Alabama Song.

How does the search for the next whiskey bar factor into Bourbonism, Greg Fischer-style?

Has Fischer resigned yet?

Brecht Was a Revolutionary, by Marc Silberman (Jacobin)

Not only did Bertolt Brecht transform German drama, but his work captured his radical commitment to socialist politics and the emancipation of working people.

... Brecht was no rosy-eyed utopian, but an artist-intellectual who developed his critical faculties through the experience of political reversals and historical ruptures. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the ossified socialism identified with it is a powerful indictment of traditional left utopianism. But Brecht’s project of a more just, egalitarian society never sought to provide answers on how to make the world better. Rather, his writings are scripts for how to ask questions, how to formulate the right questions for a given situation that is untenable and therefore must be changed.

While Brecht believed in the power of reason that enables people to recognize the problems around them and to solve them, he was neither a narrow-minded rationalist nor a naive believer in the inevitability of progress and human emancipation. Thus, his critique of emotions, which is frequently misunderstood or implemented as a dramaturgy of “coldness,” was not directed against feeling or spontaneity as such but rather against the function of emotions in traditional theater. Like interventionist thinking, Brecht’s belief in reason is a functional concept that enables individuals to determine their interest and to act on its behalf, in other words, a principle of reasoned action excluding neither passion nor emotion ...

Learn about Käthe Kollwitz.

Outbreak.

On Sunday I posted a link to an essay in which the author, an American living in Germany, related (among other things) her visit to an art exhibit in Cologne.

Loneliness.

A bank in a mall was a weird place to find the largest collection of prints by the German artist, socialist, and pacifist Käthe Kollwitz, since her work is famously concerned with the agonies and struggles of the working class. In the old boardroom of the bank, Kollwitz’s work hung, some of it so blazing with grief and feeling it was hard, actually, to take.

Käthe Kollwitz is an artist we all should know.

SUMMARY OF KÄTHE KOLLWITZ

Fiercely committed to portraying the plights of workers and peasants, Käthe Kollwitz rendered the grief and harrowing experiences of both historical and contemporary wars in the first decades of the 20th century. Bucking usual artistic trends, Kollwitz adopted printmaking as her primary medium, and drawing from her own socialist and anti-war sentiments, she harnessed the graphic and expressive powers of the medium to present to the public an unvarnished look at the root causes and long-lasting effects of war. While her interest in printmaking and sometimes her subject matter coincided with the Expressionist painters in Germany, she remained independent from them, charting her own path in the burgeoning world of modern art.

In following the example of Goya's print series, The Disasters of War, Kollwitz's depictions of rebellion, poverty, and loss refuse the melodrama of war and sacrifice and instead concentrate on specific personal experiences that can be understood by many. In addition to her powerful visual legacy that still reverberates among graphic protest artists, her role as a recognized, leading female artist of the time ensures her place in the annals of 20th-century modern art.

Lost Between Worlds: "The house that Edek built - and the secret suitcase kept inside."

A friend wrote.

I saw this and thought of you. Such an incredible life story, and his technical ability to notice detail and legislate it into beautifully realized images in such appalling conditions! His ability to add high contrast details (the tire on the back of the jeep, for instance) - the unpainted highlights on the mountains - such an accomplished artist.

And an amazing life.

The house that Edek built - and the secret suitcase kept inside, by Monica Whitlock (BBC World Service)

When Edward "Edek" Hartry and his wife Teresa designed and built their family home near Woking, they created a daringly modern building full of light.

Their glass and timber home stood out among the red-brick Tudor revival architecture of stockbroker Surrey - simple, open-plan and translucent.

It was the 1950s. Young architects were in the vanguard of imagining a new, post-War Britain.

The Hartrys though had more reason than most to believe that life could no longer rely upon old blueprints.

They were both Polish by birth, making futures as naturalised British citizens after a war that had made a graveyard of their country.

Edward, known always as Edek, spoke perfect English. He didn't talk much about the past, but that was not remarkable in that time and place.

He was busy with life, his children, his job, his sports cars.

