tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69416099490694094912024-03-29T10:22:27.911+01:00The Stockholm ReviewTintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comBlogger64125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-33572518283717811012024-03-13T16:40:00.000+01:002024-03-13T16:40:20.739+01:00NIGHTS ARE WARM AND THE DAYS ARE YOUNG: THE GOLDEN YEARS OF KARY H LASCH <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipviMHRPG9OT2lzQEdb3aNRRuZ2vo5pNvzQzCno47ACclqThR1bMXXZQAwGPwVc_gQlLewBySXrK6wamia-V7HTmRXx36FOp0Ib5Na3Na1diFSXP3ghaxtALimnN-DS812FHs8KNml742RtHsiJmWidANYv5bNF2vNHI6cH1tUf1oE1pgtzS66TPnYqtX6/s1500/61.Kary_Lasch_0773_Ekberg_p20.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="1500" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipviMHRPG9OT2lzQEdb3aNRRuZ2vo5pNvzQzCno47ACclqThR1bMXXZQAwGPwVc_gQlLewBySXrK6wamia-V7HTmRXx36FOp0Ib5Na3Na1diFSXP3ghaxtALimnN-DS812FHs8KNml742RtHsiJmWidANYv5bNF2vNHI6cH1tUf1oE1pgtzS66TPnYqtX6/w640-h640/61.Kary_Lasch_0773_Ekberg_p20.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">© Kary H Lasch/Bridgeman Images.</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i style="font-family: times;"><span lang="EN-GB">Cannes
was to blame, he told himself defensively. It was a city made for the
indulgence of the senses, all ease and sunshine and provocative flesh.</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">–
Irwin Shaw, <i>Evening in Byzantium</i> (1973)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">It
was the best of times, it was the best of times, it was the age of personality,
it was the age of proficiency, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of
great looks, it was the season of light, it was the season of nourishment, it
was the spring of hope, it was the sweet life any time of the year when Jesus
came to Rome dangling from a helicopter.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">The
February 1966 issue of <i>Playboy</i> includes an interview with the director
of <i>La dolce vita</i> (1960) which starts off like this: “‘You’ve been
accused of embroidering the truth outrageously even in recounting the story of
your own life. One friend says that you’ve told him four completely different
versions of your breakup with your first sweetheart. Why?’ Fellini: ‘Why not?
She’s worth even <i>more</i> versions. <i>Che bella ragazza!</i> People are
worth much more than truth, even when they don’t look as great as she did. If
you want to call me a liar in this sense, then I reply that it’s indispensable
to let a storyteller <i>colour</i> a story, expand it, deepen it, depending on
the way he feels it has to be told. In my films, I do the same with life.’”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">The
legendary Kary Herman Lasch (1914–1993) from Prague, Bohemia, was a keen
character, a teller of tall tales and trumped-up stories. But the marvellous
thing about it is that they were all in some way or another based on true
events and actual encounters, which hundreds and hundreds of his best pictures
give evidence of: the speciality of his intimate portraits of the stars and
starlets of the dolce vita era (and later artists and directors), his
considerate and beautiful photojournalism that never circumvented the depths of
human life, and his early and much delightful girl photography of the world’s
loveliest unknowns.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“He
told a lot stories in different ways,” says Michel Hjorth who with his
associate Christer Löfgren administer The Kary H Lasch Archive – comprising
over half a million pictures from the man’s roughly fifty years in the service
of photography – which has been in their possession since 2019. “Kary had to
sell his pictures to make a living. He was making good money, but he wanted to
have all his pictures published so he told his different stories to different
gangs, and they were in turn distorted in interviews. There was a mystique to
the whole thing that was building up. To sell his pictures he had to be really
sharp, and he was. He could tell any story he wanted. It was all about arousing
interest all the time.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span lang="EN-GB">The
central piece on the display table at Fotografiska in Stockholm, where the
quite sensational <i>Kary H Lasch: The Golden Years</i> is on show (and which
later this spring moves to Tallinn for a new arrangement), is a portrait of
Lasch taken by Michel Hjorth who was the photographer’s friend and pizza
companion (Lasch was a vegetarian so he always had a </span><span lang="EN-US">Margherita)</span><span lang="EN-GB"> for the last fourteen years of his life. And here’s
Lasch, elegant enough for Sweden, in a waistcoat, tie and a light jacket, his
legs apart on a sofa, fist clenched, making his best angry face with a pair of
mad googly eyes attached behind his thick glasses. “I hate photographers,
except for Michel …!!” he has jestingly scrawled on the print with the sort of
black marker pen that he always used to border his press photos with. This is
the other side of Kary Lasch, the cavorter.</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“He
was a very serious person,” Hjorth assures, “but outwardly he appeared to be a
clown and many people couldn’t cope with the fact that he spaced out as hard as
he did. He had a basic character and you can see it very early on in his
private pictures from home. At the age of five, Kary lured in the neighbour girl
and promised her a cucumber if she stripped naked.” The showcase is merely a
brush of items representing Lasch’s extraordinary life, such as a copy of <i>Photography</i>
magazine of June 1952, his first international cover; Lasch’s spoof on <i>Life</i>
with the “Great Photographer” type of person bragging about his camera gear
possessions, and a photo of the BBC visiting him in Stockholm for a
thirty-minute special about his alignment with the stars.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Marvin
Heiferman articulates in his book <i>Photography Changes Everything</i> that “Photographs
don’t only show us things, they do things. They engage us optically,
neurologically, intellectually, emotionally, viscerally, physically.” <i>The
Golden Years</i> at Fotografiska, oh the show – it’s pure eye candy. <i>Kary H
Lasch: The Golden Years</i> is the kind of thing that animates our heads and
our hearts and our loins. It carries the joy, knack and profoundness of this
man who was one of the most industrious and dedicated portraitists during the
high-life of the 1950s and early 60s, the golden years when the movie legends
looked so immaculately dapper, as if beyond reproach, and yet so alive and
comfortable in their own skin.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“Kary
was a wonderful, wonderful friend and I miss him very much. We stayed friends
until the end of his life. Now at eighty-four, I still get a lump in my throat
remembering that day. Dear Kary, whose talent with the lens was unequalled. And
he was admired by great artists like Pablo Picasso,” expresses the lovely
France Nuyen via email. Nuyen was not yet fifteen years old when she arrived at
the Festival de Cannes in April 1953, riding on a motorcycle with her friends
from the École des Beaux-Arts where she was the famed institution’s very own <i>mascotte</i>.
She was very shy, strikingly beautiful, and there was not a snapper in Cannes
who did not aspire to photograph this remarkable girl.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“As
soon as we got there, I was faced with having to hide behind my big architect
friends to discourage them. The one who would not give up was Kary Lasch. He
was stopping the traffic on the Croisette by pretending that his little
imaginary dog was having a poo-poo in the middle of the street, making the
infuriated drivers honk and scream in anger. But Kary would not move until his invisible
dog had finished and Kary would lift the dog’s tail and clean the little behind
with his handkerchief. By then there was a huge crowd of people watching and
laughing. Then Kary came up to us and said to me, ’Now that I made you laugh,
will you let me take your picture?’ All my friends said yes and I ended up
being photographed by Kary Lasch and I was on the cover of a lot of international
magazines as ’The Girl on the Beach at Cannes’. Kary went on taking pictures of
me during my whole career in Hollywood and on Broadway so I owe him everything.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">There
is a picture on Wikipedia from 1978 of Lasch in his very charming and likewise peculiar
two-floor studio at Skeppargatan 4 (within sniffing distance from Sweden’s most
expensive street, Strandvägen) in Stockholm, holding an Oldenburg-sized red
toothbrush. Most of the circumstances about this photographer – who in point of
fact was the one with whom Anita Ekberg shared the night after her wedding on
May 5, 1956 in Florence – were for sure larger than life. “He was accredited to
the Festival de Cannes for thirty years straight. Then you become legendary,
and can behave exactly as he did, and he could go anywhere and everybody knew
who he was,” explains Michel Hjorth.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“Movies
alone could not establish the Festival as a worldwide stage for international
film culture but press coverage of ‘events’ could,” argues Vanessa Schwartz in <i>It’s
So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture</i>.
“At a pivotal moment in American domination of the international film market,
the French-run Festival developed an international platform for the world’s
films and film personalities. In Cannes, films and their stars had access to an
unprecedented scope of publicity, disseminated by the increasingly
photo-oriented mass international press. While studies of cultural diplomacy
have underscored national chauvinism, rivalry, and the frigid battles of the
Cold War, the history of the Festival describes the forging of a collaborative
international film culture.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">The
first Festival de Cannes opened on September 1, 1939 but had to be revoked
after just one screening – it was the morning when the Nazis marched over Polish
borders. Two days later the Second World War broke out. The Festival was
revived in April 1946 as the world was trying to get back on its feet again. At
the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Lasch lost his
good life in Prague, the privileged travelling, the boarding school in
Switzerland and everything else. His middle brother managed to escape to London
and the stateless Lasch arrived in Stockholm to establish a new life from next
to nothing, starting as a window cleaner. His parents and his oldest brother
were sent to a labour camp in Belarus where they were terminated thirty-six
months later, a wound that Lasch would never recover from.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“Kary
was very fond of his mother, they had a strong love for each other. Even as a
child he said that she was his best model. I think that he was very original as
a child. He knew six languages by heart, it could be said that his talent was
complete,” Hjorth reflects. “He was expelled from almost every school that he
attended because he made practical jokes that could end up in the most absurd
situations.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“Kary
disliked his violin teacher in Switzerland so much that he slammed his instrument
on the grand piano, and since then he never touched music – other than
listening to Mozart, all the time. He knew everything about Mozart, the family
background was like that. I understand that they were surrounded by a musical
elite. The family had a summer villa, a big house in Kutná Hora [fifty
kilometres east of Prague], and in the garden they had a train that went to a
music pavilion. I never managed to find out about the dimensions of that train.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Lasch
was also fanatically fond of girls. He photographed 4,500 natural young
beauties that he located everywhere, and he claimed that he fell in love with
them all. In the January 1958 issue of the (since-long defunct) American
monthly <i>Coronet</i>, there is a story of Lasch finding one of his dreamgirls
on a boulevard in Paris, then quickly pulling out a chair from the nearest café
to photograph this mademoiselle by the name of Yvonne Monlaur (who had just
started her short career as an actress) in the middle of the street. These
things had a much deeper meaning than pissing off motorists: this was essentially
about the sense of time being paused during the moment when love and yes, yes
lust fill your entire being.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“His
early girl pictures had a clear sense of style with a compelling aesthetic and
there is a graphic sense to it that is very nice. During his first nine years
as a photographer, he had a woman who was more than twenty years younger,
Lillemor Wredman, and she helped him with everything. They were everywhere. But
he was chasing girls pretty much constantly and their relationship ended,”
Hjorth elucidates. At times when the Benny Hill/”Yakety Sax”-side-of-the-matter
took over Lasch’s photography, libido overturned artistry.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“He
got tired of girls pretty quickly, that I realised. They became a kind of
consumable and I don’t think that these pictures turned out well either. But
when he has something where there is dignity, he was sharp as a tack. He said
that he was disappointed in all the chicks because they would always let him
down, but the truth is that he was just the same himself. He claimed that he
was chronically unfaithful but I find that very strange because I didn’t think
that he was particularly sexual. He was more pubertal in sex; his audacity was
exceptional. The basis for this is to be elegantly impudent. But he always
emphasised that he was very kind and those I have talked with attest to his
gentlemanliness.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“In
Kary’s case I didn’t see charisma. He was more what you would call a
manipulator, he was cunning but in a very good way. Kary was persistent. When
he was shooting you can clearly see that it was a collaboration and that he had
a very good, instinctive approach to portraiture. So he was able to capture these
moments when the person is present, and not pretending to be present, and Kary
is a great example of that. Over the years it became less and less possible for
him to get his pictures out because in the 70s everything changed completely.
He told me on various occasions that he was terribly disappointed that everyone
thought that he only photographed girls when he had such fine pictures as those
shown here at Fotografiska.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">During
the last year of his life when he was slowly dying from cancer, Lasch was fully
engrossed in securing his life’s work. The archive remained dormant for thirty
years – stored at the picture and news agencies Pressens Bild and later TT, and
was (not ideally) in the possession of a Finnish ex-model who worked as a journalist
in Paris. Two books on Kary Lasch’s pictures were published in the 1990s by two
of his agency friends, and old and inferior press prints circulated here and
there but not much else transpired. Things suddenly began to spin when Michel
Hjorth initiated the idea of making a major photobook on Lasch. With the help
of the Governor of Turku in Finland, Hjorth and Christer Löfgren managed to capture
the entire Kary H Lasch Archive of 21,600 sheets of negatives and unbox this
treasure for the world.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Everything
in the collection has been documented and digitalised. The pristine prints come
with a unique certificate on the back, and with a mobile you are directed to a
server in Switzerland where the authenticity is verified. From his early days
in Stockholm – when Lasch challenged a photo editor in the Hasselblad store on
Strandvägen, and in jest told him that he could do so much better than the
editor’s pictures – till the end of his career when he carried out his work in
a more hasty and careless manner, much of Lasch’s photography was marked by a
slapdash attitude towards the technical side of his profession. He never bothered
about things such as using a light meter or developing his rolls in an orderly
fashion.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“Since
I knew how bad, grey and blotchy the press photos were, I had the idea that we
should bring his images up to the highest level that exists today,” resonates
Hjorth. “The books from the 1990s have mimicked him in a sense that the
reproductions look as if they are from the 1950s. There is such a quality in
the material that you have to deal with.” <i>The Golden Years: Photography by
Kary H Lasch</i> came out in 2021, and each theme – “Glory and Fame”, “The
Years in Cannes” and “Moods and Humour” – is housed in its own physical book
with pictures so alluring that they make you feel that there are more songs to
be sung and bells to be rung.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">It
should probably be mentioned, however, that most of what can be read in these
books is in dire need of editing. That said, there is a beautiful little piece
by Joakim Strömholm, whose famous father Christer thought it would be a better
idea for his son to improve his darkroom practices in Lasch’s bathroom (in his home
at Brantingsgatan 30) than to join a friend on a ski trip to the Austrian Alps.
It was one of those mornings in March 1965 that Lasch knocked on the bathroom
door, carrying a tray full of breakfast delights together with the dread of the
news brought by the morning paper: the coach with Joakim’s friend had been
swallowed by a snowslide and everyone was dead.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“I
remember him as kind, generous, mischievous, funny and very considerate,” adds
Strömholm in a message. “For a 15-year-old it was like being in paradise, to be
among all his negatives and pictures of gorgeous babes and famous actors. In a
sense, he probably helped me when I started my own photography. His social
skills and friendly forwardness were inspiring.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">In
<i>Bring on the Empty Horses</i> (1975), David Niven’s second personal account
of his life in films, the debonaire actor writes that “Hollywood was Lotus Land
between 1935 and 1960 and bore little relationship to the rest of the world,
but it was vastly exciting to be part of a thriving, thrusting ‘first-growth’
industry – the greatest form of mass entertainment so far invented.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">We
are back in Lotus Land at Fotografiska, under the guidance of Herr Lasch. “Kary
connects with the people he photographs, they feel the warmth when they smile
and look at Lasch, he participates in their moment – and you sense it,
regardless of age, I think. Equally, it is not a bad thing to experience a bit
of a concentrate of the temper of this particular era that continues to
influence much of our contemporary range of film, fashion and design,” replies
Lisa Hydén, Director of Exhibitions at Fotografiska’s mothership, who has
curated <i>The Golden Years</i> show with finesse and a sincere understanding of
Kary H Lasch and his photographic flair.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">It
is easy to nod in agreement when the curator appreciates how Lasch “persistently
won his photographic moments through perseverance, humour and mischief but
still with respect, and how he as a social virtuoso with refinement had his eyes
raised towards a kind of cosmopolitan horizon, despite the rather narrow
Swedish confinements that he found himself in. Lasch was moreover street smart,
and that is a good thing to be.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">After
various attempts to have Kary Lasch shown at Fotografiska in Stockholm without even
being replied to, Tobias Röstlund, Head of Picture Agency at TT Nyhetsbyrån, found
a new way to unlock these doors when the agency’s <i>News Flash: A Century of
News</i> opened at Fotografiska by the end of 2022. “Now that I had managed to
meet the right people, I told them about Michel and Christer’s extraordinary
work with Lasch’s pictures and the book that they had produced. And this
eventually led to the exhibition, to everyone’s delight,” recounts Röstlund. “My
ambition from the beginning was simply that more people would be given the
opportunity to see his wonderful pictures from another, bygone era since they
are worthy of being displayed in a large format, on fine photo paper.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Lisa
Hydén explains that “We chose, out of all the thousands of imaginable possibilities,
to keep the selection focus that Michel and Christer had delineated in their
book volume, the 1950s and early 60s. Then I wanted us to try to capture a
little more of Kary’s playfulness in the exhibition. It felt like a possible
way to bring the space a little closer to the feeling of being part of the
swirling energy that he seems to have had around him. We tweaked it a bit, and
asked our graphic designer at Studio Kunze to create a textual design that
retained a basic element of elegance but also energy and merriment. Lasch
expressed in interviews that he would have liked to exhibit more but the
assignments and time ran faster, so here we had a great opportunity to make an
impact and produce his prints magnified and emphasised.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">To
hint-hint a bit of Kary Lasch’s star quality: picture a man who goes to
Copenhagen to catch the night train to Stockholm because he knows that Sophia
Loren is on that train and that he knows that her agent will let him knock on her
door at 5:30 in the morning, and that the eternal woman will be delighted to
see him again and allow him to photograph her in her black nightie. When Loren arrived
in Stockholm (with two other actresses, Silvana Pampanini and Lea Massari) in
December 1955 to attend an Italian film festival, she was met by the habitual
throng of press photographers running after her railway carriage. There was
also only one photographer in the whole world who could have taken the picture
of Loren in her Grand Hôtel suite, elegantly posed at the tall window with a
crowd outside and the Royal Castle across the water. That’s excellence.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“For
foreign filmgoers, between the 1940s and 1960s, Italian female stars were
exotic, fiery, passionate, beautiful and adult,” argues Stephen Gundle in <i>Bellissima:
Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy</i>. “Whatever connotations they might
have had for Italians, for English and American audiences they were anything
but familiar girls-next-door and nor were they the sort of artificial product
that the major Hollywood studios had been turning out for decades. Before all
else, Italian stars appeared to be natural; they offered not the constructed
sex appeal of the glamourised star, but a certain raw earthiness that seemed
natural and unspoilt. To outsiders, Italy possessed the eternal appeal of an
old civilisation and the fresh vibrancy of a country that, for all its
problems, seemed basically dynamic and optimistic.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Fellini
had plenty of good things to say in that 1966 interview in <i>Playboy</i>: “I
loathe collectivity. Man’s greatness and nobility consist of standing free of
the mass. How he extricates himself from it is his own personal problem and
private struggle.” We now live in a uniquely senseless time in human history.
Graeme Turner in <i>Understanding Celebrity Culture</i> is effectively mild-mannered
when he describes the dazzle of today’s imperious meh-celebrities and how they rattle
in their cages for any kind of validation: “as the example of Kim Kardashian
might suggest, most media pundits would agree that celebrities in the 21<sup>st</sup>
century excite a level of public interest that seems, for one reason or
another, disproportionate”.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“Never
touch your idols: the gilding will come off on your hands,” cautioned Gustave
Flaubert in <i>Madame Bovary</i> (1856). One could only wish that “new”
Fotografiska will keep clear of these rattlers with their cold energies who seem
to be unable to escape the vacuum of their own personal irrelevance, and whose
faces have often enough covered the walls ever since the opening in 2010 with the
photographic misrepresentation of Annie Leibovitz. <i>Kary H Lasch: The Golden
Years</i> is on the other hand Fotografiska when it spangles.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">The
stardust of yesterday exudes from lustrous medium- or small-sized prints, framed
or frameless, while the soundtrack and the paraphernalia secure the mood in the
later years of the 1950s. Here you encounter Gina Lollobrigida in Paris in 1951
after Lasch had placated her green-eyed husband Milko Škofič with a potent
notion of “Slavic brotherhood”; wave farewell to Anita Ekberg and Anthony Steel
at the Firenze Santa Maria Novella and wish them happy trails on their
honeymoon; follow Frank Sinatra to the Gare de Cannes in 1955; play boules with
Gene Kelly and some happy Côte d’Azur locals; stay with Salvador Dalí in his pitchforked
dream castle in Cadaqués in 1958 – or you can think about the chocolate sauce and
the stabbing of Janet Leigh in <i>Psycho</i> (1960) while Anthony Perkins
smiles at you.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">In
his book <i>Glamour: A History</i>, Stephen Gundle expresses how “Bardot struck
a blow against some of the traditional canons of movie star glamour. She
rejected the costly gowns and rigid formality of previous French stars and
instead proposed a casual, yet sexy and glamorous, alternative that consisted
of gingham dresses, Capri pants, and striped tops, that were left cheekily
unbuttoned. Her imperfect, bottle blonde mane symbolised her casual, carefree
manner. In an era when stiffness reigned, she offered a dream of emancipation
and an image of unlimited desire. Bardot was hugely successful abroad but
highly controversial at home.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">The
first time that Kary Lasch photographed Brigitte Bardot was when he met the very
young France Nuyen at the Festival in April 1953. The last time that he was
close to BB was on the set of <i>Une parisienne</i> in 1957 where he had a
small part playing himself (which is not in the film however). It is beyond
question that Brigitte Bardot has embodied the Festival de Cannes like no one
else, though Lasch found her “a little cheap, and I would almost say vulgar”
when he tried to come to terms with her sexiness during the early years of her
career.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">The
most beautiful picture in the show has nothing to do with stars, sunshine and
provocative flesh. It is a beauty photographed in an Italian church with Lasch’s woman
Lillemor Wredman in the centre of the perfectly composed Hasselblad square, and
there is a toned-down holiness to everything about it: to this woman standing
at the inside of the entryway in her white blouse and what seems to be a pencil
skirt, her posture is lovely; to the soul of the carved stones and the three
very different columns to her left; to the light and darkness enhanced by the
window opening to her right; to the man in his chair below her who is deep in
thoughts. This is the point of great photography – a heartening portrait of a
woman (and an old man) united with the serene vivacity of life itself.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“The
last time I met Kary Lasch was in 1992 in Gothenburg at the Swedish Exhibition and
Congress Centre in connection with an exhibition of his pictures. And there,
between Brigitte Bardot, Gina Lollobrigida and Britt Ekland, was little old me.
In the evening Kary was travelling home and I followed him to the Central
Station. Kary looked tired, his ever so impish eyes had faded a bit. I asked
him how he was feeling and he replied, ‘You see, darling, the geezer is getting
a bit old,’</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">”</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> remembers Birgitta Lindberg in <i>Mitt jordenruntäventyr med den
berömde fotografen Kary H Lasch</i> (My Around-the-World Adventure with the
Famous Photographer Kary H Lasch). “I can still feel his warm hug that night.
He never told me that he was seriously ill. Kary died on August 27, 1993.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">In
the beginning of the 1970s, Lasch’s friend Gordon McLendon, who owned the well-known
Southfork Ranch outside Dallas, sponsored their worldwide adventure during
which ten thousand pictures were taken of Lasch’s new young model Birgitta in an
endless array of beachwear in Singapore, Sumatra, Jakarta, Borneo, New
Caledonia, Fiji, Tahiti, Jamaica, Acapulco, Dallas and Los Angeles, and the famous
photographer seemed to have friends or make new ones in every paradise and at
every luxury hotel they came to. “Kary was phenomenal at conversing in foreign
languages. He would run around like a ferret to make sure that he didn’t miss
anything,” writes Lindberg. “I say it again, he was indefatigable! That one
person can have so much energy! I don’t get it.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“Kary
also had many other sides,” Lindberg reveals in a handwritten letter. “Deep
down he was very vulnerable, sensitive and also lonely. When I was in Stockholm
recently for his exhibition at Fotografiska, I visited his grave and saw the
simplest tombstone imaginable, it cried out: <i>so lonely</i>. Nothing about
him being a master photographer. Nothing. It was painful. Kary H Lasch died
alone.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Baudelaire’s
recommendation to the sensitive souls of the world was that “One must be drunk
always … If you would not feel the burden of time that breaks your shoulders
and bows you to the earth, you must intoxicate yourself increasingly.” Aside
from his fondness for Mon Chéri pralines, Lasch never touched alcohol. But the unequalled and amazing
way he lived his life was exactly like that, in spite of the fact that he didn’t
“score” each time.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">In
a sweet letter to his favourite model Birgitta Lindberg in December 1977, Kary
H Lasch thanks her “for everything that has been and has not been”.</span></span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span lang="EN-GB"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO6CojItkdRuayvKOAJiVNDR0roHAhoo7KG9jocgPiD3aANt71PrdPc5P9GI74NzoLJmyxRs40Xc7y5edYjCfbN2OILX_ESCg5vv7nns1H2o4_kXWlzVychVr7-O6yjzoPJHtchmEEXth_fMmxIi56Kzk4CXhyBttcp5Q5WR5cQ3QSI7bHjcpvkifK_AYE/s1512/Kary_Lasch_Model%20i%20Kyrka_p445.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1512" data-original-width="1500" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO6CojItkdRuayvKOAJiVNDR0roHAhoo7KG9jocgPiD3aANt71PrdPc5P9GI74NzoLJmyxRs40Xc7y5edYjCfbN2OILX_ESCg5vv7nns1H2o4_kXWlzVychVr7-O6yjzoPJHtchmEEXth_fMmxIi56Kzk4CXhyBttcp5Q5WR5cQ3QSI7bHjcpvkifK_AYE/w634-h640/Kary_Lasch_Model%20i%20Kyrka_p445.jpg" width="634" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">© Kary H Lasch/Bridgeman Images.</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table></span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Kary
H Lasch: The Golden Years <i>at Fotografiska in Stockholm through April 14,
and at Fotografiska in Tallinn, April 19–September 8, 2024.</i></span></span></p>Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-46337187776510594562023-12-07T15:44:00.006+01:002024-02-13T21:13:12.186+01:00BRUNO EHRS: HOT WATER MUSIC<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibN3hY8Bm00jCwH-FooeDzisyfaEqtycj5zusrTGN9tp8M44HrLX9ZGOjhkGqJMdfg9Mu6qq8tJyUWD39S1xU6uuWDsVY87r0UC_p7CmT_Cy0eNGN5QLIQ-FcI44FYoZoU7UCJW71WpqeyzrubTkY9ZHXDMgzwxzivibazFcLmNm2q7LUn-sjWqHhkJCvz/s1134/bruno_ehrs.sturebadet.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="824" data-original-width="1134" height="466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibN3hY8Bm00jCwH-FooeDzisyfaEqtycj5zusrTGN9tp8M44HrLX9ZGOjhkGqJMdfg9Mu6qq8tJyUWD39S1xU6uuWDsVY87r0UC_p7CmT_Cy0eNGN5QLIQ-FcI44FYoZoU7UCJW71WpqeyzrubTkY9ZHXDMgzwxzivibazFcLmNm2q7LUn-sjWqHhkJCvz/w640-h466/bruno_ehrs.sturebadet.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Bruno Ehrs, <i>Sturebadet. July 19, 1986</i> (from <i>The Stockholm Suite</i>). © Bruno Ehrs.</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i style="font-family: times;"><span lang="EN-GB">It
is surprising what beauty can offer when you are trying to create the images
with a kind of awareness.</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">–
Bruno Ehrs</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">A
boy is running across a flowery meadow on a cloudless day – blissful, freckled,
radiant, captured by the wonderment of life. The camera starts to pan his face in
profile as the youngster rises to the sky in a burst of laughter. “Mama,
there’s a cuckoo in the woods,” he says when he touches down by the river next
to her. Mama wipes the sweat off her forehead and smiles at the sight of her
son plunging the face in her bucket of water to drink. She is dead of course. The
boy and the viewers are thrown out of the dream and hurled into a world at war.
It’s nighttime for the star.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">What
was meant as a singular thoroughgoing afternoon interview with the affable Swedish
photographer Bruno Ehrs (then half reclining on my sofa due to back problems
after a life of carrying camera equipment the size of Atget’s) on matters such
as the elevated quality of his image-making, the emergence of his own designed
daylight studio (in the country’s largest island Gotland) and his “ninth-and-a-half”
exhibition evolved into a ten-hour-long course of conversations about his
all-encompassing fondness for the photographic medium – and this is what he
shows me on his mobile across the table with refreshments in the café at
Fotografiska in Stockholm, and it is late September: Tarkovsky’s perfect
opening scene in <i>Ivan’s Childhood</i> (1962).</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“I
want my images to be a bit like an ABC book,” Ehrs (b 1953) explains, “that it
should be completely obvious as to why the photographer has placed the tripod
exactly there, and if things are going very well the pictures shall also pick
up sustenance from the subconscious. And there mustn’t be any doubt because
with my aesthetics I want to guide the viewer into what I find so mysterious
and exciting. Therefore, I try to create my pictures with great simplicity. The
word ‘simple’ is misleading because life is in chaos, everywhere, and how can
you make a simple picture? It is really difficult. I don’t want to photograph
life as it looks, but I photograph it as I want it to look.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">There
is a quote by Alfonso X of Castile (the 1200s) – “If I had been present at the
Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better arrangement of
the Universe” – among the sheets of questions and they all remain unlooked at, although
answered in depth since Ehrs’s unusual perceptiveness makes him a pleasure to record.
Master filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville talked about the necessity for an artist to
be “opocentric” (a word he made up, yes), which for certain is the kind of
determination you see in Bruno Ehrs’s work as he has devoted himself to the
spirit of photography and the kind of vigilance that goes all through his <i>opus</i>.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">The
day before the opening of <i>Bruno Ehrs and Tom Wolgers: Stockholm – Pieces of
a City</i>, Fotografiska’s gallery below is a muddle of ladders, tools,
workbenches, some glass-covered prints spread out on the floor, and technicians
running about with their settled duties. And this is a type of chaos that
actually beguiles Ehrs, <i>massively</i>. Especially so when the first speaker
is plugged in with his treasured old chum Tom Wolgers’s (1959–2020) music which
he composed for their twin collaborations in the 1980s – <i>Stockholmsutställningen
1982</i> (The Stockholm Exhibition 1982) and <i>Stockholmssviten</i> (The
Stockholm Suite) in 1987 – and which have been brought back for the first time
as an intermingling twofer that is a treat for one’s eyes and ears.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“I
am back to the key element in my photography, a theory that has followed me all
my life – that I have a mood, a feeling within me. I want to convey that
emotion to others, and how do I manage to express in pictures what is sensed in
my whole body?” Ehrs reflects. “My wish, when my photography is at its best, is
that I will be able to create an image with a mood that can be shared by the
viewer. It is by then that I have succeeded. And this is how it is with my
Stockholm pictures at Fotografiska. I hope that my pictures will move the
visitor into that state of mind.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“Many
believe that Tom Wolgers and my first exhibition in 1982 was one of the
clearest signs that a new type of photography was on the way. There are simply
two main things in this: one is the one that I naturally think is great fun
because it was the first time in Swedish photo history that a photographer
collaborated with someone from another discipline. And we had no idea, Tom and
I, but we just wanted to do it. The second is that this exhibition is an early
indication that the then-dominant documentary photography breed, usually
left-leaning, had to step aside. And that was what was so provocative. I think
that people were unprepared for it and that they didn’t understand it. I also
know that people who had opinions on my pictures never saw the exhibition.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Edward
Hopper, an artist who Ehrs reveres, was at one time asked by a boring man what
he was after. These kinds of questions often produce the best ever replies and
Hopper’s was: “I’m after me.” It’s no secret that Bruno Ehrs always has been
after “me”, which is the grand opposite of trying to be popular and uninspiring,
and this is why the vapidity of DDR-Sweden and the adherents of hollow social
realism – who maintained that putting a photograph in a frame was “bourgeois” –
would finally crash and burn along with their disregard for human flourishing.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">One
of the victories at Fotograficentrum, where <i>The Stockholm Exhibition 1982</i>
was on show from late November to late December that year, was that the nation’s
Museum of Modern Art, Moderna, purchased eight of these prints from the
gallery. But the largest one is by all means the quality of these portraits of <i>Folkhemmet</i>’s
prettiest stars, the (sort of) New Romantics of Stockholm, pictures of dream
and poetry that will surely never fade to grey.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Drottninggatan
(Queen Street) is the artery in Ehrs’s early life as a professional photographer.
Across the street just slightly to the right from Drottninggatan 86, where he
lived and had a studio, was a clever waterhole called Bistro Bohème (that somewhat
remained its fumbling Swedishness by the incorrect <i>accent aigu</i> spelling)
where Gucci rhymed with Fiorucci and the angulate pastel furnishings were a
combination of 1920s Constructivism and 1980s Memphis Group. Though Ehrs didn’t
really socialise with Bistro Bohème’s clientele, he liked these people a lot
and was fascinated by their looks. He asked one after the other if he could photograph
them the next day at one o’clock, often on a Saturday or Sunday, and always in
exactly the same attire as the night before.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“Bistro
Bohème was immense fun. It was completely crazy because it was a Belgian
architect called Guy Monseau who did the whole interior. It was extremely
postmodern with tall wooden chairs that were impossible to sit on, but they put
you in a good mood. The chairs were light green or light purple or light blue
in that novel postmodernist style. Bohème was a bit odd, new and different. I
lived alone and couldn’t cook so I ate their business lunch there every day. In
the evenings it was a little more complicated because I could never afford to
both drink and dine, and for the most part I only had beer.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Georg
Christoph Lichtenberg contended in his late-1700s <i>Waste Books</i> that “For
us the most entertaining surface in the world is that of the human face” and he
is eternally right. For each individual in Ehrs’s series of portraits, made with
a 35mm camera and a roll of film, there was a new location that he had opted
for in advance, on Drottninggatan or close by, to perfectly frame the notion
that he had about this person. Ehrs says that he longed to photograph these
people, “but at the same time I didn’t want to know anything about them,
perhaps for fear that they were not what I hoped. I think that I can say that I
have such sensitive tentacles so for me that is enough.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">The
photographer was only twenty-nine at the time when he made these pictures that
are so strikingly appealing in tone and style – yet full of conscious photo law
don’ts, like a drainpipe coming out of a young man’s head or the one where the
parking meters are voguing in front of another guy just to steal the attention.
(“I use that aesthetics as something positive to enhance the mood of presence
and present time.”) A precious picture in this series, that consists of
fourteen prints at Fotografiska, is the portrait of Cecilia (<i>Cecilia,
Student, Drottninggatan 86</i>) in a chequered dress and a thoughtful disposition,
sided by an almost robotlike and street-rough control panel and a human ink
blot, the shadow of Ehrs’s assistant. A photographer draws by definition with
light, but a really great one similarly knows what to do with the shadows. Ehrs
treats them like tangible delights. </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Also
from Drottninggatan 86 is the portrait of Madeleine in which the contrasty drama
of light and shade on her face creates a captivating penumbra. Madeleine Thor,
who worked at Stockholm’s first Italian ice cream parlour Pacific and at the dashing
clothes store Gul & Blå after school, describes Bistro Bohème as “a second
living room for everyone when we were young and hadn’t moved out from our
parents or lived in small flats”. As for the portrait, she was used to stand in
front of the camera for tests and lights since she assisted a commercial
photographer at the time: “I’m sensitive to light, I was born with sunglasses,
so the streak of light over my eye meant that I had to close my eyes to open
them when Bruno told me.” Fotografiska has a blow-up of this portrait so enormous
that the lady in the picture initially failed to notice it when she arrived at
the vernissage.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">British
photographer Eric de Maré argues in his book <i>Architectural Photography</i> that
“photography is unlike any other creative medium, and it is particularly potent
when dealing with architecture because through selection to make firm compositions
by judicious choice of viewpoint, of lighting, and of lens of particular focal length,
and in processing and printing, it can make personal comment – most often by
isolating a detail from its surroundings and building a disciplined structure
on its own right within the frame. The camera can select significant, organised
form from the general chaos of the world, and in black and white it can
formalise reality in a range of tones between black and white that creates a kind
of abstract.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">There
is art in Bruno Ehrs’s version of architectural photography made in the mid-1980s
so there is likewise personal comment, and more of those fine things that de
Maré is talking about in the thirty-nine other pictures at Fotografiska – and for
the second time Ehrs and Tom Wolgers developed a piece together for ears and
eyes on the basis of Stockholm in a different light. “My relationship with
Stockholm is really strong. I sometimes think to myself that I am a hometown
photographer,” says Ehrs who has been all over the world in his profession. “There
has always been a great interest in Stockholm in my life. I am still taken by
Stockholm and I always have thoughts in my head about documentations that I
would like to make.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">One
such documentation was <i>The Stockholm Suite</i> which premiered at the
Moderna in 1987. Its guiding idea is described as “a celebration of the vacant
Sunday city when everyone you know seems to be somewhere else”. Ehrs tells that
“In the portraits for <i>The Stockholm Exhibition 1982</i> I chose the city’s
objects as a photographic backdrop. I was driven by the idea that the city served
as an unconscious designer of the portraits’ settings, in all its brutal
simplicity and beauty. For <i>The Stockholm Suite</i> I wanted to depict the
modern city with as much clarity and distinctness as possible, far off from
romantic sentimentality.” Both of these series are monochrome – because as Ehrs
states, “The magic of black and white photography is that reality is in colour.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Bruno
Ehrs loves the tactility of a print that originates from a large-format camera negative.
<i>The Stockholm Suite</i> was made with a Linhof Technika IV with a Rodenstock
lens and 9 x 12 sheet film, “and you can make tilt–shift restitutions so that
the lines turn parallel. But it is also complicated because when you look at
the ground glass, the image is upside down and mirrored, so it is incredibly
difficult to work with these cameras, you have to redo the image in your head,”
he explains.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“The
Moderna exhibition was meant to be on display for one month but was extended
over the summer, four months. It was a <i>dramatically</i> different reception,
and we had become more mature. Tom himself has told me that <i>The Stockholm
Suite</i> is the best single work that he has done, while he thought the music
for <i>The Stockholm Exhibition</i> was a bit childish and ill-conceived. A lot
had happened during these years, photography had also changed a lot. The
aggressive tone against doing something different was no longer there at all.” The
1970s had to end at some point, even in Sweden.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Wolgers’s
contribution to <i>The Stockholm Suite</i> consists of rearranged sound
recordings of the disconcerted harmonies of the city – metro sounds, water sounds,
motorway sounds, and so on and so forth – that are wholly melded with his
predominant synthesiser compositions which form a classic sonic atmosphere,
with structures assumed from both French Impressionism and 1980s art music. (His
two works with Ehrs have just been rereleased on a double CD.) The musician and
the photographer met at a party at Gärdet in Stockholm in the spring of 1982,
they had similar preferences and loved the same kinds of artists and music (like
the Coltrane-y side of jazz), and became the closest of friends till Ehrs’s
first son was born in 1986.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span lang="EN-GB">“The
thing is that I was so fond of my family that when Tom and I were out together,
I was looking at the watch and longed to go home. As intensely as we had
socialised, just as intensely did we not socialise anymore.</span><span lang="EN-GB"> </span><span lang="EN-GB">I absolutely do not regret that decision, but I wished
that he could have understood the situation better.” By then a third collaboration,
that would have concluded their trilogy on Stockholm, was in the making. This involved
a circumstance on the greensward by the Maritime Museum with a string quartet
performing a purely classical piece by Wolgers to an Ehrs slideshow projected on
a giant screen. “That show would have been about the city’s signs and symbols,
the city’s nature morte. I never got around to make a single picture for it.”</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“I
don’t <i>take</i> pictures, I <i>make</i> pictures, and that is a huge
difference. A skilled press photographer sees things that are about to happen,
and when they happen, he is there to take the picture in action. That
photographer is not me, but I have an inner image and I physically feel it in
my whole body when I achieve it. And then I do not need to take another
picture. I feel like an athlete who is about to run two hundred metres, and
then I have to put everything aside that has to do with ordinary life. I want
to be reset and empty before a new task. My wife has many times said that when
I put the tripod down, I change and become a different person. I have learned
this self-discipline. In large productions, all one hundred and fifty pictures
must be good, and that nurtures you in some way. And I have benefitted from
this discipline, that I decide on an order, when I do my own art projects.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Three
hundred pictures in all were made for <i>The Stockholm Suite</i>. This series
is pensive too but in another way from <i>The Stockholm Exhibition 1982</i> since
it’s practically void of people. The <i>Suite</i> is a meditation on the somnambulistic
city in its Sunday robe, entangled in the geometry of surfaces, shapes and
proportions, the stuff that so much amuse him. The <i>Suite</i> is near in mood
of being in a foreign land, a bit like an old tumbleweed Western with the
Americana stripped off, or the ending in Antonioni’s <i>L’eclisse</i> (1962) in
which a desolate suburban part of Roma is what it is, yet not at all with the
director’s mysterious and poetical montage of images. Ehrs says that the great
thing about photography “is that you do the impossible. Photography can stop
time and at that particular moment it actually looked that way.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">There
are pictures at Fotografiska that show some evidence of human life, like the vast
parking garage with no cars but some tyre tracks in the snow; or the shadowy
essence of a figure who is walking by an Alfa Romeo Spider and behind is a humongous
wall, a backdrop of rough-textured bricks with a bit of the dreamy raggedness of
<i>Neorealismo</i>; or the two he-and-she doors, marked “Private” and “Ladies”,
that are having a hushed conversation in a defunct nightclub for art. Or the
one where an apparition is walking straight into the picture when the photographer
is assumed to be capturing the Berlin Wall-y backside of Kulturhuset (the House
of Culture) which has produced a particular outcome that is strange, beautiful,
out of the common and contrary to regulations.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">An
empty street, a traffic sign on a refuge, the huge corner surfaces of a
building and the Hopperesque shadows – that is <i>Klara Östra Kyrkogata. August
28, 1985</i>, and as Ehrs was standing there to make his Sunday picture (on a
day that was in fact a Wednesday) “this guy appeared and stood guard. He looked
at me and then he saw what I was doing. I took the picture and waved at him. He
waved back, then left with his plastic bags with strong beer.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">A
gem in this series is a picture with a lot of dissimilar elements, like the deserted
trolley cart that casts its shadow on an empty board for newspaper placards
where someone has spraypainted “Trousers, Skirt, Trousers, Skirt, Trousers”,
and this thing is just a bedlam of nothingness and all the same a symphony of
significance composed of things considered ugly and boring and not worthy of
consideration. This picture is implicitly anchored in the pure-natured
photography of the 1920s and 30s.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“Without
[Albert] Renger-Patzsch, I would never have experienced this. After all, he
first published a book that has the best name in the world – <i>Die Welt ist
schön</i> [1928] – meaning, the world is beautiful. You cannot beat that drama,”
explains Ehrs who is an avid collector of vintage photobooks. “This I have come
across many times when I have made photographs that I only later, and never
when I am fully engaged in the photography, can sense that I probably never would
have made that picture if I hadn’t looked at those photographs or the
paintings that I admire so much.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“There
is something tender about sitting with a book in one’s arms and the photobook
is like an exhibition, however in a slightly smaller format. If you are
interested in form, printing and typefaces, browsing through a photobook is a
great journey. I have been having fun trying to get hold of some of these old valuable
books from the Weimar period in particular. I have two first editions of [Karl]
Blossfeldt and I even like the way they smell. The book is like a kind of
company, or like a mood carrier,” Ehrs maintains.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“I
regard these photographers, my heroes, a bit like the angels in Wim Wenders’s <i>Wings
of Desire</i> [1987] who circumambulate despite that we humans cannot see them.
On occasions when you are pondering, are sad, think about something, the angel
comes and sits next to you and puts his arm around you, and all of a sudden you
feel much better. And for this reason, I believe that these people that I have
come to know through these beautiful books have deeply ingrained me, to help
me. They are my friends. It is just that they do not know it.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Pretty
miraculously Bruno Ehrs has managed to repossess his first camera, a Canon FT
QL, that he bought during a summer school holiday before a trip to Sunny Beach
in Bulgaria with his big sister. When the young Ehrs had made this purchase in
the city, he just couldn’t contain himself on his way back home to Årsta (in
the southern part of Stockholm) so he got off his bicycle after a few hundred
metres, sat down under a statue in Kungsträdgården (the King’s Garden), rejoiced
in the scents of his new tool, set the shutter speed to a second and listened
to the sound of the exposure time over and over again. And he thought to
himself that this is life.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“In
order to succeed as a photographer and make images that have meaning, you must
possess a combination of being an artist and being an engineer. I know truly
great artists, they have all embraced the artistic position, but they cannot
photograph. The common thread is that most photographers are technically
interested,” Ehrs implies. “I never became a photographer to experience the
world, I became one because I had an interest in photography. I am constantly
longing to make a really good picture, that is my journey.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">To
be an excited young man with a camera was one thing, however becoming a
photographer was not Ehrs’s first choice when he was still in school. He
applied to the School of Journalism in Stockholm, not to become a journalist
but some kind of writer, but didn’t pass the tests. His father, who was an
engineer, had a Voigtländer camera. In his early teens Ehrs biked to the Klara
quarters with his pals to photograph the brutally scarred midtown on Sundays, which
was the day of the week when they could roam freely amongst the boy-world remnants
of old Stockholm. Ehrs got a Durst 301 enlarger and set up a darkroom in a
boxroom in the basement of the apartment building. But it took some time for
him to understand that it is only the coated side of the photo paper that is receptive
to light.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Something
substantial happened to Ehrs when his father’s highly religious relatives from up
north gave them a book titled <i>Bilder av Nådens barn</i> (Pictures of the
Children of Grace, 1963) “which is no comedy, but it meant a lot to me. We had
mostly technical books at home, and all those pictures were comprehensible, but
when I was holding Sune Jonsson’s photobook I didn’t understand the story of
the pictures. It was the first time that it occurred to me that there was a
kind of beauty and delight in the incomprehensible. And the same thing happened
when I saw Christer Strömholm’s book <i>Poste restante</i> [1967]. I remember
sitting on the floor by the photo shelf in Årsta Library and being almost
obsessively shocked by the incomprehensibility of the images – you felt
something that gripped your insides, but it was impossible to analyse as a boy.
Both books were probably decisive for me becoming a photographer.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">There
was a new assignment every week at the photo school in Solna (Stockholm). Since
the student Ehrs’s dedication to photography was somewhat overenthusiastic and
(in his own description) pretty juvenile, he always seemed to do more than was
asked for but not quite what his teachers requested. One icy spring he
travelled as far as he could go in the Stockholm archipelago with his
Rolleiflex and ten rolls of film. After he had collected the developed rolls in
a brown box from a photo shop, Ehrs was sitting on the metro one day looking
through the slides with the aid of the lights in the carriage.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Facing
him was a charming man dressed in a worn lambswool sweater, a Harris Tweed
blazer and a knitted bow tie. “And he seemed so kind and smiled so much at me.
When I looked up, he looked at me, and I said, ‘Do you want to have a look?’
When we reached the Old Town, he suddenly asked, ‘Are you a photographer?’ ‘No,
I’m in photo school.’ ‘Do you want to become a photographer?’ ‘I want nothing
more,’ I said.” The gentleman was none other than the famous Stockholm
photographer Lennart af Petersens who was in charge of the photo department at the
Stockholm City Museum.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Ehrs
was hired that summer as a repro photographer, a job that was marked by its everyday
sameness – both because of the procedure of the task and that he didn’t like
the mediocre quality of the pictures that needed to be duplicated. But then
there started to appear some pictures “with an entirely different shimmer, an
entirely different light, an entirely different aura”. The author of this decidedly
particular work is Henry B Goodwin who turned photography into an accepted artform
in Sweden, via Pictorialism. Ehrs has a handsome collection of Goodwin prints
and has made two books and an exhibition about this peculiar go-getter from
Munich who nearly became a professor at Oxford.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">In
1978, Ehrs received a phone call from a man who had just seen his Solna Library
exhibition of the roundhouses in that part of town. Lars Peder Hedberg was a creative
whose objective was a desire to infuse Stockholm with a metropolitan sense of
the world and Ehrs was recruited for the launch of a truly impressive magazine,
<i>Sthlm City</i>, even if his engagement would be limited to doing basic photo
jobs. “But I ended up in an editorial office where the phones were ringing and
where there were large Hans Gedda prints on the talented art director Tom
Hedqvist’s desk. The owners shut down the magazine after four months, however,
and then I got a little sick to my stomach because this was not what I had
hoped for. It then turned out that the cleaning lady and I were the only ones
with permanent employment.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">By
the end of the first week as a fully-salaried unemployed, Ehrs received another
important call from an editor at the girlie glitz magazine <i>Veckorevyn</i>
who had mistaken Hans Gedda’s <i>Sthlm City</i> work for being his, and she
asked Ehrs to fly to Paris the next day. “So we went to Paris and I was so damn
lucky because I had some model friends, and when we got there we were invited
to the opening of a disco called Les Bains Douches and it was Paris’s Studio 54
at the time.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“When
I came back to Stockholm, the editor-in-chief told me that she had never heard
of a photographer and journalist returning with ten features in a week. She
wanted to hire me on a contract, and it paid twice as much as the last job –
and it was the same employer! Being a photographer at <i>Veckorevyn</i> with
their slightly silly coverage was not quite what I had in mind, but the
circumstances made me a bit fond of the free food, the parties and the pretty
girls. Well, I was at that age.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">That
kind of party ended when the Bonnier Publishing Group brought in their noted-switch-notorious
mender to save the magazine; a Gertrude Stein-like woman of a seriously
frightening disposition, “and let me put it this way: she had more male sex
hormones than I do. She was like an attacking eagle and I was not the slightest
cocky at that point. She kindly asked if I wanted a cup of coffee, and I
thought to myself that this is going to be bad.” Her message was that the next
thing that Ehrs was expected to do was to go straight to the elevator, press “G”
and not ever again enter the building. “It was then that I decided to never be
employed again in my life. It was 1981 and that is how it happened.” Many years
later they met by chance in the café when Fotografiska had opened in Stockholm.
This time it was friendly and Ehrs thanked her for saving his life.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">In
1979, Ehrs shot Andy Warhol. He was going to New York together with a famous
man of culture to cover a host of people of renown in the city, but was promptly
left to his own devices. Luckily Leo Castelli found the “cute Norwegian boy” to
his liking so Ehrs got his pass to Warhol and the Union Square Factory, and
also went on a cruise one night in Warhol’s limousine to places like Studio 54 where
small glasses of sponsored Absolut Vodka were served up during every fifteen-minute
stop they made. The white t-shirt that Warhol had written his phone number on
and “Call me” was obliterated one day when Ehrs’s mother decided to put it in
the washer. And later on, there was a big eruption of soup inside his camera
cabinet when one of the signed Campbell’s cans had soured up. But who needs
souvenirs with these kinds of memories?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">That
feature was for the abovementioned publishing house’s new crown jewel <i>Månadsjournalen</i>,
and this was the fecund era when Ehrs started to collaborate with some of Sweden’s
best writers – especially the legendary Bobo Karlsson who had co-founded <i>Sthlm
City</i> and who was so fed up with Sweden that he relocated to New York. Ehrs
says that besides his own family, there’s no one who has taught him as much
about how to act as a photographer as Bobo Karlsson. New York was ever so often
Ehrs’s second city during that period. He describes NYC in the early 1980s as a
really chaotic, littered and dangerous place, “but at the same time noisy and
fun, and people danced like never before with an exuberance that would abruptly
end with the emergence of Aids”.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“The
best thing that can happen to me is when someone opens a magazine and says that
Bruno must have done this,” Ehrs rejoices. One thing that sets his pictures apart
is how he deals with proportions. He also turns every picture that he makes nowadays
into 4:5, regardless. “And this is very interesting: you kind of make different
pictures with different proportions. The most complicated is the square format.
It was never intended by Hasselblad that one should make square images, but
Victor Hasselblad photographed birds and the whole idea was to focus it on the
centre cross and press. A print in portrait or landscape mode is then made in
the darkroom. If you try to create images in the square format, it is extremely
complicated because the motifs have a tendency to fall if you are not skilled
with your composition.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">He
loved the transition to digital photography in the late 1990s and claims that
it was one of his greatest experiences since his photo school days. At that
time, and for the next twenty years, Ehrs brought quality and art to the world
of business. “The advertising jobs were what funded my private projects, so I
went into self-sponsorship. It is of course a different type of visual language
that exists in the advertising world, and I also like it very much. What I had
never understood in my early years as a photographer was that if you are lucky,
you can make huge amounts of money.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“I
saw photography as a low-paying profession. Suddenly it was the opposite with
advertising: you made too much money. I also got an agent. Another interesting
thing is that I joined an image agency early on. By then I had so many pictures
from destinations. But I have never been out to rake it in, the drive has
always been to make really great photography. I kind of want to make pictures
that I myself would like to see.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">The
National Library of Sweden lists 143 books with Bruno Ehrs’s name. Since 2014,
he has photographed nine impressive tomes of opulence for Flammarion: three luxury
brands, four French châteaus and two Italian villas. Other commissioned works
of note are his photographs in the book on Dior’s Château de La Colle Noir in
the southeast of France and the one on Cartier’s jewellery.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Before
Stockholm turned 750 years old in 2002, Ehrs received an invitation from
Kulturhuset to photograph the Stockholmer. He got the idea for <i>The
Embracement</i> one day when his youngest son fell asleep with a smile on his face
on the metro – that special existential luxury of resting one’s head so placidly
on a parent’s shoulder. The series shows famous Stockholmers at rest in the bosom
of the city, and the most famous of them all relaxes on the stairs on the
Skeppsholmen island opposite the Royal Castle. Just when Ehrs had loaded his camera
with the sixth 8 x 10 cassette, a white swan pedalled past the King of Sweden to
make the whole arrangement picture perfect.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">As
Joseph W Molitor accurately writes in his book <i>Architectural Photography</i>,
“Ideas are what lift a picture from a mere record to an exciting illustration.
Ideas come to those whose daily custom it is to generate them, for man’s
imagination runs best when in constant use. One might think that the
photographer’s equipment consists of cameras, films, lights, and lenses. In
reality a photographer’s major tool is his ability to use such hardware in
imaginative ways.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“I
am not a photographer who walks around with a camera to capture the present
moment,” Ehrs explains. “No matter how difficult it is to photograph, no matter
how difficult it is to make the pictures that you want to make, the tone is the
hardest thing to establish. I often figure that out when I am lying in the
bathtub because then all the pain disappears. It is about an occupational
injury to my back because I have worn out my body. When I arrive at this tone
everything is very loose, then when I start shooting, I stick to the theme that
I think that I have originated from the beginning.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">One
of Bruno Ehrs’s favourite photographers is Keld Helmer-Petersen, the Danish maestro
of colour (but also of extracting graphical forms from a world concealed to those
with eyes wide shut), and Ehrs and his wife had the great pleasure to travel to
Copenhagen one weekend to meet the old master in his home. Helmer-Petersen’s guiding
quote came from Paul Éluard – “There is another world, but it is in this one” (or
in beautiful French: <i>Il y a assurément un autre monde, mais il est dans
celui-ci</i>) – and this is surely a valid viewpoint for Ehrs and his work as
well.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">(Just
make sure to revisit the other jocund dream scene in <i>Ivan’s Childhood</i>, the
one with the boy and his sister on a flatbed truck full of apples in the rain
against a film negative background, and all the fruits gushing out on the river
bank for the horses to savour.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">When
asked if he’s sure that the ideas behind his almost-there daylight studio in an
old outhouse in Gotland (situated beside his other house on the northern part
of the island) are going to work, Ehrs replies, “No, I am not.” He says that Gotland
was a love at first sight. “My whole family comes from northern Jämtland. It is
a terrible landscape. It is beautiful in a sense but it is incredibly dismal
with big black lakes and spruce forests. Gotland is an abundance of beauty,
history and culture. The light is so special because there are no mountains or
tall trees; the sky is so present in a way that is second to none in Sweden.
