of paintings.

We end up realizing that what matters is not how to become a rooster, but to prove to be human in vastly divergent life situations, something for which the example of the rooster is only partially successful. New challenges in life call on us to strive over and over again to be human with one another.  As humans we are never finished.