Edward died in 1967, Teresa in 2002.

It was not until then that their daughter Krystyna found a small suitcase full of papers that revealed her father, his story and his art.

His daughter's page is here: 'Lost Between Worlds' by Edward Herzbaum

'Lost Between Worlds' is my father's wartime journal.

Written in real time, it is a moving and emotional account of his experiences, immediate and untainted by the passing of time and failing memory; a first hand account and primary source of information about how it felt to be a teenager at the outbreak of war, and six years later a young man in his mid twenties, with both his youth and his country lost. He does not write about battles or military action but puts his thoughts and feelings onto paper so as to try and come to terms with

When I ended 2017 by swearing off elegiac memories of history, I was only bluffing. They always will appeal to me, so I might as well continue indulging them. Thanks to W.

Another look at East German art, as with Werner Tübke and the Americans back in 1989.

Photo credit: The Economist.

All this talk about building walls. Don't they know it's far more interesting what happens when you pull them down?

German Bilderstreit reloaded: Another look at East German art, by Prospero (The Economist)

While an exhibition of East German art attracts crowds, German commentators are still arguing about the value of communist-era art

NOVEMBER 9TH marked the 28th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, meaning that Germany has nearly been without the wall as long as it was with it. But disparities between East and West remain, particularly in terms of wages, business clout and political power. According to a recent poll, 74% of East Germans and 53% of West Germans say that the differences between them are “big” or “very big”. The “wall in the mind” still makes many former East Germans feel like second-class citizens, their achievements unacknowledged in the united country.

This is true of East German art as well. All too often dismissed as propagandistic “state art”, thousands of paintings, sculptures, prints and other artworks were removed from public buildings in the East after the wall fell. Museums left them to fester in their storage facilities. National exhibitions of German modern art have often excluded these artworks, or hung them without chronological or thematic context.

Critics say that this shows a lack of regard for the historical, political, social and artistic conditions in which artists in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) lived and worked. In an essay from 2015, Eckhart Gillen, an art historian from West Germany with particular expertise in art from the East, discussed the controversy, known as the German Bilderstreit. He called it a “pseudo-debate, a substitute for a real political debate in Germany” that never took place. It began as a dispute between painters who had left the GDR in the early 1950s, such as Georg Baselitz, Gotthard Graubner and Gerhard Richter, and those who stayed, like Bernhard Heisig, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Werner Tübke (all members of the Leipzig School) and Willy Sitte. Those in the West were protesting not just against their Eastern colleagues’ “subservience to the state, but against the fact that they painted the wrong kind of pictures,” Mr Gillen states. It was the competition between abstract and figurative painting, Western liberalism and socialist realism.

As the singer Dean Read probably never said, "we have all been here before." For me, it was September 25, 2013, and this remembrance of a Werner Tübke exhibition in the GDR.

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Werner Tübke and the Americans, 1989.

Werner Tübke -- that's the guy.

Occasionally I'm possessed by weird flashbacks to my heavy travel years, past the oft-repeated drinking anecdotes to the dislodging of sheer, otherwise forgotten esoterica: Street food in Skopje, a "free" Bergen piano recital that wasn't, or the Irish woman's insistence that my voice reminded her of John Wayne's.

In the waning days of our stay in East Germany in 1989 -- unbeknownst to us, in the waning days of East Germany as a geopolitical concept -- my friend Jeff spotted some rather arresting artwork on an East Berlin sidewalk poster, and we explored the archway into a gallery of some sort where the art of Werner Tübke was on display. It wasn't the panorama of the German peasant's war for which the artist was best known. Memories are hazy, and beer quite well may have played a role. I just remember being impressed and wanting to buy the poster, of which none were on sale.

Nonetheless, somewhere in a stack of banker's boxes, there may be a physical remnant of this viewing. I saved much forensic evidence of my travels, from ticket stubs and meal receipts to bottle caps and cigar wrappers, imagining that examining the flotsam and jetsam would bolster my recall in the years to come. For this to be the case, I'd actually have to sift through it, but doing so might place an unwelcome spotlight on a quarter-century's time elapsed.