And the island is a limestone cliff so the white limestone lights up. In
autumn, the sun has heated up this entire rock so autumn in Gotland is warmer
than it is on the mainland.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">He
found his dream outhouse in the woods, returned to it a number of times during
his and his spouse’s many bicycle tours, then bought it from the farmer who butchered
its corners with a chainsaw in order to load it on a vehicle for a hardly legitimate
move. “The farmer wanted to hit the main road and the house was so wide that oncoming
cars could not pass. A car drove into the ditch but it was no worse than it was
back on the road again. At one point we had an approach with Bus 61 and the
driver had to reverse it into another road for us to pass, and people filmed
us. On one occasion, a telephone line crossed the road and the farmer had to
climb atop of the roof and push the line with a broom. Then the farmer and his
son started arguing when they were going to lower the house onto the newly-laid
foundation, and the whole house started to creak and sway.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Another
Danish artist that Bruno Ehrs is much fascinated by is the fantastic painter Vilhelm
Hammershøi who, in Ehrs’s words, “has the black belt in empty rooms” and the
restful Sunday mood that he so much values. There is a building in Gotland that
hasn’t been in use for a hundred years called the Chapel of the Hjorterians,
and that was a rare visit that reminded Ehrs of both Hammershøi and his own anticipation
of creating a daylight studio.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">The
repurposed old outhouse has been furnished with a big window facing the northern
light that is so favoured by Ehrs. The inner walls are painted in the darkest
of greys and everything that might disturb the peace is placed in dark grey
boxes. In this space of thirty-two square metres of serenity and creativity, Ehrs
will make still lives that might possibly enter the excitement of diptychs and
triptychs because there are future exhibitions ahead. The sole picture in here
is a portrait of Yvonne, his wife.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">It’s
daytime for the photographer.</span></span></p>
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{margin-bottom:0cm;}</style><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw2Jz3dr884p5KDW9CHFjyzoPObokQ3LxGA9DQODIedeXU7LNFkZFhVgUZ7jcorD1ZsiVlrbXX7d5ggAxi-93pAOT79M21UT5pTGzBAUbi11S2DAXUMoe5FluqsjLb0Muu14CP5bCg3mDZlPQ3NzVQaQWRHJHpT6xXCgUzQ9VwhvQZE0pjils743ToJ-al/s1165/bruno_ehrs.barbar.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1165" data-original-width="863" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw2Jz3dr884p5KDW9CHFjyzoPObokQ3LxGA9DQODIedeXU7LNFkZFhVgUZ7jcorD1ZsiVlrbXX7d5ggAxi-93pAOT79M21UT5pTGzBAUbi11S2DAXUMoe5FluqsjLb0Muu14CP5bCg3mDZlPQ3NzVQaQWRHJHpT6xXCgUzQ9VwhvQZE0pjils743ToJ-al/w474-h640/bruno_ehrs.barbar.jpg" width="474" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Bruno Ehrs, <i>Club Barbar. October 1985</i> (from <i>The Stockholm Suite</i>). © Bruno Ehrs.</span></span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqAQF9AwxmrrQhNTwKfBnEFchBJCvh9Spj7V8HZVbeSkhHwVvVzsH0WdOTyJc7u4r9fdQXecbxyomAV6PSCX7mZCRDTkfryo-NIqUYYpS-vZ1Yj2rfJVx4S2mdE2Bk7S9Fli0YNOwaVCCzMnP6_Q4E903wtvzNUGj84blDCYqqvY4BEDt-jpfO8xqm-tc-/s3653/bruno_ehrs.unknown.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3653" data-original-width="2382" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqAQF9AwxmrrQhNTwKfBnEFchBJCvh9Spj7V8HZVbeSkhHwVvVzsH0WdOTyJc7u4r9fdQXecbxyomAV6PSCX7mZCRDTkfryo-NIqUYYpS-vZ1Yj2rfJVx4S2mdE2Bk7S9Fli0YNOwaVCCzMnP6_Q4E903wtvzNUGj84blDCYqqvY4BEDt-jpfO8xqm-tc-/w418-h640/bruno_ehrs.unknown.JPG" width="418" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Bruno Ehrs, <i>Unknown. Barnhusgatan 1982</i> (from <i>The Stockholm Exhibition 1982</i>). © Bruno Ehrs.</span></span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihNN65PKfHEbbpw9MIsFov8DjUvBtizwsgZ7HX0osgwv6cx7LfAHJS9TZ8CouLbSqx18eHon9489tioH6Ie5mvMGjovsdYtWFBDfwwpQOn3ewaBzn30U_OiyKf0XyFRQDztXfIARnM10LSlBSdy4BWu8tbxty_DDfb7rK1W9MU2zz_FoikU0PPZEWLJ__2/s1200/bruno_ehrs.tunnelgatan.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="889" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihNN65PKfHEbbpw9MIsFov8DjUvBtizwsgZ7HX0osgwv6cx7LfAHJS9TZ8CouLbSqx18eHon9489tioH6Ie5mvMGjovsdYtWFBDfwwpQOn3ewaBzn30U_OiyKf0XyFRQDztXfIARnM10LSlBSdy4BWu8tbxty_DDfb7rK1W9MU2zz_FoikU0PPZEWLJ__2/w474-h640/bruno_ehrs.tunnelgatan.jpg" width="474" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Bruno Ehrs, <i>Tunnelgatan, now Olof Palmes gata. September 18, 1985</i> (from <i>The Stockholm Suite</i>). © Bruno Ehrs.</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcwi5a89s0yspoI-fLaM1M_rtMEwSIE4rkp56yNAy6OgimZYy96KCFUyVRUjehKjPq4iz5Ap2xOPTxkEbaRLlnSv8byD9VywDnWQomjnqNW6PODKB8VlqFiyBPLEOVHZf5jDUbzEmjEykIP_s9yPQK0c_xG7mU1O9lHEr78sBpC5ANNA1WQdee8lRd7cpC/s1171/bruno_ehrs.kulturhuset.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1171" data-original-width="867" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcwi5a89s0yspoI-fLaM1M_rtMEwSIE4rkp56yNAy6OgimZYy96KCFUyVRUjehKjPq4iz5Ap2xOPTxkEbaRLlnSv8byD9VywDnWQomjnqNW6PODKB8VlqFiyBPLEOVHZf5jDUbzEmjEykIP_s9yPQK0c_xG7mU1O9lHEr78sBpC5ANNA1WQdee8lRd7cpC/w474-h640/bruno_ehrs.kulturhuset.jpg" width="474" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Bruno Ehrs, <i>The Backside of Kulturhuset. October 1986</i> (from <i>The Stockholm Suite</i>). © Bruno Ehrs.</span></span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: large;">Bruno
Ehrs and Tom Wolgers: Stockholm – Pieces of a City<i> through January 14, 2024 at Fotografiska in Stockholm.</i></span></span></p>
Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-60153677274723692742023-08-08T23:15:00.002+02:002023-08-09T12:35:57.324+02:00MEET MASAYOSHI SUKITA AND DAVID BOWIE<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvhZ4XgWGje7RTCYuVdgdeQcOqnF4waufJYrhvRoIzZLMrrdQEyrUnwq6n6j9gk2gIupCji4SYEkjMq1EH6FzcJTxIaLwIA2DiBGsJnIqdXYa22lHir8WTQjfe_ZWCyv7nL-ozIHOtodVTaACuw4NKfM1vpVHEsV4WPgJJWnw28EgzPGGv79RAcM41sc1Y/s1500/17-1977-B1109-trim03-2017.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="1488" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvhZ4XgWGje7RTCYuVdgdeQcOqnF4waufJYrhvRoIzZLMrrdQEyrUnwq6n6j9gk2gIupCji4SYEkjMq1EH6FzcJTxIaLwIA2DiBGsJnIqdXYa22lHir8WTQjfe_ZWCyv7nL-ozIHOtodVTaACuw4NKfM1vpVHEsV4WPgJJWnw28EgzPGGv79RAcM41sc1Y/w634-h640/17-1977-B1109-trim03-2017.jpg" width="634" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Masayoshi Sukita, <i>The Next Moment?</i>, 1977. © Photo by Sukita.</span></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /></td></tr></tbody></table>
<p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i style="font-family: times;"><span lang="EN-GB">It’s
very hard for me to accept that Sukita-san has been snapping away at me since
1972, but that really is the case. I suspect that it’s because whenever he’s
asked me to do a session, I conjure up in my mind’s eye the sweet, creative and
big-hearted man who has always made these potentially tedious affairs so
relaxed and painless. May he click into eternity.</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">–
David Bowie, 2011</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">The
stars look very different today.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">January
10, 2016 was such a grievous, particular date. It was the day when news guy
wept and told us that David Bowie had passed.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“I
believe in the premise of taking yourself to extremes, just to add a deeper cut
to one’s personality,” Bowie told an almost famous Cameron Crowe (who still
lived with his parents) in 1974. Anyone who forever lives in Bowie’s gorgeously
articulate Art Decade, when he could hear tomorrow coming and just seemed to
pour out this nimiety of supreme sounds and all these photogenic looks, knows precisely
what s/he was doing on that tenth day of the new year and how each of us was
trying to deal with the finality and the terrible blow of that message.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“Yes,
I was in my bed and checked my email and watched the news which said that Bowie
was dead,” says Maurizio Guidoni from Ono Arte Contemporanea in Bologna, who along
with his gallery colleague Vittoria Mainoldi and Kulturhuset’s Swedish in-house
curator Maria Patomella have produced the excellent <i>Bowie by Sukita – From
London to Japan</i> exhibition in Stockholm. “I immediately sent an email to
Sukita with my condolences. He responded after three days. He was completely
out of words. He always thought that he would die before Bowie because there is
a nine-year difference. Aki [the photographer’s nephew and manager] told me
that Sukita didn’t want to talk to anyone.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Sukita’s
earliest commemoration appeared through an interview in the February issue of <i>Metropolis</i>,
a free magazine for the English-speaking population in Japan: “David Bowie had
an amazing aura in front of the camera. Since that first session in 72, I
continued to capture him on several other occasions. But to be honest, I don’t
think I really understood Bowie that first time. In 77, when I shot the photo
for <i>‘Heroes’</i>, I was desperate to capture his unique aura and his quick
movements. My real memory of that day is watching him change his pose
continuously and feeling like I had to keep taking as many photos as I could as
not to lose the moment. After that day, I took a lot of other people’s
portraits; but I never asked them to do this pose or that pose. I always try to
capture the artist’s own movements and gestures by keenly observing their
worldview. So I believe he changed the way I take photos of people.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Masayoshi
Sukita was born in a coalmining town on the southernmost of Japan’s main
islands, the mountainous Kyushu, on May 5, 1938. His father was killed in China
just after the end of WWII and the strongest memory that Sukita holds of him is
through a photograph of the father bathing together with his brothers in arms. Sukita
discovered the world of cinema through his good-natured uncle who assumed the
role of a substitute father. Postwar Japan (which in fact was governed by the
Allies of the WWII and led by a US administration until 1952) was in no way a
place that suited Sukita – so the youngster would often get on his bike and
pedal a hundred kilometres to get another fix of screen rebels, musicals,
Americana and, in his own words, “visions”.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“American
pop culture arrived overwhelmingly in Japan after the end of the Second World
War,” Sukita told an interviewer. “I was extremely interested in American
culture but I was also intrigued by what was happening in Europe. It was a
fertile, productive time in the Western world and over in Japan we were trying
to figure out the new styles and trends. I was undoubtedly influenced by pop
culture and ever since I was young, I always wanted to take photos that would
bear witness to what was happening in the world.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Sukita
was a would-be rebel and a full-out dreamer during his time at the Japan Institute
of Photography and Film in Osaka as well. He often skipped the classes for
self-studies in “French New Wave cinema and British films too. I felt that the
best school lessons were from watching world cinema.” Sukita moved to Tokyo in
1965 and for a number of years he worked in the field of commercial advertising,
which was soon also combined with art photography – this new turn in Sukita’s unfolding
career transpired as he started to learn from a master in Osaka, Shisui
Tanahashi.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">You
enter the <i>Bowie by Sukita</i> show at Kulturhuset (the House of Culture) in
Stockholm through a wall painting of the graphic legs of the black bodysuit
with the white stripes called “Tokyo Pop”, which is an original design by
Kansai Yamamoto for David Bowie. The first print that meets the visitor is a
solitary one from Sukita’s extravagant <i>Watch That Man </i>series (there are
several more of these inside of course), with Bowie donning that very suit in
front of a bright red backdrop like a <i>Triadischer Ballett</i> figure or some
cat from Japan.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">And
this was Sukita’s second studio session with Bowie, who had requested Sukita
for the assignment. It took place at RCA, Bowie’s record label during the 70s,
in New York City in 1973 where Bowie was rehearsing with his band before the
shows at Radio City Music Hall on February 14–15 (Yamamoto gifted him with five
new outfits backstage) and a smaller second tour across the US. Bowie took
himself and Ziggy Stardust to Japan for the first time (where there were nine
more Yamamoto stage costumes waiting for him), arriving by sea in Yokohama in
April – for here was a Starman who refused to fly until the early autumn of
1977 when Bowie just had to make it to Marc Bolan’s funeral.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">There
is a kind of backroom in the exhibition with a floor-standing lightboard of
Sukita and Bowie from the first time that they met in 1972. This room has an
elegant arrangement of ordinary blinds cleverly arranged like Japanese hand
fans from the ceiling (and an unnecessary tabletop display case with a bland
dose of printed matter), but most of all two walls of Sukita’s new and old works
that are related only to himself as a quality artist with a set of cameras.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">On
one wall is a beautiful colour photo of a kimono-wearing woman whose profile
face is concealed by a stylish conical hat that takes up one-third of the
picture. On the other wall is an even more beautiful piece in black and white
of the same composition; one is from 2018 and the other from 1957: “This is the
first picture that he took in his life when his mother had given him a camera, his
family was so poor but she understood how important that was to him,” says Guidoni.
“Sukita told us that this picture of his mother in a summer kimono is still to
this day his favourite. It is in the tradition of Japanese photography, and
recently he took more or less the same picture, in the same room of the house,
of his niece. The kimono is a little bit different but the rest is the same.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">A
couple of the few Bowie pictures that do not work so well in the exhibition are
from a 1980 photoshoot in Tokyo in which Bowie looks like a remodelled Monsieur
Hulot, nine years after <i>Trafic</i>, trapped in the squirrel wheel of a clock
that has only ten hours to offer. <i>Bowie by Sukita</i> is in and of itself a lovely,
yet melancholy, attestation of the evanescence of time and of photography’s capacity
to deal with this treasure in richer ways than to take another cigarette and
put it in your mouth. This is also very much so an exhibition about <i>trust</i>.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“David
Bowie was portrayed by many, many photographers, but we think that Sukita-san
had a special eye for Bowie because they had a special relationship. This
relationship lasted for forty years. Masayoshi Sukita couldn’t speak any
English so it was mainly a silent relationship based on feelings, inspiration
and common grounds,” explains Vittoria Mainoldi. “Another remarkable thing is
that the only commission work that Sukita ever did with Bowie was in 1973, the
one with the red background. Every other time, they found each other. It was a
real friendship and the pictures were meant as two friends exchanging their
points of view.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Guidoni
says that his discovery came via one of Sukita’s photobooks, “and I realised
that there was something completely different compared to English and American
photographers – there is no filter and there is a special atmosphere, something
that I have never seen before in my life.” When asked how they got in touch, he
says that it was a long process with a string of emails “and no reply. And then
we wrote him a letter which we translated into Japanese – no reply. We tried
again with a couple of emails, and then we received a reply because Sukita’s
nephew realised that they could have exhibitions. Then we met him in Bologna. Sukita
was so kind to us and we have done many museum shows in Europe. And books.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">One
of these books is <i>David Bowie by Sukita: Spectacular Photos of a Legend</i>
(with texts in English and German), which mustn’t be judged by its prosaic
cover design since its contents are the opposite with the classic pictures and a
rewarding take on the interview format: “People who buy the book write to let
us know that this is a fantastic way to tell a story, by Sukita in first person.
We had several Skype calls with him and a Japanese translator, <i>several</i>, about
everything that we wanted to discuss. We put it together and sent the material
to his nephew who translated it for Sukita to approve. I love this way and we
try to do this kind of thing with other photographers because in most of the
cases they have private access to people, so they are able to tell stories
through photography and memories really well.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">According
to Maurizio Guidoni, Sukita has never really been that much of a music person
himself – “Sukita told me that he didn’t visit Woodstock [in 1969] for the
music but because it was the place to be at the time” – and as a musicians’
photographer he has always primarily been into interesting characters and, above
all, Bowie’s unique and intriguing persona. By the early 1970s, Sukita had
secured sufficient means to live an itinerant life which was absolutely ideal for
his wellbeing and for the development of his photography. Andy Warhol’s Factory,
Broadway and other such landmarks were of course places of excitement, but it
was in London that Sukita pieced it all together with the indispensable
assistance of his stylist, translator and key to the artists, Yakko Takahashi.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">After
a four-hour long photoshoot with Marc Bolan on June 30, 1972, Sukita was
strolling back to his hotel when a guy in a kicking rock pose on a street
poster piqued his curiosity. The thirty-four-year-old photographer had never
heard about this artist before, however much wisely bought a ticket to his
concert at the Royal Festival Hall on July 8. Five days later Sukita got his
first photoshoot in a borrowed studio with this effete (diamond) pup who had
just released an album called <i>The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders
from Mars</i>.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">In
his book <i>Blood and Glitter</i>, Mick Rock calls Bowie’s alien intersexual rockstar
“A dreamer of Dada with glitter in his soul.” Ziggy Stardust’s official
photographer was only pleased to salute this colleague from Japan whose first
images of Bowie happened when the artist had quite dropped his Lauren Bacall-goes-hippie
look of <i>Hunky Dory</i> (Bowie’s first imperative album, released in December
1971) and was advancing towards this new creation – for here was a Starman
waiting in the sky with a collection of outrageously great songs, flaming red
hair and a living to go with the flamboyant image.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">When
Ziggy Stardust appeared for the world during three concerts at the Rainbow
Theatre in August 1972, there was a blow-up print in the foyer from Sukita’s very
recent photoshoot with Bowie. As a reflection, there is a black and white
blow-up in Stockholm of the performer in a weird Burretti outfit backstage at
this London venue. Bowie is smoking one of his sixty daily cigarettes – having
the exit door to his back, which leads “Only to Street” – while he’s peering
into some unknown distance, which effectively is in the direction of the stage.
His future.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“It
was no longer just a matter of music, there was so much more to him,” narrates
the photographer in the <i>David Bowie by Sukita</i> publication. “Bowie had
arrived on the scene and created a new world for himself which centred around a
character from outer space and in that science fiction landscape he himself was
the alien star – a new, wildly popular idol with an androgynous, otherworldly
appearance. It was completely new, innovative, extraordinary and incredible; it
had a profound effect on me.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">In
the September 2012 issue of the Australian free magazine <i>Trouble</i>, Sukita
told Inga Walton about his first impressions of Bowie: “I quickly realised that
David Bowie wasn’t a regular performer. I felt that there was much more going
on, so much more depth and imagination than from regular musicians. I
understood entirely how he felt about using and playing with different media,
how he was also inspired by cinema and combined other ideas with his own
concepts to create something bold and new. David-san was expressing many of the
interests I also felt and could relate to, ideas that I was trying to show in
my own work.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">What
does it say about the Boring Twenties that two of the worst films made in this
young decade are supposed to be about David Bowie – the ridiculous insult <i>Stardust</i>
(2020) and the Gen Z-toadying futility of hypertension, <i>Moonage Daydream</i>
(2022)? <i>David Bowie Is</i> was the name of a comprehensive show that opened
at the V&A in 2013. The curators persevered with the title’s present tense,
and for a good reason, during the two last years when Bowie had left us and the
show was still travelling. Masayoshi Sukita’s discernment for everything that
David Bowie <i>is</i> – and this must be stressed with pleasure – is pronounced
and embodied in these portraits of his friend as they appear at Kulturhuset in
Stockholm. </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“Around
this time, David was beginning to be even more of a nocturnal creature,” Bowie’s
childhood friend Geoff MacCormack recalls in his photographic memoir <i>David
Bowie: Rock ‘n’ Roll with Me</i>. He toured and travelled with Bowie and also
lived with him and his everlasting personal aide Coco Schwab in Los Angeles during
the year when the star’s frail health, misery and exercises in sorcery due to an
uncontrolled consumption of pharmaceutical cocaine excelled his creative
faculty. “Coco and I would try to create some kind of order by occasionally
cooking breakfast and getting David up before noon. But one was loath to wake
somebody who’d been awake for three days straight. On a good day, Coco and I
would knock on David’s bedroom door with a glass of juice and a mug of tea and
proclaim, ‘My Lord, William of Orange and the Earl of Grey to see you,’ and he
would reply, ‘Enter.’ Then I would hang out with him for a while, watching a
film or some TV – the children’s program <i>Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood</i>
was a show which eternally fascinated us. That’s how it was. On a good day.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">When
Bowie’s third masterpiece <i>Diamond Dogs</i> was out in May 1974, he was
already living in New York and soaking up the city’s Hispanic culture forms and
the black music that was played at the Apollo. Bowie’s disintegration into coke
hell was more than obvious in <i>Cracked Actor</i> (1975), Alan Yentob’s
fantastic BBC documentary in which he follows a snivelling, paranoid and yet
still utterly creative and fascinating David Bowie for a couple of weeks during
his North American <i>Diamond Dogs Tour</i> in the autumn of 1974, when he
looked like the living dead that he sings of on that album.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Bowie
was down to forty kilos when he appeared at the Grammy Awards in the spring of
1975 and the British music weekly <i>Record Mirror</i> reported on his scrawny
state of health: “His physical deterioration was sad to behold. His corpselike
appearance only made more grotesque by a severe 50s-style haircut and
ill-fitting suit. His voice too was in appalling shape and it was almost
pitiful to watch him aiming hoarsely at notes he could once reach with ease.”
In all this, Bowie relocated to LA, a place he later referred to as “the most vile
pisspot in the world”.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">During
his two years of living and surviving in America, Bowie (since this is David
Bowie) recorded his soul-y <i>Young Americans</i> album (released in March
1975), divinely played the humanoid alien (“My one snapshot memory of that film
is not having to act. Just me being as I was perfectly adequate for the role. I
wasn’t of this Earth at that particular time”) in Nic Roeg’s rare beauty <i>The
Man Who Fell to Earth</i> (1976), recorded <i>Station to Station</i> (January
1976), rid himself of the inadequate Mainman organisation and its pack of revellers
and, by his own efforts, tacked together a new band in Jamaica for the <i>Isolar
– 1976 Tour</i> and the return of the Thin White Duke.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">That
Europe was closest to Bowie’s heart was evident as he opened the shows with
music by Kraftwerk and a screening of the Buñuel–Dalí surrealist short film <i>Un
chien andalou</i> (1929). Early on during the forty-date stretch of the North
American part of the tour, David Hockney was backstage with Christopher
Isherwood whose novels about his time in Weimar Berlin had captivated Bowie – who
was an avid reader of all sorts of books – to the point that the writer had to
tell him that much of the stories were just figments of imagination (“Young
Bowie, people forget that I’m a very good fiction writer”) and that he should
similarly realise that the Babylon Berlin of the early-30s was gone for good.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“Ever
since his brother Terry had introduced him to bebop jazz and Jack Kerouac,
Bowie was in awe of fearless exponents of improvisational writing and
performance. Iggy Pop was their modern counterpart and in him Bowie saw his own
future. The sessions at Oz [Studios in Hollywood] pointed the way to a new
spontaneous working method. For now, he just had to keep Iggy upright long
enough to get something down to tape,” argues Roger Griffin in his day-by-day
treatise about Bowie’s 1970s,<i> The Golden Years</i>.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">On
March 26, 1976, Bowie boarded a ship to Cannes for the European leg of the tour
(twenty-five more shows) together with Coco, a new awareness about Berlin and
some momentous ideas on his mind: “[German Expressionism] was an artform that
mirrored life not by event but by mood. This was where I felt my work was
going. My attention had been swung back to Europe with the release of
Kraftwerk’s <i>Autobahn</i> in 1974. The preponderance of electronic
instruments convinced me that this was an area that I had to investigate a
little further.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">David
Bowie lived at Hauptstrasse 155 in Berlin between October 1976 and February
1978, with Iggy Pop as his playmate. “He arrived in Berlin without his personas
and costumes to hide behind and create alien worlds. At almost thirty he was a
mature man, ready to go to the next level, not only with his music but in his
life as well,” remarks Masayoshi Sukita in <i>David Bowie by Sukita</i>. “<i>‘Heroes’</i>
has always been a very important album for me, not just because of my photo as
the album cover but for its search for new sounds and new languages of
expression that it has in its foundation. Doing this kind of research in the
shadow of the Berlin Wall, just a few steps from the border between two worlds
was so innovative that it marked an era.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Bowie
devised a lot of the major ideas for his album (and, on most days, his finest
achievement) <i>Low</i> from working on Iggy Pop’s first solo album at Château
d’Hérouville in the summer of 1976 – “I thought he was the funniest, darkest
lyricist of the time,” Bowie stated many years later. “<i>The Idiot</i>, for
me, was a new kind of musical scenario” – and both of these classics were
mainly recorded at the Honky Château northwest of Paris. When the work with <i>Low</i>
was over, Bowie had to grapple with RCA since the label did not understand it,
nor did they find it worthy of a release and was delaying it until January 1977.
His next album, <i>“Heroes”</i> (the only record that Bowie actually made in
Berlin) was recorded between July and August at Hansa Tonstudio, one hundred
and fifty metres from the Wall, and was out in October that same year. And what
a year.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Berlin
to Bowie was “the antithesis of Los Angeles” and the locals allowed him to live
a comparatively regular life in so far as the Berliners minded their own
sorrows. “I like to go out and get lost and be in places made of wood, just to
wash every shred of America off. Taking a walk was like taking a shower,” he
admitted. The Dum Dum Boys discovered Berlin together on bicycle and by foot, went
to galleries and art museums (the Brücke Museum was a favourite), watched
German art films and the current golden age of New Hollywood cinema, frequented
bars and danced at nightclubs where the drinking was beyond all reason.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Since
Bowie had a fondness for all kinds of detours, there were many crossings made to
the other side of the Wall in his dented black Mercedes-Benz 600 Landaulet
limousine (the factual vehicle on the <i>Low</i> track “Always Crashing in the
Same Car”) through Checkpoint Charlie. Iggy’s girl in Berlin, Esther Friedman,
had a diplomat father who cleared the path for them – adventures done for the
great art of being alive and to experience out-of-the-ordinary enjoyments such as
the theatre performances at Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble. All this for
(in today’s money) fourteen euros a day, which was what Coco allowed them to share.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“Bowie
and Iggy Pop in Berlin is the most incredible story in popular culture in my
opinion,” says Maurizio Guidoni. The name on the door to the seven-room
apartment on the first floor to the left in this rather cheap Art Deco building
on Berlin’s Hauptstrasse was <i>Jones</i>, Bowie’s actual cognomen. All the
rooms were wood panelled and Bowie’s room with the open fire place was the
finest, decorated with old paintings, Tiffany lamps, exquisite tapestry and
handmade carpeting. Iggy Pop moved to another flat in the building after a
while, but constant residents were Coco and Bowie’s five-year-old boy Zowie/Joey
(today Duncan Jones) who shared a room with his beloved nanny Marion Skene.
Bowie had an atelier for his painting, another room worked as his home studio.
Every Thursday eve everyone gathered in front of the TV in a space surrounded
by photo murals of the Swiss Alps to relish the 70s cop series <i>Starsky and
Hutch</i>. </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">The
rehearsals before <i>The Idiot Tour</i> took place in an old film studio in
Berlin. Bowie followed Iggy on tour as his sidekick – Bowie as the unannounced,
chain-smoking keyboard player and back-up vocalist, and he was loving every
minute of it – through the UK and North America from the first of March till
April 16. When they arrived in Tokyo to promote their albums in late April, Sukita
was of course in attendance at the press conference and was granted a
between-friends natured photoshoot with both Bowie and Iggy Pop, which was
swiftly arranged in a borrowed studio in Harajuku the day before they travelled
back to Berlin. Bowie’s only requirement was that the photos had to be
straightforward black and white portraits, and that Sukita’s stylist and
translator Yakko would provide him with a couple of black leather jackets.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“Bowie
certainly did not want to be portrayed for his handsome face; he was looking
for something else. At a certain point, in fact, he began to muss up his hair
and assume expressions of pain and suffering. I had never experienced that in a
shoot and it hasn’t happened since; public figures always want to look good in
front of the camera,” Sukita reasons in <i>David Bowie by Sukita</i>. “For a
photographer like me, capturing Bowie in the <i>‘Heroes’</i> period was
extraordinary. All I had to do in the Tokyo studio was go along with what was a
real and true performance coming from him.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">“Heroes”</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> was conceived at Hansa after Bowie had finished the
work with Iggy Pop’s new album in the same old Gestapo dancehall. Producer Tony
Visconti deployed three microphones with the last one fifteen metres away to
achieve the complete sound for Bowie’s vocals on the title track. They worked
with Bowie’s musical director Carlos Alomar on rhythm guitar, Dennis Davis on
drums and George Murray on bass – the best of the best. Robert Fripp was given
a first-class ticket to cross the Atlantic to put his fantastic guitar work, all
in one night and all first takes in real time, on six tracks that he wasn’t
allowed to listen to before the takes. Bowie encouraged him to “play with total
abandonment”.</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“Berlin
has the strange ability to make you write only the important things,” Bowie pondered.
Not only had he originated a classic recording that summer, there was also this
perfect photograph ready for the album cover. It is something of an honour and
a luxury to face twenty of his best shots (and two contact sheets) at
Kulturhuset from these sixty minutes that Sukita got with Bowie who, seated at a
small table, began to model himself according to the same principle that he employed
when he soon recorded <i>“Heroes”</i> with “absolutely no idea of the
consequences, and no perceptions of any kind”. <i>“Heroes”</i> is a piece of
art and Sukita’s image is part and parcel of what makes it so tremendously
special.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“I
learnt from the session how important it was to make my brain blank and believe
in my own senses,” Sukita expressed in an interview. The truth of the matter
was of course that he was enthralled by what was taking place before his camera
eye, with Bowie doing everything but putting up a front or a character. Bowie,
in beige corduroys and the black leather jacket that we see on the cover,
fondling the other jackets in a fashion that looks like a bit of posing. Then
he sits down at the table – and this is where it’s happening: Bowie turns his
whole essence inside out, making himself known as a figure in an Expressionist
painting with the show-it-all veneer of a jellyfish (as in a portrait by Egon
Schiele), and then the emphasis on the hands. It is fascinating to see his
course towards the picture that was chosen (in the almost-there shot, Bowie’s
angular left hand is stuck in his hair), and it was the clear favourite for
both of them.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">That
everything with <i>“Heroes”</i> was a success did not safeguard Sukita from
humiliation, and the chagrin was threefold. To begin with it was the
tactlessness of RCA which regarded these pictures as <i>their</i> property. When
they demanded the photographer to hand over everything from this legendary
photoshoot, to do as they pleased with his work, Bowie had to step in to tell
his record company to shut up and show some manners. Then it was the album
itself which RCA “forgot” to send him and the first time Sukita saw it was
through the window of a record shop in Japan.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">“How
much did that single shot add to the mystique of the songs? Enough that it now
seems fated. Enough that it caused <i>The Next Day</i> thirty-six years later,”
argues Matteo Torcinovich in <i>Outside the Lines: Lost Photographs of Punk and
New Wave’s Most Iconic Albums</i>. Bowie’s next-to-last album <i>The Next Day</i>
(2013) used the <i>“Heroes”</i> album cover without Sukita’s approval, and
designer Jonathan Barnbrook simply just crossed out the title of the original
and put a white square on Bowie’s face with the new title inside. The white
square reappears on the back as well and you can get what is left of the credits
from <i>“Heroes”</i>: “raph Sukita”.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">You
do feel the ignominy behind the words in <i>David Bowie by Sukita</i> when the
author of that photograph talks about the “large white square that seemed
almost to censor the photo from 1977. The importance that the image still had
for him was evident, even after so many years […] I was of course very
impressed by the finished product and the idea behind it.” Maurizio Guidoni responds
to Sukita’s strained courtesy by saying that “He is Japanese. But in the
documentary <i>Sukita – The Shoot Must Go On</i> [2018], he meets the graphic
designer in London and Jonathan Barnbrook apologises for not asking permission
to use the image. Consider that they were thinking of using other Bowie sleeve
designs but finally chose to use <i>‘Heroes’</i> – that is a great honour” – and
then the co-curator pauses – “in a sense.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Bowie
abandoned his Berlin home (believe it or not but this historic place is a
dental office today) at the beginning of 1978 when he went to Dallas to
rehearse with the musicians for the seventy-eight-show-long <i>Isolar II – The
1978 World Tour</i> which lasted from March 29 to December 12. This tour was
the best thing that he ever did as a stage performer, and with a backing band
that was just out of this world. (At the day of the press preview in Stockholm,
a Sukita print from that last show in Tokyo – with the linear fluorescent lamps
behind a very stylish Bowie in a Jean Genet-pleasing stage outfit – was
supported by the highly inaccurate time stamp of 1983, the year that Bowie put
on the red shoes and completely lost it.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">His
cover of Jacques Brel’s “Amsterdam” was luckily deleted as the track that was
meant to end side one of <i>Ziggy Stardust</i>. The same applies to “Crystal
Japan” that was intended to be the closing track on one of Bowie’s finest
albums, and his last masterpiece, <i>Scary Monsters</i> (September 1980). This
so-so instrumental track would however lead him to Japan once again in late
March 1980 for a TV commercial for <i>shōchū</i> (a very Nipponese libation)
and another great photoshoot with Sukita, whose suggestion was to “shoot photos
in ‘loco’ places, instead of so-called Japanese places as temples or shrines”.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">This
is savvy Bowie on a rainy day in Kyoto – Bowie on the metro, Bowie in a
phonebooth, Bowie buying stuff at the old market, Bowie with an umbrella
outside the Tawaraya Inn. “He had rented a car and asked me to sit in the back
and photograph him,” Sukita reveals in <i>David Bowie by Sukita</i>. “Despite
being a great star, Bowie did not live a life divorced from reality and everyday
activities. In fact, when he left the car and started our journey on the metro,
it was he who went to the ticket window and paid.” On a couple of gridwall
panels in the exhibition, there are quite some smaller prints of Bowie buying
these tickets and dancing all night long in the basement of his ryokan, of Iggy
doing his <i>The Idiot</i> pose in Tokyo and other rock ‘n’ roll related shots like
the one with Jim Jarmusch and Joe Strummer from the summer of 1988 when Sukita made
his way to the set of <i>Mystery Train</i>.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Questioned
why so few of these wonderful Kyoto pictures are shown at Kulturhuset, Guidoni discloses
that “I think most of the people want to see the <i>Ziggy Stardust</i> and <i>‘Heroes’</i>
series – but I think that it is more interesting to see the <i>Kyoto</i> series
and we would like to have another book with more pictures from Kyoto. Sukita
always asked Bowie for permission to show new pictures, and in most cases Bowie
said yes. I believe that Sukita wants to keep some of the Kyoto pictures
private because it was probably the most interesting shooting with Bowie.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">In
all this Sukita galore, there are some lesser interesting things in Stockholm and
they all have to do with 80s Bowie and Tin Machine Bowie (Sukita took the cover
photo for the band’s first album in 1989). 80s Bowie was severely marked by the
murder of his friend John Lennon on December 8, 1980. Bowie was playing John
Merrick in <i>The Elephant Man</i> in New York at the time and struggled to
carry out next evening’s performance. There were three empty front-row seats
that night at the Booth Theatre on Broadway: one for Lennon, one for Yoko Ono
and one for the killer. Bowie revealed in 2010 that he was next on the list.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;">Just
back in London after holidaying with his son, Bowie appeared in a fine
interview on ITV’s <i>Afternoon Plus</i> in February 1979. One of Marvis
Nicholson’s questions was if he felt a bit like the alien protagonist that he portrayed
in <i>The Man Who Fell to Earth</i>, a man (as she called it) “in his own
void”? “Thematically I’ve always dealt with isolation in everything I’ve
written, I think,” Bowie said with great attention to his host. “It’s that
peculiar part of the human mind that fascinates me – about the small universes
that can be created inside the mind, some of them fairly schizophrenic and
quite off the wall.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Bowie
by Sukita</span></i><span lang="EN-GB">
is a one damn song.</span></span></span></p>
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{margin-bottom:0cm;}</style></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvaGYfQXgoJx0UBEDvi3ND10AtzGdmskrsv0ZFqSyoHavV5c5EUE5qJOuUsN_1NT7gr6u8hASvGSqP2vxyxI4xVl7zRDITB1kfX3sQNfFSSRhi3loqb83kmvAFajLeFs-zsNTmi5975HC3evbwte434CTvtoBWzAHxtFBzg3V05n5A0U18W8RysGZXOzLG/s1600/hxjtgb0xzmjy.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1058" data-original-width="1600" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvaGYfQXgoJx0UBEDvi3ND10AtzGdmskrsv0ZFqSyoHavV5c5EUE5qJOuUsN_1NT7gr6u8hASvGSqP2vxyxI4xVl7zRDITB1kfX3sQNfFSSRhi3loqb83kmvAFajLeFs-zsNTmi5975HC3evbwte434CTvtoBWzAHxtFBzg3V05n5A0U18W8RysGZXOzLG/w640-h424/hxjtgb0xzmjy.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: Courier; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Masayoshi Sukita, </span></span><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>A Day in Kyoto 6 – Departure</i>, 1980. © Photo by Sukita.</span></span></div><span style="font-family: times;"></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Bowie by Sukita – From London to Japan </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">at Kulturhuset in Stockholm through September 3, 2023</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">.</span></span></span><p></p>Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-3049792669106488392023-05-06T18:53:00.000+02:002023-05-06T18:53:25.420+02:00ROME, BY ALL MEANS ROME (PART TWO)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEeb_A3qINwxQu26FQD0_gEjxnN_EgWaMBZbPvPXeJ2baDMwBcmiRainKAC6vDEatVCVm93DZbqpgjSYqHv7pj_PvUrl2HN7korzMixkK-wzUahDrdhGLofqXcZEMGjjrlK_wW_6qwquj89S33YujQfjss8LcQI0-MxKkk64OQtaHK2IMY1VCpiVhkwQ/s6000/1.DSC01830.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; 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text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Roma ai primi di marzo.</span></span></p>Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-10579369500219442023-04-09T17:05:00.001+02:002023-04-10T13:58:16.147+02:00ROME, BY ALL MEANS ROME (PART ONE)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge8odpHZfvp53D-ko8zJXkqNw-6qeJTm-V3cK1pMAFe7OTh1FYh0tYAd0bbW8WWAsNfVmGyXJIvYa6pfUJjdffm5bLB37Ck1xRfljCuqrNIdEhxc541ajkIsv7Qms42B_-gEh4V6Kvzc05V4JHgOI665PfwY2q4Cpu5mqFGvnSAEEOeZNUuf58B_SPnA/s6000/1.DSC01911.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="6000" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge8odpHZfvp53D-ko8zJXkqNw-6qeJTm-V3cK1pMAFe7OTh1FYh0tYAd0bbW8WWAsNfVmGyXJIvYa6pfUJjdffm5bLB37Ck1xRfljCuqrNIdEhxc541ajkIsv7Qms42B_-gEh4V6Kvzc05V4JHgOI665PfwY2q4Cpu5mqFGvnSAEEOeZNUuf58B_SPnA/w640-h426/1.DSC01911.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; 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font-size: large;">Roma ai primi di marzo. </span><br /></div>Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-34066411340747427812022-12-02T02:09:00.009+01:002022-12-12T13:02:53.012+01:00À JOUR WITH THE LIGHT: CHRISTER STRÖMHOLM AND PARIS<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizIBEjZpjP_oM7h6ZBbNiq16l_Vw6_4OVIJ9APsYe_oCIqwi5stFPaWGKeKU6z97GIfcsmIJ54i-bfw4pYRHK9-I3dm_XYKrrBF6l3tw5ydYrQY0Mtql27bfrjP6oOd7zDPPAj5JhzQ8Lt8n4capgCBuMdwkDwgvbQWfgPSlYo8WZFcUz7zt83MLVSpw/s2143/stro%CC%88mholm1.0738-D%20Fiacre.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2143" data-original-width="1575" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizIBEjZpjP_oM7h6ZBbNiq16l_Vw6_4OVIJ9APsYe_oCIqwi5stFPaWGKeKU6z97GIfcsmIJ54i-bfw4pYRHK9-I3dm_XYKrrBF6l3tw5ydYrQY0Mtql27bfrjP6oOd7zDPPAj5JhzQ8Lt8n4capgCBuMdwkDwgvbQWfgPSlYo8WZFcUz7zt83MLVSpw/w470-h640/stro%CC%88mholm1.0738-D%20Fiacre.jpg" width="470" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Christer Strömholm, Paris, 1949–55. © The Strömholm Estate.</span></span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpKsZ9z4S2mLWc5uy5XoEduoxNI_vpcNlFjrAb4SgOR70NEj3f2ku14FV-g7nYKswBRXsF7Y_CfqDmlKfYGlzQucsOqFkcKUdc2P50tBR9bnnpbs1N3uGoXrqxhpp1AU9VQng0PhfVWwqzJzk0ZutilRYL6mPIQyDm58xFmVU2UHF_kCvg_tmuIJ5IvA/s2138/stro%CC%88mholm2.1685-D%20Glas.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2138" data-original-width="1575" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpKsZ9z4S2mLWc5uy5XoEduoxNI_vpcNlFjrAb4SgOR70NEj3f2ku14FV-g7nYKswBRXsF7Y_CfqDmlKfYGlzQucsOqFkcKUdc2P50tBR9bnnpbs1N3uGoXrqxhpp1AU9VQng0PhfVWwqzJzk0ZutilRYL6mPIQyDm58xFmVU2UHF_kCvg_tmuIJ5IvA/w472-h640/stro%CC%88mholm2.1685-D%20Glas.jpg" width="472" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Christer Strömholm, Place de la Contrescarpe, 1960–62. © The Strömholm Estate.</span></span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO2OCT8qiceDfm6gFGl-1jafKeq8mPNQTco4qBrUh054jBB1KDHgDFbiaxG2l5Y-JZpTJDzeqw4_weeJ_a7hbV3GDVxedXuRe0k3HuPJQtgkwD1kqPJiDjRKmkNqlBzVsvsbEMoX0We4FsotdZHIEkjSFiHG-Tl2d4EDykeJEH10s2J23shfXIU6vv7w/s2100/stro%CC%88mholm3.0087-Leopard.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2100" data-original-width="1575" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO2OCT8qiceDfm6gFGl-1jafKeq8mPNQTco4qBrUh054jBB1KDHgDFbiaxG2l5Y-JZpTJDzeqw4_weeJ_a7hbV3GDVxedXuRe0k3HuPJQtgkwD1kqPJiDjRKmkNqlBzVsvsbEMoX0We4FsotdZHIEkjSFiHG-Tl2d4EDykeJEH10s2J23shfXIU6vv7w/w480-h640/stro%CC%88mholm3.0087-Leopard.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Christer Strömholm, Paris, 1949–55. © The Strömholm Estate.</span> </span></span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i> </i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span><span><i>Christer
wouldn’t probably have been that much without Paris. It was like a great love
that he returned to all the time.</i></span></span></span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span><span> </span></span></span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span><span>
</span></span></span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span><span>–
Joakim Strömholm</span></span></span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span><span>
</span></span></span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span><span> </span></span></span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span><span>
</span></span></span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span><span>The
best day is a day of thirst.</span></span> An evening at the Pigalle funfair in the winter of
1955, and life just couldn’t get any better for this little guy who is standing
firm on the wooden floor closest to the stage, absolutely mesmerised by the
huge allure and the certain adult danger of the chanteuse in fishnet stockings
and the high heels in front of him. And the rest of course is unspoken radiance
as we barely see anything else of the woman.</span></span>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Only
once would the photographer behind this distinctive image provide the viewer
with a title (but never an explanation) for his works – “See for yourself,
think for yourself. I cannot help you,” was his watchword – for this adventurous
garçon and his lust for life is not just any Gallic boy but a glorious young wish-version
of the Swedish-born (and Francophile to the core) photography artist Christer
Strömholm (1918–2002). Here’s looking at you, <i>Little Christer</i>.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">“There
is likely a lot of the grown-up Christer in <i>Little Christer</i>. Above all, <i>curiosity</i>,
which he himself thought was one of his best traits. That’s what Christer is,
curious and stubborn. This is the only picture he thought should have a title
so people would really know that this is little Christer, even though it’s not
him. But he saw himself in this. The wide-eyed little guy is well aware that
this will take place every evening and that he can go there and watch a girl.
This also has a lot to do with the adult Christer’s interest in women: five
marriages, two long concubine relationships and I do not know how many
mistresses.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">It
would be obvious to anyone how present-tense <i>here</i> Christer Strömholm is to
his oldest son Joakim Strömholm (who, for reasons of clarity, will be referred
to as Joakim for the rest of this text). The reverence and the tenderness that
he holds for his father, and the dedicated supervision of the Strömholm Estate,
are the kinds of sentiments that any man could only dream of garnering for his
old man.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">By
the way, we are in Christer Strömholm’s Stockholm home, a small but cosy downstairs
abode with a darkroom and the bare essentials for living: books, books, books, photographs,
magazines, his (often silly) keepsakes – Strömholm was a collector of memories
and Joakim shows me a selection including Spielberg’s “Be good” Extra-Terrestrial, a
bulldog with a name (Bosse) and a tacky thingy in yellow plastic which too was
once loved – and a shelf of negatives supporting Strömholm’s astounding series
of his transsexual friends in the 9<sup>th</sup> and 18<sup>th</sup> arrondissements,
<i>Les amies de Place Blanche</i>, which he worked on from 1959 to 1968. (This is holy ground. I only allow
myself to just touch some of these binders.)</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">“Look
at all his pictures of children, they are just reflections of his own
childhood. That’s lonely Christer, the abandoned Christer, but this is still
the tough little kid who is out in the open, in the big world, and making it. <i>Les
quatre cents coup</i>s [1959] with Jean-Pierre Léaud had not been made yet, but
Antoine Doinel is exactly the kid he wanted to be, and with a little more
confidence than Christer had when he was that age. All his children’s pictures
are self-portraits, which he also claimed. You could say that Christer’s
photography was one long kind of self-therapy.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">A
weird sort of happenstance is that if you zoom in on the other youngster in <i>Little
Christer</i> (just behind the little guy), you see a teenage mirror image of
Antoine Doinel – this brash and yet so responsive main character in Truffaut’s
masterpiece, whose single option in his tender life is to escape the
disproportionate punishments of a world of harmful grownups. There’s a charming
scene in <i>The 400 Blows</i> involving an audience of children much younger
than Antoine (Antoine and his friends are lurking in the background) as they
are watching a Punch and Judy show at the Jardin du Luxembourg. They are all screaming “Le loup! Le loup!”,
startled and amused by the sight of the wolf behind the woman. Christer
Strömholm loved the delights and the altogether poetry of this city. All in all,
he lived in Paris for possibly thirty years of his life.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">“In Paris, if you are not going to starve, you need a number of assets:
an open mind, an ever-curious eye, a sharp ear, a hound’s nose, a fleet foot,
and a certain contempt for private property – in short, the vagabond’s usual
baggage,” argues Jean-Paul Clébert in his piecemeal novel <i>Paris Vagabond</i>
(1952) in which he discovers the hidden corners of the capital among the poets,
fools and bums.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">“He
had a vagabond in him that had to get out,” says Anna Nilsdotter who has
co-curated <i>Christer Strömholm – Portraits in Paris</i> at Nationalmuseum in
Stockholm together with husband Joakim Strömholm. The exhibition is a
collection of one hundred and ninety portraits, mostly never presented before
and mostly showing the artists of the era (the big names and the forgotten
ones) and cultural figures, but also portraits of the city itself. </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">There
is an amatory picture of a sassy couple in which the woman rests her head on
the man’s shoulder at La Méthode in 1961 – Strömholm conveniently lived on the
floor above the bar, it’s the window on the right in the picture of the Hôtel
de la Montagne with a 2CV parked outside (1956), the same room that Paul
Andersson (a Swedish Rimbaud) had been residing in during his time in Paris –
and it is the one photograph in the exhibition that has anything at all to do
with the romanticism we know from another master, Doisneau.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Christer
Strömholm’s Paris was more in the vein of the passageways (the real ones and
the symbolical ones) and the offbeat poetry that Clébert is hankering after in
his novel: “Leisurely
strolls quite obviously (and fortunately) unknown to the tourist trade, for there
is nothing to see on these routes except for poetry in the rough, which paying
travellers would never appreciate: the poetry of […] workshops, still vacant
lots, bowling alleys, bistros-cum-refreshment stands; the poetry of colours but
also of smells, a different smell for every doorway. Serpentine itineraries
winding on endlessly, interminable itineraries open to anyone who knows how to
wander and how to look, who has the nerve to go through <i>portes cochères</i>.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Joakim
explains that Strömholm was “very determined about what was what, and he said
that there are only four hundred pictures in a photographer’s life that are
good. He very much trusted his immediate surroundings, that is to say his
printers and assistants. They could rummage around with the negatives, which
was great fun for him since they came out with a new classic.” The classics
from Pigalle’s curious fair festivities and of his transsexual friends,
pictures that made a whole generation of Swedes discover Christer Strömholm
when they were published galore in <i>ETC</i> magazine in the early 1980s, are
not on show at Nationalmuseum because this is the place where the goodness
continues with other expressions of Strömholm.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Blaise
Cendrars claimed that he could spend a full life contemplating the Seine flow
by since the watercourse alone was “a poem of Paris”. Pages 35–41 in the
exhibition catalogue make up one perspicacious
sequence of hardcore early-50s Christer Strömholm: pictures terse and full of
meaning, substance and gist – the uncertain beauty of two blocks of ice thawing
outside the entrance to a bar, making the trottoir look like a bloody crime
scene; carefree children at play under the pitfalls of life; two painted young
lovers and their giggle as they bend over to eyeball the aspects of a naked
woman in another painting; a streamlined car mystified by mere shapes of darkness
and light; old Parisians who have found out new beginnings since the city is
theirs again (and they are elegant), and rue Bernard Palissy where the street
is narrow and the walls are loud with letters.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">In
the introduction to his translation of Po Chü-I’s poems, David Hinton elucidates
that “In <i>Ch’an</i> [Zen Buddhist] practice, the self and its constructions
of the world are dissolved away until nothing remains but empty mind or
‘no-mind’. This empty mind is often spoken of as mirroring the world, leaving
its ten thousand things utterly simple, utterly themselves, and utterly
sufficient.” Strömholm’s art is utterly an offspring of these three features.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">In
the exhibition’s “Christer Room” (designed by Anna Nilsdotter who never had the
pleasure to meet her father-in-law), on the left to Strömholm’s Hermes Baby
typewriter and his collection of pipes, paintbrushes, a Leica and other tools
and belongings, is a little stylised shelf of two literature genres that both
reflect Strömholm’s nature: Mickey Spillane and Winnie-the-Pooh. He was an ardent
student of Buddhist writings and similarly adored Pooh’s philosophy, kindness
and thoughtfulness. Spillane is arguably a remnant of Strömholm’s murky
bloodlust youth, which would lead to dire consequences. And like Hammer he
wasn’t always sure back then what he was rebelling against.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Christer
Strömholm continued to surround himself with the most expensive art supplies
years after his wishful career as a painter had come to nothing and when he
indeed had established himself as a photographer in Paris. A main body in the
exhibition are the many important images of artists, and the most interesting
ones are those from their studios (which sometimes meant hotel rooms). “In
Christer’s artist portraits there is a clear consistency as with all of his
work, a density in the composition, a proficiency and a lack of affectations,
which means that they possess a rare ability not to look obsolete,” declares
Christian Caujolle in his catalogue text. “Encounters, eclecticism,
photographic curiosity and a lack of systematic form distinguish these studio
images which today are both valuable documents and witnesses of a time, freed
from the nostalgia that colours most French photographers’ images from the same
era.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Nilsdotter
is of the same mind: “Even if time has brought out a mystery about certain
images, they still feel as if they were taken in the present, you can recognise
yourself in them. This is the Tunisian artist Hatem El Mekki who became a close
friend of Christer Strömholm’s,” she says referring to a large print of one of
the finest pictures in the exhibition (taken in 1949) and the contact sheet it
belongs to. “This series was taken with a medium-format camera that produces 6
x 6 negatives. Back then Christer wanted to remove everything that could
disturb the images and he cropped them very drastically, but over time the
objects have become very charged and have acquired a historical, magical value
that provides the images with an exciting atmosphere. And it turned out that
Christer had an eye for life drawing and the model does not feel naked but more
like an icon for the artist.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">It
was a young dynamo, polyglot and journalist who propelled Christer Strömholm
into a career as a camera portraitist of the cultural beau monde in Paris for a
few years, and it started in the late 1940s. “Christer told me that the crucial
thing wasn’t really that they would get a good picture of the artist or politician who they
visited, but to produce a picture of Louis Wiznitzer along with the interviewee
when they sent the material to Brazil. The mystery is also that there were 6 x
6 rolls that he sent away but that he also had his Leica with him and took some
pictures unofficially, and luckily these are the negatives that we have.
Christer has never published more than a few of these pictures,” explains Joakim.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">And
as Nilsdotter adds, “At that time, photographs did not have much of value for
newspapers, many were actually thrown in the trash when they were published.
