New: York & Haven

It was another print-packed week, beginning in New York at the IFPDA print fair and the Editions and Artist’s Book Fair -- followed by several days in New Haven working at the newly renovated study room at the Yale University Art Gallery and at the Yale Center for British Art.

At the Yale University Art Gallery I saw, for the first time, the vitriolic First World War images of George Bellows, which are hard to purge from ones mind, having seen them, yet they feel wildly exaggerated and in need of purging. It was a different kind of eye-opener to see the believable nightmare that haunted the usually lyrical Kerr Eby: a shed of cadavers around the table at which their living incarnations had been surprised and massacred.

Across the street, in England, I was moved by a great swath of seemingly benign mother and child imeas etched by William Lee Hankey around 1919; presumably the women were all war widows. I don’t think I can so easily summarize Paul Nash and C.R.W. Nevinson, whose work creeps in and stays for awhile.

Returning to New York, it was heartening to visit the opening of the Prints Gone Wild exhibition in Brooklyn, with all its sure signs of life. Here is Joseph Velasquez of Drive By Press carving a Mellanesque self-portrait on a van-mounted press bed.

Stuttgart and Home

I recently returned from my travels. It is great to be back with family, but I am still in denial about being back in the USA. I suspect that I saw about 30,000 prints in all, many done between 1914-1918, but I took time in some collections to look extensively at early ornament prints and to look at landscape images from the “age of Goethe,” namely the eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries. Some of the more striking works I have seen include a literal rendering of a bombed factory with all of its huge iron gears exposed looking, for all the world, like an abstraction by Robert Michel (the WW I pilot who crashed his plane and then recovered in Weimar where he became an early member of the Bauhaus); a portfolio about the suffering of horses in the war; a 1918 portfolio of woodcuts and linoleum cuts made by a German artist in a U.S. prisoner of war camp in Georgia; elaborate, sixteenth-century geometrical fantasies in woodcut; and some of the more sublime images of great oaks, living and dead, ever conceived.

Until the outmoded concept of image copyright sorts itself out or is altogether abandoned I will share, instead of the works described above, these four stencil prints that are unquestionably in the public domain -- I saw them on the walls of the train station in Wolfegg. They tell a complex story.

My last stop was Stuttgart, whose Staatsgalerie has a remarkable collection of graphic arts (the top two floors are visible in this photograph). In addition to working with their deep collection I made weekend trips with a friend and excellent guide to the Schmuckmuseum in Pforzheim and to Ludwigsburg Palace, residence of the dukes of Württemberg. At the latter, which houses many collections, I noticed an eighteenth-century fan that had been decorated with prints.

I want to thank the many colleagues and other friends who helped me over the past two months. I’ve learned a lot from you all: that 500-year-old prints can be found stuck in the masonry of old buildings, that one can find art while looking for turtles (or prints, while taking piano lessons), that grapefruit can be eaten with curries and ground chili peppers, that printing with gun powder is as dangerous as it sounds, that printroom staff can and probably should include a dog, and that you have not given up on us perhaps because you remember that when you were very very young an American soldier standing across the street in your bombed city smiled and offered you a stick of gum.

Two Weeks in Brief

Since last writing I learned (in Freiburg) that Otto Dix must have looked hard at the work of his sixteenth-century forbears such as Lucas Cranach and Hans Burgkmair; (in Wolfegg) that a collection of prints of flowers bound up in a volume several centuries ago is the best bouquet imaginable; (in Nürnberg) that sometimes ornament prints escape from the pages of applied decoration to float freely in the atmosphere like some outrageous but rigorously symmetrical begonia that has uprooted itself to masquerade as a hallucination (a not so symmetrical but related example shown here); and (in Coburg and in Nürnberg) that in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Germany landscape prints and drawings have the ability to transport you, though I think you are not transported to a time or a place but to one of those memories we have all had, a memory of a day in nature that seemed perfect.