Like sleeping dogs, the prompters mostly are left to lie. It's better to rely on the accumulated weight of the experiences, and the way they changed me.

Take East German art seriously, by Bernhard Schulz (generatorarts)

 ... Debate about East German art has suffered from misperceptions for many years. At the time of the country’s division, East German artists were often perceived as representatives of “their” government. This was confirmed by Documenta 6 in 1977, when works by the so-called Leipziger Viererbande (Leipzig gang of four)— Bernhard Heisig, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Willi Sitte and Werner Tübke—made their first appearance in the West and became, in the minds of curators and critics, representative of GDR art.

Dezider Milly and that other Carpatho-Rusyn artist family from what is now Slovakia.

I purchased the art postcard booklet while visiting Slovakia.

Exactly which visit to Slovakia eludes me, although probably it was 1991-92, during my English teaching assignment in Košice, when the geopolitical designation still was Czechoslovakia.

Decades later, we often sift through the accumulated memorabilia, knickknacks and posters, and after one such expedition, Diana propped the booklet on her desk downstairs. I need my own museum for all this stuff.

After looking at the booklet every day for months, it finally occurred to me to find out who Dezider Milly was. Translating from the Slovak-language Wikipedia:

Dezider Milly

Professor Dezider Milly (* 7 August 1906, Kyjov - † 1 September 1971, Bratislava ) was a Slovak painter, graphic designer and pedagogue, a representative of the visual arts of the Rusyns in Slovakia.

Kyjov's just north of Košice.

Dezider Milly – a big artist from a tiny village, at RUSYN ART ("Meet Carpatho-Rusyn visual artists")

Dezider Milly was a Rusyn artist born in Kyjov, in the district of Stara Lubovna in eastern Slovakia. He achieved the status of a nationally recognized artist.

The most detailed on-line biography of Milly in English is here. Note the spelling of the artist's name.

Myllyi’s active participation in the political and cultural life of post-World War II Communist Czechoslovakia had a negative impact on his artistic creativity. His paintings became little more than highly politicized figurative illustrations. This applied as well to his series entitled Tokaik (1959), based on the tragic wartime shootings of the village of Tokajik’s Rusyn inhabitants, an event which had deeply moved the artist. In the 1960s Myllyi moved away from his narrow politicized vision and began to create large-scale decorative panoramic landscapes. As if making up for the creative time lost during the post-1948 Communist era, Myllyi began in the last years of his life to paint a series of landscapes in his unique prewar style. While he was influenced by the various new artistic currents of the twentieth century, Myllyi’s true artistic roots were embedded in the realities of his native Carpathian region. Since his death, a permanent exhibit of his work is on display at the Dezyderii Myllyi Art Gallery (est. 1983), which is part of the *Museum of Ukrainian-Rus’ Culture in Svidnik, Slovakia.

You're forgiven for being confused; we began this essay in Slovakia, and ever since it's been about Milly as a Rusyn.

So, what's a Rusyn?

Rusyns (sometimes spelled Rusins, or called Carpatho-Rusyns signifying their villages being in the Carpathian Mountains) are one of the many nationalities/ethnic groups of Slovakia, along with Slovaks, Hungarians, Germans, and Romanies (Gypsies). Rusyns are eastern Slavs, which means that their history, culture, and language are rooted in the medieval Kievan Rus' kingdom (Slovaks, by contrast, are western Slavs), although Slovaks and Rusyns have lived together on the same territory for nearly 1000 years (and share some cultural traits). Traditionally, almost all Rusyns belong to the Byzantine/Greek Catholic or Orthodox Christian churches. Rusyns have never had their own country, but their homeland today lies in 3 countries: Slovakia, Ukraine (the Transcarpathian Oblast, former Subcarpathian Rus/Ruthenia, part of Czecho-Slovakia from 1919 until 1939), and Poland (the Lemko Region, formerly part of Galicia). There are approximately 1.5 million Rusyns in Europe today, and about 120,000 of them are in Slovakia.