Christer sent film rolls along with the article, and received his money
straightaway, and then a lot of his pictures disappeared. We visited the Fondation
Le Corbusier in Maison La Roche and there was a Brazilian secretary who tipped
us about search engines to look in Brazil’s National Archives. Christer had
published around fifty articles with Wiznitzer and it was incredible to see
this journalist along with all the greats from Hitchcock to Jean Genet. The one
who received the photo credit was not Christer but the airline that had
delivered the pictures.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Joakim
says that <span lang="EN-GB">“</span>Christer was very proud of his portrait of [François]
Mauriac and it has been in many exhibitions. I found pictures where he has been
upstairs and photographed the entire workplace so this is evidently how Mauriac
lived.” The portrait is most likely from 1951. The French author and future
Nobel Prize laureate looks straight into the camera in a stately fashion and it
is beyond obvious that Strömholm was born to be an imagemaker. He is already
there, with all of his senses, photographing the essence of people that he did
not know who they were.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Marcel
Duchamp, Man Ray and Le Corbusier were three artists who really made an impact
on Strömholm. (Many others were introduced to him by his friend Pontus Hultén
who was the founding director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm.) His 1951
portrait of Le Corbusier is perfection. This is a painter’s treatment of the
light – Strömholm only ever used natural light at all times: Le Corbusier is
standing outside his rue de Sèvres studio, framed in a square within a square
by two open windows; his trademark round glasses, bowtie and double-breasted
suit, hand in pocket. Mind you, this is the man who wanted to rake all the
beauty out of Stockholm. And still, the portrait of him is exceptional to the
degree that you even lose sight of how miserable the corridor looks. It is like
when Beauty floats through Beast’s hallway in Cocteau’s <i>La Belle et la Bête</i>
(1946) with the flickering white voile curtains and the wall with the two human
hands holding candelabrums, the magic of great artists. </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Strömholm
believed that it is your experience alone that will decide what you will see in
his works, which Joakim illustrates with an episode that took place in the exhibition:
“At Nationalmuseum there is a picture now of a ‘shroud’ and then there is a
registration number underneath, 2102 MY75 – something that people take as somewhat
very spiritual because it is together with other forms, homeless images that
are just signs and traces. One person asked me why there are no titles on the
works and I replied that then the pictures would be ruined for you. What he saw
as a burial sheet is a blanket over a car engine. It is important to keep that
secret, that you have to do a bit of guesswork.” The whole thing rises like a
crimped Renaissance sculpture.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Christer
Strömholm was drawn to what was a bit forbidden and off the charts; call it anomalous,
call it interesting. In 1965, the NK department store in Stockholm put the pictures
of his transsexual noctambules around Place Blanche on show, much to the
customers’ chagrin. And the following year, the Stockholmers were exposed to
his death pictures at Galleri Observatorium. “The most famous of his death
pictures are his grave pictures, and the one that we have included in the
exhibition is the one with the large hole in the gravestone. The dead person
has run off, he has escaped, no doubt about that,” says Joakim.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">There
is another death picture in <i>Christer Strömholm – Portraits in Paris</i> whose
meaning is of even greater importance. It calls to mind how the head of Christ
in Leonardo’s mural <i>The Last Supper</i> (conceived in the late 1400s) was used
by Napoleon’s soldiers for target shooting. It is a photograph of a painting
leaning against a wall and the man in the portrait has a sinister hole in his
head. “He was very much engaged in using other people’s artwork and redoing it
into his own image so that we would not forget what others have seen,” tells
Joakim. “He photographed his good and bad memories. The picture that is in the
first room with the gunshot in the forehead, he said that it was about his
father, even though the father shot himself in the heart.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Strömholm’s
errant and unruly youth is a reason enough to holler “Le loup! Le loup!” Joakim talks about his
father’s lostness and taste for extremes during his juvenile years, how he was “like a donkey between two wisps of hay”: “A guy who
was twelve years old in 1930, who made sure to get himself a free pass to the
Stockholm Exhibition, sold Mayflowers [a pin vended by Swedish schoolkids for
charity] and became a survivor who boasted about it in his letters to his
father, which his father ignored. I think that he became damn bitter, and as a
classic protest befriended all sorts of bad people in the 1930s and joined a
lot of Nazi crap. He thought that they had much better activities than the
Scouts, and they may not have understood what would really materialise a few
years later. I would think that it was with Woldemar Winkler [his first art
teacher in Dresden in 1937] that his eyes were opened.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">There
are three framed pictures in Strömholm’s old home in Stockholm’s Södermalm area
that grab my attention. The first one is a photo of Joakim as a little boy in
the arms of his father. The second is taken by Joakim, it’s his portrait of
Brigitte Bardot from 1972 when he was her driver for a few weeks when Vadim
filmed parts of <i>Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman …</i> (1973) in Uppsala,
seventy kilometres north of Stockholm. And then there is <i>The Pale Lady</i>
(Strömholm’s absolutely vital printers had their own working titles for his
pictures), a lithography of a flawless print of the cake-faced Barcelona bordello
madam of 1959. This was the difficult picture that Strömholm put his darkroom
slaves to test with and the perfect prints are rare.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i>The Pale Lady</i> crowns the small corner with a sloping ceiling where we are parked at a
small table for the interview. It is here where Christer Strömholm and his lady
friend, actress Ingalill
Rydberg, eat chicken and chocolate one Saturday evening in the early 1990s while
they are having a really good time. She asks him why he has moved the bed – the
reply: “I can’t sleep at the same place each time” – then describes her longstanding
infatuation to the viewers: “Christer
is a true anarchist. He constantly creates new order. And this is in some way
valid on all levels. He radiates a kind of security and contact with everything
that is dangerous, unknown and tricky. There is an aura of adventure around
Christer.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Above
scene is a few minutes from Joakim Strömholm’s documentary on his father, <i>Blunda
och se</i> (Close Your Eyes and See), which was televised in 1996. Strömholm’s reticent
nature is even reflected in this moving of the bed – and, in addition, a desire
to stir up more continuity errors for the filmmaker. “There were just challenges all the time and he
was fucking with us just for a laugh. Then three years later when I had cut
down fifty hours to four and a half, he comes saying: ‘Was that all?’ He was
still not tired of himself, he never tires [the present tense again]. This
brought us a lot closer to each other. His challenging ways was a lot of his
pedagogy,” says Joakim with a twinkle in his voice. “Our relationship and his
way of stimulating me was a bit like that, affectionate and ironic.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">The film is a game of cat and mouse and all the kinds of questions that
Strömholm could never ask his father are here surveyed by his own son, who
calls him “my postcard dad”. There was another reason for making this
documentary. In 1984 a film was made in which Strömholm “is just playing games,
the stuff you would expect, it wasn’t genuine. He said the same things in all
interviews, he had his readymade phrases. I was so pissed at that film – that
is not Christer Strömholm.” In 1988, Strömholm agreed to talk in front of a
home video camera to leave a viable recording of himself for his three
grandchildren, his other son Jakob had just got his second one. And besides,
Strömholm’s speech was worsening after his stroke. The four and a half hours
were pretty good, and when Joakim suggested a real piece, Strömholm replied: “You
do that … if you dare!”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">The postcards that Joakim received every week depicted art and culture
of worlds unknown to him. The day that he was born, his father was away in in
Tunisia. He was always away. Strömholm had brushes with the law, he thought his
boy stank of rotten diapers and though he had no idea why he ended up in Paris,
he said that it was the obvious place for him. Joakim explains that “There was
a bit of escape in his behaviour, very often during this time. He was worried,
they had done things during the war. There was always a bat, a knife or
possibly a gun nearby so that he could defend himself if needed. However, that
was not why he went to Paris but because it was nicer to live there than in
Stockholm. Especially in the 1950s, which was the most important period of his
life, I think, when he became a photographer.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">All through his life, Strömholm was fuelled by his need for pedantry (for
instance, packing a car for the next trip meant days of preparation and
repeated rehearsals till people just shook their heads). “He was ever so
militarily interested and there was a military order for everything. All his
camera bags were specially made by saddle makers and tailors who sewed holsters
for him – it was more like weapons, where he could have a camera body in one
armpit and a lens in the other. Belts he had as many as possible, everything in
military green. He was completely manic about that.” </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">As a young man this mania led to confrontation with the Russian Army in
the Winter War of 39/40 in Finland, and hush-hush Resistance engagements in
Norway and Spain – he had got himself some new friends – and especially in
Stockholm years after the war where quislings were executed in drive-by
shootings. “They were doing different kinds of agent activities that contained
as much tall tales as truth. Christer loved myths and welcomed new myths about
himself – if they carried on, they just got better and better. And in all this
was a bit of what they were up to during the war: <i>disinformation</i>. That
was very important. There were many problems with the Swedish Security Service,
and if you go to the National Archives you can read about all the bloody stupid
things that he was engrossed in before he became a photographer.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">In the real documentary there is a short father–son conversation about
this particular time in Stockholm in 1947 that is as hilarious as it is
wretched – JS:
“Did you drive hand grenades in my stroller?” CS: “No, it was probably a little
surplus ammunition that we tried to get away with that lay in your stroller.” JS:
“Where did I lie?” CS: “On top of it, of course!” JS: “‘Thank you’.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">It
was Anna Nilsdotter’s idea to dedicate <i>Christer Strömholm – Portraits in
Paris</i> to Strömholm’s mother Lizzie Clason. There are two pictures from 1938
in the exhibition: one that shows his mother at the Piazza San Marco in Venice
and the other Strömholm’s one true educator with his back against the camera, a
shadowy figure by his easel in the company of a chimerical white horse in Arles,
and the handling of the daylight is quite fantastic. The painter Dick Beer died
in June that year, he was only forty-five, but his teachings about life,
philosophy, language learning and his understanding of the light were
instrumental to Strömholm. The other saviour was his wealthy mother who
supplied him with the money needed for a maverick life that would turn into
something extraordinary.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Strömholm’s
first sniff of the perturbing actualities of the Third Reich happened at
Woldemar Winkler’s art school when he was nineteen years old. In a letter to <i>mamma</i>
(dated April 6, 1937) he describes what is going on by taking the
state-approved life drawing classes as an example of the absurdities: “All this
Heil Hitlering every other minute is driving me crazy. As soon as someone opens
the door, everyone (even the model) shouts HH. The result is that the model’s
shadow changes and one is unpleasantly awakened to life and reality.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">After
quitting Dresden, he did a bit of travelling and it was then that Strömholm fell
in love with Paris on a grand scale, however then of course a global war was in
the making. Before the outbreak of WWII, Strömholm’s journeying was vivid and
what he registered made him shun the dominant isms that made the world fall
apart. He made sure to obtain some thorough art schooling in Stockholm as the
war was raging everywhere else.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Strömholm
moved to Paris when “Paris was the place”, shortly before his second wife Dagny
was giving birth to Joakim, and he didn’t move back to Stockholm again until
1956. “I think that he arrived there during a very good moment in life – young
and hungry, Paris was as most creative in the late 40s, and he had matured a
lot after the war with all the experiences that he had gained,” says Joakim. In
1948, Strömholm was enrolled at the Académie des Beaux-Arts (where he
domesticated himself until he took on further art studies in Florence in 1952
and onwards). It became apparent that the popular areas of the Paris Academy
“belonged” to the French students, or so they acted, and he began to explore
the premises all by himself:</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">“This
stupefying institution piqued my curiosity. The whole thing was like behind the
scenes at the Opera – half the place was empty! When you would sense a fellow
human being, the next glance revealed that it was just another marble statue.
In desolate halls and dark corners there were these marble arses and big-eyed
busts with chisel cuts in their pupils,” Strömholm told Timo Sundberg in 1986
(and this helpful interview is printed in the catalogue).</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">The
explorer from Stockholm found a Dutch friend and they ensconced themselves in a
remote room at the Académie. “The second day we put our names on the door. We
were doing fine in our room and thought, ‘Why not occupy the next room too?’
There were all the graphic presses, they were abandoned and dusty but since we
lived among them it was not many days before they came into use. To some extent
they contributed to our livelihood.” This was also his first encounter with a large-format
camera which too was put into service, Strömholm-style.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">“Everyone
has two homelands – his own and France,” he wrote to his mother. Paris and the perched
little village Fox-Amphoux in Provence were the two places where Strömholm
lived when he wasn’t travelling. (He said that Fox was the place where he could
be himself.) His contact with the German group Fotoform was good for Strömholm in
the sense that it made him realise that photography is about something else
than what he was trying to achieve in the art schools. The other thing was an
understanding that he had to be a present narrator with the pictures that he
made with his cameras.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Just
listen to Strömholm when he speaks with much consideration in the documentary:
“I think that you could say that the most important thing about photography and
photographic image is personal responsibility. I think that life is possible to
explore with the help of image. Without participating in life, you never get
pictures. You cannot walk around and photograph other people’s experiences. You
have to have your own experiences. You have to be there yourself, with all your
senses.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">A
day in Paris, at least during the days when Strömholm had set himself up in his
room at the Hôtel de la Montagne, began a couple of hours after noon. Strömholm
told Sundberg that during this period he “also learned the swiftness with the camera. I
had it constantly with me. Everyone recognised me, they saw that the camera was
hanging by my side all the time. During all these years I never encountered any
problem when I wanted to photograph something. It was obvious that we
photographers worked. The camera was always in order, the film advanced, the
distance set at three meters, the shutter speed at a thirtieth of a second and
I constantly fingered on the aperture ring, kept myself à jour with the light.
When a moment affects you, there is no time for doubt.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Such a moment was the dead dog in Tarragona in 1959. It was the picture
that Strömholm regarded as the new step in what was possible to achieve with
the camera as his tool, and it is the picture on the cover of his photobook <i>Poste Restante</i> that
came out in 1967. The second Strömholm spotted the animal (or what was left of
it) lying by the roadside, he slammed on the brakes. His new wife, and the
mother of Jakob, was in the car. Anna-Clara was a flight attendant and thanks
to her occupation Strömholm was able to travel vast distances. In Stockholm he
supported himself by odd-job employments and one of them would lead to the
formation of Strömholm’s legendary Photo School in 1962, with himself as the
guru headmaster for the next twelve years and his colleague Tor-Ivan Odulf as the school’s extroverted
aide-de-camp.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">“Those
inspired by Christer’s world of imagery were also stimulated by his lifestyle,”
writes Johan
Tell in the main text to <i>Post Scriptum</i> – which should be regarded as the
major publication on Christer Strömholm, issued by Max Ström publishing house
in 2012 – and this book was made by Joakim Strömholm and designed by Patric Leo
in tandem with that year’s <i>CHR</i> exhibition at Fotografiska in Stockholm. “Despite the tall tales, the theoretical base at the
college was thorough. Christer’s ability to break down complicated contexts to
concise and categorical observations created a guideline format for his
students. The three recurring principles were: Responsibility – take personal
responsibility for the truth of the image; Insight – dare to draw conclusions
from experiences; Presence – be aware of feelings, experiences and
imagination.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">When I met Strömholm’s most famous student and lifelong friend in the summer
of 2019 for an interview, Anders Petersen was describing some of the magic that
took place at the Klippgatan
19C address, as they gathered around their teacher “and he initially just talked about his photography.
This was not a man of many words, he was more Hemingwayan. It was short
sentences and his stories were more like statements in which he mentioned what
he had done. And his presence on the scene was ... yes, it was electric in some
way. We were quite smitten. Especially when you saw his pictures from <i>Poste
Restante</i> which is a fantastic collection that tells a lot about his life
and upbringing and about his fears. And he shared this with us, briefly and
distinctly.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">“He
wanted to be a little master who sat there and shared the tricks of life. It
was not so much about how to hold the camera. It was more about how you might
be able to take the train for free or to dine and dash or to run away from a
hotel bill. When the film <i>Myglaren</i> came out [in 1966 with Strömholm
playing the Wheeler Dealer], everyone said that it was just right for Christer.
But then he had his real-life experience: to know beforehand what will come to
pass. He had an <i>incredible</i> observation ability, much remained of the
secrets from the war,” explains Joakim.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">“At the Photo School he
could tell the students that among the eighty, only two would become
photographers. And the next day many had given up. He just tore up prints right
under the nose of people and told them that they were crap. But most of them
who made an effort to produce even better prints actually became photographers.
His pedagogy was very brutal, but very useful and as close to reality as one
could just come.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Joakim has been to Paris at least once a year since 1964, when he
arrived there for the very first time with a guide certificate and a group of
thirty tourists in tow. His father gave him a map of Paris and drew a circle
around the Pigalle district, and that was that. For that summer and the next,
Strömholm’s teenage son brought groups of tourists back and forth between
Copenhagen’s Central Station and Gare du Nord. “We came down to Paris at seven
in the morning and Christer met us. And then we guided each group around for a
week in a lot of different places. It was Moulin Rouge, bars and catacombs.
Christer places? Absolutely.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">“Christer couldn’t make money on selling pictures. He asked me a lot of
times how the hell I was able to survive as a photographer. We had great use of
each other,” says Joakim. “Christer was in Paris during the entire 1970s, and
was not so talked about here at home. And not so popular either, after the
school had been terminated. Everything in Sweden became so political and he was
as apolitical as anyone could be. <i>Poste Restante</i> came out and that was
enough for a while. Later the death pictures went on tour, but then nothing
really happened until Lasse Hall at Camera Obscura [the long-gone photo gallery
at Kåkbrinken 5 in the Old Town] exhibited him in 1978.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">“I think that Christer felt that he pretty much got his needed break
from pupils, student revolts, all kinds of left-wing movements, the Vietnam War
– he got so much war in his face! He had been there for so many people, and
then they stabbed him in the back. He got tired of everything and just took
off. And then he met Angelica [Julner] who was a good artist and photographer,
and he was given the opportunity to start assembling all those collected
objects – the objects without value, he called them – and photographed them
with the help of accomplished studio photographers.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">In the late 1970s you could buy an Irving Penn print for a few hundred
dollars. As a consequence of photography’s low market value and down-the-ladder
status in the art world, Strömholm declared (stubborn as he was) that his
pictures were not photographs anymore but art. When Fotografiska Museet in
Stockholm – which was then a separate department at Moderna Museet (and not to
be confused with the venue where the <i>CHR</i> exhibition was shown in 2012) –
wished to make a presentation of Strömholm’s work in 1986, he let them
understand that this would only happen in Moderna’s name. <i>9 Seconds of My
Life, Photographs 1939–86</i> consisted of two hundred and fifty prints that
filled up much of the national Museum of Modern Art. </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">A Swedish woman with an
Edward Scissorhand of paintbrushes is posing in a series of pictures from 1949
at the
Académie André Lhote in Montparnasse (where Strömholm too had been a student). “I think that there is a
nice atmosphere in the picture of Gunnel Heineman,” says Anna Nilsdotter. “This
was an assignment for [Swedish daily] <i>Dagens Nyheter</i> and it is quite
amusing because we have printed the whole article, and it says: ‘What would the
artist colony be without cute painter girls?’ And that was the spirit of the
time – they were like jewellery.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">The curators behind <i>Christer
Strömholm – Portraits in Paris</i> met Heineman in 2015 after she had sold a number of
these “Christer Christian” pictures to an auction house in Stockholm – where
the best one in the series was picked up by Magnus Olausson at Nationalmuseum,
who then contacted the Strömholm Estate to see if there were more of these
artists pictures from Paris. He had already seen a clutch of these works in the autumn of 2013 at
the Institut suédois, where Nilsdotter used to work, without giving that
exhibition much thought.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">“We showed him the pictures. He replied that he would like to do this
for real, at Nationamuseum after the redevelopment was completed [2018], which
meant that Anna’s idea of making a small exhibition at the Institut suédois
suddenly jumped into something huge,” explains Joakim. “Anna and I started
working properly in 2017. We looked through every damn box and we had to figure
out who was who and who had done what. We got to know a lot of artists in Paris
and one thing led to another. We met Daniel Spoerri. He was very happy and we
understood how much the period with Christer had meant to him.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">With a background as a picture editor for many years, and as a sideman
in a number of films, Nationalmuseum became a playground for Joakim when this
exhibition began to materialise with a true touch of mid-century Rive Gauche, assisted
by a bunch of floor symbols of dogs that point the way through the exhibition (and
as a reminder of the seven tonnes of <i>caca</i> they leave on the streets of
Paris every day). “It was one of my first thoughts when I saw how big that
space was, ‘Now I can finally build streets!’ I love to come up with picture
ideas and I wanted to build these alleys so that you would feel how narrow it
was. These pictures are chronologically correct. It was so fun to do the
enlarged wall pictures, the view from the hotel room and Christer on the bed in
natural size. It is believed that the woman who looks out of the window is a
singer in the Duke Ellington Orchestra.”</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">“I panicked when I entered that room when it was empty,” he continues. “I
had only seen it in connection with a lot of exhibitions. We had drawn the
whole room on the computer, and before the opening the room looked so large.
Without our scenographer Joakim Werning, it would have been much more
difficult. He was involved in creating these spaces, the rhythm and the colours.”
(This minor commotion aside, the curators were readily prepared with a few
possible pictures to add and several larger prints which had been made in
advance.)</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i>Christer
Strömholm – Portraits in Paris</i> is an exhibition that enchants, elates, takes you
back to a dirty, scruffy centre of the world where things looked very different
and occasionally so much better. And in the end and by more than just implication, this
is a portrait of the great man himself.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Twenty-six days before Christer Strömholm passed away on January 11,
2002, <i>Le Monde</i> published a piece about him headlined “Christer
Strömholm, le grand suédois” in which Michel Guerrin called him “one of the
greatest living photographers, one of the freest in his research”. Strömholm
could die happy for a number of reasons besides a life of pictures that would
have been impossible for anyone else to create or recreate. In 1993 he was
appointed Professor of Photography by the Swedish government and in 1998 he
received the Hasselblad Award.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">From Cartier-Bresson he had personally learned to closely observe his contact sheets, to study his movements and choices
behind each picture in a series, and to always improve from that. The Strömholm
photograph that his sons chose for the funeral card however was a picture that
was composed to perfection with just three frames. Strömholm was driving from Stockholm
to France that day and was out to set his old speed record and no longer breaks
than fifteen minutes were allowed. That is until he spotted the black Cadillac sprinkled
with fallen white flowers outside Lyon and stopped with a screech because here
was a picture that had to be made.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span><span>That’s thirst.</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i></i></span></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUYIeHL_dvjRgtoVjGXxpfaIi5sZTKLRQNf0s0rEebAdn3955Z8TV3M3pwLJI8B5C9O1V0R6VpCZWRA9OpWiY-dsxgAIPCczSPFnkCSrEy2tEuHWrwudnBjNzraUSvO6vMVmEj6WJneMqjVWZzGn8Ryj1B2SAJOE2KQfuWNzndwHWJ6v_SQjOjJLZxQg/s1575/stro%CC%88mholm4.0066-Lille%20CHR.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1224" data-original-width="1575" height="498" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUYIeHL_dvjRgtoVjGXxpfaIi5sZTKLRQNf0s0rEebAdn3955Z8TV3M3pwLJI8B5C9O1V0R6VpCZWRA9OpWiY-dsxgAIPCczSPFnkCSrEy2tEuHWrwudnBjNzraUSvO6vMVmEj6WJneMqjVWZzGn8Ryj1B2SAJOE2KQfuWNzndwHWJ6v_SQjOjJLZxQg/w640-h498/stro%CC%88mholm4.0066-Lille%20CHR.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Christer Strömholm, </span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Little Christer</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">, Pigalle, 1955. © The Strömholm Estate.</span></span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB-t3PPo1ouCf3DfckFiCMhWr1INfOn37ELggYvSKNXkJKjxT45DtdVH6L_3vXZVUlHPDfKn-jOQ4b6wAC0-XEEdkQ0GtfTDFGAJHYy04HHgNu4E0zQuvhFf1xLjXbXZehd55QkOkW_WIOhwvfeujT1Xv2v2BWNP2xH0YoETELgrqwJd0T4PhmJ7D07Q/s850/stro%CC%88mholm5.0011-Corbusier-LR.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="850" data-original-width="850" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB-t3PPo1ouCf3DfckFiCMhWr1INfOn37ELggYvSKNXkJKjxT45DtdVH6L_3vXZVUlHPDfKn-jOQ4b6wAC0-XEEdkQ0GtfTDFGAJHYy04HHgNu4E0zQuvhFf1xLjXbXZehd55QkOkW_WIOhwvfeujT1Xv2v2BWNP2xH0YoETELgrqwJd0T4PhmJ7D07Q/w640-h640/stro%CC%88mholm5.0011-Corbusier-LR.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Christer Strömholm,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Le Corbusier, 1951</span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">. © The Strömholm Estate.</span></span></span></td></tr></tbody></table></i></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Christer
Strömholm – Portraits in Paris <i>at Nationalmuseum in Stockholm through
January 8, 2023.</i></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span><p></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">
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{page:WordSection1;}</span></font></style>Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-63280098327475867212022-01-03T12:36:00.004+01:002022-01-19T16:12:33.920+01:00THE MOONBATHERS<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEilL--dlacd4b6IfiD1Ez-kG1AslGPuHkp1Z4Q1pfUlUpdhXVJxf2QBmJqqECdDt9TuirTsKp8EVPbJx74gQhDb2VxLO8f_09z7JM1xzTvOme0oMUWJ4-zrj0gy36AilrYvg9TBc3hkdJr9KsfdfXIQWJRfNX6194STPNNYj0HPjz3oLwF-VMXVyDZPtg=s1235" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1235" data-original-width="961" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEilL--dlacd4b6IfiD1Ez-kG1AslGPuHkp1Z4Q1pfUlUpdhXVJxf2QBmJqqECdDt9TuirTsKp8EVPbJx74gQhDb2VxLO8f_09z7JM1xzTvOme0oMUWJ4-zrj0gy36AilrYvg9TBc3hkdJr9KsfdfXIQWJRfNX6194STPNNYj0HPjz3oLwF-VMXVyDZPtg=w498-h640" width="498" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Julia Margaret Cameron,</span><span style="text-align: start;"> </span><span style="text-align: start;"><i>The Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty</i>, 1866.</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The pictorialists were arguably the first artists to use photography to create images drawn from the imagination … Because pictorial photographs are often strikingly beautiful, it is easy to forget that they were made with camera, lens, and sensitive paper.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">– Phillip Prodger, <i>Impressionist Camera: Pictorial Photography in Europe, 1888–1918</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">His father wears his war wound like a crown, and Jesus wants to go to Venus. When the Saviour of the World rematerialised in New Orleans in 2005, on a grossly overpainted shoddy walnut panel with an aura of next-to-zero excellence, the painting went for less than 10,000 bucks. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">However, after being </span><span lang="EN-GB">“restored” to an ignominious “Leonardo” (or “da Vinci” as many of these untaught experts call the old master), it was pumped up by the chicanery and confusion of the art world and further boosted by “</span><span lang="EN-GB">the egos and the dreams of academics”</span><span lang="EN-GB"> – a quote from art historian Martin Kemp in Danish documentary filmmaker Andreas Koefoed’s impressive <i>The Lost Leonardo</i> (2021) – all in all the wild bunch that turned an inadequate Renaissance painting into Leonardo’s forever departed <i>Salvator Mundi</i> and, accordingly, generated a record sale for an artwork on November 15, 2017 at Christie’s in New York when the Saudi crown prince snatched Lot 9 B for 450,312,500 dollars as a power piece for the yacht. </span><span lang="EN-GB">This of course is how all the great shams are packaged, marketed and sold – as a Warhol Factory writer once reckoned, “Art is what you can get away with.”</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">And now for something completely different. “The film has its own reality. The film says what it wants to say. The film is another judge,” voiced the very different Roger Ballen when he interrupted the boring press conference at Fotografiska in Stockholm in March 2014 and, on the spur of the moment, began to fill up cartoon balloons of spoken-word brilliance to describe his art photography. This space upstairs had just been cleared of the pictures taken by a Swedish actor-celeb, following his interminable television series <i>Everyone’s a Photographer</i> (including a mandatory episode on “The Male Gaze”) on state broadcaster SVT, and the one thing that this first exhibition of the year proved was that the world is full of shutterbugs.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“It is profoundly regrettable that the millions who click little cameras all over the globe take no interest in the production of the image they have blindly caused to exist in the film. Between the pressing of the button and the first sight of a print there is a hiatus in which nothing of themselves appears, beyond perhaps a little mild expectancy. This kind of procedure is not photography at all, it is mere camera handling. The true photographer’s excitement, commencing at the exposure, remains latent but certain, until he feels the thrills of development. It continues through the printing, and survives in the enjoyment of the picture he has coaxed out, in accordance with his personal taste and judgement. To skip all this is to miss one of the rarest pleasures of life,” argued Frederick Colin Tilney in <i>The Principles of Photographic Pictorialism</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Tilney, who was as old-school in his own artmaking as he was forward-thinking in his sheer understanding of the substance and the value of photography as a new art form, wrote in his book – published in 1930 during the advanced stages of this time-honoured movement that had been going on since almost the mid-1800s – that Pictorialism’s “continuous output of excellent pictures artistically contrived and skilfully manipulated is the leading sign of the times”. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The pictorialist’s volitional authority over the whole photographic process was a requisite for creating images that would manifest the alterations of the hand, the aesthetic purpose and (though more like a murmur) the intangible mind of the creator, who, by using a “simple” mechanical apparatus, a recording tool, could generate artistic prints that were absolutely out of this world. The pictorialists were the boats against the current who beat on in society in order to give credence to photography with quality and beauty and not a little innovation. And yet, enabling themselves to be carried away into the past was by all odds their thing. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">What the pictorialists framed with their cameras for immediate treatments were the flawless and fanciful things that seemed to happen to those with the proficiency to every now and then stop the world to get off. “From their point of view, what was needed was aesthetic reform of the whole society,” explains Mary Warner Marien in <i>Photography: A Cultural History</i>. “Pictorialism valued the symbolic control over industry [yet] helped foster the photographic industry, as commercial manufacturers produced soft-focus lenses and textured photographic papers for amateur use.” In effect, Pictorialism was a retrograde movement assigned to sail photography into the future.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">They shared the anti-industrial sentiments of the Arts and Crafts movement and their loathing of the mass-produced and the cheap – as William Morris put it in his 1894 essay “How I Became a Socialist”: “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilisation” – but photography was of course a medium for the present times, and it was in fact the greatest talents among the masses of amateurs who altered Pictorialism with a less moody (less “coal cellar” as George Bernard Shaw would call it) and a more contemporary frame of mind and who, in the 1920s, endorsed the language of straight photography and its modern forms of abstraction.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The original template for the pictorialists was the painted picture, and their objective was to rival the painted picture’s significance through mimicking. In <i>The Artistic Side of Photography in Theory and Practice </i>(1910), Arthur James Anderson articulated his and many others’ view that pictorialists must make use of the “forces of light and chemistry” to produce something better than that: “Photography is a new Art that must be clothed in a new garment of her own – a garment to be fashioned with much careful thought, and not in a garment that was fashioned for painting.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">Although Pictorialism relied on a considerable quantity of sources, it was still a movement that went round and round in its own self-referential loop of recurring subjects and themes: the landscapes are picturesque or rural impressions taken from a darker gallery of paintings; the cities are </span><span lang="EN-GB">marked by quiescence and its architecture by a sense of mourning (and the viewer is purposely left without a sense of where and when); people</span><span lang="EN-GB"> (when they appear in the images) are portrayed according to older notions of beauty and further condensed to generality (such as thespian characters). And yet there is a polytonality to both the salon-quality of the prints and to the core ideas of humanity that these pictured people represent, for they are indeed earlier versions of “us”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">“Clearly, pictorial photography was an art for the masses, a sort of technological folk art,” argues Christian Peterson in <i>After the Photo-Secession: American Pictorial</i> <i>Photography, 1910–1955</i>. Agreed, Pictorialism’s storeroom had something for everyone: medieval castles,</span><span lang="EN-GB"> Victorian chimneys, anonymous workers, peculiar children,</span><span lang="EN-GB"> women as </span><span lang="EN-GB">ephemeral generators of make-believe, Romanticism, Symbolism, </span><span lang="EN-GB">Japanism,</span><span lang="EN-GB"> fancy-dress play,</span><span lang="EN-GB"> </span><span lang="EN-GB">velvet-morning nudes (mind that Paradise was for the blessed, not for the sex-obsessed), the biblically quaint, street vendors, Shakespeare, Milton of course, Keats and Shelley, sylphs, sprites, satyrs …</span><span lang="EN-GB"> And everything was rare and ideal and must be kept out of daylight.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Baudelaire suggested in his “Éloge du maquillage” (“Praise of Cosmetics”) essay of 1863 that “All that is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation. Crime, the taste for which the human animal draws from the womb of his mother, is natural in its origins. Virtue, on the contrary, is <i>artificial</i> and supernatural, since gods and prophets were necessary in every epoch and every nation to teach virtue to bestial humanity, and man <i>alone</i> would have been powerless to discover it. Evil is done effortlessly and naturally by fate, the good is always the product of some art.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">It is remarkable that the pictorialists’ special sensibility and withered flowers never have been linked to the shared and sophisticated ailment of the French and British Decadents of the 1890s, the <i>maladie fin de siècle</i>: “Decadents command our attention by their determination to transform their lives into works of art, to create the meaning of life in private vision in order to resist a civilisation intent on debasing the imagination and thus making man less human,” writes Karl Beckson in his <i>Aesthetes and Decadents</i> anthology. “The artist, too, must proceed from nature to a transcendental reality in order to invest his art with spiritual beauty.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">Anna Tellgren who is in charge of photography at Moderna Museet in Stockholm calls <i>In Lady Barclay’s Salon – Art and Photography Around 1900</i> “</span><span lang="EN-GB">an exhibition that I have been dreaming of doing for quite some time”: </span><span lang="EN-GB">“</span><span lang="EN-GB">The idea is a little bit that painting and photography should meet here because the pictorialists were very inspired by painting and knowledgeable about what was going on during the period. First of all, I didn’t want to do a thematic presentation and combine the photographers and the motifs. And I think that the painting is so strong that I was worried that it would exhaust the photography. My hope is that you move from photography into painting and back to photography, and that you will perceive these relationships yourself, especially the various recurring topics and themes.”</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Lady B’s Salon</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> is a deadly good show if you excuse a number of things. Equipped with 274 photographs, this exhibition is a great manual for what Pictorialism was all about. Experiencing the almost spiritual materiality of these resplendent prints for real is quite a treat (and yes, they do come with this thing called aura). However, why distrust the power of Pictorialism with thirty paintings? (They are all first-rate per se and fastidiously chosen from the vaults of nearby Nationalmuseum, but still.) And why is it that when the Moderna shows photography in their most prestigious rooms at (upstairs) ground level, it is always front-seat bores like Cindy Sherman and Wolfgang Tillmans? It is pretty revealing that this material of solid historic photography was not even seen as worthy of a catalogue.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">One hundred thousand photographic works of art have been accumulated at Moderna Museet since its opening in the late 1950s. “There was a man named Helmer Bäckström and he is very important for the collection,” explains Tellgren. “Bäckström was professor of photography at the Royal Institute of Technology. He was a photography-collector, he was a photo historian – one of our first – but he was also a photographer. And in 1965, the Swedish state bought his photo-historical collection. And it is, along with a few others, the cornerstone of our fantastic photography collection. He photographed in a pictorialist spirit and was friends with the other photographers. He was also very active in the Photographic Society which was the Swedish equivalent of the international clubs. I think it is delightful to be able to highlight him as a photographer, especially his nature studies are very nice.” Bäckström could likewise capture the painterly drama of his hometown Stockholm with the pictorialist’s dare for composition.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">Sarita Enriqueta Barclay was a society lady who lived in Stockholm during the years that her British diplomat husband was the </span><span lang="EN-US">Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to His Majesty the King of Sweden </span><span lang="EN-GB">(</span><span lang="EN-US">1919–24), and her </span><span lang="EN-GB">involvement in this show is just as strong as Gertrude Stein’s life partner’s authoring of <i>The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas</i> (1933). The curator admits that “Lady Barclay’s salon is a bit made up, we mostly use the title as a concept and a thought” but that aside, Barclay appears like a fake sheik in the dexterous Henry Goodwin’s 1921 portrait of her ladyship. “Since Henry B Goodwin is the big name in Swedish Pictorialism, he has spread out in two rooms. He peaked from 1920 and onwards, and in 1921 he was invited to New York by Condé Nast,” says Anna Tellgren.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“Goodwin can almost singlehandedly represent Pictorialism in Sweden, and he was an exciting photographer with an exciting turbulent life. He was born in Germany and went to Sweden to become a lecturer in German at Uppsala University. He had to return to Sweden for some reason after he went to England to continue his career there. In 1914 he established himself as a photographer in Stockholm and became very successful. Many of the famous people of the time were portrayed in his studio. He exhibited, he wrote a lot, and it was Goodwin who established the concept of ‘pictorial photography’. The soft focus is evident in his photography and the colours range from brown to grey, and red and orange, depending on how he worked with the tonality. Goodwin published several books, including his famous and beautiful book about Stockholm from 1917. And we have some fantastic views among the Stockholm pictures he took. You recognize our city, but you can also see that a lot has happened since then.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Pictorialism was international at heart and several names in the Moderna show have more than a ring of “abroad” about them. Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of the anonymous Mrs Keene as <i>The Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty</i> is as enchantingly beautiful as it gets. It was made in 1866, during her rather short tenure with photography when Cameron lived on the Isle of Wight in two apartment buildings that she linked together with a tower. It is hard to define what exactly Cameron captured with her camera and which resulted in her pioneering out-of-focus portraiture that would approach another kind of keenness, a basic holiness at the core of human nature. Tennyson’s wife Emily said that Cameron put her spirit into people.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“Clothing, occupation, class, personality – all these things are transitory and accidental; they did not interest Cameron. She refused to be influenced by mere circumstance,” writes Phyllis Rose in <i>Julia Margaret Cameron’s Women</i>. “Cameron’s response to beauty, eradicating class as it did, was so extreme as to constitute an almost political statement. Her tableaux are parables of radical democracy, or, seen from a slightly different angle, real-life fairy tales.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">Other “abroad” names are Waldemar Eide, whose dusky masterpiece <i>Early Morning (Sea View)</i> – with its hushed and sempiternal atmosphere and those brooding boats in the belly of Stavanger – is twelve years in advance of Michel Carné’s <i>Le quai des brumes</i> (<i>Port of Shadows</i>) from 1938, still a time before noirs were called noirs in film; Gertrude Stanton K</span><span lang="EN-GB">äs</span><span lang="EN-GB">ebier’s three portraits from the early 1900s and Alvin Langdon Coburn’s four London pictures, all from the first years of the 1900s, are still very fresh compositions; and the movable ladies in the portraits of Dora Kallmus/Madame d’Ora are two superb pieces of image-making with the structuring and everything else.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The twenty-three pictures by Berlin photographer Nicola Perscheid are many too many because he really isn’t that special (though Tellgren assures that his “workshop” in Stockholm in October 1913 substantially influenced the Swedish pictorialists). Perscheid was one of numerous well-known professionals who remonstrated against the overuse of manipulative methods that seemed to disregard the mechanical yet soulful nature of photography. With the prowess in printmaking that followed the invention of the gum bichromate process (mid-1890s) and the oil process (1904), much of the pictures’ tonalism came to life by the hand of the photographer who would subtract details from the print and add ink and pigment as a way to create these shadowy pieces intended for the museums.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">In the October 1904 issue of </span><i><span lang="EN-GB">The Amateur Photographer</span></i><span lang="EN-GB">, </span><span lang="EN-GB">Frederick Colin Tilney favourably described that</span><span lang="EN-GB"> “</span><span lang="EN-GB">It was this vista of potence that has excited the hopes and curiosity of the majority of pictorial photographers; who are eager at all times to break down the barriers separating the mechanical and immutable from the artistic and volitional.” While a good deal of the pictorialists were a little bit too eager to persuade the rest of the world – and on second thought themselves – about photography’s advantages, many also developed a snobbier sort of artistry as a way to distance themselves from a new vast class of zealous amateur photographers who adored what they found in the imagery and the fellowship that Pictorialism provided.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“Pictorialism optimistically decreed everyone a potential artist, a claim based on the belief that everyone possessed natural instincts for beauty. Most individuals simply needed encouragement and technical training in order to physically produce a work of art,” apprises Christian Peterson in <i>After the Photo-Secession: American Pictorial Photography, 1910–1955</i>. “Women entered the pictorial ranks in droves, helping to further diversify the movement. Because pictorial imagery was accessible, idealised, and escapist, it was popular among the general public, who flocked to countless exhibitions of pictorial photographs.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Since this is Stockholm, Sweden, where all the museum gatekeepers today are females, you are barraged by the same indispensable déjà-poo about women being marginalised and victims of all kinds of injustices – and this from the very people who rejected Margaret Watkins because it would have been too much of an effort for them to learn about a woman in photography who was so much better than the men in her day. In the folder to <i>In Lady Barclay’s Salon – Art and Photography Around 1900</i> we get the regular woke juice about Swedish women receiving the right to vote in 1921, while the curator leaves out the fact that all men had to wait three further years for that privilege. “When talking about early photography, there were many female photographers. It became a female profession quite early on,” says Anna Tellgren. “But during this period, the female photographers disappeared and I have really struggled to find some examples. It is as if this network of dinners and clubs did not really welcome women. The female photographers who existed have not received as much attention in the history of photography.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Another important matter that was thoughtfully debated in the pictorialist circles was about the need to emphasise the camera’s function as an eye–I-personality with a spiritual vision. “The camera has an eye which sees what the human eye can only see by means of added optical apparatus or by piecemeal scrutiny. In the opinion of the good artist this is a fault, because the artist’s work is answerable only to normal human standards,” Tilney disputed in his 1930 book. “Photography cannot rise to the occasion in this way. Its correctness is stiff and unbending and therefore utterly unlike human vision, which is a composite thing of compromise, adaptation, and constant evaluation. But it is this composite vision that gives us all our experiences and all our delights, and it is to us the real truth – the truth of observation and experience. The best thing pictorial photography can do therefore is to emulate that vision-truth and discard its technical truth whenever it contradicts.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">In 1890 when the British photographer George Davidson originated one of Pictorialism’s finest pieces, <i>The Onion Field</i> – somewhat reflected in <i>Lady B’s Salon</i> by Goodwin’s <i>The Garden Patch. A Completed Corner (Indigenous Plants)</i>, 1919 – the Photographic Society of Great Britain presented its landmark Pall Mall Exhibition, and one who visited the show that autumn was writer and photographer Peter Henry Emerson: “On entering the exhibition the first impression is one of joyful surprise. Purple and black gloss have given way to black and white and brown, in short the general appearance of the exhibition is more like an exhibition of etchings or engravings than any photographic exhibition we have ever seen.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">When Alfred Stieglitz returned to the United States that year, he “found that photography as I understood it hardly existed; that an instrument had been put on the market shortly before called the Kodak and that the slogan sent out to advertisers read, ‘You press the button and we do the rest.’ The idea sickened one.” The Kodak box camera was introduced in 1888. When the Brownie arrived twelve years later it cost one dollar, and after the one hundred frames of the roll film had been used up you sent in the whole camera to the Kodak plant in Rochester. Kodak was fundamental in fashioning photography’s mass appeal and consequently in photography’s advancement as a new medium.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">In 1902, in order to express his disregard for the snapshot values he saw all around him in American photography and to, more importantly, create a whole new rank of immaculate photographs that were art without trickery, Stieglitz established his insular Photo-Secession group – a “pivotal juncture”, as described by Michael Griffin in <i>On the Margins of Art Worlds</i>, whose members “strove to set more rigorous aesthetic standards for pictorial photography, worked to forge closer ties to the established fine-art world, and hoped finally to confirm photography’s status as a fine-art medium. The Photo-Secession in the United States followed similar defections from the venerable photographic societies of Vienna, Paris, Hamburg, and London and was tied to an international circle of Secessionists organised through the Linked Ring of London and the Photo-Club de Paris.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">The Photo-Secession lasted for eight years before the master’s tempers and demands for artistic purity became </span><span lang="EN-GB">impossible for the others. Stieglitz was of course also the originator of <i>Camera Work</i> and edited its fifty issues from 1903 to 1917, and as Caroline Blinder notes in <i>The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume II</i>, “the early volumes of <i>Camera Work</i> appear, at times, as antagonistic defences of the pictorialist ethic, as though pictorialism, rather than an offshoot of photographic practice, was at the very heart of it”. However, at the end of the decade both <i>Camera Work</i> and the “291” Gallery on Fifth Avenue – which Stieglitz managed together with Edward Steichen until the demise of the magazine – saw a complete change of direction when all the new art from Paris rose to prominence in the US.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“American pictorialism after 1910 was multifaceted and artistically adventuresome,” writes Christian Peterson. “Unlike the Photo-Secession photographers and their limited aesthetic stance, many later pictorialists openly embraced modernism and commercialism, in addition to traditional pictorial beauty. Camera clubs and pictorial salons accepted and championed photographs that were abstract, humorous, surreal, picturesque, avant-garde, and campy. Few other photographic movements accommodated such a variety of successful genres.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">Two members of the Photo-Secession are featured in <i>Lady B’s Salon</i>. Aside from Käsebier, there is a fine nocturnal portrait by Steichen showing British theatre practitioner Edward Gordon Craig in which his shadow plays the lead. The portrayal of Craig, hunched in a black cloak, like a phantom of the past who can see the future, are six years ahead of Robert Wiene’s Weimar classic </span><i><span lang="EN-GB">The Cabinet of Dr Caligari</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> of 1919 (with its painted shadows and distorted visuals) in which the somnambulistic Cesare, who’s a dummy, bears the blame for the doctor’s murderous escapades.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“Sweden was on the fringes of the pictorialist movement,” says Tellgren, “but there were some exciting photographers who really started to discuss and pick up what was happening on the continent. And one of the first pictorialists was Herman Hamnqvist, who wrote lots of articles, and he is perhaps most interesting as an introducer than a photographer, but we have some fine examples of what he did. He had a studio in Stockholm but he also worked with landscape photography.” One such image is <i>View from Värmland</i> (ca 1910), and the gate – a quiet post at a rainy trail through the woods – that a common photographer would have left us with untouched is a portal to another world in Hamnqvist’s imprint.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Some other Swedish camera artists in the show are Ferdinand Flodin – and who doesn’t love his reversed portrait(s) of <i>Ariel</i> (ca 1925) whose smile still cracks through the old pictorialist glum, and his <i>View from My Window over Skeppsholmen, Stockholm</i> (1929), and the pictorial drama of the <i>Borgholm Castle Ruin</i> (1922), and of course his portrait of Jenny Hasselqvist, the star danseuse from the Ballets Suédois (also 1922). It is very easy to enjoy the silence and the beauty in Ture Sellman’s photography (he was also an architect) and Gösta Hübinette’s fantastic mid-1920s pictures from Rome (this is past and future photography) and his many trees, full of wisdom, life and bereavement.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“In one of these ‘pots’ as we call them, there is a photographer named Uno Falkengren who had an interesting and partly secretive life,” says Tellgren. “He was a homosexual and managed [department store] NK’s photo studio, and was also active in Berlin and has taken some of the gayest portraits of the time.” Indeed, the spark in Falkengren’s writ-large portraits is a cabaret of sorts. The majority of those portrayed in <i>Lady B’s Salon</i> are unsurprisingly so women – take a look at their faces and bodies and souls, and the exceptional level of tenderness and discernment that has been recorded in gelatin by all these male artists. Then pay attention to what Lytton Strachey wrote in his preface to <i>Eminent Victorians</i> in 1918: “Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal process – which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">Photography went through a lot of things from the 1880s when the dry plate made it possible for larger crowds than chemistry wizards to take photographs – to </span><span lang="EN-GB">John Charles Van Dyke’s conclusion in <i>What Is Art?</i></span><span lang="EN-GB"> (1910): </span><span lang="EN-GB">“What matters it the kinds of material that falls to the artist hand? If he is an artist he can fashion it into the form of art; if he is not an artist he can do as little with one material as the other”</span><span lang="EN-GB"> – to 1940, when MoMA at long last inaugurated its Department of Photography. </span><span lang="EN-GB">Clarke Graham has a good point in his book <i>The Photograph</i>, that “one of the many paradoxes at the centre of the medium is the extent to which an infinite number of photographs and of photographers has been dominated by a limited canon of images and practitioners […] Their work, and the assumptions it reflects, are basic to what we mean by a photograph.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><span lang="EN-GB"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">In the TV special <i>Memories of MASH</i> (1991), Alan Alda fondly tells the story about his boots that he took over from a young man who had retured alive from the Vietnam War, and that he wore these boots for the eleven years that <i>MASH</i> was filmed around the Santa Monica Mountains. Pictorialism’s urgency to show the whole world that it was Art made it sometimes look as if it was just walking back and forth in the same kind of boots. But the paths made in time</span><span lang="EN-GB"> was a better history on humanity based on what we quite didn’t know about ourselves and what we absolutely didn’t know about photography.</span></span></div></span><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiz7a1pWZdjmo4JerqbAcaSKCMtN4N3owB7h2O-HMApYpaIZ_Oeze_ZvnhKSnBses8-a3AUKF_0Yu9h9Smy4o0zwm0D3fyMajvEOEw0P5ve-vnaXMwyYpiztsr04JHfdumSHHAdH4S1rkiL6ON_t6xbDzPSmXcN0KdztC8UvJEKI-zk95fplhdacj9xwA=s1280" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="935" data-original-width="1280" height="469" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiz7a1pWZdjmo4JerqbAcaSKCMtN4N3owB7h2O-HMApYpaIZ_Oeze_ZvnhKSnBses8-a3AUKF_0Yu9h9Smy4o0zwm0D3fyMajvEOEw0P5ve-vnaXMwyYpiztsr04JHfdumSHHAdH4S1rkiL6ON_t6xbDzPSmXcN0KdztC8UvJEKI-zk95fplhdacj9xwA=w640-h469" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Waldemar Eide</span><span style="text-align: start;">, <i>Early Morning (Sea View)</i>, </span><span style="text-align: start;">ca 1926.</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">In Lady Barclay’s Salon – Art and Photography Around 1900 <i>at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, June 19, 2021–January 9, 2022.</i></span><span face="Verdana, sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-80614813610248510512021-09-15T16:10:00.003+02:002021-09-16T15:49:45.989+02:00TOTALLY WIRED<p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu0KqhpMen5CzcfSyqPff-RwSIC-n9cLj0BDTvFM6C6bSmPIT95wICf_nwdXklKsH2PGpl8FcUYxyHHaMZZKmR3GR_VXUuqQA3_fY70CuKod0KUCjR6NKHEC_WGShyphenhyphencvKXpbnsfo7cNKDU/s1200/snowcrash.nationalmuseum.tsr1.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1200" height="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu0KqhpMen5CzcfSyqPff-RwSIC-n9cLj0BDTvFM6C6bSmPIT95wICf_nwdXklKsH2PGpl8FcUYxyHHaMZZKmR3GR_VXUuqQA3_fY70CuKod0KUCjR6NKHEC_WGShyphenhyphencvKXpbnsfo7cNKDU/w640-h512/snowcrash.nationalmuseum.tsr1.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: xx-small;">The Snowcrash office (2001) with two <i>Chip</i> loungers. Photo: Åke E:son Lindman.</span></span><span style="text-align: left;"> </span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Snowcrash is quite a wonderful, very compressed story of innovation and ideas, concentrating on the future, combined with technology – but the centre was always the human being.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">– Ilkka Suppanen<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">From the Radio Days of the desktop computer – two businessmen engaged in a very serious conversation: “Says here … ‘The internet is the future of business.’ We have to be on the internet.” The younger guy stops typing on his Think Pad (this is an IBM commercial after all), considers the value of the message for two exceedingly long TV seconds, then forwards the simple question “Why?” First guy eyes through his papers again: “It doesn’t say.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Where were you in 1997 when such concerns circulated and many people (as a matter of fact) worried about becoming mere passengers on this novelty called the “information superhighway” which made them question their own place in the world, with and within this expendable new technology. Hence the big little “Why?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">But look, there’s another side of the story furthered by a group of freaks and geeks who came from the land of the ice and snow (and the thousand lakes). These young architects, designers and creators rose from the mire of Finland’s deep depression in the early 1990s to espouse the technology of the near future with eager anticipation, viable ideas and straightforward solutions. Their beliefs even seemed to have some ground in the shape-of-things-to-come optimism of the 1960s and its Pop furnishings which aligned with flamboyance, openness to new forms and materials, and a built-in readiness for moving through space. (As Nicholas Negroponte suggested in <i>Being Digital</i> in 1995, “Digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time, and the transmission of place itself will start to become possible.”)<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">And though they took their name from a 1992 sci-fi novel by Neal Stephenson, Snowcrash’s philosophy was rather to be found in compassionate sources such as Lewis Mumford’s essay (whether they had read it or not) “Technics and the Future” from 1954: “Let Man Take Command. Instead of continuing to mechanise and regiment man, we must undertake just the opposite operation, we must humanise the machine, restoring lifelike attributes, the attributes of selectivity, balance, wholeness, autonomy and freedom, in every department where work must be done. To follow that course, in all its ramifications and implications, will be to lay down the foundations for a new age: not the ultimate Age of the Machine, as pictured by the cockeyed writers of science fiction, but the first real Age of Man.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The first Snowcrash show at the thirty-sixth edition of the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 1997 was a dreamlike success. (And how passé wasn’t Reyner Banham’s old future forecast that technology “would probably bring furniture to an end, or at least render it invisible”?) In this appointed world of furniture design and such, these silver-shirted “young nobodies” (as they would look back on their youthful selves a couple of decades later) were the band of prodigies to bring in the alien stuff that people knew by instinct that they had been waiting for: the Snowcrash pieces were designed to let humans take command and play around with technology, allow us to relax and feel good in its presence or company, and the beauty of these objects was of course evident too.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">And here is a first-hand account by the British design critic and curator Jane Withers who “wandered into what looked like a campsite for nomadic cybernauts” in the Galleria Facsimile that spring: “There was a flotilla of silver <i>Airbag</i> cushions and a forest of softly glowing lights that seemed to breathe and gently sigh like exhausted moons. There were curvy snowboard loungers like acid-coloured bananas and an angular ‘workstation’ that looked like a hybrid between <i>Easy Rider</i> [1969] and some kind of gynaecological equipment, but turned out to be a recliner for computer geeks straddling the World Wide Web (as it was known back then) as if it were a Harley Davidson.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Her introduction to Gustaf Kjellin’s <i>Snowcrash 1997–2003</i> is (roughly speaking) as good as this pretty unimaginative book gets. The only kind of journalism involved in Kjellin’s publication is the loads of interviews that he has piled up in the text as nameless talking heads, with note numbers to be decoded in the margin which will provide you with the who’s who. Although the reading is messy, it does offer a good deal of very useful quotes from the Snowcrash bunch (and some rubbish generic praise from the business – the editor of the book is one of the cofounders of Snowcrash, Ilkka Suppanen). Considering the sorry state of the copy editing, one can only imagine the poor quality of the manuscript. The joy of this book however is the exhibition <i>Snowcrash</i> at Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, curated by the same Gustaf Kjellin.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The silly captions on the museum labels aside (they do not even seem to have been written by an adult), <i>Snowcrash</i> – the exhibition – is actually something to revel in. “What you see in this exhibition is a twenty-five-year-old projection of the future. And it was done with a great deal of excitement because the future was <i>unknown</i>. Today we are forced to make new projections but nobody really wants to do it because it feels uncomfortable, knowing how the future actually looks like. And that is what is so beautiful about museums because you can take these trips back and forth in time,” says Kjellin.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“Even though this is a company that possibly was one of the first on the internet, it’s surprising that there was nothing to find about them on the internet today. So we had to start digging. It was more like an archeological excavation and nobody that we spoke with really had the whole picture of the company.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Nine-tenths of these not-so-long-ago-pieces that Snowcrash ever produced is on show at Nationalmuseum. The first encounter with these fastidiously thought-out designer items, fashioned for an age that made it more fun to compute, clearly demonstrates how Snowcrash’s cerebrations and celebrations of the whole “cyberspace” culture was a world going forward from space-age designer Neal Small’s avowal in <i>Life</i> magazine in 1968 that “Furniture doesn’t have to be dark and gloomy, like a whale that fall asleep in your living room.