Then one day I took a closer look – through the fence, from left to right: the “Pentecost Door”, the “Bishop’s Door”, the “Pope’s Door”, and the “Creation Door”. The quartet stands in stark contrast to the opulence of the Neo-Gothic surroundings, making the doors seem almost naïve in how filigreed and light they are. Ewald Mataré, a sculptor and professor at the Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie – and instructor of a certain Joseph Beuys – designed the doors between 1947 and 1954. Beuys, at the time a 27-year-old art student, was also involved in their creation. But not so fast – Mataré wouldn’t let him have too much liberty here. Although the young Beuys was able to incorporate his own ideas and push the envelope, he would later say in an interview decades later, “Well, I never would have made the doors that way – on the contrary! I probably would even have said, leave the old door there, it’s fine how it is.” He criticised Mataré’s drafts as too ornamental, too tranquil, and ultimately too tame.
Now aware of Beuys’ involvement, I inspect the doors for signs of his originality that may have been blooming at the time. One of his responsibilities was to create a cast model for the relief on the “Pentecost Door”, showing an unscathed cathedral surrounded by a war-ravaged, burning Cologne as a symbol of hope and rebirth of the church following the Second World War. He was also involved in creating the mosaics on the two middle doors. The mosaics on the “Pope’s Door” go from top to bottom: the pope’s tiara, a white dove on a blue background, two keys, a rooster with a red and swollen crest, a pelican with a wound on its belly. The animals are most interesting to me. While the rooster confidently displays its crest, the pelican seems so melancholy, sitting there and opening up its chest with its beak to feed its young with its own blood. Despite their colourful simplicity, there is something sinister about these mosaics.
The “Bishop’s Door”, on the other hand, contains only one mosaic: the emblem of Josef Frings, acting Cardinal of Cologne in 1948. Beuys would later say that he got most of the mosaic pieces from an abandoned swimming pool in Cologne-Meerbusch. He then used pieces of his own shaving mirror for the cardinal’s emblem.
“I suddenly felt that it needs something that casts light.”
Unfortunately, the mirror shards fell off over time. So much for the beautiful reflection! Yet picture, if you will, Beuys’ shaving mirror shimmering from the south entrance toward the cathedral square in the year 2022..