Three of Milly's late-period landscapes:

This brings me full circle, as there's a Carpatho-Rusyn artist far better known internationally than Milly. It's Andy Warhol, whose father came to the United States in 1914.

It boggles my mind that it's been just shy of seven years since Warhol's brother John died, prompting the most recent reference in NAC to Rusyns prior to today.

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John Warhola's passing inspires a Medzilaborce remembrance.

John Warhola has died, and therein lies a story.

In the fall of 1991, having only recently assumed my duties teaching conversational English to staff members at Košice's university hospital, I was asked by Dr. Roland, the hospital's first non-Communust administrator, if I'd like to accompany him to a Saturday afternoon museum opening in Medzilaborce, Slovakia.

The trip involved a total of seven hours on the road, to and from Medzilaborce, a lengthy commute not fully suggested by maps which did not account for the fractured condition of rural Slovak roads and a handful of "touristic" stops along the way. Dr. Roland did not drive, and at the time, he still made use of the hospital's de facto chauffered limo service, with its fleet of Soviet-made gas guzzlers and uniformed personnel.

What a ride!

Medzilaborce is cradled within the northern terminus of the Carpathians, which then veer westward to end in exclamatory fashion at the compact Tatra mountain range. Small towns are nestled between rugged, forested ridge lines. Poland is only a few miles away. This isolated area of Slovakia (as yet Czechoslovakia in 1991) is inhabited by Slovaks, Poles and indigenous Rusyns, the latter of the Orthodox persuasion, accounting for the gorgeous church in the center of town, and explaining the road signs in the Cyrillic alphabet: Меджильабірці.

Two large Campbell's Tomato Soup cans guarding the doorway of an otherwise nondescript concrete building gave the game away, for Andy Warhol's family was Rusyn, the collection now known as the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art was an embryonic East-West cultural venture in the immediate aftermath of Communism, and Andy's brother John was on hand to speak for the foundation.

Andy Warhol's elder brother dies aged 85; John Warhola was one of three founding members of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (in the Guardian)

After Warhola's father, Andrij, died in 1942, Warhola raised his younger brother, Andy (born Andy Warhola), and made sure he attended college. Their father, who had emigrated to the US from what is now Slovakia in 1914, left enough to pay for Andy's first two years of college, but his brother took responsibility for the reminder of the artist's education.

And so, that's how I came to meet John Warhola, if only for a few seconds and a handshake in a receiving line.

"Surreal" doesn't really do it justice, but I'm happy to see that the museum has survived and apparently prospered during the two decades since my visit. In 1991, we capped the opening with early dinner at a restaurant down the street, which served delicious pork and knedlicky dumplings with roasted potatoes, all washed down with cool golden lager brewed down the road in Prešov.

With requisite condolences at John Warhola's passing, I dedicate these memories of that singular day to him.

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As you might imagine, I'd like to go back.

Michael Palin in Wyeth's (and Helga's) world.

It's not a stretch to suggest that if you'd never heard of Monty Python, you'd think of Michael Palin as the guy who does documentaries, especially travelogues, though lately he's branched out into art.

Vilhelm Hammershøi: "He was an artist. He made paintings. The rest is silence."

Michael Palin: "The world is an absurd and silly place."

Andrew Wyeth is far better known than Hammershøi, and Palin leads with Wyeth's well-known "Christina's World," but the ultimate focus lies elsewhere.

Michael Palin heads for rural Pennsylvania and Maine to explore the extraordinary life and work of one of America's most popular and controversial painters, Andrew Wyeth. Fascinated by his iconic painting Christina's World, Palin goes in search of the real life stories that inspired this and Wyeth's other depictions of the American landscape and its hard grafting inhabitants.

Tracking down the farmers, friends and family featured in Wyeth's magically real work, Palin builds a picture of an eccentric, enigmatic and driven painter. He also gets a rare interview with Helga, the woman who put Wyeth back in the headlines when the press discovered he had been painting her nude, compulsively but secretly for 15 years.