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The author/curator possesses two Snowcrash originals himself: the aforementioned “acid-coloured banana” lounger <i>Chip</i> (1996), a pressed-plywood rocker sheathed in polyurethane, and it is the sole article from Snowcrash that arrived in a range of zingy colours. The sculptural <i>Chip </i>– which made its user look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the digital universe – took a lot from Olivier Mourgue’s similarly floored and anthropomorphically-shaped <i>Bouloum</i> chair (1968) which has the same kind of “legs” but a wider body and a “head”. <i>Chip</i> is stirring about in the 1960s (when the future was looking so bright), it is like a tongue that wants to lick Eero Aarnio’s candylike <i>Pastilli</i> (1967), just as much as it dwells in its own distinctive “now” with a keen signal that the best is yet to come.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">His other Snowcrash piece of choice is Arik Levy’s <i>Infinite Light</i> (1999), a sixty-minute-long endlessness of an unchanging lightbulb shining on a TV or computer screen, which is just as contemplative or vexing as watching Andy Warhol’s fixed eight-hour film of the Empire State Building, <i>Empire</i> (1964), which resembles the top of a rocket ready to launch. When Levy presented his piece in the late 90s it was stored on a VHS tape. Way, way into the dismal future that is today, Kjellin keeps it on a tiny flash drive.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">On a video link from Milan, where he teaches at the country’s foremost technical university, Politecnico, Ilkka Suppanen talks about the death-or-glory beginnings of Snowcrash by the mid-1990s: “Finland had just overcome the worst financial crisis since the Second World War. The Finnish currency at the time, <i>markka</i>, had lost half of its value and the unemployment figures were up to twenty per cent. And we were the young designers of this period, coming out of the school when there was no actual work. We tried to do something with our means. There was financial struggle but we tried to do something different.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">It is a pleasure to listen to Ilkka Suppanen. He speaks with undistorted wonder. “Snowcrash was founded twenty-five years ago, and now you have to imagine me in my late twenties, sitting in a bar in Milan with three of my friends. And as Finnish boys we would be drinking, but we would also be talking about design. And we were looking into things at the Salone del Mobile because we recognised the importance of this place. But we felt that there could be a possibility that if we bring our own stuff here, it could be interesting. And that bar talk led to the foundation of Snowcrash. We started developing a concept for an exhibition which we would bring to Milan one year later, in 1997, to Galleria Facsimile.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“And quite early, we realised that our difficult names – Timo Salli, Ilkka Suppanen, Teppo Asikainen and Ilkka Terho – would not be recognised or remembered, and we realised that we were going to need a name for the exhibition. We wanted to use the title from Neal Stephenson’s science-fiction novel as a name because it is cool and Nordic, and because in the book snow crash is a drug which comes through the screen at the moment when the computer crashes. At that time, we thought that this was an interesting phenomenon – the moment when you turn from digital to analogue, the real world, and we realised that a lot of our products were dealing with both: how you <i>sit</i> when you are in the digital world, how you <i>look</i> at the screen, et cetera. So, our aim was somehow to be part of the two worlds and really look at how the physical world would change our lives, the way we behave, in a world in which we foresaw a future much more digital.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">In 1989 a group of student architects and designers, who would eventually consolidate into Snowcrash, took over a disused Nokia factory in downtown Helsinki to band together before the start of the new decade and what everyone sensed would erupt in a grave economic crisis. Their pre-Snowcrash days were determined by the possibilities of a future considerably braver than the sanitised push-button tomorrow of the 1960s.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Suppanen developed his itinerate-friendly <i>Nomad Chair</i> during his move-around days in Amsterdam in the early 90s, and it went into production in 1994 (followed by the <i>Flying Carpet </i>sofa offshoot in 1997). The idea must have derived from George Nelson’s <i>Catenay</i> chair (1963), with a flexible undercarriage of spring steel mounted on the same kinds of bars. But Suppanen’s solution was a balancing act of thick felt for the seating, a bit of Joseph Beuys-y repose and comfort for the digital age, and it was easy to dismantle as a carry-on piece on a flight or a move to the next flat.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">A Snowcrash design principle was that also the office could be of the roaming kind. One of Snowcrash’s most famous pieces, however, is the stationary <i>Netsurfer</i> (1995) by Teppo Asikainen and Ilkka Terho, which indeed looks like a cross between a chopper and a gynaecological chair, a development perhaps from Alien-Bowie’s turquoise lounger in front of his wall of television sets in <i>The Man Who Fell to Earth</i> (1976). (Neither the book nor the exhibition poses the essential question what gamers would make of this strange piece today.) <i>Netsurfer</i> is from the days when most computers were ugly office-grey cans around cathode-ray tubes, and this can was put on a “pedestal” of steel – while its human user got a sure-fire lounger throne in black leather to lie down on, get the motor runnin’, head out on the highway and explode into space.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">At the Salone del Mobile in 1996, the quartet with the difficult names got a twenty-square-metre cubbyhole at the far end of the Milan Furniture Fair, but still left a mark with the <i>Netsurfer</i>, <i>Chip </i>(which grew out of that seat), and the animate floor lamp <i>Glowblow</i> (1996), designed by Vesa Hinkola, Rane Vaskivuori and Markus Nevalainen after an idea to try to reproduce the fascinating shadows seen in comic drawings. In the <i>Snowcrash</i> book, Nevalainen talks about how they “tried to create a silhouette with a bag of some sorts”: <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“But blowing air inside a bag was nothing new and to gain enough air from the heat produced by a lightbulb would take ages, so we borrowed a fan from one of our computers. We sewed different shapes from a textile used for parachutes, which is lightweight but still strong enough to contain the air, giving the appropriate opacity to diffuse the light source. The lamp really had this extra feature because it took on a new shape every time it deflated, like it was alive.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">For the famous Snowcrash inauguration in April 1997, Ilkka Suppanen recounts (with that marvel in his voice) how he wanted to control the LEDs in his <i>Frozen Feather</i> pendant lamp, which was introduced that year, by a mobile phone. “And you have to understand, this was twenty-five years ago and nobody was doing these things. It was so difficult to achieve that basically, in reality, you had to send a text message to Finland and then the lamp in Milan got the message and it turned blue. We had the ideas and the visions but the technology was not there.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">A great thing about this look-back-in-wonder exhibition at Nationalmuseum is a video from Snowcrash’s victorious time at the Galleria Facsimile – when the curator of the Stockholm show was only sixteen years old. Gustaf Kjellin has also wisely added the Snowcrash soundtrack and the moving digital fresco of (very 1990s) hexagonal ice crystals floating through space, along with one of the silver shirts that the Finns from the future were dressed in. “We had the exhibition and for us it was overwhelming,” Suppanen elucidates. “[Architect and industrial designer] Achille Castiglioni told us that this was the best exhibition of the year.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">One of the new designs at the 1997 show in Milan – which made the Snowcrash fax machine in Helsinki go bonkers as soon as the orders started to pour in – was <i>Airbag</i> (1996) by Suppanen and Pasi Kolhonen. Buckled up with its heavy parachute polyester straps, <i>Airbag</i> was a truly contemporary take on the beanbag chairs (as well as the inflatable furniture, which ironically hardly ever left the traditional shapes) of the 1960s. This clever easy chair, wrapped up in the techiest tent fabrics and gorged with lightweight polystyrene pellets, could in a really swift manner be turned into a mattress for The Bedroom at the End of the Universe. What emanated from <i>Airbag</i> was some of the mid-decade unfussiness that Helmut Lang completely mastered in fashion, together with some playful survival-mode aesthetics pushed by the prevailing “Y2K scare”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Nationalmuseum director Susanna Pettersson (born in Helsinki in the 1960s) talks about the latter part of the 90s when Finland and Sweden were leaders in the development of dot-com technology and wireless communication: “Some of us remember that getting rid of the landline phones and typewriters encouraged all of us, and this was a time when ideas were born. The mentality was: pack your bag and go! And I met some of the Snowcrash members at various places in Helsinki and we talked about dreams, and of course we were all very proud of the first mobile phones and computers that we had, but first and foremost we were really curious about the future. Snowcrash certainly had the finger on the pulse maybe more than any of us could have foreseen.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Savour these rare words of acknowledgement for (white) male creativity and achievement. When Nationalmuseum reopened in 2018 it was not just the grand old building that had been remodelled but history itself, now deracinated by the beau monde of pompous celibates who in this Feminist meltdown went straight to the vile art of unlearning, indoctrination and suppression.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">When Aldous Huxley revisited his <i>Brave New World</i> (1932) in 1958, he noted that “If the first half of the 20<sup>th</sup> century was the era of the technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social engineers – and the 21<sup>st</sup> century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Anyone with human neurons knows that a museum is meant to be a place of curiosity, amusement and deep thought and learning. Nationalmuseum, which is owned by the Swedish people, was once a vehicle for centuries of accumulated cultural history. In today’s it’s-no-game Sweden, this institution has been hijacked and picked apart by fast-lane mountebanks who are in no position to educate others.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance,” argues the great Thomas Sowell. “One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans – anything except reason.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">From Snowcrash to snowflakes and back again. Ilkka Suppanen describes how Snowcrash hit the ground running when another famous trade name came to see them at the Galleria Facsimile: Ragne Bogholt – “a person who together with Robert Weil founded a company called Proventus Design, whose aim was to develop and collect design companies with long traditions. They started to collaborate with us and by October 1998 the Snowcrash company was founded, based in Stockholm. There were many exciting turns of events at the time, and Snowcrash hired the most interesting people. Every time I returned to Stockholm from Helsinki to do some design director work, there was a new person in the office, there was a new desk in there or a new machine. It was the period of dot com, of start-up companies, and the idea was to combine these spirits together with design. It became a wonderful kind of melting pot, a laboratory of ideas with designers we invited.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“We were developing with [Swedish architect and designer] Ulrika Mårtensson a textile which has a quality of acoustic absorbent. And today, really today – this year the textile manufacturers are producing what we did back then when no one was interested in them,” says Suppanen with a lot of delight and not a hint of resentment in his voice. “We were developing a plant garden, which means that we were trying to grow plants at home with only running water. This is a technology developed by NASA in the 1960s in a quest to trying to get plants growing on Mars.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The 1960s were in several ways a point of departure for Snowcrash. Look for instance at Richard Schultz’s timeless <i>Dining Chair</i> (1966) with its sophisticated aluminium frame and the mesh seating; Poul Kjærholm’s handsome <i>PK25</i> chair (manufactured in 1965) in matte chrome-plated steel, entwined in the most beautiful fashion with a (<i>yes!</i>) flagline; Warren Platner’s <i>Platner Stool</i> (1966) and its thin tubular steel column, or why not Joe Colombo’s compact units, imaginably for a young David Bowie who sang about space but who would hardly dare to board an airplane? But Snowcrash brought something else to the table.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Another interior architect, Ulrika Ljungberg, who produced the company’s last show at the Salone del mobile in April 2002, describes these special energies in Kjellin’s <i>Snowcrash 1997–2003</i> book: “The playful, conceptual approach to design that I had learned in Italy, with genuine ideas that went beyond mere aesthetics, was something I also saw in the Snowcrash products. And everything we did until the end with the collection and events, aimed at creating a joyous and communal spirit between people.” That year’s director at Proventus Design, Andreas Murray, told <i>The New York Times</i> that though Milan was nice “the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas would be a better place for our next exhibition”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The largest building in the world (which is three times bigger than the next) was completed in 1967 north of Seattle to facilitate the construction of the Boeing 747. It is rumoured (and what a great rumour it is) that clouds are being formed inside this massiveness. In 1970, Martyn and Roger Dean designed their <i>Retreat Pod</i>, a plastic womb or cocoon that was all about hippie-Earth. A black one is seen in Kubrick’s <i>Clockwork Orange</i> (1971) – you opened a hatch, inside were hundreds of orange lights, and off you went. Monica Förster’s inflatable <i>Cloud</i> (2002) was one of the very last Snowcrash designs, an inhabitable cumulus (and an allusive digital-Heaven) that was made as a piece that could be carried on your shoulder to the next appointment, at home, at work, at play.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">From the time when Ragne Bogholt made his call to the Snowcrash members in Helsinki in 1997 and Timo Salli answered the phone and demanded a foolish sum of money – that was more like an art installation than a workable transaction – till the closure of the Snowcrash office and showroom at Textilgatan in Stockholm in January 2003, Robert Weil had spent one hundred million Swedish crowns (€10m) on these, and the word affectionately belongs to Jane Withers, “disruptors”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“The old industry and industrialists looked at this event with great scepticism, and this stood in stark contrast to new parties who ran fast and only saw possibilities with this technology,” Weil comments in the book. “We wanted Snowcrash to be young, live its own life, and have a drive to experiment. Therefore, we gave total freedom for the creative process, so we later could merge that with our knowledge about production and distribution and turn it into an industrial company that could compete with the major international design brands.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The world was a bit too stagnant for Snowcrash – take a look in Paola Antonelli’s boring <i>Workspheres</i> catalogue for her exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2001 and you will get the picture – and likewise is this pedestrian presentation of the Stockholm exhibition where their designs are crammed together without much thought and consideration.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">In his “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” from the beginning of 1996, American activist-poet John Perry Barlow defined that “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">At Nationalmuseum, in this world that is today, we have the lies, hate, idiocy and dictated perceptions of the big delusional Victim Class that doesn’t know a shit about suffering and struggle. Their captions in here go all the way back to celebrate the Brave New World authoritarianism of the Social Democrats and the thought reforms and grand-scale eugenics that originated the “Swedish model” in the early 1930s.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">This is all wrong. The new totalitarians should be back in school. On the other side of the ocean.</span><span face="Verdana, sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1WZKvnKCKn_h6GiXfM6JBX9Yz1KzmNFIe1JjwYVzpxxlSRnIaZaytRQb3R7EXwVIRYvHChlu3_N9fbowcnlvX1zxdfv2dw12zJC-n4HhzNdfVV4HkmKckwnRUZn5DU8xu2J-OBOvjgcxf/s1280/snowcrash.nationalmuseum.tsr2.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1WZKvnKCKn_h6GiXfM6JBX9Yz1KzmNFIe1JjwYVzpxxlSRnIaZaytRQb3R7EXwVIRYvHChlu3_N9fbowcnlvX1zxdfv2dw12zJC-n4HhzNdfVV4HkmKckwnRUZn5DU8xu2J-OBOvjgcxf/w640-h480/snowcrash.nationalmuseum.tsr2.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;">Snowcrash </span><i style="text-align: left;">at Nationalmuseum in Stockholm through February 13, 2022.</i></span></div><p></p>Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-82319940828424541052021-07-19T17:59:00.006+02:002021-09-06T14:22:15.354+02:00WE ARE THE FASHION PACK<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3jxDwrK3rWQe-fduQdVgonQAt51VzbP3pqpDCJuC7w1weoAGw6uznXm_zTOH_PQTNDS5rgYTN5fkoBRNv-6A_SMu09s7ldr2OGyzOTbeONxocQ71OaVfWlnqqZ1P-f35tNov2T42H7Nz8/s1280/fashion_cocktail1.ritts_versace.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="955" height="650" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3jxDwrK3rWQe-fduQdVgonQAt51VzbP3pqpDCJuC7w1weoAGw6uznXm_zTOH_PQTNDS5rgYTN5fkoBRNv-6A_SMu09s7ldr2OGyzOTbeONxocQ71OaVfWlnqqZ1P-f35tNov2T42H7Nz8/w485-h650/fashion_cocktail1.ritts_versace.jpeg" width="485" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Fashion is fun, particularly if you’re not in the fashion business. Meaning we got to play in the fashion world without the fashion world’s worries … Instead, we could play dress-up like children at a tea party. We could lure the stars of the moment, or the era, to play with us because Absolut had created and polished an image as a brand.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">– Richard Lewis, <i>Absolut Sequel</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">There might have been a time when flipping bottles in a bar really was a thing for <i>Rolling Stone </i>magazine. But this is the 1980s, get that straight, and here’s a bartender who is looking for some new kind of buzz. Brian Flanagan gets up on the counter at the Cell Block nightspot in New York City (filmed in a vacated half-rotunda-shaped prison in Toronto) to reel off his ad-lib poem about the blithe spirits of cocktails and dreams. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“I am the last barman poet / I see America drinking the fabulous cocktails I make …” A few opening lines before the poem shifts gears into an inventory of the cocktails of the day, the vivid concoctions, the Pink Pussies galore, and then the finale: “America you’ve just been devoted to every flavour I got / But if you want to get loaded / Why don’t you just order a shot?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The hot-hotter-disco era provided a revived sense for cocktail culture, founded on vodka, so in the following decade when the barman poet laureate Tom Cruise flashed a bottle of Jim Beam in one hand and a shot glass in the other in <i>Cocktail</i> (1988), he was simply way off the charts. What intoxicated Americans gulped in bars by then was pure vodka shots, and it wasn’t Smirnoff. As Dave Broom puts it in <i>Spirits and Cocktails</i>, “Absolut was right for its time. It tied itself to cutting-edge fashion and modern art. It was irreverent, weird, wacky, but it was never cheap.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">A few months before <i>Cocktail</i> premiered that year, women by the thousands phoned the 1-800-CHEER-UP number at the bottom of an ad in the February issue of American <i>Elle</i>. They all wanted <i>that</i> dress – this little thing with a boatneck and an exceptionally high hemline, and the entire Absolut bottle copy on the front, looked so special and gorgeous as a whole package on the twenty-year-old model (if there ever was a Silver Girl …) who had to pull it down to cover herself up while she was striking an Avedon pose.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“From the moment supermodel Rachel Williams donned a silver-lamé minidress designed by David Cameron and leapt across a set photographed by Steven Meisel, Absolut and the public were hooked on Absolut Fashion,” writes Richard Lewis (who was one of the imagemakers for the brand in those days) in his book <i>Absolut Sequel</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“When you come in, you are greeted by this busty torso that we chose to start with because this was the first garment that was produced in this collaboration. And it was actually a saleswoman [Amy Harris] from <i>Mademoiselle</i> magazine in New York who had watched the success of Absolut Art and got the idea that you could do something similar with the fashion world. The photo was taken on the day which later became known as Black Monday [October 19, 1987] so by the time the picture came out, Cameron had already gone bankrupt,” recounts Philip Warkander, a fashion lector at the University of Lund in southern Sweden whose recent accomplishment is this initial presentation of the one-thousand-items-strong Absolut Fashion Collection. His plush and considerate slice of the cake at Spritmuseum (Museum of Spirits) in Stockholm is called <i>Fashion Cocktail</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Rachel Williams looks like the-American-girl-next-door-who-never-lives-next-door in the ad that is alongside the deflated silver dress (and look! David Cameron signed it with a black marker just above the hemline after the photoshoot). Whereas dreamworld produced a deliriously sexy candy wrap, here is reality side by side with an obsolete foil wrapper. The dress and the dream are in a Claes Oldenburg-y magazine spread – there are a few of these oversized installation spreads in the exhibition that also project videos – and the information on this page includes a line by Roland Barthes from <i>Le Système de la mode</i> (1967), that “the magazine is a machine that makes fashion”. (Preposterously, this very French philosopher who saw signs in everything is quoted in English in the Swedish text. <i>Pourquoi?</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">That the fussy followers of fashion will dote on <i>Fashion Cocktail</i> is pretty obvious, but what really matters is that this show is for the dreamers too. The curator is spot-on when he suggests that there is something deep and enticing about our unfulfilled longings and desires, what we cannot have: “There is a difference between fashion in pictures and what you actually wear and what hangs in the closet. It is very efficient to produce this dreamworld that cannot really be realised, so they have made the clothes only for the photoshoots. Most of what is shown here is only in one copy, everything is produced by hand and much is even made in couture studios in Milan and Paris.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Spritmuseum opened in 2012 in the two remaining galley sheds (adorned with a neon cocktail glass facing the waterfront) on the truly beautiful Djurgården island quite in the middle of Stockholm, and this young museum is located between a wreck and a wreck: the royal ship of the line <i>Vasa</i> that sank on its maiden voyage in 1628 after less than a mile – nowadays a museum ship – and TV architect Gert Wingårdh & Co’s recent extension of Liljevalchs City Art Gallery, a totalitarian flak fortress of sorts which is a reminder of what American novelist Upton Sinclair expressed in <i>The Wet Parade</i> (published during the Prohibition in 1931): “We could never abolish the use of liquor, until we made reality into something people didn’t want to run away from.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Museum director Ingrid Leffler explains that “This is the first time that Absolut Fashion is exhibited in a museum, these clothes have not been shown to the public in this way. So it has been quite hidden. And on the initiative of us, a couple of years ago, we wanted to get our hands on this collection and organise it, present a condition report and to find a common warehouse because it was scattered then. We wanted to do this to be able to make an exhibition, but also because they are such fine garments that need to be taken care of for the future.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“Absolut Vodka and parts of Vin & Sprit’s other range were sold to Pernod Ricard in 2008. At that time, the art collection was not included in the purchase and remained in Swedish state ownership, but was handed over to Spritmuseum which administers and manages it,” clarifies Ulrika Lövdahl at the Absolut Company. “Before the sale, we had an art curator in New York and one in Paris who handled and administered the collection, that is, lending, warehousing and more. With the sale of Absolut Vodka, the collection was packed and shipped to Sweden. It arrived in 2009 and the art collection was inventoried and catalogued by Spritmuseum and stored according to current principles at an art warehouse south of Stockholm. The fashion collection, which remains in the possession of the Absolut Company, also came to Sweden in connection with this. We commissioned Spritmuseum to inventory and document the collection, including cataloguing and labelling.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Fashion Cocktail</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> is clearly more irreverent, weird and wacky than it looks at first glance. Philip Warkander’s composure is definitely reflected in this show, though the curator has likewise had the discernment to fully underline the rareness, significance and the communicative functions of these peculiar garments. The commercial imagery and the clothing are in tune, and those that are not are synched up by the clever scenography with pieces of cocktail paraphernalia and stock Surrealism – greatly exaggerated in size, fun, fetishy, splendid and too real to be true.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Warkander says that this is an exhibition that is made to provide some (“to use a disgusting word”) eye candy for IG, “but there should also be that second level where you are going to learn something about this period and the collaborations between these different creative forces. JoAnn Tan Studio and I have worked very closely with each other when it came to developing the scenography, we have been very consistent in our references and things like that. Then the JoAnn Tan Studio is very experienced so it has been very easy to walk the talk.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">JoAnn Tan, who is based in Stockholm and Milan, likes how these oversized objects “immediately make you feel like you have fallen through the looking-glass”: “Philip was exceptionally well-informed about the material. I was so surprised as we were at the very start of the process. What stands out in my memory of our first conversation is that Philip said that ‘Fashion is an energy and it is intangible.’ I think what happened from there was that we became absolutely aligned on the goal of capturing this intangible energy for the show,” she responds. “It was important that we represented the fantasy aspect of fashion. We chose to do this with the giant eye and lips because of the sensory relationship to the theme – taste and vision.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">As with Absolut Art and its Warhols and Keith Borings, Absolut Fashion collaborated with both the big names and the newcomers, and sometimes also with youthful fashion students. One such talent was Marc Jacobs whose piece from the Absolut Jacobs ad really should have been included in the exhibition. The 1989 ad shows a model in contrapposto, bare legs, “kinky” over-the-knee boots and Jacobs’s wonderful white knitted sweater – perfectly long enough to work as a dress – with a mirror image of the Absolut Vodka logo and a turtleneck that make the whole thing look as if she is wearing a soft bottle. It is lovely.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">There are in fact more pieces from the Absolut Art Collection than the Absolut Fashion Collection in the show. As a whole, there should have been a few more from the latter (what about the twisted designs from Japan for example?), and since the title of the show is <i>Fashion Cocktail</i>, it would have been fine to see just one or two cocktail dresses poured out of the shaker. But nothing in here is “traditional” and one might very well argue that there is enough of the ballroom glitz in Anthony Ferrara’s unapologetically blingy, sleeveless dress of eighteen-karat gold mesh, and sterling silver for the text and the famous medallion from the bottle. When the seven-kilo dress arrived in an armoured vehicle one night for its first ever photoshoot on the streets of New York in 1990, it was valued at well over half a million dollars. (Consider the other extreme when it was lying in a FedEx box outside the office door of Absolut’s US importer Carillon for a whole weekend.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The 1990s were the rapturous decade for Absolut Fashion. “It must be remembered that this was a project at an exceptionally high level, both in terms of prestige and budget. Absolut Vodka in the 1990s had a different position than it might have today because then Absolut Art was in full swing. And they had had the big advertising campaign since 1980, which is the longest running in the whole world, so Absolut was enjoying an extremely high position internationally,” assures Warkander. His selection for Spritmuseum spans from the year of <i>Cocktail</i> to 2002, and there’s a cogent reason for that: “Fashion had a special position in the 1990s where there was a different energy in the industry. After that, fashion began to lose its relevance and it is something that is still seen today, I think. And besides, Absolut Fashion had been going on for fourteen years at that time and it can sometimes be difficult to maintain focus. Although there are treasures after 2002, there have been no investments at this level with someone like Gaultier being brought in.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“Absolut until you’ve had Absolut enough” – as a large patch on a trouser suit proposes – is like a signature for the whole <i>Fashion Cocktail</i> show. How charming and appealing it is to experience an exhibition in Stockholm that for once is void of the merry jingles of social issues grandstanding and the walking-dead wokeness that is more Swedish than anything else today.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Weeks of unpacking a thousand boxes of surprises, all alone in a huge industrial premises next to the Mall of Scandinavia just outside Stockholm’s city centre, made the curator realise another thing about the essence of the Absolut Fashion Collection – “the Swedish theme which you can actually be blind to as a Swede. I did not see it until I had sat down with the material for a long time that it was actually a story about Swedishness and that this is important abroad. And you can also discern, if you go through the archives, that many of the garments are based on the combination of blue and yellow, which I chose to tone down because I think that Swedes can get fed up with it.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Fashion Cocktail</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> does indeed present a range of very interesting interpretations of this thing called “Swedishness”, like the immaculate <i>Absolut Newton</i> series of eight square pictures in black and white, shot in 1995 around (and inside) the Absolut plant in Åhus in southern Sweden. And then there is the Götterdämmerung of <i>Absolut Legends</i> (2002). Jean Paul Gaultier is a master couturier and the sweetest man in fashion, but everything is wrong and tacky about the outcome of this series. What’s on this ESC-y dish (photographed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino at Sandhamn farthest out in the Stockholm archipelago) is supposed to be a narrative of the creatures of Swedish folklore, the pagan mistresses, the ho-ho Vikings and the ketchup tears of Lucia.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Even Grace Jones is embarrassing in Gero von Boehm’s <i>Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful</i> (2020), a documentary full of strong, independent women with feeble personalities, weak arguments and silly excuses for once appearing in Newton’s pictures where they all shine with puissance. Helmut Newton, who hated all forms of thought control, would have laughed at the irony of this film. Nine years before he had his final heart attack in 2004 and crashed the Cadillac into a wall on the short strip between Chateau Marmont and Sunset Boulevard, Newton was in Åhus to photograph the blonde Kristen McMenamy in pieces by seven different designers for this series of high-art ads that would run in <i>Vogue</i> later that year.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">On one side of the grid with the photographs, over a big splashy martini glass, are Manolo Blahnik’s black stiletto boots with dominating cut-out Absolut letters in silver on the shafts. The model is wearing them together with a swimsuit while she floats about on an air mattress in the moat around the Vittskövle Caste not far from Åhus. Newton snapped her just at the moment when the reflection of the spire pointed at her abdomen. (What the picture spares us is that the Kermits of the area filled up the boots.) The other designers are John Galliano (as generous with the use of fabric here as the overladen designer would later be with his bigot slurs), Azzedine Alaïa, Martine Sitbon, Victor Alfaro, Anna Molinari and of course Helmut Lang. The advanced simplicity of his dress graces the exhibition.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Philip Warkander voices that “This dress may not be one of the most striking – there are only two pieces of fabric, one sitting on the front and one on the back – but it is my absolute favourite from the collection and it is because Lang is the master of minimalism. Minimalism was so dominant in the mid-1990s, and this was what made me happiest when we went through the archives.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Lang built his aesthetics on the timeless costume of the waiter/waitress with the wite shirt and the apron, and the two long sheets of sleek acetate satin of this black pinafore are only held together by two pairs of side straps and the neat gold beige-coloured shoulder straps, the only kind of extravagance that Lang would allow his designs. The dress is depraved and delicious, as terse and merciless and sensuous in its minimalism as Shellac’s album <i>At Action Park</i> (1994). Newton keenly photographed this temper with the model gravitating under towering vodka storage tanks of steel. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">In <i>Fashion One Hundred and Fifty Years: Couturiers, Designers, Labels</i>, Charlotte Seeling delineates how the dawning of the internet led to some altered terms for designers who would all of a sudden find their new pieces copied and mass produced: “Young fashion designers learned a lesson from this and began churning out new designs every six weeks, and in so doing, caused the fashion carousel to spin faster and faster. Established couturiers could not get a look in. On the other hand, individual fashions made from expensive fabrics and involving elaborate cutting techniques, which were less easy to copy, gained additional cachet. The couture in question had to be modern, however, and stretch with the body. After all, it was important for women to be able to flaunt their well-toned bodies.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Versace was for the flaunters. Gianni Versace habitually “perfected” the irksome intricacies of the harlot/Madonna polarity and pumped it up for the bold and the beautiful. The traumatising slits-and-cleavage package that the then-almost famous Elizabeth Hurley wore for a 1994 film premiere in London is a veritable eyesore secured by golden jumbo safety pins (and for those who feel the need to relive the nightmare, check out “Black Versace dress of Elizabeth Hurley” on Wikipedia). That said, the odd times when Versace was good, his designs could be like Italian grand tourer cars with brash American V8 powerhouses under the hood.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Thank goodness that the <i>Absolut Versace</i> garments aren’t his usual Miami vices but two rather agreeable dresses with a rather agreeable pattern of raining vodka bottles (Absolut Hallelujah?) with matching bottle-shaped handbags. In addition, there is also a boyish two-piece swimsuit for men with pouring A’s all over the place. And though the curator claims that <i>Fashion Cocktail </i>comprises all of the few collaborations that were made for men, that is not entirely true since Absolut Fashion generated a larger line in 1991 devoted to men even though it wasn’t that special.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">There is a bottle-shaped portal through a magazine spread that you can walk into, do a face swap in Versace’s kitschy Medusa logo and be famous for fifteen seconds. But the real deal in this part of the exhibition are the eight electric-blue photographs from Jukkasjärvi in the northernmost part of Sweden, shot by Herb Ritts in December 1996 – not 1997 as stated in the exhibition (there is an overall lack of editing in these texts, and rule number one is that people’s names must be correctly spelled) – for each and every April 1997 edition of <i>Vogue</i>. By the summer, half a billion people across the world had seen the <i>Absolut Versace</i>/<i>Absolut Ritts </i>campaign.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">(It is more than strange that <i>Fashion Cocktail</i> fails to mention that Gianni Versace was murdered on the steps of his palacelike mansion Casa Casuarina in Miami Beach on July 15, 1997. He was fifty years old when a serial killer ended his life.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The models are the dull names of the decade, but these glacial images are utter classics. One of the finest depicts K Moss up in the hollow triangle of a big-letter A, a purpose-built sculpture made out of solid chunks of ice. She wears a blueish, glittering Versace dress with what looks like a purple bodystocking, and this is the cocktail dress that should have been materialised in the show. Fashion photography in the pre-digital era involved meticulous planning and an eye for the decisive moment, and there was no other way for the models than to endure these photoshoots by the Torne River in –32° C and arctic winds with nothing more than those skimpy little pieces covering their bodies.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Ice</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> was an unexpected keyword during the development of Absolut Vodka. Americans put their vodka bottles in the freezer – something a Russian would never do – but since Absolut was designated for the US market, it was Vin & Sprit’s duty to yield to a ridiculous demand on fake authenticity: “What would become Absolut seemed almost ready for production when the prospective American importer arrived and stated that no vodka in America would sell unless it passed the ‘ice test’. When a bottle of freezer-stored Stolichnaya was poured, the liquid slipped out slowly like thick oil, and any new vodka would have to emulate this or it would not be accepted as true vodka,” writes Geoffrey Elborn in <i>The Dedalus Book of Vodka</i>. “The vodka had been deliberately stripped of some Russian characteristics, but impurities such as fusel oil, which had been removed, were returned by degrees until the potential Absolut importer felt that the icy flow was slow enough. The formula for Absolut had been created and the vodka was ready to be bottled.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">American writer Thomas Hine argues in <i>The Total Package: The Secret History and Hidden Meanings of Boxes, Cans and Other Persuasive Containers</i> that “The whole vodka isle is a bottle beauty contest” and that Absolut “has successfully made its package an icon”: “This war on the beautiful bottles results both from vodka’s lack of distinctive flavour and from its longtime association with modernity […] Among liquors, gin can occasionally be modern, but vodka alone has the license to be avant-garde.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The Absolut Vodka bottle’s bearded man on the medallion over the transparent label is Lars Olsson Smith (1836–1913), a rebel of his day who spent his childhood making vodka – and at the time that he had established his distillery on the small island of Reimersholme in his early teens, he was producing one-third of all the vodka in Sweden. L O Smith’s free ferry line to Fjäderholmarna in the inner archipelago where Stockholmers could purchase his ardent spirits was known to be fired at by his competitors, who did not stand a chance against his nose for business and the quality of his vodka. L O Smith would eventually move his operation to southern Sweden where he could find the winter wheat that he required. In 1879 he introduced the famous Absolutely Pure Vodka, <i>Absolut</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Swedish thought and craftmanship created the bottle (based on an antique Swedish pharmacy container) for the booze when Absolut Vodka was reintroduced in 1979. The precipitous success of the brand was the work of TBWA agency in New York together with the ingenious Michel Roux at Carillon Importers. At the time when Roux’s friendship with Andy Warhol led to the very first piece in the Absolut Art Collection in 1985 (<i>Absolut Warhol</i>), Absolut Vodka was already bigger than Smirnoff and all the other vodka brands in the United States.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“Here we have an Absolut Pepper and an Absolut Lemon. It is partly the kitsch factor that I thought was fun to highlight, but also how Absolut Fashion follows the brand's development,” says Philip Warkander in front of a yellow, 1950s-shaped dress by Eric Gaskins decorated with red hot chili peppers, and a sequined minidress with a lemony theme and a vegetative state of mind which appears to have been implanted from a Tim Burton film. Bradley Bayou has placed the Absolut Lemon bottle from the crotch up as a reversed tie. Both of these dresses are from 1993.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Around that time, someone responsible for something at the Absolut Company wrote an anal-retentive protest to the Swedish monthly <i>Nöjesguiden</i> for their cover shot of a pretty young woman who smiles like the sun while she is pouring the contents of a bottle of Absolut over her head. The editor-in-chief’s epic two-word reply was “Absolut Humourless.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The curator explains that “The selection for <i>Fashion Cocktail</i> was not made because the designs are so famous, but because they say something about the time or the project. Other things have been chosen because the person behind is so respected and enjoys such an elevated position. An additional criterion is that certain things are simply flippant or funny and say <i>hey</i> in a way that we thought would be good for the exhibition.” One of his personal favourites seems to be the effervescent section with the over-the-top combo of the embroidered motorcycle jacket and the matching jeans, together with the silvery handbag, bikini and the boots, caught up by the bubbles of 1999 when Tom Ford was the creative force at Gucci.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“Jeanette Kastenberg’s jumpsuit [1993] with transparent sequins was chosen because it converses with Absolut Art, and here we see works that we recognise from the Absolut Art Collection – even though she has chosen to present herself advantageously larger,” he says. “Side by side is a design duo that is quite unknown today, Van Buren, and during the 1990s they collaborated a lot with music artists with this more spectacular type of aesthetics adapted for videos. If anyone remembers Cher’s video ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’ and the V-shaped bikini dress she wore, that was as design by Van Buren, and they also made the costumes for Prince’s ‘Cream’.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Absolut Zodiac</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> (1999) and <i>Absolut Ephemera</i> (2000) are two photo series in the exhibition which both look like expensive art director excursions. On top of two giant ice cubes are Dr Martens’ late-1990s rendition of an Absolut collaboration. These boots are just too Elton, but get your mind off Captain Fantastic because this would be him when he lost it with the Donald Duck suit in Central Park in 1980. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">A beautiful garment is Hussein Chalayan’s cap-sleeved dress in white synthetic voile from the mid-1990s. It has the blue Absolut letters displayed under the bust, printed blue ocean waves below the knee and a hemline finale mimicking black and yellow barricade tape – the effect is sensational yet subtle. The standout piece in the show is by all means Jean Paul Gaultier’s yellow (and green and pink and brown) halterneck dress (made the same year as the abovementioned sauerkraut) that seems to have been created for Liv Lisa Fries’s strange and absolutely delectable flapper Charlotte Ritter in <i>Babylon Berlin</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times;">The big eye above gives us a wink, Salvador Dalí’s Mae West lips a kiss – it is the good life to be free and explore the unknown. This exhibition has the ken of the </span></span><span style="font-family: times;">“</span><span style="font-family: times;">First Manifesto of the Cocktail Nation</span><span style="font-family: times;">”</span><span style="font-family: times;"> (and yes, it is from the 1990s too): “We, the Citizens of the Cocktail Nation</span><span style="font-family: times;">, do hereby declare our independence from the desiccated horde of mummified uniformity – our freedom from an existence of abject swinglessness. We pledge to revolt against the void of dictated sobriety and to cultivate not riches but richness, swankiness, suaveness and strangeness, with pleasure and boldness for all. Be fabulous.”</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The birth of Absolut Fashion is recounted by Richard Lewis in the first of his Absolut books, and he was the one whom Amy Harris approached in the summer of 1987 with the suggestion: “‘Why not have a fashion designer create an Absolut dress?’ I had visions of a tiny little frock draped over an Absolut bottle as if it were a Barbie doll. She quickly set me straight: ‘A fashion designer will put the Absolut bottle imagery on a dress – logotype, medallion, blue and silver colours, that stuff – and then you’ll put it on a beautiful model and photograph it for an Absolut ad.’ I think I got it then.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Thirty-one years later the company introduced its spoofy “Absolut – The Vodka with Nothing to Hide” commercial in the form of an “employee introduction film”. Twenty-eight human bodies and not a garment in sight.</span><span face="Verdana, sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLbpJ2w9crRBXXwrBaJkdZhOkKeRsCORZ_jmOzFJOd-o2BJpIDXEx-4mKEixxC9Sw-OTUvQMcMJEy1BLOTejniRsmdpLTMCz_EAmlFxOIuIJ_D1sEF1ZKOwkchFMqKZMW_CHcDhTy_YXmA/s1280/fashion_cocktail2.hussein_chalayan+.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLbpJ2w9crRBXXwrBaJkdZhOkKeRsCORZ_jmOzFJOd-o2BJpIDXEx-4mKEixxC9Sw-OTUvQMcMJEy1BLOTejniRsmdpLTMCz_EAmlFxOIuIJ_D1sEF1ZKOwkchFMqKZMW_CHcDhTy_YXmA/w640-h480/fashion_cocktail2.hussein_chalayan+.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh97lREKqkGhSxCN1sNGPBqumqgybUTvEV0qWJbQVFD6i90zbWGMz64VVn1fje7z5a0CDZdd6hoxfiDuCYURFpBJxw16Lrmv66nowRfJ16IXHdxgZO_ySlX2LqMXBDeu6Kwd3UIMgqYFfMA/s1280/fashion_cocktail3.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh97lREKqkGhSxCN1sNGPBqumqgybUTvEV0qWJbQVFD6i90zbWGMz64VVn1fje7z5a0CDZdd6hoxfiDuCYURFpBJxw16Lrmv66nowRfJ16IXHdxgZO_ySlX2LqMXBDeu6Kwd3UIMgqYFfMA/w640-h480/fashion_cocktail3.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Fashion Cocktail <i>at Spritmuseum in Stockholm through January 23, 2022.</i></span></span></p></div></div>Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-90235713888336990942021-01-24T11:14:00.006+01:002021-05-24T19:15:24.418+02:00A TREE DROPPED A SEED IN PARIS: THE FIVE YEARS OF LES BALLETS SUÉDOIS A CENTURY LATER<div style="text-align: left;"><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div style="text-align: center;"><h2></h2><h2></h2><h2></h2><h2></h2><h2></h2><h2></h2><h2></h2><h2></h2><h2></h2><h2></h2><h2></h2></div></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH8L4YuYsUgv3uY50HQpP4U8cvpD5QT1xFoq-nrPEaysC6MUVnEqyk4uDzrB8yWzBsIGwxE0RYmqmlxID06geH1Janl1eQ-mLxvPaNmwR_JIVEMDgBHZRUGLc8Lr_MVU4sUR9fMgMNz-iV/s1250/ballets_suedois.dansmuseet2.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1250" height="492" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH8L4YuYsUgv3uY50HQpP4U8cvpD5QT1xFoq-nrPEaysC6MUVnEqyk4uDzrB8yWzBsIGwxE0RYmqmlxID06geH1Janl1eQ-mLxvPaNmwR_JIVEMDgBHZRUGLc8Lr_MVU4sUR9fMgMNz-iV/w640-h492/ballets_suedois.dansmuseet2.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Publicity shot for <i>La Boîte à j</i></span><span style="-moz-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><i>oujoux</i>, 1921.</span></span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">My purpose in the theatre has always been to work towards an entirely new form of choreographic entertainment, and I should not even call my performances ballet if I could think of anything better.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">– Rolf de Maré<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">It was quite like the most complete and potent piece of Dada ever conceived – an extraordinary moment in time when </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">the oddly relatable, the perfectly bonkers and the insanely beautiful concocted to ignite people’s imagination. A</span><span lang="EN-GB">nd yet it was all a happening that unfolded of its own accord during </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">an evening by the end of November 1924, </span><span lang="EN-GB">outside </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">the closed doors of the glorious Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on Avenue Montaigne</span><span lang="EN-GB">. The nineteen hundred individuals who were there for the premiere of the</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> Swedish Ballet’s</span><span lang="EN-GB"> <i>Relâche</i> were greeted with an obstinate one-word door announcement, “Relâche” (French for <i>No Performance</i>), which inadvertently roused the baffled crowd to wander back and forth for quite some time as they were trying to figure out whether they had been hoodwinked or maybe, perchance were participants in what <i>was</i> the show.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Relâche</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> was delineated as “neither a ballet nor an anti-ballet” and there was a backdrop catchword for the second act of the real, performed <i>Relâche</i> – as it went in Picabia’s delightfully unpardoned French: <i>Si cela ne vous plaît pas, vous êtes libre de foutre le camp</i> (“If You Don’t Like It, You Can Go to Hell”). Both of these summaries were entirely in line with the French avant-garde aspect of the Ballets Suédois. The brilliant Francis Picabia, who was the main instigator of what would turn out to be the company’s last production to be performed with some regularity in Paris, described the piece in plain Dada as if there was no tomorrow: “<i>Relâche</i> is as much alcohol and opium as sports, strength, and health,” he announced, adding that it has “everything turning in a movement as rapid and agreeable as that which we can get at three hundred horsepower on the best route bordered by trees tilted for a speed-producing illusion”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">The audiences that attended the thirteen performances of <i>Relâche</i> had been instructed to wear sunglasses and to stop their ears with cotton. There was a reason for that. The curtain rose to a new curtain that looked like the black milk bar drapes in <i>Clockwork Orange</i> (1971) with flickering sentences of <i>Relâche</i>-related puffery which was swapped by a white screen with a vignette that, since the film still exists, shows a cannon on the loose up on the pebbled roof of the very </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Satie and Picabia are bouncing all over the place like two merry monkeys, the cannon is loaded and they fire the projectile through the screen, right in the face of the audience. The orchestra provided the noise.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Then the stage cracked open with a blinding archway design of hundreds of coruscating discs that looked like car lights with an animal intensity that chummed along with the rowdiness of Satie’s throbbing score. A smoking firefighter entered the stage and a woman in a gala dress (the ensemble’s new danseuse Edith von Bonsdorff) joined in from the auditorium, followed by several male dancers who had also been concealed as members of the audience. It was a taciturn choreodrama with the warm thrill of confusion, for every time someone danced the music and the headlights went quiet.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">René Clair, who would make the superbly fanciful <i>Paris qui dort</i> in the following year, directed <i>Relâche</i>’s part-of-the-show intermission <i>Entr’acte</i> (in identical fashion to musical performances in Parisian cafés which were usually interluded with film screenings). We are back on the roof of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and, for a montaged moment, the world is turned upside down before balloon heads are filled up with helium, and there’s an upskirt view of a female ballet dancer through a glass floor, an Eiffel Tower on two legs. Cut to a corner of the rooftop where the famous chess playing between Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray takes place till they are soaked in water from an unknown source. A hunter who is Jean Börlin – the ballet master and choreographer of the Ballets Suédois and the one person for whom the prosperous Rolf de Maré created the company – shoots at an egg on a jet of water which turns into a pigeon that lands on the hunter’s head. When Picabia is aiming his gun at the bird he hits the hunter instead who falls to his death from the very top of the theatre. (Or something like that.) <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Six years later, as fate would have it, Jean Börlin would be lying in a coffin again, however not as an actor this time. In <i>Entr’acte</i>, the self-pulling hearse with the dead hunter has a dromedary in front and an overjoyed procession in tow. The coffin falls out when the hearse sets off on its own accord and the revived Börlin uses a magic wand to make the nosy crowd disappear, and then himself. The twenty-two-minute-long film ends when Jean Börlin breaks out of the screen the very moment that the FIN comes up, but is kicked back into his Dada reality by (as it seems) someone in the audience. The fireman and the smart flapper returned in the second act of the ballet. The fireman gushed water from vessel to vessel and the woman arrived with a crippled man (Börlin) in a wheelchair. (This was only a few years after the conclusion of World War I after all, and those of the eight million French young men who came out alive came back as damaged goods.) <i>Relâche</i> ended when Satie came driving onto the stage in a Citroën not much bigger than himself. Those who attended <i>Relâche</i> did not need to go screw themselves, they loved the show.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">One should consider that this took place a century ago when humans with hope and insight and daring views made things for people who understood the concept of a free mind.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">It was not without reason that the 1920s were viewed as </span><i><span lang="EN-GB">les Années folles</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> (the Crazy Years) in the capital of France. It was indeed a remarkable period </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">when “pushing the boundaries” wasn’t a cliché but appertained to fighting for our civilisation, for the good stuff, for triumphant new expressions in art, remarkable ideas and discoveries, bracing sources of pleasure, freer ways of being – bravery, as far as possible, without surrender, for a life worth living – as opposed to the colossal inanities and hysteria of the 2020s when people are convinced that ugly behaviour, overassertive standpoints and the endless endorsement of no-limits “liberalism” is the way to go. </span><span lang="EN-GB">We are now so disconnected from what we could be that we </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">shrug away or play along as our liberties, relishes and the air we breathe are being invalidated with each passing day.</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Play stupid games, win stupid prizes because nothing in the age that we live in must tarnish the vileness of this current rubbish.</span><span lang="EN-GB"> (</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">A female professor at </span><span lang="EN-GB">London Metropolitan University recently pronounced that human <i>debate</i> “is an imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis heteropatriarchal technique that transforms a potential exchange of knowledge into a tool of exclusion and oppression”. These fakers really want to be Stalin, all of them, don’t they</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">?) Twenty-Twenty will go down in history as the year when Tanzanian leader John Magufuli’s car died of the big bad Virus because the motor oil in his presidential vehicle tested positive. Twenty-Twenty will also be remembered as the year when people couldn’t wait to spend seventy-five dollars on a votive candle with the smell of Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">A hundred years ago, when there were people in this world who sought to take us onwards and upwards, the Ballets Suédois effectively conveyed what open minds can achieve with a great deal of imaginative effort and this new course of uninhibited interplay between the arts – just what the </span><span lang="EN-GB">French art historian Frank Claustrat expresses in <i>Dancers, Artists and Lovers: Ballets Suédois 1920–1925</i>: “The meteoric rise of the Ballets Suédois lit up the Roaring Twenties like no other artistic enterprise, and it was thanks to this company that dance became a field of boundless experimentation. The strength of its choice of repertoire lay in a continual dialogue with its public. It was relevant to everybody and touched on universal themes, envisaging an altruistic society hitherto unheard of. The ability to dream was regarded as the first condition for such change.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">This new (and Virus overdue) <i>Dancers, Artists and Lovers</i> publication is the essay book providing a slew of new perspectives and unique images – and the three hundred pages are concluded with a very useful list of all the twenty-six works by the Ballets Suédois to tie up the loose ends – which, combined with a separate catalogue, accompany the <i>”If You Don’t Like It, You Can Go to Hell”: Ballets Suédois 1920–1925</i> exhibition at the Dance Museum in Stockholm. Dansmuseet’s centennial over the Ballets Suédois is bang on in terms of depth and magnitude, looks and beauty. It is of course all too true what Lynn Garafola notes in <i>Legacies of the 20<sup>th</sup>-Century Dance</i></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">, that </span><span lang="EN-GB">ballets are only living entities as long as they have their stage life. On the other hand, when the next best thing makes you dance on moonbeams and slide on rainbows, well, then it is absolutely hats-off to Dansmuseet and this significant achievement.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">“Previous exhibitions about the Ballets Suédois, but to a large extent also previous publications, have been very focused on the scenic and perhaps mostly on the visual artists. The exhibitions have presented long ranks of beautifully framed costumes and decorative sketches from those big-name artists, in typically white-painted exhibition galleries. With this exhibition we wanted to get a greater grasp on the performing arts as an art form – phenomena and complexity – and to focus on the whole endeavour of creating this whole project, this adventure that the Ballets Suédois was,” explains Erik Mattsson who left his position at </span><span lang="EN-GB">the Department of Theatre Studies at the Stockholm University in 2017 to take over as the Dance Museum’s new curator and the person in charge of the centennial.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Mattsson says that his main academic interest in the performing arts lies in “its complexity and societal ramifications, always these connections to economics, law, the issue of public space, social relations, collaborations, geographical movements, advertising … The performing arts as an art form is remarkably diverse, it is so complicated compared to literature and visual arts.” It is evident that this curator has a knack for passionate archival studies, a passion that has been contagious (if one dares to use that word these days) for the entire production of the </span><span lang="EN-GB">show</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">. Whereas the book is more like an archipelago of missing bits and pieces, presented in sections like a stage performance, the exhibition itself is the mainland of all the chronicles, stories, magical dust and a wealth of astonishing articles that are cleverly put into context and aided by a fair amount of detailing. It is roughly everything that remains of the Swedish Ballet in the 2020s. <i>They’re here</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">In his luminously sturdy biography on </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">the Ballets Suédois’ founder and animator </span><span lang="EN-GB">Rolf de Maré (subtitled <i>Art Collector, Ballet Director, Museum Creator</i>), the former director at Dansmuseet Erik Näslund argues, and with good reason, that “A laboratory like the Swedish Ballet was necessary in order for art to be capable of developing.” Unlike the mad scientist in </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Paris qui dort </span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">who uses his beam to put the people on the streets of Paris in a frozen state of slumber, de Maré u</span><span lang="EN-GB">sed up an entire fortune between 1920 and 1925 to purvey something dearly precious for Parisians and tout le monde – new art, </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">deep entertainment and a whole lotta play.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">The hard-touring Ballets Suédois performed on seven hundred and twenty occasions</span><span lang="EN-GB"> (their pieces were carried out 2,717 times in all)</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> during these five years, which in effect were more like three and a half. The home arena and the base for their organisation was the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées at the beginning of the treelined Avenue Montaigne between the Seine and the Champs-Élysées. This theatre is a restrained beauty in concrete with an embossed marble frieze right under the eaves, a cassette layout for the golden window frames, and a sensuous inside where the dishy particulars of early Art Deco emerge in the grand lobby.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“The Ballets Suédois has always been highlighted as a Parisian phenomenon and when reading previous books, you almost always get the feeling that they were mostly in Paris,” says Erik Mattsson. “But the fact is that out of these nights, one hundred and seventy were in Paris and five hundred and fifty in other cities. Surely, Paris was very important because there was the artist community in Montparnasse that the Ballets Suédois was very dependent on and collaborated very much with – that was where many of the artistic impulses came from. Several of the productions were made for a Parisian audience, with the Montparnasse community in mind.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Contrary to the Ballets Russes, with which the Ballets Suédois was routinely measured against, the Swedish company was not elitist (highbrow, sure, but never high-and-mighty). Part of their mythmaking power was that they loved killing it in smaller theatres just as much. Mattsson explains that “While they were touring, and they performed in one hundred and forty-six cities in Europe and the United States, they often presented other types of works. <i>Relâche</i> and <i>La Création du monde</i> [1923], for example, were given only in Paris and a few times. <i>Relâche</i> could not be toured with and it was not made to tour with. It was considered that the audience in other cities would not be appealed by these most modernist works. It was more of Swedish folklore, classic and humorous works that were run in the countryside and in smaller towns, and it often worked out well there too. I think it was an experience that they gained, that this was what worked.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Rolf de Maré was born in Stockholm in 1888 to a family of considerable riches. Though hardly cut from the same cloth, de Maré and his famous grandmother </span><span lang="EN-GB">Wilhelmina von Hallwyl</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> shared some essential traits. Here were two plutocrats who understood what to do with their given privileges: they both had a penchant for culture and the artistically valid, collecting was in their blood, and so was the pleasure of beneficial expenditure. Rolf’s mother left her son and husband when the family returned from Berlin in 1904 to start a passionate new life together with her son’s young tutor. Rolf, the coy dreamer, stayed in the heart of Stockholm with the countess in her Hallwyl Palace (today a public museum with everything kept as it was in the old days, including the amusing skittle-alley in the attic known for its thunder that reverberated across the whole building).<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">“There is often a connection between tuberculosis and a highly developed sensibility,” hints Erik Näslund in the biography, and he means that it was de Maré’s illness that delivered him from a tedious existence. Part of his young life included sojourns on a magic mountain together with the rest of the moneyed Half-Lung Club, and this in an environment where social interaction was not restricted to reading alone: </span><span lang="EN-GB">“It should be remembered that TB above all afflicted young people, and the disease enhanced their intrinsically strong sex drive. Condemned as they were to non-physical activity, their physical needs sought other outlets. The sanatorium world was notoriously promiscuous.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">Just back from one such stay in the Alpine world, his father brought him out again on a long journey to India in January 1910. There would be many such around-the-world trips for de Maré, like when he escorted Prince Wilhelm of Sweden to the coronation of King Rama VI of Thailand that autumn, and carried on by himself for fifteen months across the Far East and North America. His grandmother supplied him with a mansion on the western shores of Sweden, </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Hildesborg, for she alone had decided that Rolf would become a lord with both of his boots in the agricultural domain. On de Maré’s own volition, however, he would turn things around towards an autonomous life of excitement, enjoyment and freely-chosen frustrations. And almost everything that would come in his way during the 1910s would cluster into the formation of the Ballets Suédois.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The recondite pencil notes in Rolf de Maré’s pocket planners from the autumn of 1912 and five years on were about his secret romantic appointments with the dainty Swedish dandy Nils (von) Dardel who had an incredible <i>cercle des amis </i>including many of the finest modernists in Paris where he himself lived as an expatriate artist. Dardel in effect became responsible for bringing much of the new avant-garde into de Maré’s life and art collection, which up to this point had been dominated by global artifacts of ethno-lore. The couple travelled the world together, most notably during the World War I (and through another Russian Revolution), and at the start of this 1917 tour they enjoyed Enrico Caruso at the Metropolitan in New York City and the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova at the Teatro Nacional in Havana.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">It was Pavlova who had performed <i>The Dying Swan</i> at the</span><span lang="EN-GB"> Mariinsky in Saint Petersburg in 1905 to the great Michel Fokine’s emancipated choreography in which he lifted the dancer away from the impediments of traditional ballet – much as in Greece around 500 BC when the sculptors made the blockish statues (with their stilted Archaic smile) finally step out of the marble they came from. Like Sally Bane explains in <i>Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism</i>, “Fokine had radically reformed the Russian academic style in accordance with five principles, which he summarised in a letter to the London <i>Times</i> in 1914. He believed that in each ballet the movement should correspond to the subject matter, period and musical style, instead of being simply another combination of preordained steps; that dance and gesture should advance dramatic action; that the entire body, not just the hands and feet, should be used in gesture; that the role of the corps de ballet should be expressive rather than merely ornamental; and, finally, that dance must be allied with the best in the other arts but still maintain its own independence.