While at the Veste Coburg I managed to catch the last few days of a very fine exhibition about aquatint up to and including Goya. The exhibition and its catalogue were a wonderful collaboration between a print curator and a paper conservator who did not balk at attempts to recreate the processes of Sanby, Le Prince and Ploos van Amstel. Here are the details:

Christiane Wiebel (with contributions by Wolfgang Schwahn). Aquatinta oder "Die Kunst mit dem Pinsel in Kupfer zu stechen" Das druckgraphische Verfahren von seinen Anfängen bis Goya. ISBN: 978-3-422-06693-9

I’m also attaching a photograph of two chopped bicycles boasting “PimpGarage™” labels that can be seen parked on the streets in Nürnberg.

Karlsruhe

I spent all of yesterday looking at an assortment of prints by Erich Heckel made between 1907 and 1965. I’m not ready to try to put any related ideas into language yet -- thoughts about the intricacies of carving faces and landscapes are still churning (the detail shown was not photographed on this trip). I also had a chance to look at a stunning little drypoint done by Ludwig Meidner in 1913. The effect was a bit like looking into a small glass orb to see a city coming apart as if under some extreme gravitational influence; or maybe it is better described as a city that is shaking apart because the routine laws of perspective have failed; or perhaps it is a city in which matter is strung out like laundry on lines that have snapped and so they no longer converge. I’m going to extreme lengths not to use the one word that is always used to describe Meidner.

Today, October 3, is an anniversary of German reunification. For the past few days the German television networks have been working up to this national holiday with a movie, with interviews and with other specials focusing on the difficulties of divided Germany prior to October 3, 1990. These programs have been discussed as an attempt to remind that part of the population that suffers from “Ostalgie” -- the nostalgia for life as it was in the East (Ost) -- just how grim existence was under the control of the East German secret police.

The most prominent of these televised features was a film (Die Frau vom Checkpoint Charlie) about Jutta Gallus (now Gallus-Fleck) and her daughters. Gallus is the brave woman who had been a political prisoner in East Berlin but was eventually “traded” to the West in exchange for a large payoff. The cruel twist is that Gallus’ release meant that she was forcefully separated from her young daughters who had to remain in East Berlin. Some of you probably remember photographs of Gallus near Checkpoint Charlie where she demonstrated daily beginning in 1984, wearing signboards about her daughters and her divided family. After the movie was screened the real, and articulate Jutta Gallus and her grown daughters appeared for a round-table discussion that would seem to put to rest any lingering glorification of a police state, but no doubt the situation is more insidious than that.

Dresden

Imagine that you are a museum worker in Belgium in 2007 and one day you stumble upon some old photographs of your museum taken during the occupation of the early 1940s. While the facility and all of its spaces look familiar, you are disoriented by this photographic image because there are solders wearing armbands and carrying rifles in the galleries. A colleague recently shared just such an experience with me. Imagine also that you are doing research in German museums and libraries and sifting through the holdings of used bookstores. It dawns on you that what you are seeing, and more importantly what you are not seeing, has a lot to do with political situations that started to unfold about a century ago. What was created under duress, what was banned, what burned during an aerial attack, what is missing because it was sold to far-away collections? There are reminders at every step, and they are living reminders: colleagues with personal histories; buildings that, for whatever reasons, have or have not been restored; books and prints only recently catalogued and indexed. While visiting a rural landscape recently I made a comment about a quaint duck pond and was reminded that there was a good chance that it was an old bomb crater. In another idyllic, rural landscape in another country another colleague pointed to the Black Forest “there” and the famous vineyards of Alsace “there” and the site of furious bloodletting toward the end of the First World War “there.”

Against many odds, the resources in European print collections are staggering, consider the sign outside of the Dresden study room for graphic art (housed in the castle or Residenzschloß that is pictured here):

The Kupferstich-Kabinett holds some 500,000 drawings, prints and photographs dating from the late 14th century to the present. Due their sensitivity t light, these works of art cannot be on permanent display.

The Study Room provides all visitors – scholars and laypersons alike – with the opportunity to examine the holdings of the Kupferstich-kabinett even when not on display in special exhibitions (...)

Right on!

Since I can’t post images of prints from my recent study visits I will post a British Satirical print by James Gillray (courtesy of Wikipedia) that illustrates, however painfully, the realities faced by at least one quasi-vegetarian who dabbled with options in the land of bratwurst.