Ah, yes. The infamous Helga Testorf.

How Michael Palin Broke the Silence of The Helga Paintings, by Bob Duggan (Big Think)

... Palin deserves a lot of credit for getting Helga Testorf to give her side of the story at last, but it raises the question of how true her or the Wyeths’ side really is. Undoubtedly, “The Helga Paintings” are really about “love,” but whether they’re about love of art, love of the human form, love of a friend, love of a mistress, love of money (the root of all evil), or some or all of the above, I’d love to know.

As an aside, the late Robert Hughes didn't buy into the "official" explanations.

THE GREAT HYPE: WHEN HELGA FOOLED US ALL

... The final lesson of the Helga hype was that we journalists had done it to ourselves. We wanted to believe in a big, squishy human-interest story where none existed. When it began to come clear that there was not, we still went ahead, because we were afraid of being outsplashed by rivals.

Whether 1987 or 2017, it seems that certain aspects of American culture are recurring and eternal.

Vilhelm Hammershøi: "He was an artist. He made paintings. The rest is silence."

The documentary is called "Michael Palin and the Mystery of Hammershoi" (2005), more specifically Vilhelm Hammershøi, and while I've learned a lot about Denmark since befriending Kim, Kim and Allan, this artist had remained completely unknown to me until watching the film.

Palin tries mightily to get inside the artist's head and learn what made him tick, but a century later, evidence remains elusive. The conclusion? Sometimes things just are. Palin's valedictory words are very moving to me.

"He was an artist. He made paintings. The rest is silence."

'A heady fusion of Hopper and Vermeer', by Michael Palin

... I don't think Hammershoi would have liked the confessional times we live in now, when a desire for privacy is considered suspect and appreciation of any work of art seems to depend on how much we know about the artist's personal life. He left us his quirky, innovative paintings and I think he intended them to say everything about himself that he wanted the world to know.

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interiør. Stue med klaver og sortklædt kvinde, 1901

On the artist Paul Nash.

Here and below, courtesy of The Guardian.

Back in May, I offhandedly mentioned watching a documentary about Paul Nash. It's narrated by Andrew Graham-Dixon.

In the years preceding 1914, David Bomberg, Walter Sickert and Paul Nash set out to paint a new world, but, as the century unfolded, found themselves working in the rubble.

On 25th May 1917, war artist Paul Nash climbed out of his trench to sketch the battlefields of Flanders near Ypres. So focused was he on his work he tripped and fell back into the trench, breaking his ribs. Stretchered back to England, Nash missed his regiment going over the top at the Battle of Passchendaele. His regiment was wiped out.

The episode links:

• 1/4 Paul Nash: The Ghosts of War (Ep1) - British Art At War
• 2/4 Paul Nash: The Ghosts of War (Ep1) - British Art At War
• 3/4 Paul Nash: The Ghosts of War (Ep1) - British Art At War
• 4/4 Paul Nash: The Ghosts of War (Ep1) - British Art At War

Nash also came up in another Graham-Dixon documentary: The painter Edward Burra never told anybody anything. 

I'm an untutored rube who completely lacks artistic aptitude, but I know what fascinates me. After all, a little bit of autodidact never hurt anyone.

From English woodlands to war: the pioneering paintings of Paul Nash, by Paul Laity (The Guardian)

Nash lost his heart to the English countryside – and his illusions in two world wars. A major retrospective coming to Tate Britain gives a more complete picture of a modern master.

 ... While critics have recognised this engagement with modernism, many have preferred to dwell on Nash as a painter with a personal response to landscape, and to emphasise that his version of continental experimentalism was thoroughly domesticated. Several of the newspaper reviews of the last major Nash exhibition, at Tate Liverpool in 2003, were typical in suggesting that he is best seen as part of an English tradition, that his efforts at surrealism are clunky (a Betjemanesque version of Magritte), and that the cubism he practised was merely a decorative, salon variety. His interest in abstraction and surrealism was not at his core, it has been argued, and such borrowed styles conflicted with his native gift.