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">These principles were implemented and cherished during Fokine’s 1913–14 stay at the Royal Opera in Stockholm – where the promptly resigned ballet master from the Ballets Russes arrived after a typical rift with its imperiously tempered impresario Sergei Diaghilev. One of the dancers at Kungliga Operan was a talented twenty-year-old who was getting seriously tired of the silly “gymnastics” of Swedish ballet and of being so completely underused. The effeminate Jean Börlin had been training ballet since his mother one day decided to abandon the family. She disappeared for good after dropping the child off at some relatives’ house south of Stockholm and four hundred and twenty-six kilometres from home. Fokine brought back the young man’s joy for dance, sharpened his expression and peeled off the sugar. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“According to Fokine, it was Jean Börlin’s goal to create a performing art that could be able to be an expression of humanity in all its diversity,” writes Lynn Garafola and she argues that Börlin’s “passion for knowledge appeared to be never ending. He read all the time and he learned several languages on his own, just as de Maré had done. Unlike his sponsor, however, Börlin stayed friendly and sympathetic. He was able to adjust in every situation and was a very empathic person. During his career with the Ballets Suédois, this proved to be very convenient. His universal knowledge and his flexible way of being made it possible for him to adapt himself to the needs of the artists involved.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">What was written in the stars shall be. Rolf de Maré had seen <i>The Fairy Doll</i> at the Stockholm Opera in 1909 and on stage was a dancer who would be attributed in red pen in his pocket planners from the fall of 1917 and the years to come. “That was a good day at work!” smiles Erik Mattsson when he describes how he discovered that these markings are about de Maré’s love, lust and schemes for Jean Börlin, his future star of the Ballets Suédois.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">When actor Paul Demange in 1931 summarised what he called “the scope and significance of this formidable movement created by Rolf de Maré and Jean Börlin,” he argued that “there had not been a more favourable time for the appearance of new aspirations. This was the postwar period in which everything that had existed in the past acknowledged its inability to survive. Creation was essential at all costs. But everywhere on this virgin soil that was thus laid bare to artists’ aspirations, chaos reigned. There was no time for pruning or weeding; vigorous building had to take place amidst the quagmires and the ruins. Such an enterprise attracted pioneers of the most impetuous kind. Rolf de Maré and Jean Börlin were two of these.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">In 1975, Joni Mitchell was sitting in Gordon Lightfoot’s house playing her new song “Coyote” (recorded the following year for her album <i>Hejira</i>) while the host, Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn were trying to keep up, unable to understand what she was doing. For the bearded ones it was still the Summer of Love but Mitchell had catapulted into the future. </span><span lang="EN-GB">This was exactly what the Ballets Suédois was doing in relation to the classical dance companies during its five years of existence.</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB">“Already around the turn of the century, there was a general tendency to liberate dancing from the established classical dancing methods,” writes Pascale De Groote in her book <i>Ballets Suédois</i>. “Next to the fact that academic dancing was going under in decadence, this trend can be explained in different ways. There was the idea of a new sense for dynamics, a greater concern for the concept ‘body’ and an increasing interest in the subconscious and in the corresponding emotions.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">This was sensed and assumed in the visual arts as well. After seven years of working on his </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Les Grandes Baigneuses</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">, Cézanne left the painting as it was in 1905, unfinished <i>and</i> completed. <i>The Bathers</i> is an exceptional piece of grand traditions, and yet – take a look at these crude bodies and the sketchy future that is already there. Two years later when Picasso painted the similarly large and revolutionary <i>Les Demoiselles d'Avignon</i>, the bodies had become more disjointed and unrestrained as if the five prostitutes (two of the faces are completely masklike) were accomplishing a modern image of the human subject that in essence tackled old instincts against brave new mechanics.</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">There was also a curiosity in the air for the performing arts, which also to a great extent came from other art forms, all stirred up as they were by this new world of aspirations that would revive ballet (and in the end even <i>French</i> ballet). In <i>The Ballets Russes and Beyond: Music and Dance in Belle-Époque Paris</i>, Davinia Caddy explains that “This enthusiasm for dance was no doubt stimulated by a cluster of concurrent phenomena: a burgeon interest (across the visual arts, photography and early cinema, as well as the physical sciences and industry at large) in the concept of motion; a specifically theatrical anxiety about opera, vocal exegesis and dramatic impersonation; an intellectual loss of confidence in verbal culture (the so-called language crisis, symptomatic of early modernism); and a societal trend towards sport and recreation.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">What would ensue was a string of “goodbyes” to the old ballet world. Russian-born artist Léon Bakst, who worked as a scenographer and designer in Diaghilev’s company, said goodbye “to scenery designed by a painter blindly subjected to one part of the work, to costumes made by any old dressmaker who strikes a fake and foreign note in the production; it is goodbye to the kind of acting, movements, false notes and that terrible, purely literary wealth of details which make modern theatrical production a collection of tiny impressions without that unique simplicity which emanates from a true work of art.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">As a twenty-four-year-old de Maré had seen the Ballets Russes perform at the</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB">Kroll Opera House in Berlin</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> in 1912. However, it was not until he became friends with Fokine and his ballerina wife Vera during their – and Börlin’s – stay in Copenhagen that he began to not only value ballet but to entertain the idea of a Paris-based company under his own direction. de Maré was, as he expressed it much later in life, all too aware of the Swedish mindset not to see that a debut at home “would be tantamount to suicide”. It is highly likely that this idea was discussed when they all got together over dinner at his Hildesborg mansion on April 27, 1918.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Börlin experienced the Ballets Russes perform at the Empire Theatre in London on his way to Paris when the hostilities of the WWI ended in November 1918. Though the pieces included the famously cubist-fragmented <i>Parade</i> (with contributions by Picasso, Satie and Cocteau), he could only recognise “the same old contorted ballet steps” and petulantly called Léonide Massine’s choreography “perversions of old ballet”. (Thirty years later Massine was the sullen dancer and ripening cobbler who delivers the ballet slippers to the delectable Moira Shearer in The Archers’ Technicolor masterpiece <i>The Red Shoes</i>, a film that indeed was inspired by the Ballets Russes.) Börlin came to Paris to study dance and art, but got on a gloomy start: “I’m getting more miserable by the day,” he wrote to de Maré. “I’m so afraid for the future.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">“</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">When they returned from their holiday in Algeria, Jean made his big solo debut in Paris in March 1920,” tells Erik Mattsson. “In retrospect, it was as if they were testing a lot of stuff that would then reappear in the Ballets Suédois in the autumn. It was the same theatre, even though it was the smaller stage [Comédie, on the third floor], it was the same conductor, and the seven solo numbers were expanded into larger choreographies that were part of the Ballets Suédois’ repertoire. And the press in Sweden reacted precisely as it would do during the Ballets Suédois.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Mattsson points at one of the many letters (dated February 4, 1920) in the exhibition downstairs. “</span><span lang="EN-GB">This is the first time that the Ballets Suédois is mentioned in writing. It is a letter to Jenny Hasselquist who was a huge star at the time. The first thing Rolf and Jean did when they had decided to start this company was to contact her and ask if she wanted to join. Once she had said yes, they could start recruiting other dancers. But Hasselquist was only there for three months before it clashed between her and Börlin.”</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">It was a French publisher and man of letters who (for legal reasons) would be the official theatre manager during the Ballets Suédois’ lease of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Jacques Hébertot was the smooth operator of the Swedish Ballet, he filled the three stages when the troupe was out of town, he ran the magazines that promoted the Ballets Suédois, he did all sorts of press and PR, and de Maré gave him all the money he would ever ask for to keep this dream alive. In the summer of 1920, Hébertot and Jean Börlin were in Stockholm to search for their dancers and to let them rehearse before it was time for the big move to Paris. While the male dancers came from Copenhagen, de Maré pretty much emptied the Royal Swedish Opera of its female dancers to the unspeakable fury of its director and many others. de Maré explained in writing that he “did not have a single scruple about demolishing the corps de ballet of the Stockholm Opera, considering that I had decided to present it as a magnificent troupe dedicated to performing abroad”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“All the dancers who I have looked up who were from the Royal Opera came from clearly obvious working-class homes. Their fathers and mothers were industrial workers, cleaners, chimney sweeps, fruit sellers. By joining the Royal Opera’s ballet school, you received an education and you could have hopes for a future profession. And you got paid a little already from the age of six or seven if you had a small extra role. It was far from everyone who became a dancer in the end, and had it as a profession, but you still had that opportunity if you were disciplined and a little talented,” explains Erik Mattsson. “When they joined the Ballets Suédois, because of their class background, the fifteen-year-old dancers suddenly earned more than their fathers, which may be a partial explanation as to why the parents allowed their daughters to go away to Paris.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">He says that Jean Börlin “was probably not entirely easy to deal with, but they liked him much better than they liked de Maré. The dancers thought he was stingy, mean and boring. I do not really know what this being ‘stingy’ is based on because the dancers had very high salaries.” The foul temper of the Swedish impresario paled in comparison to Diaghilev’s whose leadership was characterised by an atmosphere of bullying and perennial diabetes tantrums, reinforced by the ghastly foresights that he received from his supply of fortune tellers. Everyone in the Ballets Suédois enjoyed paid vacations in the summers, and they were justly compensated in case of injury or illness. And when the Stockholm dancers got on the train to Paris on September 27, de Maré made sure that everyone was provided with a first-class ticket.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Jean Börlin had originated nine small ballets under quite some pressure when the premiere took place less than a month later. (He always had every move in his head and hence barely jotted down anything of his choreography for future studies.) “</span><span lang="EN-GB">The Swedish first night was a success of exactly the right Parisian kind, with applause, cheers, boos and controversy,” writes Rolf de Maré’s biographer. This garboil over four pieces of ballet was of course nothing </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">in comparison to the thunder of disagreement that took place in here on May 29, 1913 when the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was all new and the Ballets Russes presented Stravinsky’s <i>Le Sacre du printemps</i>. Even though the Ballets Suédois started out as mildly as a Swedish heatwave, they were the ones who had the money, the vision and the energy to generate what </span><span lang="EN-GB">art director Mikhail Larionov was dedicated to create in the Ballets Russes – a “universe existing alongside the world of reality”. It was the Russians who possessed the virtuoso dancers, but the Swedes were</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB">teeming with charming imagination and capricious punk and the Ballets Suédois was a </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"></span><span lang="EN-GB">Krazy Kat daydream.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Sergei Diaghilev, who had travelled from London to Paris to witness the Swedish premiere, “had genuine cause for concern,” recounts Lynn Garafola. “Although the Ballets Russes had managed to survive the First World War, financially, its position was shaky. Rich Russian patrons had disappeared with the Revolution; German touring venues with the Axis defeat. For months the company had been a ‘turn’ on the English music hall stage, while its grand postwar comeback at the Paris Opéra early in 1920 had been marred by a two-week strike of the Opéra personnel. And, compared to the fifty-odd performances of the Ballets Suédois opening season, the Ballets Russes season that followed would amount to fewer than a dozen.” The Ballets Russes was not alone to be in desperate straits. The entire ballet production at the Palais Garnier in 1920 was two foreign divertissements.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">The old photographs taken from the top of the theatre are numerous and full of symbolism – everyone in the young troupe looks like a champion of the world. Erik Mattsson was there too, a few years ago: “</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Nicolas Le Riche [the director of the Royal Swedish Opera] has worked a lot at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and he says that you are not allowed to go up there, that it also applies to the staff. It is forbidden, but everyone does it anyway. They smoke, drink coffee and bask in the sun. I don’t know if it was forbidden even in 1920, but when you look at the dancers’ private everyday pictures, and we have quite a few from the roof, they dance, jump and just hang around. It was their haunt, a resting place with a fantastic view of the Eiffel Tower.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">The Ballets Suédois appeared as a force in the French capital. The idea was to play around with a bit of the old Swedish folklore and some different conceptions about Swedishness – and to </span><span lang="EN-GB">confect it with contemporary life and</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> with the vanguard artistic movements that were so special to Paris. What emerged, when the best of Paris and “Sweden” roistered till sunup in creativity, were </span><span lang="EN-GB">true works of art.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“It is a Swedish-French project,” answers Mattsson, “but if you look at it numerically, there are more French artists and composers that they collaborated with, and there were more French than there were Swedish works. At the beginning of the autumn of 1920, the Swedish <i>Nuit de Saint-Jean</i> and <i>Les Vierges folles</i> were included in the repertoire. In the more modernist <i>Maison de fous</i>, there is not much Swedish other than that it is made by Swedes. But these three works were performed for a very long time and they probably thought that that was enough. Rolf de Maré once said that one of the driving forces for working so much with French artists and composers was that there were too few of high quality in Sweden. They made more friends among artists and composers in France than in Sweden. Kurt Atterberg and Einar Nerman, from whom they bought <i>Les Vierges folles</i>, were not the best friends with Rolf and Jean.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Funnily enough, the Ballets Suédois arrived in Paris at the same time as Continental Dada. The Bauhaus school had just opened in Germany while the country’s Expressionist theatrical movement, with the gaunt loners, their Angst and the painted shadows, was approaching the abyss. Those things were soaked up by the Swedish Ballet too. Erik Näslund poses something very interesting in his book on Rolf de Maré: </span><span lang="EN-GB">“Was the intellectualism of the Ballets Suédois perhaps more congenial to the German psyche than to the French? Classical ballet had nothing like the strong position in Germany that it occupied in Paris, and consequently fewer people felt constrained to defend its dominant position. This left the way clear for a new kind of dance to challenge the classical convention.”</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB">And as he argues, the young Germans “were united in their contempt for classical ballet and in their endeavour to create a new dance style”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">This was hardly the sentiment that ruled among the dancers in the Swedish (or rather Scandinavian) troupe, who too many times found that what they were there for shrunk in the face of the artistic paraphernalia of the French avant-garde. “When many of the Danes signed for Ballets Suédois, the hope was to dance in Fokine’s new ballet style on which Börlin built his own choreographic style. But it did not always turn out that way,” explains Erik Mattsson.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“It was quite a lot of folk dancing that they did not think was so fun to do. And in the most modernist works, it was movement patterns and types of dances that they did not like. The recurring thing among the dancers is that in letters and diaries they mentioned very little about the dance at all. They told much more about everyday life – how to celebrate Christmas in London, and how awkward it was to be on tour – and when they mention the dance, it is regarding that there is too little classical ballet. You almost get the feeling that the dancers were more conservative than the Ballets Suédois.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“They liked some of these more innovative and modernist works. There are several who thought that <i>Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel</i> [1921] was very fun to do even if there was not much dancing in it. What many of them highlight is <i>Chopin</i> [1921], which was a classical ballet with en pointe dancing, and to get a part in it was significant. But there are several who have said that they just thought that <i>L’Homme et son désir</i> [1921] was weird, with advanced music, and that they could not possibly use their skills in that kind of work. It was a new pattern of movement and the choreographic expression was not always central.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Years later, de Maré confessed that the reason for dissolving the Ballets Suédois in March 1925 was that he found it impossible to back out of the consequences left by <i>Relâche</i> which, in an immediate future, would make both the dancers and the choreographer redundant. Also, he figured that the company’s penultimate production “was contrary to our Nordic spirit”. Despite the fact that Jean Börlin expressed that “the dancer must cease to be the sandwich man condemned to carry the great painters’ advertisement boards” – and many critics cherished his way of turning excellent paintings into ballets – there was always a struggle within his own choreography, pushed by de Maré’s expectations, between the vast supply of visual images and the actual, suffocative effect that this overload would have on the dance itself. “Each picture gives birth in me to an impression that immediately transforms itself into dance,” Börlin said. “It is not that I have tried to copy them by making tableaux vivants. But they awaken in me reflections, ideas, and new dances.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">“What in Heaven’s name have I done to Sweden,” de Maré asked his supportive stepfather in a letter. “In every quarter, attempts are being made there to destroy me.” Nils Dardel’s watercolour <i>The Executioner or the Triumph of Ballets Suédois</i>, painted as early as 1920, is like a revenge movie on a piece of paper. The narrative appears as a succession of scenes in which the craven</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> David Sprengel, the leading muckraker voice of the Swedish press, is led to his effeminate headsman</span><span lang="EN-GB"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">– the artist himself dressed in a bloodred bodysuit – who is anything but careful with that axe. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">In reality, the uncouth Sprengel, full of spite and the usual Swedish grudge and inadequacy, did not end his days as pig feed – as it is pictured in Dardel’s bloodcurdling vision in Dansmuseet’s exhibition – but continued to lash out at the Ballets Suédois in order to create as much damage as possible. This critic had gone postal when Jacques Hébertot was offered the job that the Swede was never considered for anyway. But there was a further reason. With the arrival of the Ballets Russes in 1909, the homosexual Sergei Diaghilev transformed the new ballet into a veritable art form that, besides its lessening of the cult of the ballerina (and her side role as a fetish prostitute), advanced towards an ambisexual multi-ballet with the quirks of his own carnal appetites.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">The homosexual tinge of the Ballets Suédois and the “soft and gelatinous” aspect of Börlin was a sitting duck for the Swedish press. On July 2, 1921, the Swedish paper <i>Svenska Dagbladet </i>published a demurral from the dancers in the troupe:</span><span lang="EN-GB"> “We find this treatment from fellow countrymen incomprehensible. One would expect compatriots to be swifter than foreigners to appreciate a Swedish undertaking and judge it fairly, but this not being the case, we have the satisfaction of having received the very best reviews in every other country.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Erik Mattsson says that it is obvious that their countrymen’s scolding of the Ballets Suédois was driven by homophobia and that “</span><span lang="EN-GB">It is then that the writings were as most aggressive. If you compare France and Sweden, there were similar norms about homosexuality in both societies at that time, but France was still more permissive. And juridically, homosexuality has been legal since the Revolution. In Sweden, this did not happen until 1944 and ceased to be classified as a disease in 1979. In Sweden, homophobia was linked to nationalism. It became like a motor in Swedish writings, a patriotism where it was considered that the Ballets Suédois embarrassed Sweden internationally. It has to do with the fact that this project was called the <i>Swedish</i> Ballet and that it was considered ‘disgusting’ and ‘sissy posing’ that was shown on stage. In France, this was not an issue. It was not called the French Ballet. It was not their flag that was being ‘dragged through the dirt’.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">One of the ballets </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">on the premiere eve of October 25, 1920 was particularly exotic for the French audience. The homespun scenography for <i>Nuit de Saint-Jean</i> (or <i>Midsummer Vigil</i>) was made by Nils Dardel and this piece had the essence of Swedishness with a dance around the maypole in genuine costumes to Hugo Alfvén’s score based on traditional tunes. (This was ninety-nine years before American filmmaker Ari Aster’s ridiculous Sweden/Switzerland-whatever “chiller” <i>Midsommar</i>.) The true exotica of the Ballets Suédois, however, was how they so wholeheartedly embraced the avant-garde of Montparnasse while they kept their Swedish innocence – as one of the dancers recalled it, “We were like some retirees who knitted our way through Europe.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">”<i>If You Don’t Like It, You Can Go to Hell”: Ballets Suédois 1920–1925</i> is an exhibition with an original soundtrack composed by six students from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. What pleasures Mattsson a little extra is that they are five men and one woman, just like the group Les Six </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">that worked with the Ballets Suédois and who were of the same age and 5–1 make-up.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">This is the first time that all the preserved costumes are on display since the 1930s when they were on show in Rolf de Maré’s museum the Archives internationales de la danse in Paris. (The brilliant costumes are the property of the </span><span lang="EN-GB">Bibliothèque nationale de France</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> in Paris, while practically everything else from the Ballets Suédois belongs to Dansmuseet in Stockholm.) Other things to like in the show are paraphernalia such as costume designs, décor sketches, stage models, letters, scores, portraits, some choreography notes, scripts, press clippings, magazines, signed photos, passports, a life’s worth of pocket planners and Jenny Hasselquist’s boots.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">While on tour in London in the autumn of 1922, de Maré told the press that his “organisation is as perfect a democracy as is possible in this world”. This was naturally way off the mark. The Ballets Suédois was Jean Börlin’s “Me”-vehicle – <i>he</i> was the sole performer who was allowed to shine. “Exactly,” Mattsson affirms, “there would only be one star in the Ballets Suédois. That is why it clashed with Jenny Hasselquist, and that is why she left the company after only three months, and that is why it happened to Carina Ari in 1923. They simply became too popular and Börlin and de Marté could not stand it. They did not want to give them the position that they deserved in the company.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“Many of the dancers emphasised how friendly Börlin was. He gave them lessons in the morning and rehearsals during the day, and then performances in the evening, so he worked very close to the dancers. On the other hand, he was quite moody. It seems as if he was alcoholic during the whole Ballets Suédois. At least from late 1921 there are testimonies from one of the dancers who writes in his diary that Börlin is drunk, and even performs drunk on some occasions. There were some who said that he had problems with his nerves. Others formulated in different ways that he had nervous breakdowns.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The architecture of the show turns the perspective around to include views both from behind the scenes and in front of it, with yourself (with a bit of imagination) as a delegate for an audience. You almost step into the “backstage area” right away, with the framing of the walls left bare to work as shelves and showcases. This creates a special rhythm which makes a lot of sense and is visually pleasurable as well (in fact, the only thing that <i>looks</i> cheap downstairs are the signs). Rolf de Maré had a rather large office that he shared with Hébertot at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, whereas the one recreated at the Dance Museum is a space just sufficient enough to provide you with the all-inclusive sense of sitting at de Maré’s desk a hundred years ago and listen to the only known recording of his voice in the handset.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Erik Mattsson says that it was rediscovered on a French database before the exhibition opened: “What is interesting about this recording from the 1950s is that when de Maré talks about the Ballets Suédois, he emphasises classical ballet as the most important thing for choreographers and dancers – that it is the classical legacy that is central. Jean Börlin was a bit on the same page when he was interviewed in the 1920s, that the classical ballet is the ‘Master’ and that the modernisations are something that can be done based on that.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">The exhibition also lets the dancers and the people in the Swedish Ballet’s administration shine in the spotlight. Seven of the twenty-six ballets are highlighted, and what a luxury to see Dardel’s décor design for <i>Maison de fous </i>recreated on a wall, and in paint, together with the spare-nothing Expressionism of his costume sketches. Rolf de Maré’s letter to his mother, dated a few days before the premiere on November 8, 1920 (and with <i>El Greco</i> coming up ten days later), has the certitude of a ballet director who knows that his company is gaining momentum and that the Ballets Russes should better keep an eye out</span><span lang="EN-GB">: “The battle for supremacy has begun.” The dancers themselves had to develop their characters’ monomaniacal movements through an insane asylum so dismal that a sane woman loses her mind, and her life, in here. <i>Maison de fous</i> stood without references – or as Pascale De Groote puts it: “Such extreme madness had never been seen in a performance of academic dancing.”</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The curator has to stop for a moment when asked which of the ballets that he would favour to experience today. “I have never really thought about that. But had I been able to choose a single performance, that would be <i>Cinésketch</i>, the New Year’s Eve cabaret, the last of December 1924. It is probably very difficult to reconstruct, and there are too few testimonies and information about it. But it would be fun if someone tried. I do not know if <i>L'Homme et son désir </i>would be so successful on stage today. But it would still be interesting to see it with the four levels, and the play with the space that was done here, with singers placed in the auditorium to make the sound come from different directions, and that the audience was surrounded by the rainforest soundscape. And then, of course, <i>Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel</i> would be a joy to watch with a real historical reconstruction.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">L'Homme et son désir</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> and <i>Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel</i> were the two superb pieces that the Ballets Suédois presented in 1921. <i>L'Homme et son désir</i> – the “ballet symbolique et dramatique” which was created by Darius Milhaud (music), Paul Claudel (libretto) and Audrey Parr (décor and costumes) – was turned down by Diaghilev and Massine the previous summer due to its “picturesque exoticism”. Roger Nichols argues in </span><i><span lang="EN-GB">The Harlequin Years: Music in Paris 1917–1929 </span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">that history has vindicated the Ballet Suédois and</span><span lang="EN-GB"> that “<i>L’Homme</i> remains one of the most moving works of the decade, in which any picturesque exoticism serves as a profoundly human message”. Jean Börlin came out on stage in the appearance of a naked Roman statue, his and the ensemble’s highly constricted dancing were like yearnings trapped by the gravity of the floor or simply the realities of life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">Börlin is listed as the choreographer of </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> but it was the author of this ballet, Jean Cocteau, who took care of that part too by gesturing the movements he had in mind in front of the dancers. Gustave Eiffel’s spire (again a central place in René Clair’s <i>Paris qui dort</i>) is where a wedding party is about to be captured by a photographer whose phantasmagorical camera blurts out a set of bizarrely puffed-up figures, among them the Trouville Bathing Beauty and the Lion that feasts on one of the guests. The very Futurist delivery of all the dialogue and the narrating came from two human megaphones amplified by a large horn by each side of the stage. </span><span lang="EN-GB">Cocteau presented the ballet with these words: “Before our very eyes a new theatrical genre is being born in France … It expresses the modern spirit, and is still a world unmapped, rich in discoveries.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Jean Cocteau’s wonderful creation was a further indication that the most spirited pieces of Surrealism were going to be made outside the dominion of André Breton. This nuptial ceremony, which was altogether Cocteau’s own invention apart from the music by the Groupe des Six, was correspondingly rejected by the Ballets Russes because they didn’t have the guts to produce it. </span><span lang="EN-GB">“The mixing of highbrow and lowbrow and the anti-romantic, anti-naturalistic attitude are typical of 1920s Paris and also came to characterise the repertoire of the Ballets Suédois, which likewise enjoyed exposing its audience to provocation,” writes Erik Näslund.</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB">“A few critics perceived what lay beneath the farcical, ironic and absurdist surface, namely a tone that was supremely personal, poetic and serious.” There is a 1929 letter in the exhibition from Cocteau in which he spells out that he had the time of his life when they were making </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">. Erik Mattsson is right when he avers that “Rolf and Jean had no artistic manifestos themselves” but they sure knew how to choose the right artists to work with.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The Ballets Suédois made forty appearances in London around Christmas 1920. It was in the middle of a performance of their most popular piece, <i>Les Vierges folles</i>, that Börlin started to lash out against the much more celebrated Jenny Hasselquist, who immediately left the stage and made a classic twenty-three skidoo from the company.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">1922 was assigned by continuous touring so the only new work that year was Fernand Léger’s Cubo-Futuristic ballet <i>Skating Rink</i> – based on Ricciotto Canudo’s poem “Skating-ring à Tabarin: Ballet-aux-patins pour la musique” – and it premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on January 20. Léger’s incentive for this ballet was his interest in the rather new machine world and, as a consequence, the life of the mechanical man. The French artist was, in Erik Näslund’s words, “fascinated</span><span lang="EN-GB"> by the acrobats, clowns and jugglers because their technical skills mechanised the human body in a way that resembled the cogs of a machine”. Léger also fancied the idea of works of art operating as wide-ranging showpieces, and his <i>Skating Rink</i> was a huge metaphor for humankind going round and round until the maverick (here as the Poet/the Madman) comes in to break the circle and, for better or worse, bring out some human instincts.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Taylorism (which got its name from Frederick Winslow Taylor’s efficiency bible <i>Principles of Scientific Management</i> from 1911) also became visible in the arts as mechanical dynamism. (Just take a look at Oskar Schlemmer’s lovely <i>Triadisches Ballett</i>, developed in 1912 and onwards, with its Bertie Bassett and his small circle of friends-like figures, which still to this day is a work of extraordinary modernity and beauty.) </span><span lang="EN-GB">In her 1926 essay “Advertising and Photography”, <span style="color: black;">the </span>modernist photographer Margaret Watkins summarised how “Weird and surprising things were put upon canvas; stark mechanical objects revealed an unguessed dignity; commonplace articles showed curves and angles which could be repeated with the varying pattern of a fugue</span><span lang="EN-GB"> […] </span><span lang="EN-GB">and showing an apparent queerness of choice most painful to the orthodox.” The Ballets Suédois was a locomotive that pulled those new trains coming.</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">They toured and toured and toured in 1922 and in all gave two hundred and eleven performances that year. The company’s travels through Europe commenced on January 29, and after Volksoper in Hamburg on May 12 everyone bit the bullet and entered the Swedish Theatre (</span><span lang="EN-GB">destroyed in a fire three years later)</span><span lang="EN-GB"> on Blasieholmen in Stockholm for a fortnight of mini-victories that would quite favourably alter their countrymen’s adverse view on the Ballets Suédois. The composer and critic </span><span lang="EN-GB">Wilhelm Peterson-Berger got very excited over the ballet <i>Iberia </i>(1920):</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">“</span><span lang="EN-GB">The three stage sets alone, by the celebrated [Théophile-Alexandre] Steinlen, had an electrifying effect. First came the unparallel harbour scene, with its tangle of steamers and ships, masts, tackle and cordage. Equally remarkable were the costumes, the refined colourfulness of which was juxtaposed with the still more refined way in which the outlines of the figures stood out one moment and dissolved and disappeared the next, these figures being one moment living beings and the next fantastically meandering blobs of colour, imparting the symphonic movement with a supremely original and delightful softness and freedom. And the dance steps and attitudes themselves portrayed a new Spain, as fiery as the old one but bold, unconventional and quite disarmingly artistic.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">After yo-yoing between France and southern Scandinavia, the Ballets Suédois made a successful tour in the UK for the rest of the year. The company travelled from city to city in the northern parts of Italy during the first four months of 1923, and they were a roaring success wherever they appeared. The only trouble was that the Italians <i>adored</i> Carina Ari and that their ardent love was much too much for Jean Börlin’s ego to process. After a week of performances at Stora Teatern in Gothenburg in July, Carina Ari – and all but six of the other dancers – decided to leave the Ballets Suédois.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">“</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">The thing is that the dancers who were contracted in 1920 were on three-year agreements. There was a very bad atmosphere in the company by the end of that period. From the summer of 1923, Rolf de Maré changed his mind and gave the dancers short-term contracts of four months during a tour, and the troupe was much more heterogeneous during the final years. It was not just Swedes and Danes anymore but it was Finnish, Norwegian and German dancers, it was an Englishman and a Russian woman,” explains Erik Mattsson.</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“Margit Wåhlander, one of the dancers in the first troupe, probably thought that the whole world lay open when she left the company in 1923. She imagined that she could get any assignment, however that did not happen. She had to work for a living in Sweden for a few years and then she stopped dancing. And that was what happened to most of them. The Ballets Suédois did not become a springboard to a solo career. But for Carina Ari, the Ballets Suédois was certainly a step up and it is quite telling that she is the only one of the female ballet dancers of whom it has been written a biography.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">Two new important productions were put to the test at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées before t</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">he three-month tour in the United States. The first performances of <i>La Création du monde</i> and <i>Within the Quota</i> took place on October 25, 1923. <i>La Création du monde </i>was a response to a sentiment that had existed in Paris since the days of Decadentism in the 1890s and grew in influence after the human meltdown of World War I (and the real pandemic that followed with the Spanish flu). Once again it was a work by Fernand Léger and the scenario was by his close friend Blaise Cendrars, the lyrical poet who thanks to the omnipotent entitlement of Male Privilege lost his right arm in the bloodshed.</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“In 1910 I bought my last picture from Picasso and that was one I did not really want, but I had from time to time advanced him sums of money, and this cleared the account,” told Leo Stein in <i>Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose</i> (1947), the book that he didn’t dare to write until his self-aggrandising sister Gertrude Stein was out of the picture. “Once when I gave him a hundred francs to buy coal, he stopped on the way home and spent sixty of it for Negro sculpture.” For these artists, African masks became the signage for the new creation of the world in the Machine Age, and even more so the recreation of humankind.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Sally Bane has a well-founded summation of the plot in her book: “In <i>La Création du monde</i>, at first the stage is dark; one perceives a tangled mass of bodies. Three enormous gods, Nzame, Medere, and N’kva, move around it slowly, reciting incantations. The mass begins to move, a tree grows, drops a seed, and another tree grows. As leaves of the trees touch the ground, they tremble and swell and turn into animals. The stage grows lighter with each birth. During a round dance of the creatures, a man and a woman are born, execute a dance of desire, and couple. All the creatures, including the shamans and sorcerers, join the dance, which reaches a frenzy. Finally it dies down, and the couple remains isolated in their kiss.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The corps de ballet was in this case not much more than stage hands and the only body parts that the members of the audience could see were their feet. Their task was to change the positions of the eight metres high gods and to flesh out the animals that came into being from the falling leaves. The original intention was to fill animal skins in the shapes of crocodiles, monkeys, birds et cetera with helium – like Pink Floyd later did with their inflatable piggie “Algie” for the <i>Animals</i> (1977) artwork – but this was an idea that unfortunately had to be ditched. The music was a Harlem type of jazz score composed and conducted by Darius Milhaud. (In the year ahead, Léger was going to put together his reel-to-reel cacophony of kinetic restlessness and mechanical fervour – the nineteen-minute short but intense montage film <i>Ballet mécanique</i>.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Within the Quota</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> was carried out three times at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées before the Ballets Suédois took it to America for which the piece had been assigned. The ballet – which was the creation of two American expats, Cole Porter and Gerald Murphy, who lived the good life in Paris and on the Côte d’Azur in the 1920s – follows a Swedish migrant who arrives in a dreamlike version of the United States that will greet him with the fallacies of his own imagination, or prejudices one might say. The characters he encounters are the stereotypes of Americana and the landscape is a collaged form of overused expressions. However, the caricature is deliberate, warm, tongue-in-cheek – for who wouldn’t love to go West with the Sweetheart of the World?<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">This was the endless dream, just like it went on in F Scott Fitzgerald’s <i>This Side of Paradise </i>(1920) with “the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets”. One of the figures in <i>Within the Quota</i> is a cameraman who turns the other types in the ballet into actors in a film. (The cineaste will start to film the audience too as a conclusion.) </span><span lang="EN-GB">“The old opera ballet had no meaning, except that the dancers can pirouette upon the tips of their feet,” Rolf de Maré told the American press. “I thought it possible to go considerably further and to tell a real dramatic story. It is a new and I think fascinating venture into the realm of art.”</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">The US tour was fraught with problems. The American promoter lived on his reputation alone, which was that he had been the tour manager for the Ballets Russes in 1916–17. But there was also the new troupe of dancers, inexperienced to this kind of life, and the growing problems with Jean Börlin’s health. He was constantly s</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">tressed out and overwrought, and his alcoholism and substance abuse had made him quite too pudgy for a dancer. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Pascale De Groote tells it bluntly, that the Swedish impresario’s “</span><span lang="EN-GB">riches had decreased – the performances in Germany had taken place in a time of inflation and had made a big hole in the budget – but de Maré had also counted on the US as his second home. He had thought that there would be an opportunity to create an American dancing circuit. The reactions of the press and the public did not square with the expectations. It appears that a lot of choreographies were too modernistic to the general opinion and they were removed from the programme, which meant a surrender to common taste.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">For the better part of 1924 there were no performances by the Ballets Suédois at all. Börlin was getting five new ballets ready for the fall, and the piece – that in actuality was more of a happening – that must be addressed is the one-off performance of the legendary <i>Cinésketch </i>that took place on the very last evening of that year (and just imagine the scale of it, the set also included <i>Relâche</i>). The directors of this “revue” of many colours were</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> Francis Picabia and René Clair. Apart from Jean Börlin and the unofficial female star Edith von Bonsdorff, the cast included such luminaries as Satie, who made his last public performance this evening, and Marcel Duchamp and Bronja Perlmutter (model, actress and soon-to-be Mme Clair) who embodied Adam and Eve from a late-Renaissance painting by Lucas Cranach made four hundred years earlier. It was back to the beginning again. And since this was Dada, Picabia paid his respects to Cranach by making Eve the apple of temptation, the original tart. Caryathis (Élise Toulemont) was one of the dancers and the American jazz band The Georgians that was on a long and final tour in Europe delivered the music.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">The revue lasted all night long. In <i>Dancers, Artists and Lovers: Ballets Suédois 1920–1925</i>, Frank Claustrat delineates how</span><span lang="EN-GB"> “a costume ball was held in the basement of the theatre in the bar area. This ball was to form the epilogue of <i>Cinésketch</i>, to which the entire audience was invited. Here they would be able to become performers themselves in an unscripted and unchoreographed scene. Press accounts tell of a joyous and colourful throng: Maria Ricotti, futurist artist, danced a java, Tristan Tzara, Dadaist poet, dressed up as a Prussian army officer, Jean Bo</span><span lang="EN-GB">̈</span><span lang="EN-GB">rlin danced a gypsy dance, the actors André Daven and Marcel Herrand danced a shimmy and an Apache dance respectively, the artist Marie Vassilieff danced a bolero with Picabia, and Kiki de Montparnasse, the artists’ model, and her friend Thérèse Treize performed a belly dance whilst singing texts from the Kamasutra!”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">The <i>Cinésketch</i> epilogue is like</span><span lang="EN-GB"> the photo from the 1920s</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB">that Neil Tennant comes across in “Being Boring” – “And </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">we were never holding back or worried that time would come to an end” – but the Ballets Suédois would reach the final curtain a few months later. It happened in the middle of Champagneland after the last piece, the Swedish-titled <i>Dansgille</i> (1921) which ironically means “dance feast”, was over in Épernay on March 17, 1925. Erik Mattsson reveals that “What de Maré himself explained long afterwards, that he had announced the troupe in March 1925, after a sad performance when he is said to have gone backstage and declared, ‘This was the last one, now we are closing down,’ that is not true. It was a decision that transpired. They had plans to take it up again, and in his pocket planner from October 1925 there is a note, ‘Premiere Ballets Suédois’. But he has erased it, and erased it so hard that the page is ruined.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Jean Börlin became weak and yellowish at the end of the 1920s after developing jaundice during a tour in South America. He was in New York City in December 1930 to perform at the Carnegie Hall, but died on the 6<sup>th</sup> of that month. He was thirty-seven. </span><span lang="EN-GB">“The art of Börlin – sober, intellectual, pure-bred – came from audacious pursuit and at times attained sublime stylisations which delighted Fokin,” expressed the </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">French (and Russian-born) writer Pierre Tugal, who helped Rolf de Maré founding the </span><span lang="EN-GB">Archives internationales de la danse for the purpose of honouring Börlin’s memory, and who curated the collections until the museum closed in 1952 and de Maré the following year established Dansmuseet in Stockholm.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">“DESPERATELY SAD YEAN [sic] LEFT US TODAY 405 PM HERMINE,” reads the Wester Union telegram in Swedish from Börlin’s last patron Hermine Jourde to de Maré. Börlin was taken to Paris and buried at the Père Lachaise in his tuxedo. The “Börlin Room” is only a corner in the exhibition but it is not just the telegram and the funeral wreaths that fill this room with sorrow. An unnecessary gimmick in here, though, is a screen portrait of Börlin that receives its pixeled colours from Nils Dardel’s portrait of their mutual former lover de Maré and the sound is generated by the visitors in the room.</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> This piece reverberates in its own “now”-conceptualism, void of the emotional punch that appears to have been its intention.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">A strange film in black and white meets the visitor at the end of the show. It is strange because this is just about the only moving material there is of the Ballets Suédois – a company that worked with filmmakers and loved this new medium – and the quality of the dance itself is quite average to say the least. Mattsson explains that the video with the three female dancers is showing an “Arabic dance”:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">“I have been sitting and watching this clip quite a few times and among other things thought about how good they really were at dancing. They are not so synchronised in this clip, they laugh all the time, which gives a pretty amateurish impression. And then, just recently, I came across diaries written by one of the dancers, source material that has not been known before and which now belong to the museum. Margit Wåhlander mentions that there was no piano. They had no music to dance to so Jean Börlin, who was very musical, had to stand up and sing instead. But to dance to just a song and to find the rhythm in it must be very, very difficult. And besides, he was teasing them so that is why they laugh.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Five years, that’s all that they got. A hundred years ago the Ballets Suédois elevated minds.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The late philosopher Roger Scruton wrote these words in <i>The Guardian</i> on December 19, 2012: “The life of the mind has its intrinsic methods and rewards. It is concerned with the true, the beautiful and the good, which between them define the scope of reasoning and the goals of serious inquiry. But each of those goals can be faked, and one of the most interesting developments in our educational and cultural institutions over the past half century is the extent to which fake culture and fake scholarship have driven out the true varieties. It is important to ask why.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Ever been to Pleasure Island? “Right here! Get your cake, pie, dill pickles, and ice cream! Eat all you can! Be a glutton! Stuff yourselves!” as the speaker voice yells out in Disney’s most effective nightmare, the amusement park in <i>Pinocchio</i> (1939, note the year) which turns every sucker into a dumb beast. For some reason, this seems far too much like a picture of the world today, a place where we have forgotten who we are.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Well before the exhibition at Dansmuseet opened last autumn, SVT showed an hour-long documentary about the Ballets Suédois on national television (and it runs on a screen at the Dance Museum as well). One of the voices in the film is Nathalie Sergent at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and she says with a glow in her face that “The funny thing about the theatre’s history is that this whole beautiful adventure was born thanks to dreams. It gives this theatre a special atmosphere.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">The dance has swirled away with the applause, the cheers, the boos and the controversy. And still</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">, as anyone in love with the morrow</span><span lang="EN-GB"> –</span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"> they’re here</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Never mind the cotton, cum on feel the noise.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: xx-small;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><br /></span></span></p><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSzCi2a76GB5OGbZfD0QwD9lHmn3IafRM5fgaiGL-s6a-W1IBCiISy2rzLX4j4QTS2DksBIjlYfVL817TRun7NKJPw0hHUusOpLqhtJAkTl0_LU_MSmio4C8u8QuiCDWOujOJMt47yrHZu/s1280/ballets_suedois.dansmuseet1.jpeg"><img border="0" data-original-height="853" data-original-width="1280" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSzCi2a76GB5OGbZfD0QwD9lHmn3IafRM5fgaiGL-s6a-W1IBCiISy2rzLX4j4QTS2DksBIjlYfVL817TRun7NKJPw0hHUusOpLqhtJAkTl0_LU_MSmio4C8u8QuiCDWOujOJMt47yrHZu/w640-h426/ballets_suedois.dansmuseet1.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;"></span></div><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: large;">”If
You Don’t Like It, You Can Go to Hell”: Ballets Suédois 1920–1925 <i>at Dansmuseet in Stockholm
through May 15, 2021. The major part of this exhibition (costumes excluded) will continue well into 2022.</i></span></span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-26439964443141115112020-07-01T00:23:00.001+02:002020-10-02T15:09:11.454+02:00TREMORS<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy1vBUI8mVVCHNZkpTceZmS19lY0ifETIuMx2mJWa6dq7zUTQAN33xY1n3Ynct_8oIL7bTYwYaxKzCSDfrGLyCGugd7DJF_IOukCtW7o7sXwnmLnB1OC6HlDVS3ry55RevY3CJjQeiU9jj/s1600/3kiruna_forever.iwan_baan.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="853" data-original-width="1280" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy1vBUI8mVVCHNZkpTceZmS19lY0ifETIuMx2mJWa6dq7zUTQAN33xY1n3Ynct_8oIL7bTYwYaxKzCSDfrGLyCGugd7DJF_IOukCtW7o7sXwnmLnB1OC6HlDVS3ry55RevY3CJjQeiU9jj/s640/3kiruna_forever.iwan_baan.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;">From <i>Global Kiruna</i>, a project by Iwan Baan, Anne Dessing and Michiel van Iersel, 2020.</span></span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3SreyTODS4O212iPitPCV-cw_qWa2yKr5z05Aq64xkVahS7i2HIShMlRCID_wjMuHntzf-wOUVqQYiUvEeBTCj5iAXc6au9i1JLauonESy8FNlv8JcvELqPaV-KR8hZuW2EnxNGAXOIkY/s1600/1kiruna_forever.gregor_kallina..jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="853" data-original-width="1280" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3SreyTODS4O212iPitPCV-cw_qWa2yKr5z05Aq64xkVahS7i2HIShMlRCID_wjMuHntzf-wOUVqQYiUvEeBTCj5iAXc6au9i1JLauonESy8FNlv8JcvELqPaV-KR8hZuW2EnxNGAXOIkY/s640/1kiruna_forever.gregor_kallina..jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;">Kiruna as seen from Luossavaara mountain. The photograph was taken by Gregor Kallina on March 15, 2019.</span></span></td></tr>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">All of man’s mistakes arise because he imagines that he walks upon a lifeless thing, whereas his footsteps imprint themselves in a flesh full of vital power.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">– Jean Giono<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Bang, bang, that awful sound. The thirteen people who were down there that night were knocked off their feet by the sudden impact of a terrifying wallop that occurred at 03:11 on May 18 this spring. Some miners were resting at 814 metres below the ground, while most of the unit was some hundreds of metres deeper when the largest mining-induced quake in Sweden’s history ruptured on a level between them. The early-morning seismic blow was something very different from the sixty tonnes of explosives which cause this place to flutter and ruffle an hour after midnight every single day of the year. It was a 4.9-magnitude jolt, a sneeze from Mother Earth.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Above this dramatic underworld sits an Arctic town with 16,660 residents. The state-owned mining company LKAB employs 2,175 people on this location, with a large workforce deep down in the intestinal dominions of the mine – the largest and purest body of magnetite on the planet is swaddled by an industrial complex that extracts and dispatches six Eiffel Towers’ worth of iron ore every twenty-four hours, imagine the scale of it. “Wherever you are in Kiruna the mine is always present,” writes Dominic Hinde in <i>A Utopia Like Any Other: Inside the Swedish Model</i>. “Kiruna is in a Faustian pact with the industrialised world outside, selling its mine wealth and its culture in return for being allowed to exist.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There is an existential rift between the moods expressed in television chef Keith Floyd’s miserably inebriated performance in the Kiruna mine in 1997 in which he, drunk as a skunk, confounded the wine with the brandy and poured the whole bottle of the latter into the pot – and the bedrock kind of sorrow in Sofia Norlin’s dismal feature film <i>Broken Hill Blues</i> from 2013, in which a Kirunian kid is asking a young woman who is brushing his hair: “What’s my room going to look like afterwards, when no one lives here anymore?” “Well,” she tells him, “you might get some trees growing in there. It might even snow in there.” And here’s the thing about Kiruna as we know it: the <i>here</i> about Sweden’s youngest town, founded in 1900, is in the process of becoming a <i>there</i>, a place that will topple inwardly and, in a matter of decades, perish altogether.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“The citizens of Kiruna have been forced to face extraordinary, philosophical questions […] This urban landscape destabilises notions of time in an accelerated society. One can see a jump-cut version of a city,” argues curator Carlos Mínguez Carrasco in his essay to the necessary <i>Kiruna Forever</i> exhibition, on show at Arkdes – the National Centre for Architecture and Design – in Stockholm until February next year. The fine-looking catalogue, with the great cover photo by Gregor Kallina, has a panoramic view of the surviving mining district and the edging localities that will be the first to disappear, and reappear in some other form for the 21<sup>st</sup>-century version of Kiruna and its dynamic past. Mínguez Carrasco: “No other Swedish city embodies the 20<sup>th </sup>century in the same way as Kiruna. Its enlightened belief in progress, its hope for the future, its struggles for better labour conditions, its community building and social emancipation. It simultaneously epitomises the tendencies of the welfare state and capitalist statecraft.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Jump cut to a day in Kiruna’s history when the town was in its infancy. Borg Mesch’s one-hundred-and-nineteen-year-old and sun-soaked photograph <i>Midsummer’s Night on Kiirunavaara </i>(<i>vaara</i> is the local word for mountain) in the <i>Kiruna Forever</i> show is a remarkable testament to the hopes and dreams of the new settlers who have gathered here by the hundreds, some together with their wives or sons, all of them dressed and groomed for the occasion, with the mandatory long walking sticks, as they crown the top which will be the first to go in this Faustian pact. (Another thing about Kiruna and its peculiar sense of time is the five weeks around midsummer when the sun never sets and the three weeks of unending night in the winter.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There is something very hard-wired and primeval about scooping out tunnels in the crust of the earth. The shafts throughout Kiirunavaara’s underbelly run two kilometres deep, which is likely the rock-bottom level of the four-kilometre-long and eighty-metre-wide slab of iron ore that was formed 1.6 billion years ago, and this is the curse and treasure that will keep Kiruna “forever”. It is the myriad of caverns and the massive hanging wall towards Kiruna society that are propelling the subsidence, and it just keeps getting worse since two-thirds of this gargantuan chunk remains for the next one hundred years of mining and the further extraction of 219,000 new Eiffel Towers.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">As Dominic Hinde points out in his book, “Sweden colonised itself. Axel Oxenstierna, a Swedish nobleman and royal adviser in the 17<sup>th</sup> century declared ‘In Norrland [the country’s nine northernmost provinces] we have our own India.’ A few hundred years later it was declared that Norrland was Sweden’s own American west.” When Hjalmar Lundbohm arrived in this outback to establish a mining community between Kiirunavaara (Ptarmigan Mountain) and the smaller Luossavaara (Salmon Trout Mountain) for LKAB in the late 1800s, there were no routes to the area other than the rivers in summertime. The place was connected with the Iron Ore Line in 1899, the railway between Luleå on the Swedish side of the Gulf of Bothnia (which is frozen nearly five months a year) and Narvik on Norway’s Atlantic coast – Kiruna’s port for pretty much the lock, stock and barrel of what is brought up from its underbelly.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Lundbohm was a man who had seen the world. Most of all it was Port Sunlight, this new Merseyside town with its ideal concoction of business, industry, learning, culture and, of course, great architecture that made the strongest impression on him. In the academic journal <i>Scandinavian Studies</i> (vol 83, no 4, 2011), Kristin Kuutna describes Lundbohm himself as “a curious combination of hardboiled industrialist and sensitive intellectual interested in art and culture. He had amassed an impressive collection of art, and frequently hosted artist friends from the southern metropolis of Stockholm at his house in Kiruna. He also entertained musicians and hosted regular concert performances in the wilderness mining settlement. His controversial character, accompanied by the driving force of economic advantage and patriarchal superiority, nevertheless included affectionate sentiments towards the Sami.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“But while his mining pursuits destroyed the Sami habitat on the one hand, Lundbohm energetically articulated the need to record and preserve Sami culture on the other,” explains Kuutna. “Lundbohm expressed the necessity for Sami to retain their rights, while the biggest menace seemed for him to be the new circumstances which, ironically, he himself had fundamentally created. Lundbohm’s mining practices were riddled with contradictory features: he was strongly opposed to hiring Sami to work in the mines, which he saw to be destructive of their lifestyle and ancient culture.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Hjalmar Lundbohm’s direction to his friend Gustaf Wickman, the architect who designed early Kiruna’s most significant buildings, was that the wooden church – one of the most loved buildings in Sweden today – would be made with references to a Sami hut and a Norwegian stave church, and that it would also serve as a pleasant and useful meeting place for the townspeople in matters other than the Almighty & Co. The church (1909–12) with its eight hundred seats is painted in Falu red and safeguarded by twelve golden sculptures which each embodies a human state of mind absorbed in a saintly posture. The church together with the belfry and the Maria Chapel (holding the remains of several thousand Kirunians) will be dismantled and moved in 2026, exactly one hundred years after the “uncrowned King of Lapland” was put to rest here under the tallest headstone.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In order to develop the town plan, Wickman worked with his colleague Per Olof Hallman, whose clever layout to face the Arctic cold was accepted in April 1900. In his book <i>Demokratins genombrott: Människor som formade 1900-talet</i> (Breakthrough in Democracy: The People Who Shaped the 20<sup>th</sup> Century), Curt Persson describes how “they designed an irregular street network where both hills and cavities were taken into account. Instead of excavating elevations in the terrain, they suggested to wrench the street network through or on the side of the craggy terrain. To counteract and create a protective barrier against the prevailing northwest mountain winds that constantly circulate in the area, they constructed irregular street systems with small square-like places where several streets met to divide the advancement of the winds. The plan itself can be seen as a gigantic work of art – in harmony with the conditions.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Obviously far from everything was a piece of art in this frontier outpost at the beginning of the century. Makeshift sheds were squeeged all over the town and the miners had to lurch kilometres through the snow and brave the immense cold during wintertime and, in addition, climb up the Kiirunavaara before their workday had even started. A tram and a funicular were put into service in 1907 – however, by 1909 thousands of settlers left Kiruna, among these were five hundred people who were trying their luck in Brazil where their misfortunes only went on. (A group of optimistic migrants were the “Kiruna Swedes” who moved to the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and onwards. Most of them were murdered by the regime when it dawned on them about the realities of Communism.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Around 1920, Kiruna had become the focal point of the massive machinery that was designated as the Norrbotten [County] Technological Megasystem. When LKAB’s ore production regained strength after the nadir of World War I, a three-month strike in 1920 brought on a twenty per cent rise in earnings for the workers on the mountain. Another decline in production led to a three-day working week in 1922, until the output spiked again in 1927, only to crash anew during the Great Depression. The Megasystem kept the Wehrmacht going throughout WWII, but outlanders were banned from entering Kiruna and soldiers were protecting every train bridge across the Iron Ore Line on the Swedish side.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When Kiruna obtained its city rights in 1948, vast sums of the wealth from the mining business began to pour into the Municipality. The mine itself was modernised and the town progressed in terms of new neighbourhoods, created by the country’s leading architects in the 1950s and 60s when the future was something to look forward to. One of them was a twenty-five-year-old Englishman who arrived in Sweden on his bicycle in 1939 with a fresh set of idealistic concepts for the new welfare state, <i>Folkhemmet</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“The architect who has possibly spent the most time and effort in planning Kiruna is Ralph Erskine. He was out of work in the late 1950s and started on his own initiative to draw up a new Kiruna. He was very interested in the climate and developed theories of Arctic ideals on how to build in a cold climate. We have a fantastic material of this work that kept him busy for years. Unfortunately, not much of this was built but you can look at his ideas here in our collections,” says Frida Melin, curator of the collection at Arkdes. “The exhibition shows how Erskine has described Kiruna as a metropolis in the Arctic landscape. There is also a very nice perspective where he summarises his Arctic ideals and demonstrates what the Arctic city could look like.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Artur von Schmalensee<span lang="EN-US">’s</span><span lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-GB">Town Hall building from 1963 was demolished in 2019. The <i>Kiruna Forever</i> exhibition does not only show </span>von Schmalensee<span lang="EN-US">’s</span><span lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-GB">original drawings for this marvellous piece of architecture, but also a thoughtfully grief-stricken installation-of-sorts made out of genuine parts from this building’s very beautiful and very gone public atrium. “We wanted to make sure that the audience would experience, physically, the features of these fantastic details the building had. The building was also very symbolic for the citizens of Kiruna. It was located in the mining area and it hosted very important public events. A Picasso exhibition happened in the building [in 1965], but also concerts, weddings and political speeches,” says </span><span lang="EN-US">Carlos</span><span lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-US">Mínguez Carrasco.</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“The main reason for the demolition of the Town Hall was because it was located in the most affected area due to the expansion of the mine. There were many discussions and studies about looking at the possibility of moving the entire building, but it was too expensive and technically very difficult to move. It has been one of those elements which has been super complex – lots of years of discussions, documentation and records – and the reality today is that it is gone. I think it is sad, it was a fantastic building.