I’ll also share two photos of bicycles that I took just before leaving Berlin. One is a rental bike of a variety seen parked randomly around the city. If you need a bike you call the number posted on the vehicle, give a credit card number, and the device is unlocked via a radio transmission (or that is my hypothesis) – to learn more see www.callabike.de. The only thing better would be the honor system (which is used on the grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum ). The final photo is just a reminder that the honor system doesn’t always work when humans are involved.

Berlin

From Münster I took the train to Kassel where I had a few days to take in Documenta 12, which was a good deal better than the reviews would have you believe. Rather than share my favorites, which tended to be the more political works, I would like to catch up to where I am now: Berlin.

One of the most impressive aspects of traveling by train through Germany is the visible proof of this country’s dedication to green solutions to our global environmental crisis. The rural landscape absolutely bristles with windmills. The picture I show here is hardly exceptional, it one of several dozen photographs I took of windmill-laden landscapes en-route to Berlin. I’ve also included a nice image of how mail and newspapers are delivered in this big city.

I have been steeped in the study of prints made during the “Great War” – what a misnomer if ever there was one. So far I’ve looked at portfolios by George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Ludwig Meidner, Willy Jäckel and Natalia Goncharova. I’m not in a position to post any images of these works, but I am overwhelmed and not sure how to share it. Goncharova managed a brilliant confluence of Russian Orthodox imagery and images of the new machines of war; the word "apocalyptic" is usually applied to Meidner, but he was telling it, vividly, like it was; Grosz was very cunning with his multilingual titles (which do not amount to translations or transliterations in most cases) for his Gott Mit Uns portfolio (an idea that could find apt application today); and Willy Jäckel, a superb draftsman with training similar to that of Lovis Corinth, as I understand it, put forth a damning series about the war that was quickly suppressed by the officials (he ended up 40 kilometers from the front making trench maps).

We may not learn from history, but when we look at it really carefully it turns out we were equally frustrated by this fact in the past.

Münster

Once each decade since 1977 the city of Münster has hosted a city-wide sculpture exhibition. I was able to spend nearly two days at Skulptur Projekte Münster 07. One of the wonderful features of this project is that the thirty-three works created for 2007 can be visited along with thirty-seven works from previous years that are still in place around the city. Happily, it is necessary to rent a bicycle to see many of the outlying sculptural installations (a rented bicycle is shown here in front of Ilya Kabakov’s lyrical antenna of poetry “Blikst Du hinauf und liest die Worte…” [“Looking up. Reading the Words…”].

Some of the most successful works are those that have a meaningful association with historical sites or events specific to Münster, such as Martha Rosler’s Unsettling the Fragments [Erschütterung der Fragmente] which focuses attention on a number of aspects of the city’s history such as the cages on the tower of Church of Saint Lambert that were used to display the executed bodies of Anabaptists, such as Jan van Leyden (who can be seen in a brilliant engraving by Albrecht Aldegrever). I also enjoyed Andeas Siekmann’s Trickle down. Der öffentliche Raum im Zeitalter seiner Privatisierung [Trickle down. Public Space in the Era of its Privatization], and Bruce Nauman’s Square Depression [Quadratische Senkung].

Everyone I spoke to in the community loved Rebecca Horn’s, Das gegenläufige Konzeert (The Contrary Concert) – an installation work in one the cities old fortifications that was used in the Second World War to interrogate, torture and kill prisoners. Horn’s installation is largely auditory. The dimly lit corridors and rooms of this masonry maze have many mechanized hammers that slowly tap at the structure. Other sounds come from an electrical arc and a device that lets drops of water fall from the center of the fortification to a pool below. These subtle sounds provide all that the visitor needs to forge fuller associations internally.

Bicycles rounded out this visit, through the delightful work of Guy Ben-Ner, I’d give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it [Ich gäbe es dir, wenn ich könnte, aber es ist nur geliehen]. To view this piece the viewer pedals something like an exercise bicycle that powers a video display (the faster you pedal, the faster the video runs; pedal backward and the video runs backwards as well). Spoiler alert → the video concerns bicycle parts, specifically those found in a museum: sculptural works by Jean Tinguely, Pablo Picasso, and Marcel Duchamp. In the video, Ben-Ner, his son and his daughter proceed to whisk the works, past a dozing guard and out of the museum where the clever family recombines the parts to form a working bicycle. Lovely!