The exhibition about to open at Tate Britain challenges this head on. With over 160 works (the biggest show since the 1975 Tate retrospective), it is large enough to accommodate any interpretation of Nash, but it underlines his importance as a pioneering figure of the British avant garde. Here he is not only a romantic individual communing with the land, but a highly varied artist at the centre of networks of experimental creators. According to the curator Emma Chambers, the goal “is not simply to move consideration of his art beyond the war work, but also to show aspects of his work beyond landscape. In the 1930s, still life, surrealism, found objects are all areas that Nash explored, and this is also a moment when he expanded his use of media into photography, collage and assemblage.” The effect is to round out a major artist and make him even more beguiling.

Northern Renaissance, with Jan Van Eyck, Albrecht Dürer and Hieronymus Bosch.

Any excuse to hoist Albrecht Dürer's image to the marquee is appreciated, but in fact this series is three hours well spent. The link takes you to the YouTube portal for all three episodes.

Northern Renaissance (BBC 4; first broadcast 15 Nov 2007)

Series in which Joseph Leo Koerner argues that the Renaissance in Northern Europe - more so than its Italian counterpart - laid the foundations of modern art.

The Supreme Art
A look at how Jan Van Eyck's oil paintings transformed the art world.

The Birth of the Artist
A look at painter Albrecht Durer, the first world-famous artist.

Image Wars
Joseph Leo Koerner examines the work of Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch.

The painter Edward Burra never told anybody anything.

I'll concede that prior to stumbling on this BBC documentary, I'd heard of Edward Burra only briefly, purely in passing. Now I'm appalled at my negligence.

Here are three randomly chosen views of his work.

Burra died in 1976, but lately his work has been selling for staggering sums. There was a major retrospective in the UK a few years back, reviewed here:

Edward Burra, transgressive painter of English countryside and dockside bars, by Kathryn Hughes (The Guardian)

No one has ever been sure what to do with Edward Burra, the British painter whose most celebrated work was produced in the 1920s and 30s. Looked at one way, he's a satirist along the lines of Otto Dix or George Grosz, a social realist with a sharp distorting eye for the human figure writhing and bridling its way through various vanity fairs. Looked at another way, though, Burra is a romantic landscapist, with all the yearning for English soil of his friend and sometime mentor Paul Nash. But then there are the bright colours, the oranges, blues and greens that flash out from his work, which hardly fit with modernism's subfusc palette and pared-down aesthetic. It is all very confusing, which is why some art historians have dismissed Burra as an aberration.

They won't be able to get away with that for much longer. A new exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, of 70 of Burra's most important paintings is proof, if any were still needed, that he is simply too good to be sidelined.

This exhibition also was reviewed by Gavin Burrows at his Lucid Frenzy Junior blog, where I borrowed the photos above, and where there are many more.

Edward Burra 1
Edward Burra 2

“Glamour and squalor appealed to him in equal measure” – curator Simon Martin
“I never tell anybody anything. So they just make it up.” – Edward Burra, 1973

Not So Naive

Orthodoxy states that an artist’s reputation is either cemented or demolished by his death. But as pretty much everything about Edward Burra was unorthodox, things didn’t work out that way. Despite ill health, including arthritic hands seemingly unable to hold a brush, he worked solidly from the Twenties through to his death in 1976. After which he lay pretty much ignored, for this is the first major show dedicated to him in over a quarter-century.

The art of Warren Parker.

My cousin Don "Beak" Barry wrote last week to say he was shipping me an original Warren Parker woodcut. I hope Warren won't mind my reproducing the image here.

Manolete was one of the most renowned Spanish bullfighters. Perusing Warren's work at his web site, the artist's love for the corrida is evident.

It's been too many years since I've seen Warren, to whom I was introduced by Don at the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain, in 1994. If I'm not mistaken, Don has attended every annual bull festival in Pamplona since then, and Warren most of them. They'll be returning this summer to celebrate the fiesta's noble tradition. Hemingway lives, and Manolete will adorn a wall. At Bank Street Brewhouse? Public House?