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">As the curator points out, “The reality of a city is impossible to portray in an exhibition, there are so many aspects, it’s infinite. Once you start to see this, you see how impossible it is.” </span><span lang="EN-US">Mínguez Carrasco</span><span lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-GB">and his team at Arkdes have started from a pocket full of miracles and created an exhibition of many elements that in essence balances like a Calder mobile. Whether you are on a speed dating with <i>Kiruna Forever</i> or are mesmerised for hours (time flies in here), you will get a great sense of Kiruna’s lineage and new directions – with one critical exception.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“The mine is the heart in Kiruna,” convinces a voice in Liselotte Wajstedt’s video piece <i>Kiruna the Drift Miner</i> (2020) in which the residents in Erskine’s soon-to-be-razed neighbourhood have their say as so-called ordinary Kirunians. (Three ladies are asked about the future and they reply, “It is behind us.”) Wajstedt is a Kirunian herself and her parents and siblings are working in the mine, however this is as close to that heart as the whole exhibition aims to take us. There is a side room in <i>Kiruna Forever</i> with two pieces of “meta art” which could have served so much better as a space that would have given us just the tiniest sense of going so deep down in the mine that the ears pop – the claustrophobia, the disorientation, the moisture, the quivers and the odd smells, even the tactile physicality of the iron ore pellets would have done a lot for the understanding of the forces that this show, after all, is dealing with. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Arguably the most illuminating new piece in the show is Ingela Johansson’s solemn <i>Silver Tongue, the Great Miners’ Strike 1969–70</i> (2020), a fifty-seven-minute video work displayed over three screens, about the wildcat strike that broke out on December 9 and stalled the Norrbotten Technical Megasystem for fifty-seven days. The origins of the strike were several, but a great incentive was the author Sara Lidman’s interview book <i>Gruva</i> (Mine) that was published the year before the strike with pictures by Odd Uhrbom (you will find a few of these in the show).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">“</span>I have no hesitation in saying that Sara Lidman<span lang="EN-US">’</span>s <i>Gruva</i> is not at all representative of the <span lang="EN-US">circumstances</span> up at LKAB<span lang="EN-US">,” vented the</span><span lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-US">Minister for Finance, Gunnar Sträng (who held this post for twenty-one consecutive years in the Social Democratic Party), during a speech in November 1969. “</span>When I say that I know this<span lang="EN-US">,</span> it is because I have had the opportunity to personally speak with people, municipal people and direct employees, in those places and they have been quite indignant about this presentation of their workplace which has, quite unexpectedly, fallen upon them.<span lang="EN-US">”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-US">What one day began as thirty-five miners’ spontaneous sit-in strike in an underground tunnel quickly rose to this massive work stoppage, involving four thousand five hundred men (and of course, the miners were all men until 1979). </span><span lang="EN-GB">“My film is an in-and-out-zooming of press images that I have digitalised. The three tracks serve to create a flow, and obviously I have worked rhythmically which I hope will provide a cinematic feeling,” explains Ingela Johansson. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“It is also nice that <i>Silver Tongue</i> is in dialogue with the installation, the reconstruction of the Town Hall. The design of the work grew in conversation with Carlos Mínguez Carrasco who likes performativity. This video work is a montage from all the speeches held at the major meetings, mainly in Kiruna. The Town Hall is the centre space, but the speeches were also held in the sports hall in Kiruna and in [the smaller mine town] Malmberget. The microphone on the Town Hall podium is the original model of the one that was used during the strike.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Silver Tongue</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> is a very apt title. The eloquence, the fairness, the humanity of these mineworkers’ speeches is a joy to listen to – “You are wonderful people and you will remain people. We have to persist – we have to fight for our right to be people. It is difficult to comprehend that you have to do that in 1969” – and what a different world from the demagoguery of today when we are expected to kneel before the entire female/minority victim game of fashionably baleful idiocies. Orwell was the first to recognise that the next wave of Fascists will call themselves anti-Fascists. In <i>Nineteen Eighty-Four</i> (1949), Winston tells Julia that “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” Here are we now.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Norm Form</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> was the title of the last of a decade’s worth of predominantly cheapjack exhibitions at Arkdes before Kieran Long took over as the adult in the room in 2017. <i>Norm Form</i> was presented by three disposable heroes of hypocrisy (all rendered with academic titles), and this was the vilest attempt in a public museum to promote the endorsement of fallacious, totalitarian and sociologically disastrous ideologies based on a chauvinistic, nonsensical sorting of <i>people</i> in which everything fits a template narrative. This is the crybully hogwash and rabidity that the Swedish taxpayers are forced to patronise when the voices of reason are squelched and we have stupidity at that level. One of the last things that H L Mencken wrote before he died in 1956 was that “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Director Kieran Long puts forth some relevant questions in the <i>Kiruna Forever</i> catalogue: “What does it mean for our sense of our place in the world if the cities we live in are movable, friable, if they simply disappear from the Earth because of a judgement about the greater good? What is the ethical basis of a city established on land populated by indigenous people for centuries? What happens when the monuments that define our history are saved, moved or demolished according to the arguments of historians, architects, judges and politicians? How do we remember our town histories, when the places we remember no longer exist?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Are there answers to these reflections in the exhibition? Yes, somewhat and quite considering that we live in an age obsessed with questions for the sake of questions. The problem with <i>Kiruna Forever</i> is to a certain degree the catalogue. It has the looks all right and everything that you can wish for from the physical exhibition – however, apart from lacking the flavour of considerate editing, reading the essays is like watching two current Swedish television commercials where a woman and a man are trying to eat crispbread, but are interrupted too many times by a voiceover that is more like a strafing attack of jolly PC slogans for the targeted viewer: the well-formatted Swede, the world champion. Such are the schemes that pester our institutions and government bodies as well, and the question is if we want them repeated in these catalogues? There is a straight-up answer to that: no.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A big table in the exhibition over Kiruna’s topography etcetera, <i>Kiruna Forever: A Visual Exploration in Five Acts</i> (2020), is a reasonable starting point to appreciate this show. Four plates at one of the short sides reveal the city’s (and the table’s) development phases from the early 1960s to the absolute now of today. There are various projections on the table and there is a screen at the other end. A great deal of information is involved in this installation – which is like the spaceship environment in <i>Alien</i> (1979) with the jagged old analogue versus the high-tech – and as much as the table is indeed confusing it is also illuminating and very helpful for the understanding of the course of Kiruna. (Two markings on the floor are related to the big table: the airport strip at the side of the table, and a faraway dot that marks the Esrange Space Centre, the only civilian rocket station in Europe.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The show has a generous draught of old maps, architectural drawings and early models.<i> I Am Mountain – Measurements</i> (2016) looks like a real-time seismograph that would measure Kiruna’s underground movements, but is instead another share of “Me”-ism, care of an artist who has mixed a 1902 sound recording of Sweden’s highest peak Kebnekaise with the twang of her own body. Things to love in the show, however, are Lars Harald Westman’s Miroslav Šašek-y illustrations to Ralph Erskine’s <i>Arctic City</i> concept, the paintings by Carl Wilhelmson, Helmer Osslund and Axel Törneman where early Parisian modernism meets the mining realities of Lapland, and Rolf Dahlström’s graphic photographs (1967) of Örjan Lüning’s buildings and twenty-six-metre-high iron wind organ for LKAB’s industrial complex in Svappavaara northeast of Kiruna.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Hakon Ahlberg’s office building for LKAB, that sits on solid ground in front of Kiirunavaara, is a beautiful piece of architecture with the looks of the opening sequence in Hitchcock’s <i>North by Northwest</i> (though it was finished a year after the film’s premiere in 1959), and we are presented to a sweet sequence of Polaroids of this building. Photographer Gregor Kallina’s pensive and very poetic <i>Iron Heart</i> series from 2019 is a delight, and the same goes for Iwan Baan’s <i>Global Kiruna</i> (2020). One of these images by this undisputed master of architectural photography is an overview of three railway tracks stuffed with iron ore freight cars. These trains are seven hundred and fifty metres long and are pulled by the toughest locomotives in the world.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“I often wonder what Sweden would have been like today without this mine,” asks the last writer (a Swedish woman with a professional career in academia) in the catalogue, in an essay that would never have been published in this context in a less unwell society. “What would it have looked like today if the land’s rightful owners had been in charge? If the land had not been stolen, not been colonised?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The great (black) American thinker Thomas Sowell highlights how little it is today that measures up to even an agreeable academic standard, and that our collective human story is being misrepresented all the time for ideological purposes. In “Twisted History” (can be found in <i>The Thomas Sowell Reader</i>), he deals with the actualities about slavery: “Everyone hated the idea of being a slave but few had any qualms about enslaving others […] although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18<sup>th</sup> century. People of every race and colour were enslaved – and enslaved others. White people were still being bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, decades after American blacks were freed.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There are a number of Sami works in the <i>Kiruna Forever</i> exhibition and they look like the kind of indigenous art that one has come to expect. The Sami victim narrative looms large in this last essay – a text that addresses such different and victorious topics as “colonial and scientific racism”, “racial studies”, “massive carbon dioxide emissions”, “dramatic changes to the climate”, Stockholm’s “rising sea levels” (never mind factual life at all, never mind that the <i>land rise</i> after the last Ice Age is much more significant), the (asserted) malevolence of Kiruna’s founder towards the Sami and the (asserted) awfulness of Western culture.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued a papal bull that authorised representatives of Christianity to kill or enslave enemies of Christ,” she writes in an attempt to show that the Sami “also fell victim to this greed masked as Christianity”. “This was followed by further edicts that justified the killings or enslavement of non-Christians in Africa, Asia, and in what would become America (named after the Christian ‘explorer’ Amerigo Vespucci), as well as the seizing of their lands – all in the name of Christianity. In 1492, the Moors – of Muslim faith – were expelled from Spain, and with them we lost the scientific knowledge and medicine that they had translated and developed from ancient Greek philosophers and scientists.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">For those interested in something else than this self-serving gaga – after eight hundred years of the most fiendish fundamentalist oppression, this was the best thing that could ever happen to the Iberian Peninsula. “Historians often gloss over Islam’s destruction of Visigoth Spain. The Islamic invasion is frequently described as bringing enlightenment to a cultural wasteland,” delineates Darío Fernández-Morera in <i>The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise</i>. “Never mind that modern archaeology has confirmed that the ‘Dark Ages’ were less dark than is usually proclaimed and quite enlightened when compared with Muslim culture prior to the Arabs’ conquest of the Middle East and North Africa.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Moreover,” he continues, “unlike Muslims, the Visigoths had not been motivated by their religious faith to conquer the land and force its inhabitants to convert, or submit and pay a particular tax (<i>jizya</i>) designed to humiliate them and remind them of their submission, or die. In fact, the Visigoths did not make their faith (Arianism, a form of Christianity that orthodox Christians considered a heresy) the dominant religion of the land; they eventually converted to the existing and prevalent form of Christianity, Catholicism.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the good old-fashioned monster movie <i>Tremors</i> (1990), in which a sudden threat from the underground takes over the lives of a group of Middle American people, Val McKee (Kevin Bacon) looks over a map of an area that almost appears as desolate as Swedish Lapland and exclaims: “This valley is just one long smorgasbord!” For the Kirunians, who have folksy names for everything around, the locality three kilometres northeast of town that variably functioned as a dumping ground, a junkyard and an industry area was commonly known as “Death Valley”. It is here where the new Town Hall has been put as the cornerstone and emblematic first building for what, in the next few decades, will emerge as Kiruna 2.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Kiruna 2 is just one long <i>smörgåsbord</i> for the architects and urban planners that will substantiate the transformation. On September 19, 2011, the Kiruna Municipality partnered up with the Swedish Association of Architects and the following year in June they had ten contestant parties in a competition that was briefed with the following goals in mind:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">(a) “To show a vision for the Kiruna of tomorrow. The watchwords of that vision must be sustainability, attractiveness and identity. The vision must affirm growth and new, robust patterns of living,” (b) “To describe a strategy and a basic sustainable structure for accomplishing the urban transformation eastwards in a dynamic, quality-creating process, in which the new and the pre-existing will form a holistic entity and will function throughout the transformation process,” and (c) “To suggest ways of shaping a sustainable, distinctive and pleasant city centre in the east, within a holistic structure encompassing the entire city.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The word <i>pleasant</i> is the only surprise in here. The way to go with architecture in Sweden is to positively respond to the word <i>sustainable</i> in any entry declaration, cue it with this lingo called <i>architect jargon</i> – and you are free to erect the most stale and unimaginative buildings you like. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The new Town Hall is called the Crystal due to the angular barracks on top this circular building which, in fairness, would better suit a less important section of an airport. The Kirunians’ brand new “living room” is already suffering from leaking roofs, which means that the Norrbotten County Art Museum, as a twist of fate, has been forced to delay its in-house <i>Kiruna Forever </i>exhibition for an unknown period of time. The new town centre will be dense, which was what the citizens wished for, and feature a hotel that has the quirk of a ski jump tower, a big enough culture centre and some smaller housing blocks. It looks like a very sustainable place indeed, a place that forgot or really never much bothered about the pleasant side of things.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The wooden houses from the Kiruna of Hjalmar Lundbohm’s days are noticeable for their special joinery and colouration and quite nice as such. (However, let’s not make a perfect past of a town that was known for its lugubrious parking lot in the middle of everything.) Thirty-one of these old buildings are being moved – as Jane Jacobs argues in <i>The Death and Life of American Cities</i>, “Cities need old buildings so badly it is impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them” – along with a hundred birches because hardly anything grows up here, one hundred and forty-five kilometres north of the Arctic Circle.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Sweden has a long tradition of moving buildings. During agricultural land reforms in the 18<sup>th </sup>and 19<sup>th</sup> centuries, villages were split up and the houses, typically wooden, were relocated to allow more large-scale farms,” informs Jennie Sjöholm in <i>Authentic Reconstruction: Authenticity, Architecture and the Built Heritage</i> (a book with Stari Most on its cover, the dazzling Renaissance bridge in post-Yugoslavia that was shelled for days in 1993 and then rebuilt a decade later). In her part of the book, Sjöholm articulates how incertitude took over the initial aplomb after Kiruna’s new electricity and sewerage systems were ready for use in 2009:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“One argument has been that reconstructions would not be authentic; the reasons behind are not dwelled upon, but seem to relate both to notions that buildings which have been moved lose authenticity at a new setting, and that new constructions, looking like existing buildings, would be pastiches. It is also clear that the authority prefers to build anew without references to Kiruna as a historic site, other than to continue a tradition of building what is new and innovative of the time.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Kiruna discovered itself in the 1980s. The Kiruna Municipality’s preservation plan in 1984 was succeeded by a decision by the Swedish National Heritage Board to declare the whole town a historic site in 1990. The government agency regarded Kiruna as “an early 20<sup>th</sup>-century town setting and industrial landscape where a vision of a model society was realised in an unprecedented manner in previously unexploited mountain scenery”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">After LKAB at the beginning of the 2000s had established that underground cracks were moving towards the town at a rate of fifteen metres per year, the then-councillor and chair of the Municipal Council – the aptly-named Kenneth Stålnacke (Neck of Steel) – expressed that “The most important is that the town does not split but is held together and allowed to grow.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Six thousand Kirunians are going to have to leave their homes since four hundred and eighty thousand square metres of living space will be left in the fissure zone like a set from a Tarkovsky film. Furthermore, thirty thousand square metres of commercial space and an equal amount of office space will have to be remodelled in and about the old “Death Valley”. The winning competition entry of 2013, <i>Kiruna 4-ever</i>, and the entire relocation will cost LKAB 372 billion kronor or 330 million euros, a drop in the bucket compared to the value of the nugget underneath.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Lennart Olson’s 1960 photograph of Hakon Ahlberg’s iron ore hoisting and separating plant, which was built during LKAB’s transition to underground mining in Kiruna, shows a tower with what seems to be a futuristic outlook storey topped with a mast with the vigorous alchemy symbol for iron. These days are long gone and in <i>A Utopia Like Any Other</i>, Dominic Hinde pokes fun at LKAB’s smugly fashionable self-image in the Social Democratic utopia where sustainability (and the catchphrase alone) is the answer to everything:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Each year the company uses over twenty gigawatt hours of electricity, equivalent to around two per cent of Sweden’s total consumption. In the LKAB promotional film played to visitors this emphasis on sustainability builds to a crescendo as helicopter shots of the Arctic landscape are mixed with a voiceover and ambiguously ethnic music. The narrator explains how the source of both Kiruna’s prosperity and the developing world’s sustainability emerges from the untainted and pure Norrbotten earth. It looks and feels like an advert for mineral water, presenting iron ore as a lifestyle product for the ethically aware.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-US">Lena Stenberg’s piece at Arkdes, <i>Deformation Zone</i> (2016), is a dollhouse in a total disarray, as if someone has been kicking in chairs and knocking down tables in an act to precede the unpreventable. </span><span lang="EN-GB">Architecture is shaping and enclosing cities – on a touchscreen in the <i>Kiruna Forever</i> show you can browse through a wealth of press clips from 2004 to where we are now in this thoroughgoing process. This is a very good thing in a very good exhibition.</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-US">The Last Light</span></i><span lang="EN-US"> (2018) is a series of interior pictures taken by Erik Lefvander during the old Town Hall’s last sigh. </span><span lang="EN-GB">In the catalogue, Kieran Long describes how he and the staff of Arkdes “sat stunned when we first saw the photographs of Artur von Schmalensee’s Kiruna Town Hall being demolished in early 2019. A great work of architecture lost, a listed building demolished, a place of democracy erased.” Esaias Poggats’s round door handles for </span><span lang="EN-US">this </span><span lang="EN-GB">squished masterpiece (</span><span lang="EN-US">lovingly known as the Igloo)</span><span lang="EN-GB"> is now on the new Town Hall whereas the thirty-three-metre-tall campanile, from the same time and place, has been reassembled outside. And there is a weirdly reassuring announcement on Google Maps for those who want a further piece of Kirunian foreverness. It says that the old Town Hall will open tomorrow again and every tomorrow at eight.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The famous first words – <i>In my beginning is my end</i> – and the famous last – <i>In my end is my beginning</i> – in T S Eliot’s “East Coker” from 1940 make this poem go on forever. And between these lines is a greater knowledge, a circumstance that a Swedish town with a very old lump and a whole new essence (wherever it is) should be able to vouch for:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Houses live and die: there is a time for building / And a time for living and for generation.</i></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnwrvwYUwke6XzpqIHrlY2eKwmybyqSZ6WEa5E964ATmySg63a7l1p3-09AibeDwhZGJJ82P20pNYZcHpSoONvDTlPjpdRUDsBXxe2FT3_L_50AKJXuUeGch0MmFf_I8WNwYsD3x23gHHF/s1600/2kiruna_forever.jessica_nilden..jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="853" data-original-width="1280" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnwrvwYUwke6XzpqIHrlY2eKwmybyqSZ6WEa5E964ATmySg63a7l1p3-09AibeDwhZGJJ82P20pNYZcHpSoONvDTlPjpdRUDsBXxe2FT3_L_50AKJXuUeGch0MmFf_I8WNwYsD3x23gHHF/s640/2kiruna_forever.jessica_nilden..jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;">The Engineer’s Villa, LKAB’s thirty-ninth building from 1900. The picture was taken on the last day of August 2017 by Jessica Nildén.</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Kiruna Forever <i>at Arkdes in Stockholm through February 7, 2021.</i></span></div>
Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-91573981147921091042020-04-11T14:48:00.001+02:002020-06-28T10:49:34.964+02:00BLOODY TOURISTS<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuVel6y8ruT2KjNps0KEcwutgjc6mteQPV8NAOKW_WgATJsXc-VrAfZylev9p8kLrGZ8Cfce21h0aV0m3n8K3HlgV2EPcLHnxiyflFt0nF0jJTJfZAo0lPf6fzkd-bfNjPA41p7XOuefcJ/s1600/dm.souvenirer1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuVel6y8ruT2KjNps0KEcwutgjc6mteQPV8NAOKW_WgATJsXc-VrAfZylev9p8kLrGZ8Cfce21h0aV0m3n8K3HlgV2EPcLHnxiyflFt0nF0jJTJfZAo0lPf6fzkd-bfNjPA41p7XOuefcJ/s640/dm.souvenirer1.jpeg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">From Lasse Åberg’s book <i>Souvenirs: A Glimpse of the World of Form that Flies Far Under the Radar of the Aesthetics</i>.</span></span></td></tr>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The relationship between the tourist and the environment that surrounds him is only rarely genuine, and it is this veil of falseness, imitation and admiring sentimentality that more often than not makes the world, as it appears to the tourist, vomit kitsch all over itself.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">– Gillo Dorfles, <i>Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">From a Hindi murder mystery movie on everyone’s television set, as the sprightly dancing-and-singing overture for <i>Ghost World</i> (2001), to a most miserable high school graduation party in the next turn – which of course is just too real and ugly to be left uncommented by the film’s sarcastically sound teenage girls. Rebecca: “This is so bad it’s almost good.” Enid: “This is so bad it’s gone past good and back to bad again.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">For John Waters, the American director of camp, kitsch and the jizz-and-dogshit trash of <i>Pink Flamingos</i> (1972), “bad taste is what entertainment is all about”: “But one must remember that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste,” Waters explains in his book <i>Shock Value</i> from the early 1980s. “To understand bad taste one must have very good taste. Good bad taste can be creatively nauseating but must, at the same time, appeal to the especially twisted sense of humour, which is anything but universal.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This good–bad cyclicity in which miscellaneous mantlepiece keepsakes in the vein of kitsch Casanovas, mermaids after midnight, ashtrays with inscriptions, bits of mass production and tacky tigers loop through the tasteless, the gooey, ridiculous, grotesque and the astonishingly inept has created a world of memorabilia that is, in effect, and largely inadvertently, uproariously funny.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">All of this is auriferous stuff for kitsch connoisseur and souvenir collector Lasse Åberg, the Swedish filmmaker, artist and (in his own words) jack of all trades who is one of the country’s most famous and popular figures (Åberg turns eighty this spring). “There are some who think that kitsch is nice,” he says. “And then there are snobs like me who have gone full circle and have learned to love it in a different way.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and fake sensations,” argued Clement Greenberg in his famous essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939). “Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money – not even their time.” Such sentiments have always prevailed around the table of those illustrious Good Taste makers where clues of a twisted sense of humour would always be less expected than the day when hell freezes over.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Kitsch is dead the moment it is born,” enforces NYC scholar Celeste Olalquiaga: “The perceptual process that eventually leads to kitsch is that aspect of experience constituted by what consciousness leaves out: the intensity of the lived moment,” as she writes in <i>The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience</i>. “Despite appearances, kitsch is not an active commodity naively infused with the desire of a wish image, but rather a failed commodity that continually speaks of all it has ceased to be.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">That she is somewhat mistaken about the value of the souvenir – “the souvenir must wait, perhaps forever, to become part of a personal universe” – is more than obvious downstairs at Dansmuseet (the Dance Museum) where Lasse Åberg presents his goodly and passionate collection of kitschy souvenirs, built in the form of a cabinet of curiosities. Dansmuseet is situated in a beautiful Art Nouveau building at Drottninggatan 17 in the Swedish capital. What seems to amuse Åberg even more, however, is that this old bank palace is in the midst of “Stockholm’s souvenir ghetto”. <i>Souvenirer</i>, as the exhibition is called in Swedish, is Heaven <i>and </i>Las Vegas and it is absolutely badass. It is indeed a very personal universe that one will enter through the white fringe curtain.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Danish philosopher Søren Kirkegaard suggested that “The best demonstration of the misery of existence is given by the contemplation of its marvels.” One is shocked, marvelled and overwhelmed by the sheer profusion of underwhelming artefacts and this acme of artifice that are living la vida loca in Åberg’s Wunderkammer, which greatly pushes you to think about the essence and the shifty nature of kitsch, and why its issues are so fraudulent to some, an emotional rescue to others.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“What do these themes have in common? The answer is: they are all highly emotionally charged. They are charged with stock emotions that <i>spontaneously</i> trigger an unreflective emotional response,” implies Tomas Kulka in <i>Kitsch and Art</i>. “The aim of kitsch is not to create new needs or expectations, but to satisfy existing ones. Kitsch thus does not work on individual idiosyncrasies. It breeds on universal images, the emotional charge of which appeals to everyone. Since the purpose of kitsch is to please the greatest number of people, it always plays on the most common denominations.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Souvenir is French for remembering. But what is there to recollect from these foolishly inadequate remembrances that always seem to come with a default factory setting and some kind of urge to tickle us with a mighty impression of auralessness – which yet keeps morphing in our minds to the point of amusement chained with repulsion? “Kitsch isn’t simply an artistic failure, a work that has somehow gone wrong. There is something about kitsch that sets it apart from bad art,” writes Tomas Kulka. “However, the question of how kitsch performs such wonders, as well as the question of what its appeal consists of – which are essentially questions of aesthetics – have not been fully answered. The same applies to the question of why kitsch is worthless.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The thing with great kitsch is that it keeps morphing and morphing between these poles of good bad taste and bad bad taste, and that it doesn’t give a fuck about decorum. Kitsch’s objective is to dupe you like a car salesman, please you like comfort food and to mess around with your brain chemistry like an artificial sweetener. Lasse Åberg calls his show “an astonishing sea of tastelessness” and all these wacky items quite beyond recovery “a mishmash relying on naïve confidence trickery and unintentional humour”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But Åberg does not proceed through Dansmuseet’s basement gallery with a snob’s sneer on his face, not at all; the onomatopoeia of the day is rather the many shy little <i>tee-hees</i> of his film alter ego Stig-Helmer Olsson, a geeky mummy’s boy in yesteryear’s golf clothes who really wasn’t made for these times, but who is nonetheless pulled out by his nice Norwegian friend Ole to see the world in spite of his fear of flying and his general awkwardness. The poor donkey-that-poops-real-cigarettes souvenir from the first film about Stig-Helmer – a guilty pleasure of sorts, <i>Sällskapsresan</i> (<i>The Charter Trip</i>, 1980) – is of course included in the <i>Souvenirer </i>exhibition.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When Bill Shapiro and Naomi Wax interviewed hundreds of individuals for their book <i>What We Keep</i>, they were struck by the fact that none of them had chosen an object that had any kind of financial value: “Our hearts are not accountants; we cling to the meaningful, not the monetary. What makes these objects so evocative for us is that they hold the memories of people, of relationships, of places and moments and milestones that speak to our own identity.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the film <i>Richard Jewell</i> (2019) we follow the overzealous (and frankly rather immature) security guard by that name whose life was left in shambles after rescuing a great number of people during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta when he located a backpack with three large pipe bombs under a bench in Centennial Park, but instead got the FBI accusing him of being the bomber. One of the Feds’ “proofs” was that Jewell kept a splinter from that bench as, as he called it, a <i>souvenir</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the preface to his <i>Souvenirs: A Glimpse of the World of Form that Flies Far Under the Radar of the Aesthetics</i> (2008) – the title is translated here as the book is in Swedish only – Åberg wryly remarks about how “The anaemic stone-cold aesthetic that is ‘Scandinavian Design’ has a firm grip on our time.” Jacques Tati said something similar in 1972: “I am not against modern architecture but I believe it should come with not only a building but a living permit.” Tati, who had his own workspace at Sveriges Television in the early 1970s, described Monsieur Hulot (in his overcoat, hat and pipe) as a tall, odd figure who simply cannot hide from the current affairs of modernity. It is hardly a coincidence that both Tati and Åberg, and even more so their alter egos, are compelled to address the sepulchral efforts of modern life with some kind of a muddle.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The road to Lasse Åberg’s vast collection of chirpy-chirpy-cheap-cheap souvenirs began during the same time as a seventeen-year-old by the name of Pelé won the World Cup final, when the Brazilian team defeated Sweden by 5–2 at the Råsunda Stadium in Stockholm in 1958. That year, Åberg purchased a kitschy little porcelain cat in Italy during his first charter trip to allay his mother. “Why would two happy eighteen-year-olds go to the Riviera dei Fiori? The travel cost two hundred and fifty kronor [€23] and my mother was very annoyed so I thought that I would buy her something very nice, and she was delighted of course. The flight was very exciting, it took one day: Bromma–Copenhagen–Basel–Nice and then coach to San Remo.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">He says that there are not that many who would use the word <i>nice</i> for souvenirs. “But a lot of people laugh and bring them home as something funny. When you see them like this in a collection, it becomes like what in art language is called installations.” Åberg discovered in the late 1980s that he had developed an actual weakness for splashy travel trophies, and that too-much-of-a-good-thing is the guiding principle for really understanding and enjoying these aesthetical unmentionables. An artist friend’s cabinet that was used as a hideout for the unwanted <i>tee-hee</i> gifts that Åberg had acquired for him on his journeys was the awakening.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The idea of the souvenir is as old as human journeying. One example is the porcelain knick-knacks that were commonly obtained by the sailors at the whorehouses and brought home as pardons for the missuses. “Kitsch and tourism; two words which go nicely together. Why is every monument, every landscape, every object from folklore instantly made kitsch by tourism?” asks Gillo Dorfles in <i>Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste</i> (published in 1969). “People who go to foreign countries [and] who have prefabricated their (borrowed) feelings, their indignation, compassion and admiration in advance; people who take every feeling, myth, legend, piece of folklore for granted – such people come prepared.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The 1950s and 60s were the heyday of kitsch. Åberg explains that most of the articles in the <i>Souvenirer</i> exhibition are bargains from flea markets and online auctions. “When my wife and I are at flea markets, we have a laser beam in our eyes that tries to find these wonderful things. Sadly, I must confess, they are running out. Now it is the same mug in [Swedish <i>polkagris</i> stick candy small town] Gränna as in Barcelona because it is the Chinese who manufacture them. So, this is a dying kind. Unfortunately.” The vapidity of today’s Made-in-China souvenirs are no laughing matter, they are produced as if they were in a chroma keying (greenscreen) process where anything universally blank can be switched into “New York”, “London”, “Paris”, “Munich” and boogie with a suitcase.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Marita Sturken is dealing with this issue in <i>Tourists of History: Kitsch and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero</i>: “This economic network responded rapidly to the events of 9/11, apparently fully aware that certain kinds of objects, such as models of the towers, had instantly become desirable. Souvenir distributors in New York produced new designs about 9/11 as early as September 12 that were then faxed to their manufacturers in Korea and China, who churned out new merchandise in four days. Once air traffic resumed, the souvenirs were shipped in, and pins, decals, and buttons with the flag, the twin towers, and the Statue of Liberty began appearing on street corners within a week.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Åberg admits that being a collector, of his magnitude, does have its perils. “Yes, beware! I have a diagnosis. But this stuff is really an amusement.” The <i>other</i> stuff is of course his famous Disney memorabilia from the company’s early era (1928–38) – including a painted celluloid element that was used in <i>Steamboat Willie</i> (1928) – a collection of international repute that is always on show at Åbergs museum (<i>mus</i>, interestingly, is the Swedish word for mouse) some tens of kilometres northwest of the capital. He was studying at Konstfack, the University of Arts, Crafts and Design, in Stockholm during the early years of Pop Art, and Mickey has ever since been a figure that Lasse Åberg has based his collecting and his art on, though it is the un-wimpy and pretty faulty humanity of Donald Duck that he really dotes on.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Earlier in the [20<sup>th</sup>] century, when modernism’s victory over <i>pompier</i> academicism (one of the most gorgeous and self-righteous forms of kitsch) and other similar corruptions of taste seemed irreversible, the art world indulged in the optimistic illusion that the benevolent and sinister monster of kitsch would never again haunt its precincts,” writes Matei Călinescu in <i>Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism</i>. “But the polymorphous monster of pseudoart had a secret and deep-rooted power that few modernists were aware of – the power to please, to satisfy not only the easiest and most widespread popular aesthetic nostalgia but also the middle class’ vague ideal of beauty, which still is, in spite of the angry reactions of various avant-gardes, the commanding factor in matters of aesthetic consumption and, therefore, production.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Amongst the artists in the Schwabing borough in 1860s Munich, there was a new term for all those poorly painted little children with big teary eyes, paintings thriving on the cliché-ridden, the banal and the cheap, works that purport to be “art” when the one thing that is really genuine about them is the wretched comedy – <i>kitsch</i>. Călinescu – who regards kitsch as “one of the most typical products of modernity” – describes how kitsch after World War II “came to enjoy a strange kind of negative prestige even in some of the most sophisticated intellectual circles”. Magritte, for instance, made some of his most splendid series appertaining to kitsch: <i>Sunlit Surrealist (Renoir)</i>, 1943–46, and the paintings from his gorgeously bonkers <i>période vache</i>, 1947–48. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There was a very important circle of artists between the world wars, however, where the members were closely engaged in “identifying, collecting, displaying and revering certain types of ‘things’” found at the <i>marché</i> <i>aux puces</i> just north of the Boulevard Périphérique in Paris: “[André] Breton recognised at these flea markets the fullest possibility for ‘chance encounters’, for unexpected, novel associations, for the discovery of objects torn from one set of circumstances and thrown into another,” explains Louise Tythacott in <i>Souvenirs: The Material Culture of Tourism</i>. “Many of the activities of the Surrealists were concerned with seeking out and attributing sacredness to banal, forgotten, devalued things in a deliberate attempt to defy Western systems of value.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A <i>Souvenirer</i> exhibition bonus is a vitrine with objects lingering in a twilight zone between art and kitsch from Lasse Åberg’s collection of Swedish contemporary artists. Some examples behind this glass are a hideously attractive radio receiver that transmits a conglomerate of ceramic whimsies (<i>The Parade</i>), and different kinds of Dalecarlian horses – the best known of all Swedish souvenirs – such as the sliced, packed and supermarket-ready folkloristic wooden horse by Peter Johansson (<i>How to Cook a Souvenir</i>) and Ylva Ekman’s procession of animal species (mostly African) in that characteristic red-painted livery with the <i>kurbits</i> decoration (<i>Rinkeby Horses</i>).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) emerges from the sea as an Aphrodite in a creamy bikini in <i>Dr No </i>(1962) with two naughty seashells in her hands. The seashell section of the show is a monstrosity of kitsch and as such an impeccable circuit of nausea and delight (and look out for the cowry-bodied, scallop-footed Mickey). A picture of a seated JC adored by children and framed by an orgy of shells is probably the one work in the exhibition which vacillates the most between lowbrow and highbrow because it comes with that smart look of art imitating kitsch. The Redeemer walked on water but isn’t able to slip slide over the ice without skates as a hockey player in a particularly weird piece that spells out “Jesus Is My Coach”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Among the earliest Christian souvenirs were stones, soil, and water collected at holy places associated with Jesus Christ and his apostles in the Holy Land and around the Mediterranean. These items were commonly placed in small containers, sealed up and blessed,” imparts Dallen Timothy in <i>Shopping Tourism: Retailing and Leisure</i>. “Thus, these bits and pieces of sacred sites became popular keepsakes for pilgrims, and eventually resulted in concerns among guardians of holy places that too much of the sites was being looted or destroyed as pilgrim numbers increased. As a way of mitigating this problem, caretakers responded by producing mementos and tokens that symbolised the sacred nature of the location. This is often regarded as the beginning of the manufacture and trade in souvenirs purposefully made for travellers.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Shellcraft” and “Religion” are some of Åberg’s many “pseudoscientific” category-breakdowns for this collection – “Terribly Tragic Souvenirs” and, of course, “Propaganda” are two others. “Kitsch can simultaneously provide psychological comfort and reinforce a host of natural mythologies. It has an immediacy that art must avoid,” asserts Catherine Lugg in <i>Kitsch: From Education to Public Policy</i>. “Manufacturers of kitsch are aware of a given audience’s cultural biases and deliberately exploit them, engaging the emotions and deliberately ignoring the intellect. As such, it is a form of cultural anaesthesia.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“DDR and also the Russians and the Chinese were masters of sending out strange gifts to people,” Åberg notes in front of a showcase that is a mishmash of agitprop, old mainstream culture celebs, Swedish bluebloods, Jimmy Carter as a peanut and despots from Idi Amin to Stalin – but not a model of the Malmö–Zlatan statue which is such a splendid piece of dictator kitsch. “Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements,” argues Milan Kundera in <i>The Unbearable Lightness of Being</i> (fittingly published in 1984) which takes place during the 1968 Prague Spring. “Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality. The artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Souvenirer</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> is a wonderful dog and pony show where the delightful flounders with the brutal (and the spin cycle is endless). And what is evident is that Catholicism is both the originator of the most splendid works in the history of art <i>and</i> of the most scabrous and lewd souvenirs – as explained by Karl Pawek in <i>Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste</i>: “Catholicism does not make accusations of heresy, i.e. it does not cast off genuine theological substance, but merely puts it cautiously under the carpet from time to time (centuries are irrelevant here) and this often leaves room for cheap psychic and moralistic odds and ends to spread themselves.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the sci-fi classic <i>Invasion of the Body Snatchers</i> from 1956, Dr Miles Bennell has something to say us about the world that we are in today: “I’ve seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happened slowly instead of all at once. They didn’t seem to mind … All of us – a little bit – we harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realise how precious it is to us, how dear.” This is where the benefits of the sour old kitsch of the 20<sup>th</sup> century come in handy: in his work <i>Meaning of Modern Art</i>, German philosopher Karsten Harries argues that “If the world does not satisfy our demands, what remains except to enjoy ourselves? In kitsch man strives for an immediate relationship to himself which offers an escape.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Why?” is the sickest section in the exhibition, a quelle-sensation-bizarre where absolute tastelessness is reaching out towards the kitsch sublime (and switching to and fro). A coarse pizza parlour “installation” (with a man-in-the-moon-faced pizza) is a souvenir from Swedish town Örebro. With a reversed sense of outdoors–indoors, we are actually looking into a huge window which displays a pine tree, a white deer and the Örebro water tower “Svampen”. (This mushroom-y landmark that was built in 1958 later got thirty-one duplicates in Kuwait City.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Why?” is the question one keeps asking, but what really takes the cake is another “installation” of three disgusting froggies – straight outta Wuhan wet market? – tippling away in a shady boozer, and this piece is vomiting kitsch all over itself. You wouldn’t believe it, but the name of the bar is Corona. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Look Mickey, we’ve gone full circle!!</span></span></i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4VQNk8Q0-LyCaLUe5VG5bHB8lGuVmMdwXncW4H2yIz-d1mWtrRKq4Oa9HAOXkqiTBLPUf4W0jzXkOpvzvRw3Mjy8QHPWhKzaD1DUDZoybodvJB10s-cGaf0aIIHenS4H-GQSi5x6x1rFl/s1600/dm.souvenirer2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="914" data-original-width="1280" height="456" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4VQNk8Q0-LyCaLUe5VG5bHB8lGuVmMdwXncW4H2yIz-d1mWtrRKq4Oa9HAOXkqiTBLPUf4W0jzXkOpvzvRw3Mjy8QHPWhKzaD1DUDZoybodvJB10s-cGaf0aIIHenS4H-GQSi5x6x1rFl/s640/dm.souvenirer2.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-align: justify;">Souvenirs </span><i style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; text-align: justify;">at Dansmuseet in Stockholm through July 26, 2020. Dansmuseet will reopen on September 1 without this exhibition.</i></span></div>
Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-75869938183972642052020-03-09T11:03:00.000+01:002020-03-09T16:55:47.184+01:00TREES, GRASS AND STONES<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigcnIBaYpDL6eDmq52NKv3FyOpIW1DLdbq_MmjOcykMd3wA4RnTEgWBUJ8P7hEq0dcpD35rA8X4vZm8b8jcVM_qwAgACipu_iXVWNkhCZgt2V5axmp2vr5EYJBxnlqfojIMk3gwDoWzaM-/s1600/bonniers_konsthall.landscape1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigcnIBaYpDL6eDmq52NKv3FyOpIW1DLdbq_MmjOcykMd3wA4RnTEgWBUJ8P7hEq0dcpD35rA8X4vZm8b8jcVM_qwAgACipu_iXVWNkhCZgt2V5axmp2vr5EYJBxnlqfojIMk3gwDoWzaM-/s640/bonniers_konsthall.landscape1.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger. © Bonniers konsthall, Stockholm.</span></td></tr>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the Grand Tour. Here look – Capability Brown doing Claude, who was doing Virgil. Arcadia!<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">– Hannah Jarvis in the 1993 play <i>Arcadia</i> by Tom Stoppard<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The landscape, vast and lovely. A green field with flowers white and yellow, a line of trees in the hazy distance and further afar the soft contours of a hill range in northern France. Arcadia, no doubt. Seconds later the camera sweeps us backwards to a spot where two young Britons are discourteously awakened by their sergeant. It is the first Friday in April 1917 and William Schofield hands over a letter to his friend – “Myrtle’s having puppies,” Tom Blake tells him before they walk down the trenches – and the camera turns around to face their suicide mission in this harrowing bedlam of barbed wire, filth, fear, nothing but death and a few trees that look like burned toothpicks. In areas where recently there was life, the Germans have chopped off the blossoming cherry trees and gunned down the cows. There will be no time for these boys in Sam Mendes’s profound achievement <i>1917</i> (2019) to reflect about White Male Privilege around fat rats having a banquet on laddie cadavers with mouths choked with worms in landscapes far surpassing the demonic imagination of Hieronymus Bosch. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Rilke observed how the bleeding hearts and artists “see their task in grasping Nature, in order to insert themselves somewhere into its great contexts”. Nature is not a work of art. However, for the last five hundred years of Western civilisation the landscape has been a standalone genre, judged, painted and enjoyed for its own sake. A poet and a newspaperman who delineated this change of the landscape in art, from an earlier position as a mere backdrop to a noticeable subject for artistic imagination, was William Bryant in his 1882 study <i>Philosophy of Landscape Painting</i>: “Throughout the whole of what has become known as the period of the Renaissance there is observable a steadily increasing clearness and penetration in man’s view of, and a consequent deepening of his sympathy with, nature; and in precisely corresponding degree do we see that landscape backgrounds were wrought out with greater elaboration and care until they began to acquire significance apart from the personages represented in them.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Caspar David Friedrich, who of course painted the almost too famous <i>Wanderer above the Sea of Fog</i> (1818) with the red-haired man in the dark green outfit and the walking stick at the summit of a misty sublimity, believed that “Every manifestation of Nature, recorded with precision, with dignity, and with feeling can become the subject matter of art.” Friedrich’s Wanderer was done in the thick of Romanticism, painted in a rare spur of happiness when the artist was honeymooning and briefly returned to the humanistic practice of putting people at the centre of everything. “This attitude is completely reversed in Romantic thought,” explains Moshe Barasch in <i>Modern Theories of Art: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire</i>. “In Romanticism in general, and in the views of Romantic painters in particular, comparatively little attention is paid to the human figure as an expressive medium. It is now the landscape, animated by a mysterious life and reflecting human moods, that takes the place and traditional function of the human body.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Landscape painting, as Maggie Chao points out in <i>The End of Landscape in 19<sup>th</sup>-Century America</i>, is “defined by its philosophical underpinnings – its metaphorical modes of address” yet gains much of its value and significance through “a set of pictorial conventions that became steadfastly aligned with the genre’s cultural mandate”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">An artist duo that opened this closet of conventions in the mid-1990s was Komar and Melamid who launched a large-scale international consumer questionnaire as a serious and well-intended effort to specify the general public’s <i>Most Wanted Paintings</i>, which pretty much turned out to be the same kind of painting: a generic, idealised landscape of pastoral kitsch comprising a uniform set of people, wild animals, some trees, lots of blue water and remote blue montane ripples. “Can you believe it? Kenya and Iceland – what can be more different in the whole fucking world? – and they both want blue landscapes,” commented Aleksandr Melamid in 1997 while trying to soften the disastrous result: “Maybe paradise is not something which is awaiting us; it is already inside of us, and the point is how to figure it out, how to discover it, how to get it out.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A young black man and the murdered <i>The Shining</i> twins lately announced in Scandinavian Airlines’ two-and-a-half-minute-long commercial designed to diss their customers and to pander to the PC in-crowd – the company’s tribute to the ideological inanities and the bewitchment of majestic trite in the Swedish distorted society where extremists and amateurs are authorities – that the merit of our culture is “absolutely nothing” and that we are still no better than our looting, raping Viking ancestors. So how do you make an exhibition about Swedish landscape painting then when (according to SAS) “everything is copied”, worthless and ho-ho, Eric?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“<i>The Trees, Light Green</i> is an exhibition about landscape in two respects: the landscape as nature, the forest, the soil, but also landscape in the painterly tradition,” says Theodor Ringborg who is the new artistic director at Bonniers konsthall in Stockholm. “It brings together historical works and contemporary works in an attempt to discern differences, expressions, concepts between these two periods of time and between these artists. The idea is that the historical artists come from a period of mass industrialisation in Sweden, especially the forest and mining industries, and that the contemporary artists are a generation that observes some of the consequences of the massive expansion.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Ringborg was hiking in the northern province of Jämtland in the summer of 2018 when (in his own words) “Sweden was on fire!” – yes, due to a singular heatwave, arsonists and the fact of the matter that Sweden is a woodland without legitimate fire prevention – “and we started to talk about signs in the landscape”. <i>The Trees, Light Green: Landscape Painting – Past and Present</i> comprises eighty-one works by twenty-eight artists, fourteen dead and fourteen alive. It is an exhibition that splits into a ridiculous part that bumbles on “ideologically”, and a so-so part that is what is physically shown on the walls. The latter does not take any part in the adolescent hysteria of the Greta cult however.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">With his eight-hundred-and-ninety-word essay for this show that is (or is it really?) about landscape painting, Ringborg has composed an apocalypso of Luddite stubbornness and climate doom. “</span><span lang="EN-US">The typical landscape painter of the past depicted a seemingly unspoilt nature,” he argues. “The landscape still remains a motif in contemporary art. The problems with the environment serves [sic] as the subject of a painting at times, but not always. However, whenever depicting nature today, contemporary artists must surely be aware that the landscape is undergoing a historical transformation. An underlying connection to the current climate catastrophe is inevitable, whether or not it is made visible in the work.” So far, so predictable.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Here is the worst part (warts and all), and it is as messy as Greta’s Tesla: “This exhibition primarily features our immediate environment. But as climate change is global, so too is the exhibition. Just like a fire that pays no heed to divisions between a national park and a cultivated forest, the climate could care less about regional boundaries and frontier lines. On the very same day this exhibition ends – on the 29<sup>th</sup> of March, 2020 – humanity will have most likely have consumed this year’s resources. In other words, the natural resources our planet can produce in a single year will then be depleted. From that day on, we will be living off resources we essentially do not have. We take from future reserves that are diminishing by the minute. The planet itself, naturally, is anything but frail. It is rather we, pathetic latecomers, who arrived in the most recent microseconds of the planet’s history, that have constructed a system wreaking havoc. Without us, Earth would repair itself in time. To keep existing we must reassess how our system is currently prioritised, with economic growth prevailing over all else that grows. At one point in time, laws were put in place to enable industrial expansion. Many now believe we have enough information to regulate in the opposite direction.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The curator of this show appears to be a flower from the same garden as Cambridge professor Patricia MacCormack who in her new book <i>The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene</i> proposes that “The only solution to climate change is letting the human race become extinct.” (Speaking words of wokeness, let it be, let it be.) Ringborg’s exhibition fits perfectly well with a quote from William John Thomas Mitchell’s book <i>Landscape and Power</i> in which the author maintains that “It is almost as if there is something built into the grammar and logic of the landscape concept that requires the elaboration of a pseudohistory, complete with a prehistory, an originating moment that issues in progressive historical development, and (often) a final decline and fall.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Nature</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> is interchangeable with <i>weather</i> when the curator speaks, as both are consequences of “human impact” and hence “unnatural” he figures. It is more than ever enormously beneficial for one’s career to cautiously declining to produce anything like a thought of one’s own in the Social Democratic La La Land – this groupthink-tank nation of soulless Me-centrics who think that they have all the answers. The science of climate stupidity is the Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle of our time, yet everyone is expected to kneel before these fools and their “discovery” that our solar system is a precious clockwork and that the climate is changing over time (and always has), and because of that we must all live in a state of panic, the worse, the better. People are not nice but our planet is fine. We have now a much more balanced weather system and the Earth is greener than in ages thanks to the sound levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Try to ask Greta a relevant question and you are briskly surrounded by her eight totalitarian bodyguards who will tell you to <i>fuck off</i> because, referring to her homeland, “This is a Communist country.” Recently in a cold and damp Bristol, where thirty thousand little planet savers wrecked the public College Green in order to get a few minutes with their callow commander, Greta lifted her new Iphone to read out what the speechwriter had typed for her: “The world is on fire!” (Ha-ha, charade you are.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“As I write this,” the curator stresses in his introduction to the essay, “contemporary art is a much-debated topic in the media. In some places people are opposing ‘challenging contemporary art’ and restrictions have been made on art’s place in the public sphere.” Well, almost everything in this country is judged on how you play along with the emotional Marxism in the Swedish Opinion Corridor and its instinctively constipated resistance towards sincere new thinkers, people who see things differently and have the courage to be good. (It is like what Houellebecq said in <i>The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq</i>, exactly thirty years after <i>1984</i>: “Sweden is one of the most undemocratic countries in the world. Sweden is a real dictatorship. It is impossible to think what you want.”) A generic blue landscape painting is not a work of art, but the same goes for art class suck-up Margaret’s tampon-in-a-teacup piece – “The shocking image of repressed femininity!” – in <i>Ghost World</i> (2001) and all that kind of “challenging” crap for the taxpayers’ money. It is the death of art (life, joy, lust, truth, creativity), either way.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The French 18<sup>th</sup>-century painter Claude Joseph Vernet quipped that “If it is good enough for nature, it will be good enough for painting.” <i>The Trees, Light Green</i> exhibition at Bonniers konsthall puts the past and the present (and nothing in between) in Swedish landscape painting under one roof with “a modern, contemporary salon hang that is made to break relationships and also create relationships”, but is it good enough, does it work? Is the line of tradition and the quality of these paintings strong enough for this higgledy-piggledy? Nah, these now-and-then squares are as bad at getting along as they are at ignoring each other, and though the works from the past are goodies they are hardly any goldies.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“He discovered virgin lands where no one had yet placed a foot, aspects and forms of landscape that one could say were unknown before he painted them,” wrote art critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary in 1882 about the greatest artist of physical landscape painting, Gustave Courbet. “Each time he plunged into the bosom of deep nature, he was like a man who has penetrated a beehive and come out covered with honey; he returned charged with perfume and poetry.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Ringborg says that the ambition of the exhibition is “to give people a place to reflect on their relationship to what we call nature or the environment or landscape, but also to give people an opportunity to experience landscape painting as it looks today and what it has looked like earlier”. The title of this honeyless show is taken from a late-1960s poem by Göran Sonnevi which he ends with an essential urge to make “the distance between trees and between people disappear”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The world did not end in 1917 or in 1918, not in 1933 or in 1942, nor has it ended at present day in spite of these drastically pathological loudmouths who really aim to sink the world to beige. <i>1917</i> closes just like it begins with Will against a tree, and once again he is looking out at a vast and lovely landscape. The young man pulls out a small metal box from his uniform pocket and picks up a photograph of his loved ones at home with somebody’s handwriting, “Come back to us x.” Here is the paradise within us.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Sara-Vide Ericson, <i>Surface</i>, 2017.</span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Trees, Light Green: Landscape Painting – Past and Present <i>at Bonniers konsthall in Stockholm through March 29, 2020.</i></span></span></div>
Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-32909458401035419072020-01-10T11:39:00.001+01:002020-01-21T11:09:31.529+01:00HELLA JONGERIUS PRESENTS THE RAINBOW<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Photo: Anna Danielsson. © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.</span></td></tr>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Disregarding entirely the generality of men whose gross retinas are capable of perceiving neither the cadence peculiar to each colour nor the mysterious charm of their nuances of light and shade; ignoring the bourgeoisie, whose eyes are insensitive to the pomp and splendour of strong, vibrant tones; and devoting himself only to people with sensitive pupils, refined by literature and art, he was convinced that the eyes of those among them who dream of the ideal and demand illusions are generally caressed by blue and its derivatives, mauve, lilac and pearl grey, provided always that these colours remain soft and do not overstep the bounds where they lose their personalities by being transformed into pure violets and frank greys.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">– Joris-Karl Huysmans, <i>Against Nature</i> (1884)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">She comes in colours everywhere, and the chosen outfit this late morning in Stockholm is green, green, green. However, since it’s Hella Jongerius (b 1963) who we are talking about, it is not green as US one-dollar bills, Spock’s blood, Irish identity or David Banner when he is very angry, nor is it – heaven forbid – in any of the greens out of the Pantone plumage. To Goethe, who sampled “light’s suffering and joy” beyond the confines of the lab, green was the representation of heaven and of hope.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Whenever this Dutch-born industrial designer becomes engrossed in a subject, owing a lot to Jongerius’s probity and persistent determination, it will take her to the core and essence of that matter. Her tenure at Vitra as the Swiss furniture company’s art director started in 2005 with a new kind of kick. For years, Jongerius’s obsession buzzed and hummed around such matters as isabelline, puce, orpiment, gamboge, cochineal, hematite, madder, woad, cerulean, celadon, orchil, heliotrope, buff, fallow, mummy, obsidian, bastard, beryl, coquelicot, nymphea, jasper, peridot, quimper, watchet and puke. It is this keen love for the chromatic that has made her think of colour as “a metaphor for life itself”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“As a designer I feel responsible to be in between the consumer and the Industry because I know what the Industry <i>could</i> make, or what the full potential of the Industry is,” says Jongerius when she presents her personal and analytical <i>Breathing Colour</i> exhibition at Nationalmuseum (the National Gallery of Sweden) this very morning. “And that is why I also work with the theme of colour because in Industry the colours are all created in a certain pigment range that keeps colour very flat. Only a part of the full pizza is used. The biggest reason is of course money and to keep colours stable the whole day long so that they don’t react on the light. Colour is only experienced because of light visions. In the morning, light is very different than at noon or in the evening. I think that if a colour is not reacting on light you really lose the quality of colour and that is what I wanted to show here.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Hella Jongerius’s entire career has basically been a case of Jongerius versus the Industry, so to say, manifested in her <i>Frog Table</i> (2009) in which a sculptured frog not only (unnecessarily) supports one of the legs of the table but annoyingly takes up considerable space for no good reason – the Industry portrayed as the boastful Mr Toad in Kenneth Grahame’s <i>The Wind in the Willows</i> (1908). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“What most design events have in common are the presentations of a depressing cornucopia of pointless products, commercial hypes around presumed innovations, and empty rhetoric,” Jongerius and her theorist accomplice Louise Schouwenberg wrote in their manifesto “Beyond the New: A Search for Ideals in Design” in 2015. “We advocate an idealistic agenda in design [since] the discipline lacks an intimate interweaving of the values that once inspired designers, as well as the producers of their ideas.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">For reasons not quite clear for anyone outside the domain of corporate S&M, Jongerius’s pertinacity is serving her well in the same international design industry that she is in the habit of chiding at every possible turn. Arguably, her greatest strength as principally a conceptual designer – her physical designs are really not that special – is this ability to win these figurative frogs over so that she can beat them at their own game, over the whole table top. Poet, misfit or hippie? All three according to the discontented designer who still works towards a poetic conclusion.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Her first exhibition at the Design Museum in London in 2003 was Jongerius’s door opener to a greater world. When Deyan Sudjic offered her a second show after he took over as director there in 2016, she made it very clear to him – as described in the September 2017 issue of <i>Domus</i> – “that she was not interested in another retrospective. Instead of showing us what she has already done, she wanted to spend some time exploring colour, a subject that has fascinated her throughout her career, to use that research to help give our audience a new perspective on how we see colour and perhaps to use it to help share her future work. It is a theme that has clearly been important to her in her recent work with Artek and Vitra where the sensitive new colours she has given Alvar Aalto’s <i>Stool 60</i> for example are one of the few entirely convincing such exercises. It is not a banal attempt to modernise an object by using present-day fashionable colours. Rather Jongerius has given us a new way to look at Aalto’s original design not as cosmetic but as a response to its essential form.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Before her <i>Breathing Colour</i> exhibition opened in London in the summer of 2017, Jongerius was the thirty-seventh recipient of the Dutch Sikkens Prize, an international award that was instigated in 1959 to honour “individuals or institutions that are considered to have made a special contribution to the field of colour”. She opened her speech on March 26 by saying that “I feel like an absolute beginner when it comes to colour. Even though I have learnt a great deal about colours, I still can’t really get my head around the subject.” There are a number of notes in Josef Albers’s book <i>Interaction of Colour</i> (1963), however, that surely must have influenced Jongerius’s way of thinking about this, shall we say, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious subject:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">With the discovery that colour is the most relative medium in art, and that its greatest excitement lies beyond rules and canons, a more sensitive discrimination was needed.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The more a creative use of colour developed, the less desirable became a merely trustful and obedient application.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">As with tones in music, so with colour – dissonance is as desirable as its opposite, consonance.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When Hipgnosis designed the artwork for Pink Floyd’s <i>The Dark Side of the Moon</i>, the album came out in early 1973, they actually repeated what Isaac Newton had achieved in 1665: he put a second triangular prism next to the first to prove that the pure white light which dispersed into all the colours of the rainbow was not, what had always been presumed, a consequence of some impureness of the glass but instead the true nature of light. It was not yet understood that these spectral colours are electromagnetic waves and that they are only wavelength sensations until our brains convert them into colours. <i>The Dark Side of the Moon</i> gatefold displays six rays of colour whereas Newton had people memorise the Roy G Biv colour acronym of seven letters:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“In a letter written in 1675 to Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society, Newton confessed that his eyes were ‘not very critical in distinguishing colours’. Once he saw eleven in the rainbow. Usually he saw only five – red, yellow, green, blue, and violet – until he looked again, or, rather, until he stopped looking. There were seven musical notes in the diatonic scale. The world was created in seven days. And the rainbow was a sign of cosmic harmony, so it had to have seven colours – and Newton added (saw?) orange between red and yellow, and indigo between blue and violet,” explains David Scott Kastan in <i>On Colour</i>. “Our seven-coloured rainbow was born, though more as a child of faith than as one of science.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Newton’s widespread <i>Opticks: A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light</i>, issued in 1704, was followed by a great many treatises on colour by artists, poets and intellects, however not the physicists. In his book <i>Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism</i>, John Gage – another Sikkens Prize recipient (1997) – implies that “One of the reasons why scientific students of colour have been reluctant to draw on the experience of art is that artists are generally considered a small, untypical and commercially insignificant group in society.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Hella Jongerius has been on a mission to save the world from “colour anorexia”, and in doing so she has applied the artists’ creative use of colour. “For me, colour is material,” she told <i>Icon</i> in September 2017, “it can help you shape an object, downplay it or lift it up, make it look bigger or smaller, or give a shadow. It’s a powerful tool, but it’s something designers forget, or are afraid of. They think it’s something you do at the last minute or that it’s just decoration. I think it’s something our profession needs more knowledge of.” To prove how much of a colour even black is, Jongerius developed sixteen different paints of black from a number of pigments that the Industry – by convention – considered to be nothing but a hassle.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The desire for dissonance is obviously present in her design. It is the coincidental, the imperfect, contorted, unfinished and the marred which is heightened when her traditional handicraft methods blend in with the spirit of contemporaneity; the hand of the creator, the “fingerprint” of the machine tool and the seriality of the process. In an interview in <i>Disegno</i> (July 2011), Jongerius argued that “there is a generation that don’t want to work with their hands. But I think your hands are intuitive and if you work manually then surprises inevitably emerge. You can recognise it when people only design from a computer and when Google is the only inspiration – you can always tell. You’ll see there’s no tactility, no knowledge of the material.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Two such series in which her design faces monitored fortuity are the pretty enticing <i>Soft Urn </i>(produced by Droog in 1993) – petite rubbery pots in the same material as skateboard wheels, and hence unbreakable, with the combined aesthetics of a little more colourful future and something dug up together with the Pompeii body casts – and the other is her somewhat warped tableware series <i>B-Set</i> (1997), heated in a kiln so fiery that the porcelain will forget what it was supposed to be. A wonderful thing is that this series is manufactured by Royal Tichelaar Makkum, a Dutch company that has been in existence since the Renaissance.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Jongerius was brought up in the Dutch countryside, in a house full of her mother’s sewing machines, pattern designs and textiles, though it was the men in her family who offered her young self a few good ideas about independency. She claims that it was “the freedom and non-conformism of the art world” that in 1988 drew her to Design Academy Eindhoven, which was hardly (and hardly surprising) an ideal place for Jongerius after all. In 1993 she set up her Jongeriuslab in Rotterdam, which grew with the success stories, until she finally moved the studio to Berlin in 2009 in order to reintroduce herself as the constant outsider – and to redesign the North Delegates’ Lounge at the United Nations’ East River base in New York together with a small group of Dutch designers.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The cover design for the catalogue to Jongerius’s <i>Misfit</i> exhibition in 2010 at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam depicts a drawing of one of the almost three hundred vases from the <i>Coloured Vases</i> series. For her many vases, manufactured at Tichelaar in Makkum, Jongerius applied layers of different kind of glazes based on both the synthetic mixtures used by the Industry today and old mineral pigment formulas from (oddly enough) the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Consisting of one hundred and fifty colours in all (many of the vases are also painted), the work was presented as a viable colour wheel at Boijmans.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the January/February 2011 issue of <i>Frame</i>, Jongerius applauded the “unbelievably rich and irregular” properties of mineral colours: “They really melt into the ceramic, while the industrial glazes remain on the surface. And it’s noticeable how the vase changes form because of the colour – colour reacts with shape.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Boijmans was also the second venue for the <i>Breathing Colour</i> exhibition in 2018. The show at Nationalmuseum in Stockholm is its third instalment and the one that the designer is most content about. Two shows worth mentioning after Nationalmuseum’s reopening in the fall of 2018, after a four-year-long complete and very satisfying overhaul, are the excellent <i>Danish Golden Age</i> (in painting) exhibition and one about die Mauer and beyond, <i>1989 – Culture and Politics</i>, which worked as a pretty good primer to the full-blown buffoon world that is Sweden today and where the lives of others carry on in the absence of a wall.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Cilla Robach, curator at Nationalmuseum, enjoyed <i>Breathing Colour</i> at the Design Museum in the summer of 2017, “and I thought it was so exciting because she is an industrial designer, but these are not products. It is about the process, about the artistic research method, how she has tested and rummaged around with colour, texture, material, form, light and shadows. This is a process description that is very visually attractive,” she affirms.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Hella Jongerius talks about how flat the industrial colours are. If I buy a coffee maker that I perceive as green in the store but which feels brown at home in my kitchen, perhaps I would return it, and then it becomes difficult and problematic for everyone. But if we can see that colour is just something that isn’t solid or stable but vivacious and personal, something that can enrich our world, it can give us an emotional connection to things that make us nurture and care for them so that they last longer. I find this to be the basic purpose of her work.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">That modern colours are rubbish is testament in the Netflix film <i>The Two Popes</i> (2019) during the conversations between Pope Benedict XVI and his successor Pope Francis in the Sistine Chapel, which was laboriously recreated in full scale at Cinecittà Studios in Rome. The problem here is not just that there is no individual in the world with the might to copy Michelangelo straight off the bat, but that the colours themselves look so lifeless.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Matching Jongerus’s pieces in the <i>Breathing Colour</i> show are twelve old-to-very-old paintings by Dutch and Scandinavian artists, most of them portraits, and the designer explains that they were chosen from the perspective of light, colour and atmosphere. Cilla Robach fills in that what Jongerius requested from the collections were pictures of “interiors and people with a slightly contemporary feel so that you can recognise yourself a little in them”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When Ken Nordine recorded his album <i>Colours</i> in 1966, he made thirty-four spoken word vignettes directly addressed to each colour as if all of them were characters to be loved (or at least liked) in good times and in bad. The purpose of the many and oddly beautiful colours next to each other that are covering the podiums, and the cubes on these podiums, in the middle of the exhibition is to shack up with a strange looking group of round origami-like objects that has some visual punch, but they fail to do what they are there for. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Jongerius has a name for these things, “colour catchers”: “They are a kind of an abstract way of looking at shapes out of our daily life. The colours of the bases are reflected on the shapes. It is about reflection and shadow. A shadow is never black but a reflection of the object itself,” she says without mentioning the origin of these hollow structures. “From the early 18<sup>th</sup> century onwards, many colour systems and diagrams were designed and applied in both the arts and sciences,” Alexandra Loske explicates in <i>Colour: A Visual History</i>. “Other diagrams are more fanciful and experimental, in the shape of triangles, diamonds or stars, or attempting three dimensions with ‘colour globes’, pyramids and cubes.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“I took the colour catchers as a symbol for the different stages that light goes through during the day – just to know where you are,” Jongerius says with a diminutive laugh. <i>Breathing Colour </i>is premised on a twenty-four-hour periodicity, like the circadian movement in <i>The Swimmer </i>(1968), one of the greatest films of the 1960s, before Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster) reaches the first swimming pool in the neighbourhood and decides to swim home: “Pool by pool they form a river all the way to our home. I’ll call it the Lucinda River, after my wife.” This is a day that goes from a summery Slim Aarons-y poolside mood to the total autumnal breakdown of the treacherous swimmer. <i>Breathing Colour</i> ends (or begins) with black walls, black colour catchers, dark paintings and the designer’s black weaves as window covers (“where the light is having a coma”), for how can you have a day without a night?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Jongerious chooses to begin her presentation where we would find the Piper at the Gates of Dawn: “This is an invitation of the morning light. In the morning the light comes up and there is a lot of water in it which makes it hazy, and the temperature of the colour is blueish, very gentle and fragile so the interpretation we make is paper weave in pastel colours. In translucency you see the reflection of the morning.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The almost three hundred vases from the <i>Misfit</i> show are lined up after their colour schemes on a large shelf construction, paused by a few paintings (one is a Renaissance portrait of JC by Dieric Bouts) against a very “now” orange fund. “Later in the morning, say eleven o’clock, yellow comes in the temperature of colour,” she continues. “This is the afternoon so the light comes from above with a very strong yellow colour, and the colours are very sharp. Further in the afternoon there is a more reddish colour.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">J-K Huysmans was only thirty-six years old in 1884 when his masterpiece <i>Against Nature</i> was published. The connection between colour, philosophical ideas and the flavour of life looms large through Chapter Two in which Huysmans’s supreme dandy Jean des Esseintes is making design decisions for his new Fontenay house: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Blue inclines to a false green by candlelight: if it is dark, like cobalt or indigo, it turns black; if it is bright it turns grey; if it is soft, like turquoise, it grows feeble and faded. There could be no question of making it the dominant note of a room unless it were blended with some other colour.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Iron grey always frowns and is heavy; pearl grey loses its blue and changes to a muddy white; brown is lifeless and cold; as for deep green, such as emperor or myrtle, it has the same properties as blue and merges into black. There remained, then, the paler greens, such as peacock, cinnabar or lacquer, but the light banishes the blues and brings out their yellows in tones that have a false and undecided quality.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">No need to waste through the salmon, the maize and rose colours whose feminine associations oppose all ideas of isolation! No need to consider the violet which is completely neutralised at night; only the red in it holds its ground – and what a red! a viscous red like the lees of wine. Besides, it seemed useless to employ this colour, for by using a certain amount of santonin, he could get an effect of violet on his hangings.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Pravdas in Sweden have all concluded that Hella Jongerius is a “world famous” designer and consequently has a great show to give us. But her clout on the Industry is only one thing. When Des Esseintes is reasoning with himself in his splendid isolation, he also prepares us readers for unhampered new proposals to the beauty and mystery of colours. For her <i>Breathing Colour </i>exhibition, Jongerius has followed Goethe’s belief from <i>Theory of Colours</i> (1810) that “light and its absence are necessary to the production of colour”, and it might be a good place to start for a show like this. Still and all, <i>Breathing Colour</i> falls short of its mission to attest how colours actually “breathe” with the light, and the exhibition is far too cold and insipid. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When the cops ask Nicolas Cage to describe the strange meteorite that struck his family’s property in <i>Colour Out of Space</i> (2019), he replies that “It wasn’t like any colour I’ve seen before.” That is not the way to describe <i>Breathing Colour</i>, unfortunately.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In <i>Beanpole</i> (2019), the most stunning piece during last year’s Stockholm International Film Festival, Kantemir Balagov depicts the life of endurance in Leningrad straight after the end of WWII through the friendship of two young women whose garments, in bright green or red, work like insults of happiness. A few dots of colour by a master filmmaker is just what it takes to give complete meaning to the artwork of <i>The Dark Side of the Moon</i> album where the green among the six rays of colour inside the gatefold loop forms a cardiac cycle, a heartbeat.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv7YvsNjpAJSFDadsWLhAiF7tGNyS3F7GlFB2hV3Vq7jvpvi9HaD0IyYld1nBiUUIfzmkvtXNPL-3_7NNK9ElKLZFeeVtnQuxGTzXb9f1e6Hc_5I8DavhltdbQAmaeKSR_L_C9Ok4UPiNT/s1600/hella_jongerius.nationalmuseum2.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv7YvsNjpAJSFDadsWLhAiF7tGNyS3F7GlFB2hV3Vq7jvpvi9HaD0IyYld1nBiUUIfzmkvtXNPL-3_7NNK9ElKLZFeeVtnQuxGTzXb9f1e6Hc_5I8DavhltdbQAmaeKSR_L_C9Ok4UPiNT/s640/hella_jongerius.nationalmuseum2.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Hella Jongerius – Breathing Colour <i>at Nationalmuseum in Stockholm through March 1, 2020.</i></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-49257269931019616662019-11-16T15:14:00.005+01:002021-06-17T17:04:24.643+02:00BLACK LIGHT: MARGARET WATKINS AT LAST<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face="Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;"><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;">Margaret Watkins, <i>Domestic Symphony</i>, 1919. </span><span style="text-align: start;">© Joseph Mulholland Collection.</span></span></td></tr>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Some people regard their work as a sort of remunerative sideshow to a light and festive existence (I want it to be everything).</span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">– Margaret Watkins<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“We can still look through your eyes. Thank you.” The narration is as comely and precise as ever when Mark Cousins rounds off his love letter to the greatest voice in filmmaking in <i>The Eyes of Orson Welles</i> (2018). When Canadian-born photographer Margaret Watkins (1884–1969) needed a promotional portrait of herself during her thriving career in modernist photography (her pictures were exhibited all over the world in the 1920s) and as a transformer of advertising image-making in New York City, it was evidently a picture that was going to be modelled on time and light and through her own discerning eyes.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Here, Watkins portrayed herself like the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck would later do in her famous last series of paintings from the Second World War – the bare essence of a female face, pursed lips, head tilted slightly backwards and seen a little from below; unflattering, uncompromising, but in no way without beauty. “Miss Watkins took this portrait of herself by means of an ingeniously devised mechanism,” she typed at the bottom of the prints that went out to the press. Dismayed by a New York newspaper’s refashioning of her portrait into a flapper temptress in a feature of October 1923, headlined “Feminine Photographer Whose Domestic Symphonies Reveal Beauty of Objects Heretofore Considered Most Prosaic”, she extended her message on the back of these prints: “To ye engraver: Don’t clip prune or place this in an oval. Neither retouch or paint to the semblance of a snake-eyed vamp.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">She called herself “fussy” (Watkins’s mind was continually at work) but it was the fussy particulars of her photography – her fastidiousness, resolution and integrity – and every aspect of how she looked at the world and what she did with it which made her photographic work <i>everything</i>. She was tuned-in to this current world where, as Lynn Dumenil argues in <i>The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s</i>, “There was not a new woman, but many new women.” Watkins made no concessions to folly: “I can’t brazen my way through a business deal the way so many do, nor have I the cutely kittenish capacity for vamping the office-bond male, and you would be startled to know how much the supposedly soulless and impersonal world of trade is managed by these two extremes. Yet critical folk are keen on my work, both in craftsmanship and originality, and working with the right people I can turn out a corking good job.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Alfred Stieglitz’s good friend Charles Henry Caffin wrote as early as 1901 that the photograph as a work of art “will record facts, but not as facts”. The “Domestic Symphonies” addressed in that verbose newspaper caption above refer to a number of household pictures – which are anything but household pictures – that Watkins took in 1919 and which could be regarded as her chef-d’oeuvre. This series alone is a testament to her wonderful understanding of photography’s intrinsic nature, to her sheer modernity and keenness in approaching the medium. Watkins described how “It took hours and infinite patience to create a rhythmic whole in line and tone values.” You hear her singing in the wire in these sonorous compositions. She arrayed and transcended the everydayness of her odds and ends (which could have been sampled from anyone’s Manhattan home in the late 1910s) into pure photography. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When “Domestic Symphonies” and twelve hundred other photographs of hers resurfaced in Glasgow at the beginning of the 1970s, Watkins’s name had long gone faded into absolute obscurity. Her homebound existence at Westbourne Gardens, where she had gradually tapered off for the last forty years of her life and where she was living the art of selfhood as a recluse with a brilliant mind in a Victorian house full of books, and all of her dusty suitcases packed and ready for an expeditious return to New York City (“home”), was altered by mere coincidence one day when she received a phone call from a friendly neighbour who wanted to alarm her about what looked like an obvious case of larceny. Many visits to 41 Westbourne Gardens would follow, with sparkling discussions (BBC’s Third Programme was always in the background) and never a dull moment. But there was never a word about her past.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">She took bennies to keep her homesickness and the “curdled despair” in check, and jolted down her tempers and her thoughts on life’s vicissitudes on any available piece of paper: “I miss the artistic crowd most desperately. Collectively they may have every falling under the sun, but, in spite of their sins (or because of them) they have a strange gleam of vision, something worth striving after, something a bit beyond the end of their small human noses,” she wrote. “I want to go hooome and I haven’t got any home! I feel like a lost cat on the roof of the world!”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Before long the old lady entrusted her new friend with a sealed treasure chest that was only to be opened after her death: “There were palladium prints and silver gelatin prints. And there was a series so unusual that my attention was riveted on each of the images composed around what turned out to be the kitchen sink and bath in her New York apartment in Jane Street, Greenwich Village,” explains Joseph Mulholland in his foreword to <i>Seduced by Modernity: The Photography of Margaret Watkins</i> by Mary O’Connor and Katherine Tweedie. “For hours I stood there looking and looking – enthralled and totally at loss. I had thought I knew Miss Margaret Watkins.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Miss Watkins came from Hamilton, Ontario, a city on the outskirts of Toronto. She grew up on King Street East with her Scottish mother Marie and her merchant father Frederick in a house that befittingly was the birthplace of the original female photojournalist Jessie Tarbox Beals. Watkins’s home was a place that would warrant her a happy childhood – until her early teens, when the family disintegrated after Margaret’s father was seriously injured in a bicycling accident on a family trip to Europe in 1897. Both of her parents went into different states of aberration. One of Margaret’s aunts arrived from Glasgow to take care of her while the mother was recuperating in the Hamilton Asylum for the Insane and the father was losing his wits in the course of Dr John Harvey Kellogg’s pious brainwashing at the Battle Creek Sanatorium. Eight months after her father reopened his grand dry goods warehouse in the city, he went bankrupt. For the rest of her life, Margaret Watkins discarded anyone’s attempt to interfere with her capacity “to observe and consider my own impressions”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In November 1908, at the age of twenty-four, Watkins had had enough of both Hamilton and her family situation, and left. “Some people’s thoughts are <i>so</i> nice and orthodox – like woolly toy dogs on wheels, carefully drawn by the string of inherited opinions, in fact unable to move in any other manner,” she wrote. “People are such <i>sheep</i> – let me be a black sheep, just to relieve the monotony.” Her first station towards excellence was an industrial Utopia in the village of East Aurora (near Hamilton, on the US side of Lake Ontario) where she stayed for a year and a half, both as a housemaid and as a student of book design. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Roycroft Arts and Crafts community is described by Marie Via and Marjorie Searl in <i>Head, Heart, and Hand: Elbert Hubbard and the Roycrofters</i>: “What began as a modest printing establishment in 1895 soon evolved into a community of five hundred artists, craftsmen and other workers who were drawn together by Hubbard’s charisma, by the congenial atmosphere, and by a loose allegiance to the social and artistic ideals of the English reformers John Ruskin and William Morris. Once fully developed, the Roycroft flourished for about a dozen years on the strength of Hubbard’s energetic leadership, his wealth, and his ability to attract people of talent to the enterprise.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The ensuing Utopia was the Sidney Lanier Camp (in Eliot, Maine), a sanctuary for people of all ages who wanted to learn “the art of living”. Watkins stayed there for the next three years, even though her initial judgement was that they were “all mad”, doing the camp’s administrative work and discovering the possibilities of photography. Later, when Watkins had moved to Boston in 1913 to train in a photo studio for a few years, she returned as the official photographer and designer of the community’s outdoor performances of biblical parables. It is some kind of irony that one of modernism’s finest photographers who has ever been recovered from oblivion worked for the clearly antimodernist Sidney Lanier Camp, taking pictures much influenced by the pictorialism of the day.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Pictorialism took a backward stance on life. The pictorialists’ outlandish idea for making photography valuable for upper-class appetites in a time when cameras had become an everyday article was to photograph the daughters of dawn singing the praise of Pan in painterly forests drawn on a fairy-tale past, and so on and so forth.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In her book <i>Clarence H White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895–1925</i>, Anne McCauley delineates how “the extent of participation and the increase in institutional structures such as regional and international exhibitions, journals directed to the amateur market, and clubs that took place after the commercialisation of the gelatine dry plate (which simplified the preparation of negatives) signal a watershed change even prior to the development of the Kodak camera in 1888. Like today’s Snapchatters, everyone by the 1890s seemed to be making pictures, but they were doing so in groups – shooting on excursions, comparing works in exhibitions, meeting monthly to hear lectures, and gathering in club darkrooms to share processing tips.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Margaret Watkins paid one hundred and fifty dollars in 1914 for the first of a string of summer camps organised by the Clarence H White School of Photography, where she eventually would become a demanding but popular and highly estimated teacher herself. The summer schools were based on White’s more modern take on pictorialism, inspired by compositional geometry. The communal spirit of the Arts and Crafts-y gatherings under the trees were not about pre-industrial innocence but rather part of the great teaching from some of the best instructors in the United States (the painter Max Weber was one of the lecturers in 1914). It was with White that Watkins found her true calling in photography. He became her tutor, friend and, clearly, a tremendously inspirational companion in her life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Modernist photography developed somewhat differently in Europe,” says Gerry Badger in <i>The Genius of Photography</i>, “but for American modernists the purity of the medium was paramount. Image sharpness and tonal quality were also important, and there was almost a fetish about obtaining the ‘fine’ print, one in which tonal values shone like a jewel.” Watkins cultivated her fetish for making the best possible prints already when she was toiling away in the darkroom of Arthur Jamieson’s portrait studio in Boston. At the White School she became an expert in what different soups and techniques would do to the negatives in the developing process. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It was also at the White School that Watkins became a quality modernist. As O’Connor and Tweedie write in their book, “Somehow White was able to instil the idea that the design of the image must be structurally sound no matter how common the subject.” Watkins’s early masterpiece <i>Opus I</i> (1914) is a triangular symphony with a trinity of fishing skiffs. One of the two fishermen at the top is simply cut in half (he is not necessary for the composition), and despite the fact that the photographer has employed a slight pictorialist dim to this picture it still shines with the pure light of modernist perception. This is not a photograph of a seaside reality but a glimpse into the actualities of photography.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Her portraits of women, until the early 1920s, were drawn on Renaissance portraiture without further regard to pictorialism’s mimicry of painterly modes. Watkins was an instinctive advocate for womanism and revered the sisterhood of the day. And she celebrated the French 19<sup>th</sup>-century animalier Rosa Bonheur who rambled the Parisian livestock markets, slaughterhouses and similar areas, off limits for women, in the guise of a gentleman in order to gather fresh imprints for her art: “At a period when all genteel and delicately-reared young females were swooning at mice or embroidering weird beasts with beads and wool work, Rosa Bonheur, in peasants’ blouse and trousers, her hair cut short and neatly parted, was studying first-hand, the cattle and horses in the markets of Paris. Not pretty work, not ladylike, but it made her a master among animal painters.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The move to Manhattan took place in mid-October 1915. After inheriting a reasonable sum of money in 1917 she was able to move into her personal space at 46 Jane Street in Greenwich Village. From her crestfallen exile in Glasgow only twelve years later she relished the times of yore: “‘Home sweet home’ was not even thus to me, and for the first ten years on my own I perched in rented hall bedrooms or odd corners of other people’s homes. So that it was a joy and delight to have bedroom, bath and living-room (with a discreet ‘kitchen corner’) and an extra room for renting or guests; to haunt junk shops in cellars and old furniture shops in lofts, to pick up fascinating if slightly decrepit odds and ends and to pull the whole thing together and flavour it with a few choice bits from home – well, I had the time of my life.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">That Watkins had the time of her life is evident from the photographs she created in this period. It must be underlined that the decade on Jane Street was the only time in Watkins’s life that she was free to roam in a place that was entirely her own. Modern life is ravishing in <i>The Kitchen Sink</i> from 1919. (“The ‘objects’ are not supposed to have any interest in themselves – merely contributing to the design,” she explained.) Surely, this was the ripper that Walker Evans so much desired in art photography – “the defining of observation full and felt” – a visual chord in the mind.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Domestic Symphonies” resounded very well with what the Imagists were achieving in their poetry of the 1910s. “An ‘Image’,” Ezra Pound suggested, “is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” They summarised their endeavours in six points (here slightly abbreviated): 1. “To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.” 2. “To create new rhythms.” 3. “To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject.” 4. “To present an image.” 5. “To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.” 6. “Finally, most of us believe that concentration is the very essence of poetry.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Domestic Symphonies” are embodiments of female ingenuity. They are also made with reference to Watkins’s obsessive darkroom chores (which often continued through the nights) at a point in her life when she had just finished four years in a studio on East 23<sup>rd</sup> Street owned by the successful portrait photographer Alice Boughton. Watkins addressed this special kind of labour in her “How Art Enriches My Life” speech to the Newark Camera Club when she talked about photography’s “mean, messy, technical side calling for patience, perseverance and a very nice precision. Long before signing a masterpiece you roll up your sleeves, play about in poison – keeping the cyanide out of the soup – and work in icy water till the hand hangs dead on the wrist.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Alice Boughton was an untidy woman who was annoyingly careless about the technical facets of photography. However, she and Watkins were united in their efforts to create business alliances between female entrepreneurs in the city, and Boughton introduced her acolyte to a host of conspicuous individuals (some of whom she would later portray). One of them was Nina Broderick Price whom Watkins photographed in the publisher’s flourishing art deco home. The picture that is called <i>Portrait of Nina B Price</i> (1925) is in fact void of the sitter. Watkins included a print of this cerebral portrait at the back of Katherine Dreier’s book <i>Modern Art</i>, which was published at the occasion of a show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926, and her portrait of <i>Katherine Dreier at Home</i> (1926) at the front. Dreier was famous for her participation in the American avant-garde movement and for originating the Société anonyme together with Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp in New Jersey in 1920, yet something drove Watkins to add an ambiguous line on the print: “Does this suggest the habitat of a ‘modern’ artist?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The American 1920s were roaring with traditional values. “The Progressive reform era (1900–14) that had proceeded World War I gave way in the 1920s to a period of conservatism in which politicians and pundits alike celebrated Big Business as the saviour of American democracy and enterprise,” writes Lynn Dumenil in <i>The Modern Temper</i>. Watkins had her own jeering name for her portrait of the stern-faced <i>H E Vance</i> (1926) – “Babbitt” – one of the pictures she used to send to exhibitions. “The intellectuals had only to read [Sinclair] Lewis’s books [<i>Main Street </i>(1920) and <i>Babbitt</i> (1922)] to realise that the qualities in American life which they most despised and feared were precisely the ones which he put under the microscope for cold-blooded examination. It was George F Babbitt who was the archenemy of the enlightened, and it was the <i>Main Street</i> state of mind which stood in the way of American civilisation,” argued Fredrick Lewis Allen in <i>Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s</i> which came out in 1931.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Despite Watkins’s long-serving occupation at the Clarence H White School, when the post as the head teacher in New York became vacant in 1924 it went not to her but to an undergraduate at the school, Paul Outerbridge. For her remaining years in the city, Watkins continued to stay in the thick of things by turning to advertising photography, and she did it with the same level of artistic fervour and finesse as in her other pictures – she sure applied to what advertiser Earnest Elmo Calkins pronounced in 1928: “The men who produce advertising art are the men represented in the art exhibitions. There is no longer any distinction, and no stigma attaches to art used for business. Artists realise that advertising offers them an opportunity as great as any in the world today, not merely to be well paid for their work, but also to realise their artistic ambitions without sacrifice of their standards or their ideals.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">One of the strongest admirers of her work, particularly the pictures with the immaculate geometry of her surfaces where she isolated groups of singular objects and fragmented them for a whole new vision, was Condé Nast’s Art Director Heyworth Campbell. Between 1924 and 1928, Watkins’s commercial work was seen in magazines all over the United States. “Even the plain businessman, suspicious of ‘art stuff’, perceives that his product is enhanced by fine tone-spacing and the beauty of contrasting textures,” Watkins suggested in her 1926 text “Advertising and Photography”:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“With Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, came a new approach. Soulfulness was taboo, romance derided, anecdote scorned; beauty of subject was superseded by beauty of design, and the relation of ideas gave place to the relation of forms. Weird and surprising things were put upon canvas; stark mechanical objects revealed an unguessed dignity; commonplace articles showed curves and angles which could be repeated with the varying pattern of a fugue. The comprehending photographer saw, paused, and seized his camera! And while the more conservative workers still exhibited photographs beautiful in the accepted sense, strange offerings startled the juries; prints original perhaps, but hardly pretty, and showing an apparent queerness of choice most painful to the orthodox.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Superb pieces like <i>Design – Curves </i>and<i> Design – Angles</i> (both 1919) were reframed in Watkins’s commercial work. Woodbury’s Facial Soap and Phenix Cheese, or her <i>Untitled (Still Life, Glasses and Pitcher)</i> for the Fostoria Glass Company in 1924, in which she magnified the presence of the glassware with her passion for the intangibility of the shadows (an idea copied by the <i>Neue Sachlichkeit</i> photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch two years later), are all early examples of forward-thinking advertising photography. O’Connor and Tweedie are correct in claiming that “Watkins modernised her form without giving over to the cleanliness of modernity.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In his reflection on the American 1920s, Fredrick Lewis Allen described how the intellects of a younger generation “looked at Victorianism as half indecent and half funny […] Some of them, in fact, seemed to be persuaded that all periods prior to the coming of modernity had been ridiculous – with the exception of Greek civilisation, Italy at the time of Casanova, France at the time of the great courtesans, and 18<sup>th</sup>-century England.” Watkins’s nudes and portraits and outdoor pictures with people did grasp these periods. And she made fun of the prissy mannerisms of young Victorian ladies in the jocular <i>Untitled (Verna Skelton Posing for Cutex Advertisement)</i>, a great shot from 1924 that sold nail polish. (There is also a very beautiful study for Cutex with a close-up of a missy hand swirling a pearl necklace.) Her commercial photography influenced further personal works, such as her splendid <i>Head and Hand</i> (c 1925) with a woman’s curved hand and a small female head asleep in its tender hold.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In Mexico City in the summer of 1925, on a school field trip with a group of students, Clarence White suffered a heart attack and died at the age of fifty-four. He and Watkins had been working intensely together in creating a portfolio of White’s finest prints for what they hoped in due time would go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Meanwhile, White and Watkins made an agreement that she would buy the forty-four prints for the symbolic sum of ten dollars – partly because the school was in financial trouble, and Watkins had not been salaried for a long time for her teaching there, and partly because she was the one person whose expertise and authority White firmly believed in.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The portfolio was still at the White School at the time of his passing. When these prints resurfaced at the Pictorial Photographers of America’s commemorative exhibition at the Art Center in New York the following year, they had been sold to the Library of Congress by White’s suspicious wife. Once the show ended on May 1, Watkins had the walls stripped of the prints that she considered were in her custody. She lost them in the resulting lawsuit, and she lost her associates and her standing at the Art Center that she had been closely linked to for years and where she had her only solo show in 1923.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In August 1928, Margaret Watkins embarked on a journey for a trimester-long vacation in Glasgow. But never again would she return from her “rest cure” in a Victorian house full of dying aunts and leaking pipes.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Aunt Anna kicked the bucket within a week after Watkins’s arrival at 41 Westbourne Gardens. In a letter to a friend two years later she described the remnants of her mother’s childhood home: “The youngest [Grace] (!) is seventy-seven and has been in bed for five or six years; the next [Jane], eighty, valiant but very tottery and subject to the most shocking insurrections in the interior; the eldest [Louisa/Louie] eighty-six, a human dynamo, loves the movies, tries to manage the whole solar system and is furiously indignant if I suggest that she is perhaps not quite so strong as she was in the good old days.” Watkins realised that she was “the only available detached female relative who could take the job of keeping an eye on them. And a hectic job it has been, much more than I could have foreseen; and I am not just exactly suited by temperament, or temper, to be the honorary curator of an old Ladies’ home! But here you are – needs must!”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There were three escapes from the “aunthill” until all of them were gone. In the fall of 1928, Watkins took her Graflex camera to the humongous Pressa in Cologne, an international fair on recent advancements in graphic design, printing, publishing and advertising which occupied three exhibition halls and forty-two other buildings on a three-kilometre-long stretch by the Rhine. El Lissitzky (who was living in Germany at the time) curated the engrossing interiors for the Soviet Pavilion, which featured a mural photomontage – <i>The Task of the Press Is the Education of the Masses</i> – by some avant-garde artists who were still permitted to shine because Stalin wanted to convince the West about the superiority of his first five-year plan. Watkins revelled in the experience, she loved when miracles popped out of ordinary hats.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When she came back to the Westbourne Gardens “sarcophagus” at the beginning of the new year, after a two-month stay in London following Pressa, she was broke and in an ill state of health. What worsened her condition was that her friend Polly had to clear out her true and only home that summer since the building in the Village would soon be dismantled. “All of my connections are broken in New York,” she wrote at the age of forty-six. “It’s the most disheartening problem I’ve ever been up against, and now that Jane St is gone I have no foundations left, how in heaven’s name I’ll ever make a fresh start in NY, I don’t know.” Watkins set up a minimal darkroom on the top floor of the “aunthill” just to keep herself connected to photography and the craft of playing about in poison. She became an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society in London and, locally, a member of the Glasgow and West Scotland Photographic Association, where she was known as an outsider due to her great style of dressing and her strange offerings in photography.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Have made a good many mistakes, double exposures, forgetting to fix the time, etcetera but the lot that came from the shop today are quite hopeful. It is wiser to do one’s own developing when possible as you can vary the treatment to suit the subject, but I had to know whether I was getting anything or not and have done several things over again to improve composition or to get a better light. I would have had plenty of cash to get home on if I hadn’t spent it on films and developing but having been nearly twenty years at the game it seemed rather foolish to let the whole business slide and when the interest was revived, I decided to go at it for all I was worth and have something to work on during the winter,” Watkins told her aunt Jane in a letter from Paris on September 18, 1931.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">She had returned to the Continent that summer to participate in the eighth International Congress of Scientific and Applied Photography in Dresden during the first week of August. Watkins spent some time in the German capital, which the filmmaker Walther Ruttmann had just portrayed in his modern, mechanical and rhythmic Weimar masterpiece <i>Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis</i> (1928). However, it was at the Paris Colonial Exposition, which filled up the whole Bois de Vincennes, that Watkins began to photograph for real again. France had culled a huge number of indigenes from its twenty-six territories and so had the other “empires”. These people were treated like animals in a zoo, but for Watkins this spectacle was “literally a trip around the world in a day!”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">She loved the vivacity around the Seine. She wrote to aunt Jane that the river “keeps me fascinated and I’ve made a whole series of pictures of the life there. There are huge barges for washhouses for the poor; piers with fussy little steamers arriving and departing with holidaymakers: long low coal barges via canal from the Rhine; fishermen in tippy little boats, other fishers hanging over the copings and stone stairs which run right into the water; artists sitting in every likely and unlikely place where they can plant themselves and an easel; a man teasing out the innards of a mattress with a sort of rocker, while his wife puts it all back into the tick; a couple of terriers being scrubbed by their missus; cranes and steam shovels and huge piles of stone and sand for the new docks; half an acre of wine casks rolled together; beggars cooking meals in odd corners, others washing their clothes and most of themselves, and all along the parapets of the bridges, a black beading of heads and shoulders belonging to the gentlemen who are ‘doing nothing, and doing it very well’.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In Paris she photographed posters, shop windows, tradesfolk in Les Halles, bits and fragments of buildings and the Eiffel Tower from indirect positions, not all that special. She returned to modernity in her <i>Self-Portrait</i> with the Vendôme Column in the background and the photographer hiding behind her big camera while a policeman joins in to complete the deformed picture, which is fully mirrored in the bulbous chromium alloy of a parked car’s headlight.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When Margaret Watkins photographed <i>The Bathroom Window</i> in the comfort of her home in 1923, the windows were closed and the curtains drawn because this world in the Greenwich Village was enough. The windows in the “window scenes” that she photographed in the fall of 1931 during her stay in London are all opened by the photographer to facilitate the possibility to take off and just leave.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In London she used the same kind of template for her photography as in Paris. But these pictures are so much stronger and resolved, and this is the point where Watkins is reimagining herself in her profession as a photographer. She met her colleagues at the Royal Photographic Society and saw an exhibition there on colour photography (colour photography was something that had spurred her interest for some time), and she went to The Annual London Salon of Photography, themed <i>Invention in Design</i>, where a certain number of her North American pictures were included. Her London “street photography” is void of people – a sign of the dispossessed state that she was in – but full of Watkins’s delicious way of looking at things, despite the gloom and a <i>Stairway to Where?</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The last trip went on a freighter from London Bridge to Leningrad via the Kiel Canal in August 1933. Watkins was eager to learn more about Soviet avant-garde art and how Stalinism, in relation to the recent market crashes in the United States and in Europe, was carried into effect. Before the train left for Moscow, Watkins sneaked out of her Leningrad company (including the Secretary of the Royal Society of Arts, Peter Le Neve Foster) and “took my first photograph – of statue of Peter the Great on horseback – while the rest of party stayed at hotel for a second huge meal”. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“In general, the visual and performing arts, with their radical form and content, stunned Watkins, but she was also on the cusp of a fundamental shift in the Soviet art world. In Moscow, she visited the retrospective exhibition <i>Artists of the Russian Federation over Fifteen Years </i>[1917–32], which she ‘assiduously prowled for two half days [and] appreciated to the limit’. The fight against formalism was a subtext of the exhibition. The show had originated in Leningrad a year earlier, and by the time it got to Moscow it had been severely edited. The major emission was the abstract paintings of Malevich, who had an entire room devoted to his work in Leningrad. This was part of Stalin’s dictated shift from constructivism to social realism. In this transitional moment of 1933, photography, too, was in the midst of change from the avant-garde formalism and fragmentation, acute angles, and extreme close-ups,” explain Mary O’Connor and Katherine Tweedie in their biography. “By stripping away individualist markings, the door was opened to selling myths about the new Soviet society.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Watkins was not anywhere near as gullible as her student Margaret Bourke-White who swallowed the Stalinist propaganda straight off. Watkins returned from the Soviet Union with six hundred pictures which capacity and August Sander-like social critique went over the heads of the censors. One such picture was <i>Street Photographer, Moscow</i>, depicting a poor, knitting woman (looking much older than she probably was), with a camera on a tripod pointing towards a pathetic backdrop that would place the sitter in a world far, far away from the USSR.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the beginning of her Glasgow days she photographed the west corner of Westbourne Gardens. <i>Park</i> is a wintry, semiabstract picture with a bird’s-eye view from the house that would ground her for the rest of her life. In a letter never posted she confessed that “It would be hopeless to try and sell 41 at present as there is no demand whatever for such houses and I’m told the demand for flats has slackened. I think I ought to keep up my work. If I survive the aunts it means picking up a connection somewhere and piecing out a living with what funds I have and I must retain my health and what wits I have.” Watkins began to wander the Glasgow harbour area – where she really wasn’t welcome – like an undisguised Rosa Bonheur, “to see man in his true perspective as a very small creature, creeping and scurrying about the earth” (another metaphor for her own condition). Among the harbour’s “prehistoric monsters” she especially fancied the Finnieston Crane situated on the Queen’s Dock – from the heights of her pet crane Watkins was “hanging over the rail in a stiff breeze, looking straight down on the squat dome of the tunnel entrance, with little trucks and figures making a quick beetle pattern of light and dark”. The River Clyde became her mental escape route.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Heaven forbid that I should slump into a fussy old maid stewing about her symptoms,” she wrote. In 1937, when Watkins was living alone in the sixteen-room house, her main project was to find textile and carpet producers for the kaleidoscopic designs that she had generated from her most abstract photographs. When that wasn’t realised, Watkins started an antiques business together with a far-off friend. She had a talent for discovering the greatest paraphernalia at the Barrow’s Market across town and had her bargains shipped to Toronto until the outbreak of the World War II. During the war years, Watkins did something that other Glaswegians were not so keen to do, she opened her home to refugees. For several years after 1945, she had Walter Süsskind (the conductor of the Scottish Orchestra at the time) and other tenants living in the house.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">By the mid-1950s, Watkins did not even dare to venture out to her film club any longer, and she loved film. She had become an agoraphobe and the children looked at her building as if it were a ghost house. She lived in a creative torpor together with her many books, one of her few remaining enticements, and spent her days filling diaries and catalogues with memories and notes. The authors of <i>Seduced by Modernity</i> explain that “the multiple revisiting of her past – conducted in annotations on her parents’ letters, in the margins of the books and exhibition catalogues she had bought, and on scraps of newspapers she kept – all indicate a project to make meaning, and to leave an inheritance. At times, we have understood this to mean that she was waiting for biographers to do a further annotation – to write her life and understand her photographs.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Watkins’s neighbour Joseph Mulholland argues in his foreword to their book how “Margaret Watkins had achieved what I believed she had set out to do. By creating a mystery, she had left me with a legacy and a duty. That duty was to find out as much as I could about her – and see that she was not forgotten. I had started off with a little more than the labels on the backs of these glorious pictures, a birth date and a death date, a lady with a slight North American accent, and a home where room after room was cluttered with an accumulation of some two hundred years of family clothes, papers, and furnishings. During my search, I found reviews of exhibitions where her photographs had won praise and prizes, and I gradually pieced together the bones of her story.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Third Eye Centre in Glasgow presented the first Margaret Watkins retrospective in 1981. When the pioneering New York photo space Light Gallery showed Watkins in 1984, she finally began to receive some recognition in the UK as well. She was called “the show’s greatest discovery” when an exhibition produced by the Detroit Institute of Arts – <i>Pictorialism into Modernism</i> – travelled the world between 1996 and 1998. Another book on Margaret Watkins came out in the autumn of 2012 when the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa presented her art for the Canadian public with their <i>Domestic Symphonies</i> show.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In<i> All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity</i>, Marshall Berman gives such a beautiful description of modernism’s vacillating nature: “To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction. It is to be overpowered by the immense bureaucratic organisations that have the power to control and often to destroy all communities, values, lives; and yet to be undeterred in our determination to face these forces, to fight to change their world and to make it our own. It is to be both revolutionary and conservative: alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead, longing to create and to hold on to something real even as everything melts.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In spite of everything melting away in her life, Watkins penned down these words in the summer of 1962: “In 1908, November, I left home to build a life and make a living. (The Quest continues.)” In 1919 she photographed <i>Untitled (Woman Holding Photographic Plate)</i>, a picture so dynamic that it could have been a clever painting from today of a woman with the looks of former times and a smartphone in her hands. In the mid-1930s she photographed herself climbing a flight of stairs as a shadowy figure crowned with a hat in <i>Untitled (Self-Portrait and Shadows)</i>. What looks like an early work by the secretive Vivian Maier – whose photography was unboxed in 2007 – also very much conveys the sorrow of being the last picture Watkins ever took.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">To the lost cat on the roof of the world: We can still look through your eyes. Thank you.</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-gdazeHnLn56joJFfSNOcNGeXPtS__4_n1Qr0VZ_LYeFIYRzBao0G_zs7FaVMkXyFloe1CXtXL0njbPul6AuM4_OQhQdYR-hlIFTde6iuvGveF01JgEnrypPxkF_02G_kNui1sLelS_Jd/s1600/margaret_watkins.2.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1212" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-gdazeHnLn56joJFfSNOcNGeXPtS__4_n1Qr0VZ_LYeFIYRzBao0G_zs7FaVMkXyFloe1CXtXL0njbPul6AuM4_OQhQdYR-hlIFTde6iuvGveF01JgEnrypPxkF_02G_kNui1sLelS_Jd/s640/margaret_watkins.2.jpeg" width="484" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face="Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;"><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;">Margaret Watkins, <i>Head and Hand</i>, c 1925. </span><span style="text-align: start;">© Joseph Mulholland Collection.</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>This essay is from the forthcoming exhibition catalogue </i>Margaret Watkins: Black Light<i> and is pre-published here courtesy of diChroma Photography in Madrid.</i></span></div>
Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-24781130552006315092019-10-01T15:03:00.000+02:002019-10-02T13:23:13.934+02:00FANTASIA<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBFcCW3lmU6jndZocxY_9WAx97e78gsoJi-ppqOLWJSY41YynqNC3B5DnoQowrUUoVv4qSXwSwxLvp9zqwluXbcCMvg45Su9KezfQk9Z0Az69YkEfj8xn6NBNHoWNDpQ02z4YpNbniCRXr/s1600/fornasetti1b.lina_eyes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="823" data-original-width="1600" height="328" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBFcCW3lmU6jndZocxY_9WAx97e78gsoJi-ppqOLWJSY41YynqNC3B5DnoQowrUUoVv4qSXwSwxLvp9zqwluXbcCMvg45Su9KezfQk9Z0Az69YkEfj8xn6NBNHoWNDpQ02z4YpNbniCRXr/s640/fornasetti1b.lina_eyes.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I was born into a family of wretched good taste and I use wretched good taste as the key to liberate the imagination.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">– Piero Fornasetti<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Her lips are sweet surprise. Yet it is the eyes that produce the whew and the wonder of this demure and puckish beauty, pure as Milan snow.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">A thread in the Portuguese poet-philosopher Fernando Pessoa’s wonderfully pensive work is how a person can be made of multitudinous imaginary characters, or heteronyms as he preferred to call them, and possess them all as a more wholesome individual. The abovementioned Italian songbird Lina Cavalieri was no longer alive when Milanese artist, designer, craftsman Piero Fornasetti (1913–1988) fell in love with a halftone image of her extraordinary face as it appeared in a newspaper article in 1951. His </span><i><span lang="EN-GB">Tema e variazioni</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> series is this image of her visage as it goes through three hundred and sixty transfigurations, which also involves the artist’s many ideas of his own identities – Lina as exceptional versions of himself printed on rather common</span><span lang="EN-GB"> white plates, twenty-six centimetres in diameter – and outright examples of what </span><span lang="EN-GB">John Hooper talks about</span><span lang="EN-GB"> in</span><span lang="EN-GB"> his book <i>The Italians</i>, “This very Italian talent for dusting life with a thick layer of stardust.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">From Lina as Fornasetti’s pristine, original </span><span lang="EN-GB">halftone-dotted beauty to</span><span lang="EN-GB"> Piero Fornasetti as Cavalieri, there are as many Lina plates as only a creatively bonkers mind by any chance could come up with: Cavalieri in a knitted balaclava, Lina drinking her morning bowl of coffee, Lina who goes up, up and away as a Montgolfier balloon, Lina </span><span lang="EN-GB">who walks like an Egyptian or is peeled like an orange or eaten as a wheel of <i>formaggio</i>, the newly-hatched Lina and Lina as a vanitas skull, Lina as Fantomas or </span><span lang="EN-GB">as the tongue-y Albert Einstein or as the Tramp, Lina as the Queen of Hearts, the perplexed Lina, Lina as a flapper, </span><span lang="EN-GB">Lina as a broken-plate painting by art market dabbler Julian Schnabel, Lina as the third eye and the give-us-a-wink Lina</span><span lang="EN-GB">, Lina </span><span lang="EN-GB">as a conqueror of the old world, Lina as the crowning member of a column, the like-a-surgeon Lina or the Wild West Lina with a price on her head, the Ziggy Lina (who played guitar with Weird and Gilly) or Lina wearing her emblematic face as a necklace. The platonic Mrs Fornasetti as the pearl of creation.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Hannah Arendt, in her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s <i>Illuminations: Essays and Reflections </i>(published in 1955), argued that “What guides [poetic] thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallisation, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things ‘suffer a sea-change’ and survive in new crystallised forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living.” Piero Fornasetti was a master of those “sea changes” that set the scene for new formations. Also, he was an artist of an omnivorous disposition – a diver, an astronaut and (much less figuratively) a cyclist who loved the streets of Milan and soaked it all up.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">The image of Lina Cavalieri’s face is seen on a Fornasetti vase in the bookshelves in Almodóvar’s recent, autobiographical and numb <i>Pain and Glory</i> (2019), where one can also spot Fornasetti’s raised small sideboard <i>Farfalle</i> (plenty of butterflies on a white background) in Salvador Mallo’s delectable Madrid apartment which has everything that the filmmaker and his alter ego have not. The gallery of this famous face continues to be Fornasetti’s most recognised work –</span><span lang="EN-GB"> </span><i><span lang="EN-GB">Tema e variazioni</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> is how you went viral in those days – even though it is his least interesting.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">One of Fornasetti’s plate designs might reveal how he at times must have felt about this particular creation: here is a floored man fully occupied with keeping the seven plates with Lina’s face spinning on its poles, so as not to fail. However, it would be fair to say that the changing faces of his star vehicle Lina Cavalieri served as a scrapbook to sort out and to measure the mania, the baroque histrionics and the general too-muchery that not only formed this maverick’s design, but even more so perfected it, Italianated it, made it so elegant, so goddamn full of flair.</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“The variety of his stylistic registers and particular talents shows Fornasetti to belong to a wave of artistic taste in Europe between 1930 and 1960 that has yet to be fully understood. It was created by artistic as much as literary individuals whose common theme was to resist the formulaic doctrines of modernism, and to counterpoise a neo-baroque or neo-romantic imagination, while at the same time re-evaluating works and movements that had hitherto become neglected,” writes his biographer Patrick Mauriès:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Visual tricks, imaginary stage and theatre settings, figures borrowed from commedia dell’arte, fantasy landscapes, games, tropes and allusions to literature and art; the loss of reference point and the blurring of identity are the driving forces behind Fornasetti’s art. Concealed one behind the other are his regular stylistic approaches: his taste for series, which incidentally lends him the status of a forerunner of one of the principal themes of contemporary art. It is a procedure by which form seems to arise out of itself in an endless game of features and deviations.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">There is both a reiterative rhythm</span><span lang="EN-GB"> </span><span lang="EN-GB">and an obsessional continuousness </span><span lang="EN-GB">in Fornasetti’s tremendous body of work</span><span lang="EN-GB">. He </span><span lang="EN-GB">was a</span><span lang="EN-GB">n ancient spirit with a modern (not modernist) temper.</span><span lang="EN-GB"> (Picasso made five hundred portraits of the great and fragile Dora Maar during the years when he abused her to insanity; On Kawara’s irresistible series of <i>Date Paintings</i> began in 1966, he made as many as three thousand and each took eight hours to paint – “I make love to the days,” as he put it; a third example is of course the king of seriality himself, Andy Warhol.) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">In </span><span lang="EN-GB">last year’s very decent biopic from Nils Tavernier, </span><i><span lang="EN-GB">The </span></i><i><span lang="EN-GB">Ideal Palace</span></i><span lang="EN-GB">, Joseph Ferdinand Cheval’s future wife takes a liking to the unyielding postman and asks him what he thinks about during his daily ten-hour rounds. “Je rêve” is his crisp reply – a few days later. In 1879, the year when their daughter Alice was born, Cheval tripped over a peculiar stone which he brought home on a wheelbarrow, and for the next thirty-three years he built the Palais Idéal for her and later on to her memory (Alice died when she was fifteen). The cross-grained Fornasetti was a dreamer too, of the most elusive dreams. And he called his guiding principle <i>follia pratica</i>, practical madness.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">Ettore Sottsass – the man with the red typewriter </span><span lang="EN-GB">and, later, the c</span><span lang="EN-GB">andy-coloured collectibles for yuppies – described him as</span><span lang="EN-GB"> </span><span lang="EN-GB">“a very sophisticated child, a magic child with charms that can transform the world into a place of fantastic memories […] from faraway lands where everything is beautiful, silent, pleasant, noble and even a bit comic, a bit ridiculous, a bit erotic, a bit beguiling”. While the Fornasetti brand is in every way a fantasy world of sparkling love, flowers and pearls and pretty girls, the designs are always pervasive and rigorous statements of beauty, a beauty difficult to pin down without some proper thought, affinity and lust for life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">“The whole of my work is based on design, design as a discipline, as a way of living and organising my own personal existence, as well as a continuous study of things, of their essence. I prefer order, but this doesn’t prevent me admiring what is casual and unexpected,” Piero Fornasetti said during the later years of his life.</span><span lang="EN-GB"> </span><span lang="EN-GB">“What I did was something more than decoration. It was an invitation to the imagination, to think, to escape from those things around us that are too mechanised and inhuman. They were tickets to travel through the realm of the imagination.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Young Piero became an artist he was ten. The boy was sitting by a lake with his sketchpad one morning in the summertime when the pen began to move in a whole new way, and when it was all done he had drawn a fascinating human figure: “I was amazed, in heaven, dazzled by this miracle, and I am still astonished today when I see this image come bursting all by itself from somewhere deep inside me into the paper.” Drawing, and to understand the world through it, was the very starting point for Fornasetti. He talked about it “as a discipline, as a way of life, as a way of organising one’s existence, and as an uninterrupted study of things, in what makes the essence”: “Whenever someone asks for my advice about how to ‘design’, I always say: go and learn life drawing. That’s the only way to learn how to design. Knowing how to draw, as the Ancients did, makes it possible for you to organise and design an object, a car, a frontispiece or page of a book.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Just like John Ruskin in the 1800s, Fornasetti argued that the instance of drawing was the best way for people to know how to see or, better, to learn how to really look at the world in a different manner. As a youngster Fornasetti was staying in a room not much bigger than the size of the bed, and all he was doing there from morning to evening was to draw and to have every object in this insufficient space covered with these designs, or “leftover dreams” as he called them, “and thus concealed a message in every work, a little story, sometimes ironic, wordless of course, but audible to those who believe in poetry”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The furniture that he made together with the multitalented Giovanni Ponti in the 1950s are in every aspect architecturally worked out pieces. The main construction was blueprinted by Ponti and covered and even more so <i>integrated</i> with Fornasetti’s idiosyncratically playful designs, often characterised by ingenious trompe l’oeil effects. When you eat in Italy there is of course the table itself, <i>tavolo</i>, but feminise the word and it describes the meal and all the joys and the beauty surrounding the table. Fornasetti’s work is <i>tavola</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There is a photograph of the designer as a young man in the 1930s – slicked back hair, hands in pocket, a grey three-piece tweed suit, tie and a white shirt, a dark coat. Look closer, everyone – there is a hole in his right-side trouser leg at the knee, and he doesn’t give a flying fuck. Fornasetti’s biographer explains that his outward presence “suggested an essential paradox: there was a concern for form – in every sense of the word – expressed by a refined sense of elegance, codified and slightly out of date, in understated tweeds or cashmere, yet this was simultaneously enhanced or countered with a flamboyant waistcoat or tie, or perhaps an impertinent pocket handkerchief, showing not only particular care for his appearance, but also superb insolence in the face of conformity or the outwardly respectable.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There are two great photographs of Piero Fornasetti from 1948. By 1930, and at long last, his headstrong father surrendered all further attempts to push his son into a career that he had mapped out for him, and turned around and helped him acquire a studio with a printing press at Via Antonio Bazzini 14. In the first of these photos, Fornasetti is sitting with his back against us, deeply concentrated, in this ascetic studio with rolls and rolls of his designs in the right corner and empty picture frames on the wall in front of him, which do look like American artist Allan McCollum’s <i>Surrogate Paintings</i> (his emblem paintings from the late 1970s). Nothing in this space is embellished and adorned. What took place in his head, however, must have looked like Cecil Beaton’s bedroom fairground.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In 1948 Fornasetti found, what he called, his “gospel” in Eugen Herrigel’s <i>Zen in the Art of Archery</i>, a short book in which the author canvasses the idea of becoming one with what you are trying to achieve: “It took me a considerable time before I succeeded in doing what the Master wanted. But – I succeeded. I learned to lose myself so effortlessly in the breathing that I sometimes had the feeling that I myself was not breathing but – strange as this may sound – was being breathed […] I managed to draw the bow and keep it drawn until the moment of release while remaining completely relaxed in body, without my being able to say how it happened. The qualitative difference between these few successful shots and the innumerable failures was so convincing that I was ready to admit that now at last I understood what was meant by drawing the bow ‘spiritually’.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">The other photograph is a portrait by Irving Penn. Fornasetti is standing behind the very chair he is sitting on in the first picture, now with his rough hand resting on the backrest, his head slightly tilted, the curve of the open tweed jacket forms the line between light and total shadow, bow drawn spiritually. This portrait was made between Penn’s legendary fashion photography and the <i>Small Trades</i> series in a skanky room in Paris and his existential <i>Corner Portraits</i> of 1948–49, in which he shoved heroes and plain celebrities into a most narrow corner. It was American <i>Vogue</i>’s brilliant Art Director Alexander</span><span lang="EN-GB"> Liberman who sent Penn to Italy and France to photograph the cultural names that had gone invisible since the war. Edmonde Charles-Roux at Paris <i>Vogue</i>, who joined him on these journeys, said that “I was extremely surprised by Penn’s attention to, interest in, even admiration for European art world personalities.” Penn and Fornasetti then, what could go wrong? Nothing.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Italian journalist Luigi Barzini reverberated “the great art of being happy” sentiment by Stendhal, and this French author’s undying love for Italy (and especially the Milanese), in his book from 1964, <i>The Italians</i>: “The Italians know that everything in their country is governed by their experience, the product of their industry, imbued with their spirit. They know that there is no need, really, to distinguish or to choose between the smile on the face of a <i>cameriere</i> and Donatello’s <i>San Giorgio</i> […] They are all works of art, the ‘great art of being happy’ and of making other people happy, an art which embraces and inspires all others in Italy, the only art worth learning, but which can never be really mastered, the art of inhabiting the earth.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">Someone who would really dig that quote is the gentleman Director Bo Nilsson at Artipelag,</span><span lang="EN-GB"> </span><span lang="EN-GB">the enormous art space on Värmdö in the Stockholm archipelago (with its almost thirty thousand islands, islets and skerries). And guess what, Fornasetti is pure catnip for this man who has been thinking of Piero Fornasetti ever since he discovered his work in a Paris bookstore thirty years ago. </span><span lang="EN-GB">“But what is it, do I understand it? Not really,” Nilsson confides. “I have had a long process in trying to understand what Fornasetti is really about. There have been many books and exhibitions, but not really from the perspective that I fancied, with the questions that I wanted to ask.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“It became more and more obvious that one day I would have to make my own Fornasetti exhibition. Now is the right time to do it. Fornasetti is getting more and more attention in the world of contemporary art. I’d say that Fornasetti is an artist who is difficult to pin down. He’s unpredictable and that is why this exhibition is called <i>Inside Out Outside In</i>,” Nilsson explains. “We didn’t want to do just another small thing of the image of Fornasetti since he is one of the major designers of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. We wanted to bring him back to the full scale of his artisanship, of his artistry, everything that he stood for – a real Renaissance man who has been working in so many fields. So, we are trying to bring him back as the artist he started as, and how he developed his different artforms.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Inside Out Outside In</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> succeeds in doing the full-scale Fornasetti. It is just about the pick of the litter, nearly as far as you can take a Fornasetti show. (Though what is missing in this grand survey is the secluded illustrations of the artist’s innermost sexual desires.) Objects that are not on the walls are on beautiful plywood plinths or in plywood showcases. The walls are either gallery white or painted in flawless hues of blue, grey, yellow and red, or covered with Piero Fornasetti’s wallpaper patterns. A sun disc lamp against the <i>Nuvolette</i> wallpaper, a big sky as a surrealistic burst of angsty cloud puffs, is hardly something that would impress the Japanese kawaii market. His idea of the sun included <i>himself</i>, and the Fornasetti sun amounts to Summerisle’s eerie Helios symbol in the horror masterpiece <i>The Wicker Man</i> (1973) where the heliotherapy goes too far for an unfortunate police sergeant.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The three thousand square metres of exhibition space has always proved to be too much for Artipelag. It is something of a <i>soundstage</i> – with an added “airport corridor” (with sliding doors) that twists and turns into more agreeable compartments – that for unknown reasons has to be filled up for every new show, whatever the material. Last year’s <i>Bloomsbury Spirit</i> for instance, curated by an art critic slash self-professed authority on the Bloomsbury bunch, looked as if it had been scraped together by means of a bizarrely awkward fengshui algorithm. It was a shockingly stultifying, feckless production which would have saved itself a little had it utilised, say, Ari Aster’s dollhouse aesthetics from <i>Hereditary</i> (2018). <i>Inside Out Outside In</i> is on the contrary an almost perfect exhibition. Almost.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Bo Nilsson writes in the catalogue how “Fornasetti imagined history not as accidental or confused but as a carefully organised universe arranged according to scientific principles. For this reason, he thought it rational to organise his own objects in accordance with similar principles. It is not difficult to imagine Piero Fornasetti as a Renaissance prince collecting rare objects in order to satisfy his curiosity about the wonders of the world. These cabinets of curiosities compiled specimens of rare plants, fruits, flowers and animals. Their opposite were artefacts created by man, such as books, letters, music, theatre and art of exceptional beauty. In the course of history, these collections grew as the world opened up as the result of journeys and new experiences.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Inside Out Outside In</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> as a universe intended to show the full scope of Fornasetti’s artistry spreads these items of fancy as if they ever were intended as museum pieces, and they are not. It is when these wonderful objects are pulled together by their innate forces of attraction that you will ensure the full appreciation of Piero Fornasetti as one of the most special designers of the 20<sup>th</sup> century – as with the chock-full cabinets in one of the last rooms in the show, replete with his smaller designs, curiosities, the familiar and the sublime. Perhaps at this point you will still not “understand” Fornasetti but you will love him for what he left in this world.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In her book <i>The Artificial Kingdom</i>, Celeste Olalquiaga calls the Age of Wonder “A happy interregnum between theology and science” and “A time when the universe was still – if residually – alive with magic feelings, every creature and thing the source of infinite amazement, the age of wonder indicated in its childlike openness the beginning of a new cultural era. It was a moment when the West perceived the world as an object of contemplation and spectatorial delight while readying its mercantile profitability and intellectual consumption.” A more “compressed” presentation of this show would have turned Artipelag into a Fornasetti-congenial Wunderkammer.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Piero Fornasetti was seventeen when he was admitted to and quickly kicked out of the Accademia di Brera in Milan with a zero for conduct. His idea of artistic education was based on the study of the human body, but the art academy refused to provide the students with anything that would even vaguely relate to the carnal. After the Brera Academy, Fornasetti participated in various evening classes at Castello Sforza where he found his passion for the complex dimensionality in Renaissance art, particularly its architecture.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There were two strong country-specific artistic movements that formed the young man when he grew up. They were both very modern (not modernist), and they were both reconsidering the Italian past with a kind of dreamy accuracy. “I was lucky enough to be interested in culture when the Novecento happened, and to meet some of the movement’s followers, whose ideas I espoused: painting should be tonal, like that of Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, and as it has been inherited by Carrà, Sironi and Soffici, and in architecture one should only be rational,” Fornasetti argued. The other group, Pittura metafisica, pronounced the unknown pleasures of profound, enigmatic places, far away from the material world, where time has expired and the kingdom is ruled by imagination.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Patrick Mauriès: “The corollary of this basic rigour was Fornasetti’s definitive rejection of every sort of romantic pathos of 19<sup>th</sup>-century <i>scapigliatura</i> [bohemianism] such as the soft and sinuous forms of the Art Nouveau or Liberty style that was all the rage in Milan when he was growing up. His artistic approach was unmistakably influenced by the formalism pursued by certain artists to whom he was close in Italy in the 1930s. He was also eager to acknowledge a fundamental debt to two books: Carlo Carrà’s <i>Giotto</i> and Roberto Longhi’s <i>Piero della Francesca</i>. These books both show that the metaphysical experiment during the early decades of the 20<sup>th </sup>century had its roots in a sort of ‘primitivist’ memory of Italian art, resonating with Quattrocento ‘purism’ and various expressions of a ‘return to order’ that were current in Europe at the time [with] pure lines, dull chromaticism, restrained colour range, the taste for a certain monumentality, shallow spaces, the recourse to classicising gestures and themes, along the lines of Picasso subject matter in the 1920s.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">At the far end of the <i>Inside Out Outside In</i> exhibition is a piece of a stunning quality. It is a painting that thrills with various Quattrocento expressions, with irruptions of modernity, a sedated masterpiece with a lacerating presence that employs a holy union of Renaissance linear perspective, Surrealist weirdness and unadulterated Fornasetti genius. <i>La venditrice di farfalle</i>, painted in 1938, shows a “butterfly saleswoman” behind a counter in a shop that could have been a candy store were it not for all the boxes of pinned up butterflies, the symbol of dead souls, Fascist Italy. A nimble dot in pink and orange in the lower left corner changes the sombre tone, a butterfly takes wings.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“An artist whatever he does, is always drawing his self-portrait,” said Fornasetti who effortlessly switched between different themes and styles with each new painting. His most “traditional” self-portrait is from the same year as the lady and the butterflies – the seated artist with his hand positioned on the chin like Rodin’s <i>Le Penseur</i>, but here in a much more upright position and eyes locked on the viewer as if we are disturbing his privacy. The other hand is holding a paintbrush as a foreboding pendulum, loaded with a dot of rosso corsa. Another great piece in this part of the show is his “Novecento” painting <i>Spiaggia</i> from the 1940s that has the atmospheric touch of the film <i>On the Beach</i> (1959), in which a random Morse transmission turns out to be a Cola bottle lugged in the loop of a roller blind, beeping to a dead world.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But come, let us feast our eyes on a bunch of radishes, <i>Rapanelli</i>, a beautiful little piece from the 1940s in the style of those lusher still life paintings of the 1600s – like Osias Beert the Elder’s <i>Still Life with Cherries</i> (Nationalmuseum in Stockholm) or Giovanna Garzoni’s <i>Cherries in a Dish, a Pod, and a Bumblebee</i> (Galleria Palatina in Florence) – however complicated by the calamity that brews in this supposedly decorative work of art as it rather looks like a heart ripped out of a human body. Fornasetti’s work was always about the bewildering of his own shrewdness, schmoozing the incredible with surefooted continuous walks on the wild side. He painted his impossible air vehicles in the high ceiling of his bedroom when he was young. In 1988, when Fornasetti left this world, they flew for real in Terry Gilliam’s <i>The Adventures of Baron Munchausen</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In 1980, this autodidact admitted that in the past “No one could teach me anything in the ateliers I visited. I learned from books. I learned lithography, engraving. I learned all that before schools were started for teaching individual techniques.” Bo Nilsson writes in the <i>Inside Out Outside In</i> catalogue how Fornasetti, in his new studio on Via Antonio Bazzini, “tried out every technique of gravure and printing: lithography, engraving, drypoint, monotype. His assiduous practice of all these techniques quickly gave him the necessary skills, both as an accomplished engraver and printer. He collaborated with the greatest artists of his time, printing artists’ books and lithographs for them, thereby making his living. The Stamperia d’Arte Piero Fornasetti produced work by Fabrizio Clerici, Carlo Carrà, Massimo Campigli, Eugene Berman, Giorgio Di Chirico, Orfeo Tamburi, Marino Marini and Lucio Fontana.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Fifth Triennale in 1933 was when this international design exhibition landed in Milan for good. Fornasetti’s printed silk scarves were so insanely out of this world and into this world that they were dismissed by the Triennale’s committee, most likely because its members lacked the capacity to define these intricate and inordinately lovely pieces where technique and design merged with such brilliancy. It was at this Triennale that Gio Ponti discovered the qualities and idiosyncrasies of the twenty-two years younger and just-rejected Piero Fornasetti.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">For the latter it was a “decisive moment” in his early career: “Ponti was very excited about my way of using this technique, so much so that he gave me a long list of jobs straight away. We had a great deal of respect for one another, although we always addressed each other formally. That is how we launched into a series of works together in the 1950s. I would decorate all kinds of things from luxury apartments on the liner <i>Andrea Doria</i>, to furnishing fabric or cinema interiors.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Seventh Triennale in 1940 presented this new design dyad’s first great synergic work, a swanky bulging glass cabinet; hardware by Ponti, mindware by Fornasetti. The concave midsection has only the coated glossy black lacquer that covers the whole front, while both of the sides are flowing with some of Fornasetti’s signature nature morte motifs: musical instruments, playing cards, a chain, jars, a pipe, a medieval helmet, asparagus, fruits and flowers, a blue butterfly and an angel’s kiss in spring.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When Fornasetti’s series of self-portraits from 1941–45 – <i>Autoritratto</i> – was finally published in 1966, he used a quote by Leonardo da Vinci as the epigram for the book: “The mirror, the mirror above all, is our master.” Most of these ink drawings, executed on damped paper, were made during his three years in exile when he was detained in a Swiss camp a long way from civilisation. Italy joined the war with Nazi Germany and Japan in September 1940, and for a few years Fornasetti managed to evade the warfare business by inventing some major public assignments for himself. Before he was arrested and fled to Switzerland in 1943, Fornasetti created two fantastic interior paintings in Milan and at the University of Padua.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In several of these <i>Autoritratto</i> works presented in the Artipelag show, Fornasetti uncaps the top of his head or opens a door to it so that we can glimpse into this enterprise that is his brain, decorated with floral designs. One of these self-portraits illustrates a male hand that is covering his moustached face with a flower. There are three other series of drawings in this show, all made in the Deitingen camp in 1945. The aesthetics is very Jean Cocteau-y. What Fornasetti was lusting for by the end of the war is pretty obvious here: naked male <i>Bathers</i>, naked male <i>Bricklayers</i>, naked male <i>Athletes</i>. However, what was really going on in that lively brain matter of his was a veritable peep show, still too risqué to be part of the <i>Inside Out Outside In</i> show.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">His series of sixty-nine ink and pencil drawings of penises galore – <i>Elogium Mentulae</i> (also 1945) – remains unpublished, though he tried again in 1973 and added a new drawing, which looks very Warholian in style, of a female head with penis earrings. The <i>Praise of the Penis</i> series embraces Leonardo da Vinci’s view that “man is wrong to feel ashamed to name it, much less to display it, always covering and hiding what should be adorned and displayed with due solemnity”, and it is a libidinous exposure of penis-y noses rubbing similar noses or penis-y horns slipping into male mouths, clusters of penises, an elevated plate of penises, blow jobs between men and fornicating fantasy creatures from ancient times. Think of manhood guru Frank T J Mackey in <i>Magnolia</i> (1999) who urges his crowds to pump up this universal, evolutional, anthropological, biological, animal message about respecting the cock.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Fornasetti returned to his precious Milan in 1946 with the intention “to fill the universe with scarves” (he had actually been able to continue his scarf production locally in Switzerland). Bo Nilsson says that it was Fornasetti’s “experiences of the city – from the top, the bottom, the outside, the inside” which “created this complexity that also characterised the Italian cultural heritage. Milan is a paradoxical city, it is both a city with a financial centre, Italy’s strongest power today and since a very long time, but it is also a creative city where owners of small businesses have a phenomenal ability to develop design. At the same time, it is based on its ancient heritage, and none of this has been wrecked, they have just added and added – from antiquity into the Renaissance and Neo-Classical times – so in that way Milan and many other Italian cities act as kinds of archaeological excavations. They are still however modern cities. And this is Piero Fornasetti in a nutshell, he is past and present.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Gio Ponti loved this Fornasetti-<i>in-nuce</i>. “If ever my life as an architect were one day deserving of a book, the chapter that starts in 1950 could be called ‘The Fornasetti Passion’,” he expressed in an article called “The Fantasy Home” in one of his own magazines, <i>Domus</i>, in May 1952. “What does Fornasetti bring to me? The possibility of having ‘unique’ things, thanks to a process of printing on cloth, with prodigious inventiveness and speed; chair after chair, panel after panel, drape after drape. To which one may add his lightness of touch, whose power to evoke makes such an impression.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Inside Out Outside In</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> has a generous display of what Ponti and Fornasetti achieved together, like the round table <i>Pesci cavallucci marini e astici</i> (1950), a beauty with lithograph prints of fish under the glass top and seahorse and lobster prints on the legs, or the marbled table <i>Libri </i>(1950s) with trompe l’oeil books thrown on its surface, or the structured cabinet <i>Panoplie</i> (mid-1950s) which is a feast of effects on a creamy base with highly elaborated gold leaf decorations, owned by the man who in 1984 sang “The Power of Love”. Nilsson: “The starting point is architecture and he created chairs, tables, cabinets and everything imaginable. This was made possible by his printing skills, that he had an ability to work directly with the prints on the three-dimensional objects. And everything is done with tremendous craftsmanship.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There is a 1932 painting in the show depicting the <i>Porto di Genova</i> with a white liner in the background. It is done in a slightly Naïve style, effectively (and thankfully) messed up with black smokestack vapours in front of a jumpy Il Duce sky. In the early 1950s, Ponti and Fornasetti designed the first-class sections of the transatlantic liners the <i>Conte Grande</i> (1950) and the <i>Andrea Doria</i> (1952), which very much functioned as corporate embassies for the country to display Italian design at its finest for the ships’ affluent clientele of international travellers. <i>Inside Out Outside In</i> shows a couple of Fortnasetti’s sketches for a ceiling and two large walls on the <i>Andrea Doria</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">“</span><span lang="EN-GB">These pictures are a little interesting because here in Sweden we have a very special relationship with the <i>Andrea Doria</i>, which in 1956 collided with the Swedish American Line’s ship <i>Gripsholm</i> and sank,” explains Bo Nilsson. “It was a pretty big tragedy and Piero Fornasetti has somehow had an almost psychic ability to understand what was going to happen. If you look at both of these drawings, he has suggested that it is not really easy to go out on the big seas. He has produced great drawings of starry skies for <i>Andrea Doria</i>’s ceiling and around it are huge pictures of fish, pictures of aquariums really, and many of the fishes are actually quite awful so as you should realise that this is more than just a holiday trip. In the past the stars helped us to navigate, nowadays we have modern technology. But as we saw with the <i>Andrea Doria</i>, navigating may not be that easy after all. And what is hiding in these deep waters? Horrendous sea creatures. Piero has the ability to create an image which tells us that nothing is as simple as it seems, we also have to go into our psyche and deal with it accordingly.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Fornasetti believed that “Salvation is in the imagination” and encouraged the idea to establish “a hundred schools of imagination in Italy”. The Italian places that he overhauled with Ponti were exactly such premises of excellence and imagination, total sceneries. After having decorated Milan’s Cinema Arlecchino in a modern style in 1949, they continued with the Casinò di Sanremo (1950), followed by the Pasticceria Dulciora (1951), a Milan confectionary shop where Fornasetti’s murals were a paean to days of yore and decidedly enough of a treat. They created a handful of spectacular apartment habitats in their hometown, of which the absolutely most complete was the Casa Luciano on Via Giorgio Washington – for Ponti and Fornasetti the place was nothing less than <i>la Casa di Fantasia</i> – and Fornasetti embellished every surface that was his with most clever trompe l’oeil decorations. The painted shelves were crowded with painted books.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Books, books, books, and all kinds of printed matter, these were schools, enjoyments, inspirations and collector’s items (ideally in complete series) for Piero Fornasetti: “I read everything from Abbé Ferdinando Galliani to any magazine, pamphlet, newspaper from any country; in everything there is the sign of the passage of man, and this fascinates me,” he explained. “I have gathered thousands of documents on the so-called decorative arts; it is essential to find, to collect things together so that at the right moment I can find an aesthetic reference to use for my creations, and it gives me a sense of tranquillity, another satisfaction of the ‘collector’.” In 1951, he published the poet Raffaele Carrieri’s <i>Viaggio in Italia</i>, a book that Fornasetti designed with the above-mentioned Eugene Berman’s lithographs.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Marilyn Monroe died on August 5, 1962, the day after Warhol’s <i>Campbell’s Soup Cans</i> show closed in Los Angeles. In a fit of celebrity grief, Warhol picked up a publicity photograph of her from the 1950s, cropped it and converted it without further alteration into a silk-screen template. Fornasetti was ten years ahead of Warhol with his serialisation of Lina Cavalieri’s lovely face – his paragon of female beauty whose countenance was altered for each new plate in a blaze of creativity that mostly looked like a merry riot – whereas Warhol kept his Marilyn(s) unchanged and full of replicated sorrow.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Lina Cavalieri, who was portrayed by Gina Lollobrigida in the 1955 picture show <i>La donna più bella del mondo</i>, encountered death from above when her villa in Venice was shattered in an aerial attack in 1944. Her magic was described by the designer and illustrator Erté in his autobiography <i>Things I Remember</i> in 1975: “Over the years, hundreds of journalists have asked me whom I regarded as the most beautiful woman in the world. Invariably I replied ‘Lina Cavalieri’. Why? She was tall and extremely slender – a rarity among turn-of-the-century prima donnas. Her classically pure features were enhanced by dark hair and eyes and a long swanlike neck. Yet her beauty was not cold. Her expression was full of animation, and she moved with grace and authority. Cavalieri’s most dominant quality however was her extraordinary charm.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Wherever there was extraordinary charm it was surely picked up by Fornasetti. There are two works on paper from the 1940s (not in the show): <i>Pennelli</i>, an ink drawing of his brushes which is just like a much later piece by Warhol, at that juncture before he originated his silk-screen paintings; and <i>Pennini</i>, a lithograph that zooms in on the beauty of an ordinary consumer product (pen nibs) – and again it is very proto-Warhol. Fornasetti’s <i>Piscibus</i> plates (1955) are quite astonishing pieces with a hand-painted trompe l’oeil fish (of different sorts) on a silk-screened background that mimics Spode’s idyllic <i>Blue Italian</i>. Another item worth mentioning at Artipelag is his pencil holder <i>Piede romano</i> (1960s), which also shows the ironist side of Fornasetti as it alludes to the eighty-metre-high metallic Maxi-Me Hercules that Il Duce was to erect in Rome but which ended with a mere foot.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“I consider myself also the inventor of the tray, because, at a certain point in our civilisation, no one knew how to pass a glass, a message, a poem anymore,” Fornasetti expressed. His trays depict some weird creatures of the deep, and the sun and the moon and the empyreal. However, the most brilliant tray at Artipelag is the one with his widescreen motif <i>Interno Teatro alla Scala </i>(where Cavalieri used to perform) in which a long line of ballerinas is facing us while we are facing the audience. These trays are so good that they shouldn’t pass anything else than the poetry of their own presence.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It is obvious when one walks around in this show that Fornasetti was crazy about screens, screens as room dividers (etc), screens as metaphysical displays and shelters. There is a framed photograph from the 1960s of Piero Fornasetti where his most famous screen forms an existential baseball diamond, hardly wider than in Irving Penn’s <i>Corner Portraits</i> where the angle was fixed at 22.5 degrees. The quiet origin of this work, his pièce de résistance, was the <i>Scaletta</i> screen that he made in 1955, a pictorial game in which some kind of a ladder leans against a wall full of quite impossible stairs.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">“This piece is a reconstruction of a work that Fornasetti did as a kind of therapy from 1955 to 1958. And it is a work that looks completely different, and you cannot really understand if it can be associated with what he was doing with Ponti. It is a work called <i>Stanza Metafisica</i>, the metaphysical room. The starting point is a screen that is often found in Italian churches so that it does not get too cold and draughty. They are of Oriental origin and Fornasetti was interested in both the religious and the Oriental, and that is what he was trying to unite in this work. </span><span lang="EN-GB"></span><i><span lang="EN-GB">Stanza Metafisica</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> was a room for himself – ‘a room of one’s own’ as Virginia Woolf would have called it – Piero’s own room,” says Bo Nilsson as he sits down on a very red lounge pug in the middle of a very different space.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“And we imagine that he was sitting here, surrounded by a thirty-six-piece screen that he could change according to what he wanted to achieve when he was creating. He sat in this room, he used it as his thought chair. And this is typical of that time – a renewed interest in spirituality existed in art throughout the 1950s – to go back to meditation, to understand oneself however in a slightly different way. This is a reconstruction, with the same wallpaper, because the original work that Piero did is very fragile. Here you can sit and perceive some of this spatiality which is, after all, a deceptive spatiality of a room that does not really exist. <i>Stanza Metafisica</i> is a created room with many different facets, openings and possibilities.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The spinning plates that Fornasetti’s alter ego juggler kept gyrating on his poles across the decades were bound to drop one day. When Fornasetti’s business finally plummeted, the company was suffering both from managerial issues and the customers’ sudden lack of interest in his designs. “Artists have their highs and lows. It is not only the quality of their own production that is subject to change, but above all the response of their work which depends on the spirit of the time,” clarifies Nilsson. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“And Fornasetti didn’t want to be mainstream but to stand for himself, in the midst of his own identity. This, of course, resulted in him becoming extra vulnerable, and with the large investments he made in the 60s when he opened stores in Milan and Capri and in several other places, his economic situation worsened. In connection with the recession in the 1970s, it became evident that design was perhaps not the first thing that people acquired. Fornasetti was near bankruptcy. And it also came with the spirit of the times, that minimalism – pure and very simple design – was the priority. In the 80s, he was elevated by the postmodernists, but then forgotten. Now the younger artists are looking at Fornasetti again.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Early in 1970, Fornasetti was engaged in designing the graphics for an exhibition about competition cars called <i>Bolide Design</i> at the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris (Fornasetti’s second favourite city), which employed the idea of regarding these speedsters as works of art, pretty much like Roland Barthes did in his collection of essays <i>Mythologies</i> (1957): “I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.” Fornasetti found a new outlet for his refinement of sensibility in the Galleria dei Bibliofili, which he co-founded and managed throughout the 1970s. The shows had themes such as <i>The Sun</i>, <i>The Hand</i> and <i>Owls, Grand Dukes and Co</i> and were often brimmed with thousands of objects of varied expressions and from different ages, and included Fornasetti, his fellow artists and a younger generation of creators.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Piero Fornasetti was not an easy character,” writes his son Barnaba (born in 1950) in <i>Practical Madness</i>, the book that was made for the exhibition <i>Piero Fornasetti: La folie pratique</i> at the Musée des arts décoratifs in the spring of 2015. “I only ever lived in the world of Fornasetti: the whole house was filled with the spirit of his designs, his tastes, his collections.” Quite ironically, it is Barnaba Fornasetti’s “postmodern” re-evaluations of his father’s work that are the most suitable as museum pieces in the <i>Inside Out Outside In</i> show, and the presentation is much denser in this room.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Fornasetti’s only child took the leading role in the company in 1982. “I really had to adapt production to a slightly more rigorous method,” he explains in this book. “In the end there was only one artisan left in the workshop, a pensioner from Puglia, who spent his time squabbling with my father, to whom he spoke only one day in two, but who was utterly devoted and had in the course of time acquired a remarkable skill that he was not always prepared to share. I managed to establish a trusting working relationship with him by avoiding the power struggles that Piero always found necessary, and then we began to make an inventory, to classify and restore the archives.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">In his book <i>Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s</i> (written in 1931), Fredrick Lewis Allen unknowingly sums up the pain of living in Sweden today: “You cannot fully enjoy a zoo if you have been led to think of it as the home of an enlightened citizenry.” Fornasetti at Artipelag is like leaving the muddle of a passive-aggressive totalitarian ideology, the mass hysteria and the piecemeal destruction to follow </span><span lang="EN-GB">a riverbank of excitements together with the kind Mr Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s <i>The Wind in the Willows</i> (1908):<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Never in his life had he seen a river before – this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver – glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-align: start;">It</span><span style="text-align: start;">’</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-align: start;">s</span><span style="text-align: start;"> about</span><span style="text-align: start;"> <span lang="EN-GB">the great art of being happy and making other people happy</span></span><span style="text-align: start;">, remember</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-align: start;">?</span></span><span style="text-align: start;"></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyDQNHKaYEfIAx6mjwY_pQscJNjqZp0v65qtf1aelp_eO8YkTEUvTSWFtECZKNiHyJP6Nd18kSFlQthopsCQTeb64q3-PgAjbpBoK2QPCSCyBrna5wjM-O6g7121VsAeNSxng2zKytun9I/s1600/fornasetti2.la_venditrice_di_farfalle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1233" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyDQNHKaYEfIAx6mjwY_pQscJNjqZp0v65qtf1aelp_eO8YkTEUvTSWFtECZKNiHyJP6Nd18kSFlQthopsCQTeb64q3-PgAjbpBoK2QPCSCyBrna5wjM-O6g7121VsAeNSxng2zKytun9I/s640/fornasetti2.la_venditrice_di_farfalle.jpg" width="492" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Piero Fornasetti, <i>La venditrice di farfalle</i> (The Butterfly Saleslady), 1938. Tempera on panel.</span></span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Fornasetti: Inside Out Outside In <i>at Artipelag in Stockholm (Värmdö) through January 26, 2020.</i></span></span></div>
Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-1667746292254600702019-07-08T15:09:00.008+02:002021-06-09T18:28:48.744+02:00ALL THE SOMEBODY PEOPLE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Anders Petersen, </span><i style="text-align: start;">Stockholm</i><span style="text-align: start;">.</span></span> </td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Anders Petersen, </span><i style="text-align: start;">Stockholm</i><span style="text-align: start;">.</span></span></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Anders Petersen, </span><i style="text-align: start;">Stockholm</i><span style="text-align: start;">.</span></span></td></tr>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There’s work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">– Richard Powers, <i>The Overstory</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We are in yesterday and a Nikon F leaps through the air in a caper between the drunk and the briefly gorgeous in an otherworldly place right at the beginning of Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. It is populated by individuals from the lower rungs of society, who anyhow are living their lives to the fullest on some higher grounds of hell-bent, organic existentialism.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“It was an absolutely fantastic bar. It was <i>packed </i>with people and nothing was noticeable from the outside. It was such a huge difference. And the volume was like walking into a wall – with Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little Richard, the Beatles, Stones of course, and Jonny who sang ‘Junge, komm bald wieder’ on the jukebox,” recalls the owner of that camera with an immensity of warmth. As a young man he did come back to photograph the regulars there for the remaining years of the 1960s. Half a century later there is a (so-called) gentrified hotel where this bar once was, on the other side of the road from the Zeughausmarkt Square. Still and all, Anders Petersen’s precious family of nocturnal animals has a permanent place in his legendary photobook from the 1970s, the forever gorgeous <i>Café Lehmitz</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Anders Petersen had previously been roaming the streets of Sankt Pauli in 1961 together with the young wild things of Hamburg as a seventeen-year-old. However, when he returned in October 1967 – blessed by his teacher Christer Strömholm – the only one left from his much-loved tribe of outsiders (many had not survived this unrestrained lifestyle) was Gertrud, a lady of the night who suggested that they should meet up in the wee small hours the next day in a place new to him. Petersen fell in love with the Café Lehmitz clientele right there (that his friend was two hours late did not make much difference).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Is it any good?” asked a destitute king of the Lehmitz crowd, pointing at the Nikon F that the photo student had left on the table. He told Petersen that he of course had a much better camera, a Kodak Retina, whereupon Petersen countered that he had owned a Kodak Retinette when he was little. “And we drank to that. And we continued to toast and after a few pilsners we went to the bar for some stronger stuff, Ratzeputz. We started dancing with some lookers and it was then that I discovered that the camera was gone. It was dreadful. But shortly afterwards I saw it at the other end of the bar, hurling in the air. They threw it between themselves – <i>poof! </i>– and took pictures of each other. I was a little plucky after all the drinking so I danced over to them and insisted that it was my camera, so they could just as well take a picture of me, and that made some sense. They took the picture and handed over the camera – but then I held on to it.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">During this first trip abroad as a photographer, Petersen took a picture of a Hamburg train window on which someone (in German) had scratched: “I love you. Do you love me too?” This has always been the prime motivator in Petersen’s highly subjective and exquisitely tender photography – documentary as it is in some sort of way, yes, but always centred around these auspicious circumstances of love, curiosity, transformation and altered realities; a take-the-sad-songs-and-make-them-better intensity rooted in his urges of longing and belonging, and always this validation of others. Petersen’s work is about the knowledge that we are all full of shit and yet full of wonder, if we are up for it, if only we are seen.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Luis Buñuel (through the handsome editing of Jean-Claude Carrière) described this specific force in his biography <i>My Last Breath </i>in 1982: “When we were young, love seemed powerful enough to transform our lives. Sexual desire went hand in hand with feelings of intimacy, of conquest, and of sharing, which raised us above mundane concerns and made us feel capable of great things.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Photography is not so much about the cerebral for me, it is more about intuition. And then it is actually about this matter of how you are and how you move. It is very, very crucial,” says Petersen. “For example, when you approach a group of people that you don’t know, then it is important to go straight to the nitty-gritty and tell them that I am Anders and that I am about to take pictures and why I do it. As quickly as possible. And then you ask more about them, and <i>learn</i>. Because to be with people is also a way to gain knowledge, and to recognise yourself not least, and to find a kinship and a presence in this group. Many photographers make this mistake, and I have also done that: you see something that looks like an interesting picture, and you go on thinking, and then [makes a clap with his hands] suddenly it just disappears. You should not keep thinking and calculating with risks. It is important to go straight on – and to walk straight.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We are in his lab on Stockholm’s absolutely most beautiful island, Stadsholmen, on the opposite side of the Old Town’s touristy thoroughfare with the plasticky Viking helmets. We are in a small corner, underground, next to a black staircase – as narrow and steep and dreadfully exciting as the rear airstair of a splendid old Super-Caravelle – that drops down to a medieval coal cellar which for thirty-two years has served as Anders Petersen’s magical darkroom, where days are spent on perfecting a single print, though he claims (under protest) that no one appreciates that kind of craftsmanship anymore. Binders and binders of his negatives shelve one of the walls, and two silver magnetic boards cover the other walls in this corner. For years these were cram-full of small printouts that were rearranged on a regular basis, images of his recent project.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">From late winter 2014 until late spring this year – when the largest exhibition of a photographer ever conceived in Sweden opened at the huge Liljevalchs konsthall in Stockholm – Petersen was busy working on his first in-depth examination of the people of his hometown. It is called <i>Stockholm </i>but should obviously have been titled <i>Stockholmers </i>– for geography is of little interest to him; it is the people, their stories and private spheres that make the city great according to Petersen. “One of the most difficult things to do is to photograph in the city where you live, in any case that’s how it is for me, and I needed to give myself assignments. In this project I gave myself a task several times a week to go to a new place with the camera.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">One of those many places was the suburb of Fisksätra, and in Stefan Bladh’s hour-long documentary on Petersen (recently shown on Swedish state television SVT – a shorter version is looped in a room in the <i>Stockholm </i>show) you find the photographer catching the image of an older woman with crutches who is reading a newspaper on a bench in a cheerless shopping mall. When she becomes aware of Petersen and his tiny Contax T3, he makes a hush sign with the finger to his mouth and the lady mirrors the gesture and grants him the picture he is after. He takes her hands and kisses them. The loveliness and the candour. This is Anders Petersen at work.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Orson Welles famously remarked that one of the truer meanings of the word <i>amateur</i> is someone who loves. “I am in that sense an amateur, absolutely,” responds Petersen. “And it is not about having been working as a photographer for fifty years, it’s just about <i>being </i>– and then you are an amateur. To put yourself in situations where the original, the primitive get an opportunity to be present. It is on the earth, on the ground that the creative vitamins exist, not up there among the clouds and the angels. Away with the head! Throw it away! To be conceptual is not my temperament. I prefer to be at speaking distance, and to be a part of the circumstances.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“The funny thing about Anders is that he is really never getting finished. Constantly new pictures to be taken. As a client you have to keep a cool head, accompany this talent on the journey. Anders, with his warmth and intelligence, has put many a people at work during these years,” tells the Director at Liljevalchs, Mårten Castenfors, who reveals that he had just seen the Anders Petersen retrospective at Fotografiska in Stockholm in 2014 – which followed the Paris retrospective at the Bibliothèque nationale de France – when he decided to produce and host a Petersen show-in-the-making, <i>Stockholm</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“I am personally a minimalist, a sparse boy who travels between home and Liljevalchs every day and sees very little of Stockholm. This is a unique insight into the other Stockholm, which I have no idea about,” Castenfors reflects. “Anders has really come close to a Stockholm that also exists. And when I see the photographs I sense, regardless of the motif, the earnestness and sympathy for what is in front of the lens. And if I look at the exhibition it has become an extremely interesting document about the diversity that exists in today’s Stockholm, highbrow as well as lowbrow, life in the suburbs as well as the Nobel Banquet. Nothing is missing, and for that I am more than grateful.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">That’s the way it is with Anders Petersen’s photography. He extracts what is us – and with that, what is him. <i>Stockholm </i>dwells (more than anything else he has done) in a time-and-space area that is rare, peculiar and still very real, as if he wanted to stimulate a Verfremdungseffekt in these pictures. “Exactly, that is how I see it too. You walk around the streets, and are a little lost. Thus, there are so many impressions that attack you – from the top, from the bottom, from the sides, from behind – and this is to some extent the diversity that I want to show in this selection. It is too much of everything. It is difficult to see, you have to be very focused to be able to distinguish, and I have tried to just opt for the parts and to put them together in a new way,” Petersen replies.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Stockholm is a city where you can walk around for hours without meeting the eyes of another human being, and for a decade without ever receiving a compliment, and probably for a hundred years before someone invites you home – as Susan Sontag argued in 1969, “Being with people feels like work for them, far more than it does like nourishment.” For a person who has always been interested in “what’s behind all the fucking closed doors”, Petersen uses his camera in genius ways to unlock all sorts of gates and inhibitions.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">He explains that with <i>Stockholm </i>he lured himself to be surprised all over again. “Innocence has a lot to do with life and photography. Photography is not about photography but about completely different things. Above all, it is about adventure and, depending on who you are, it is about looking for an answer to the questions that lie in wait.” </span><span lang="EN-GB">Something very near in sentiment to what Robert Louis Stephenson observed in his travel memoir <i>The Silverado Squatters </i>(1883): “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Without knowing about this quote, this is exactly what I think, no matter where we come from and our cultures,” he says. “The more you are going around and meet people, you discover that we are a large family and that we are not so different. We are family members, we are relatives the whole bunch, and that is the very underpinning of everything. And if you have that idea it is fantastic to see how many doors are being opened for you. And it is important that the doors are opened because I am not so interested in the surface or what people represent, but mostly what is <i>inside </i>– for example, our longing, our thoughts, our questions. Other people’s questions are also your own questions. You should remember that and not be dazzled by the outside too much. In order to get on the right track, you have to enter. And when you come in things are happening.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">One such image, and for the <i>Stockholm </i>project one of the not so many pictures photographed in landscape mode, shows a woman and her dog in what looks like a weird internal staring contest (teeth shown as to trigger aggression), but Petersen assures that they had a lovely time together over a <i>fika </i>(Swedish coffee break) in the woman’s home. “If you shoot in Rome, Saint-Étienne, Madrid or Barcelona, it is a completely different matter because every street in these cities is like a scene. You really only have to hold up the camera and the pictures jump in like rabbits. But here you have to go in where people live, and <i>there </i>it happens. This is the case in Scandinavia, especially in Sweden. It is rather little that is actually happening over a whole year, but there is a big difference in the summer months.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There are quite many pictures of people on their balconies – a remark that takes Petersen by surprise. He figures that they are the outcome of the need for daylight, pure and simple. And there are many pictures of people with tattoos, however it is not the tattoos as such that fascinate him, “it’s just that it is so very common. Sweden has the largest number of head tattoos in the world, this I know as a fact. Previously it was a mark that you came from the prison, that you were a criminal or a sailor. I have photographed in a prison and there the tattoos mean something. Today they mean very little, it is just a decoration, a fashion above all.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">It is no secret of course that Petersen photographs people that he can identify with and that his photography is a kind of enamoured family album. </span><span lang="EN-GB">In his book <i>The Ascent of Man </i>(1973), following his BBC television series of that year, Jacob Bronowski writes that “We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilisation, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.” Perhaps no other picture represents Petersen’s quest for companionship without the rosy narratives as much as his augmented self-portrait </span><i><span lang="EN-GB">Lilly and Rosen </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">(1968) from <i>Café Lehmitz</i>, in which a bare-chested man with a girl tattoo is seeking comfort in the bosom of a woman who accepts him with a heartful laugh. This very tender but in no way uncomplicated image is also the face for the Tom Waits album <i>Rain Dogs </i>(1985).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A <i>Stockholm </i>picture from a restaurant kitchen with a parade of pickled cucumbers just out of the brine is very Petersen, and even more so are his individual snowmen, these mourning human figures that are eighty per cent air. “There is something that I think is so obvious in Sweden and that is the melancholy, the Scandinavian melancholy, which is poignant and very beautiful. And there is a lot of it in the snowman, you see. Their lives are short. I had a snowman standing outside the door here for four days, and then it languished away. But the snowman that I photographed on Katarinavägen has a twig mouth so it smiles a bit obliquely.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The animals and the animalistic are part of everything in his work, and <i>Stockholm </i>is no exception. “The primitive is a bit ‘back to basic’. With primitive I do not mean to go to any extremes – if you are hungry then you eat, if you want to say something you say it, if you are angry you are angry, if you are sorry you are sorry – it is about trying to approach the simple things, it isn’t more complicated than that. And you show it, you don’t hide it. It is a way of dealing with things in everyday life and in the work to be like that. It does not mean that you are in any way strong, you are never strong enough. It is bullshit when people say that you have to be strong. In fact, you have to be weak enough because it is then that you open up for opportunities, both for yourself and for others, by showing your fear, your anxiety, your questions, your vulnerability. And I think that this is a fundamental part of being present in what you are photographing.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Anders Petersen has a metaphor for what is making his photography so distinct and that is the example of the pyramid. “By that I mean that from the beginning you are at the bottom – there you have your friends, food, good wine – but none of that gets you to work as a photographer. It is wonderful if you have a security, but you have to give away the security, scale it off to arrive at a confidence in yourself. You must believe in yourself. Who are you? You must have an idea of why you do this. What is important? The more you peel the closer you get to the capstone. You sharpen it and finally you are so feverish, and that is when you can go on. And then you are a bit dangerous.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“I have seen so many different types of photographers over the years, but what unites them is usually that they are a bit shy and cautious people, not so outrageous – that they are curious of course, that they are patient, a little stubborn, that they are searching and searching and not giving up. But then it is another thing that may not be so nice when I think of the people I know, and whom I have seen photograph, and that is that they are so incredibly sharpened and focused that it is like they are in a small bubble. They are only inside the creation in some way, and it is a phenomenon for better or worse because it can mean that they are not particularly sensitive, or they can even be rather ruthless. If you look at some of the war photographers, it is a necessity that when they hold the camera it becomes a protection so that they dare to do things. But that also applies to street photography. You can never trust what a photographer really says. That is typical for photographers, they have a bad vision, they see what they want to see.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Twice before and long ago has Petersen been working on a photographic project on his hometown. In 1969 he and his friend Kenneth Gustavsson (with whom he started Saftra, a famous cooperative of photographers, the following year) made a work together with two very gifted architects at the Stockholm City Museum called <i>The City in Return</i>, an exhibition that delineated both the city’s slum areas and the ravages of a Social Democratic warlord Mayor whose antiseptic demolitions were schemed to erase the better part of Stockholm’s history, vitality and great beauty. And then again in 1973 when he photographed merrymakers at the uncharming amusement park Gröna Lund, which is also the title of his first photobook since all the seven publishers whom Petersen approached in Sweden turned down his pictures from Café Lehmitz.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The large and lush <i>Stockholm </i>assignment very modestly began in a café at the corner of Stortorget in the Old Town (the Grand Square where the Stockholm Bloodbath took place in 1520) when Petersen’s friend Angie Åström came back from Paris with an idea. She had been living in Paris for several years and reflected how common it was that the exhibitions in this city depicted its people in various ways. At the opening of Petersen’s retrospective in the Bibliothèque nationale’s glorious 17<sup>th</sup>-century building in the late autumn of 2013, she “encountered residences from all over the world, but Anders’s hometown was missing on this map of pictures”. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“The reason that I contacted Liljevalchs about a request for the <i>Stockholm </i>project with Anders Petersen arises out of how I figured a similar series of pictures would materialise in Paris,” explains Angie Åström. “The large range of images was not the intention from the beginning, but the renovation and extension of the art gallery led to the continuation of the work with the pictures for four years. It was in this way that the <i>Stockholm </i>project started, and five years later I have not tired of his pictures or his personality. On the contrary, he is even more interesting as a photographer today. Anders’s idea of a diversity of images instead of the individual photograph generates entirely new ways of thinking.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A bit over two thousand Tri-X negatives were scanned for the <i>Stockholm </i>show. “I made contact sheets and from these I chose the negatives to be scanned, and then I selected too much because you never know how it might work out. A very idiotic process really because it takes such a time and costs money, but that is how it is to be analogue and at the same time insist on doing digital things,” says Petersen. “From these we selected about eight hundred pictures and processed and copied the scanned files much like you do analogue in the darkroom. And then we made a selection from it, seven hundred pictures, but it was too much.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The around five hundred contrasty printouts do look fantastic, especially the big ones presented in blocks and nailed to the walls in the major of the eleven rooms at Liljevalchs. “The great work with <i>Stockholm </i>was actually done by Erhan Akbulut. He is a digital editor who has worked for Magnum in Turkey, a maestro who I met in Istanbul. Now we have made five books together. He sits with the newly-scanned file and I sit behind and scream ‘Lighter, no darker!’ It is an exhausting and demanding process, as you understand, especially for him. I did a residence there for two weeks and he developed the films and made contact sheets and I saw that he had a feeling for it. And then he came to Stockholm, and now he lives here and is together with an adorable Norwegian.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Anders Petersen grew up on the posh Lidingö which is one of the islands in the inner archipelago of Stockholm. When he was fourteen the family moved to the city of Karlstad in Värmland, a part of the country that Petersen is very fond of and a province that wrenches Sweden’s largest lake, Vänern. When he was seventeen, Petersen’s parents wanted to do something about his bad results at school so they sent him to the affluent Hamburg-Groß Flottbek district in order to learn German. It did not work out so well with his wealthy host family whose garden he was expected to maintain. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Soon enough Petersen found his peers in the disreputable underworld of Sankt Pauli. “It was a gang that came from England, France, Italy, America – and then I met a Finnish girl, Vanja – and they were not god’s best children but I liked them very much,” says Petersen with a lot of affection in his voice. “I got the whole package. And this package included companionship and a kind of curiosity on life, unfortunately also drugs and not entirely legal things. It became very clear to me that alone you are nothing, it is with friends that you can create a platform for something worth standing for.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When Petersen shortly returned to Karlstad from Stockholm to write for the morning paper <i>Nya Wermlands-Tidningen</i>, he had no intention whatsoever to become a photographer. One day the young man was waiting to get his hair cut. Since Petersen has always liked crosswords he flipped through a women’s magazine when a minute photo of a snowy Parisian cemetery grabbed him with a bang. “I was very affected by the picture, that the photographer managed to interlace this idea that the dead were socialising at night when no one was seeing anything and that the footsteps revealed them. It was so poetic, so loaded, but I had no idea who had taken the picture.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“This thing with being a photographer has never really interested me,” he implies. “I was painting and trying to write before, but I never really got close. When you write you are usually very alone, and same when you sit on your chamber and paint. In photography it is so wonderful that you can be in the middle of a situation with a lot of people and you can talk, you can share views, there is a mutuality in it, and at the same time you can photograph without making a big deal of it.” The next year in Stockholm, in 1966, Petersen met some photographer friends. One of them was Kenneth Gustavsson who – much illegally – provided him with a key to Christer Strömholm’s Photo School whose darkroom Petersen (still much illegally) began to use each night between twelve and four.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Eventually Petersen was caught one night when there were loud bangs on the door to the darkroom. It was the great man himself – the photographer of the metaphoric 1959 picture of the Montparnasse cemetery, where the tombs have begun to rattle and ghostly tiptoe steps make it through the snow. “I was convinced that he would notify the police so my confidence in him grew when he instead just asked me if I wanted to begin at the school.” Petersen was twenty-two years old when he met Christer Strömholm for the first time that night.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“He had already when I started at the school, and how I started there, given me an idea of how to be and how to trust someone, and <i>see </i>someone. So, he not only became a teacher for me or the principal at the school, but also a close friend I would like to say. He also became a deputy dad. I was disconsolate when he died, it was horrible. He had his stroke in 1982 but then he continued for twenty years, and he trained. But his photography was not the same. He focused on stationary motifs, Madonna pictures, symbol images and such. No outreaching photography, it was difficult with the stick. But he went on.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There was language teaching, history teaching, social studies, writing and photo history continuously at Strömholm’s Photo School. “I remember the first few times when we were at Klippgatan 19C, when we sat there and he initially just talked about his photography. This was not a man of many words, he was more Hemingwayan. It was short sentences and his stories were more like statements in which he mentioned what he had done. And his presence on the scene was ... yes, it was electric in some way. We were quite smitten. Especially when you saw his pictures from <i>Poste Restante </i>[1967] which is a fantastic collection that tells a lot about his life and upbringing and about his fears. And he shared this with us, briefly and distinctly, and said names that showed that he knew things. But then I had the old habit that I used to come in early, already at eight, and there in the windowsills lay his pictures in 18 x 24 size which had been copied during the night.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“And I looked at the pictures that lay there and it was an incomparable experience. I understood that this was not just a guy who was anyone but a narrator who also <i>made </i>pictures, and when you pulled them together you got Christer and his dreams, his magic and visions. He grew enormously. Another thing that was so nice with him was that he was so adventurous, he had such an appetite for life, even after his stroke. I remember, I went in his Volvo and we were somewhere in the Vasastaden district and suddenly he said, ‘Did you see? But didn’t you see the legs?’ [Petersen mimics Strömholm’s broad Stockholm accent]. He made a U-turn and drove towards the traffic and back and crawled forwards – and there came a girl with very nice legs and high-heeled shoes.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There were new assignments to solve each week at the school, “like ‘white egg against white background’, which was certainly good but not so fascinating. And then I asked him if it was okay if I went to Hamburg to photograph my old friends, because they had something that I did not have with my bourgeois background. So, it was both a protest and a kind of idea of community that I wanted to photograph.” This was ten years after <i>On the Road </i>(1957) with Kerouac’s gallery of odd ones out, “the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Now six years older, Petersen returned to Hamburg only to find that his desirous Sankt Pauli family was gone – everyone except Gertrud who he found at the Scandi-Bar, which was located on Seilerstraße (a parallel street to Reeperbahn), “a place that opened at twelve o’clock at night, and it was full of striptease stars, transvestites and everything else who used to come there. It is very interesting. You learn a lot about life.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Gertrud mostly knew him as a painter since he used to sell his postcard drawings at the Fischmarkt every Sunday. “She did not like the idea of me being a photographer, but after three pilsners she changed her mind and said that I could come to Lehmitz at one o’clock the next night.” Though Petersen couldn’t have had a more celebratory start at Café Lehmitz, he did not at first realise what a treasure trove for situational photography that he had run into. “No, no, not at all. This was just a place that I came to, but then I liked the people more and more when I got to know them, and we got along really well. I had to convince them somehow. They were exceptionally kind and decent people,” he answers. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“They were people affected by circumstances in different ways. Much like in Fassbinder’s <i>Berlin Alexanderplatz </i>[1980], a fantastic effort, with the protagonist coming out of prison and is about to start a new life. He is a sensitive, living person, and he has to conduct himself all the time. And it is so difficult. It is through his eyes that the film illustrates various things. There are wonderful films that Fassbinder has done. Even his last film was strong, <i>Querelle </i>[1982], the one about the sailors written by Jean Genet.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There were several men just like the fictive Franz Biberkopf in Petersen’s new Lehmitz family. “I am a small guy. I was no threat to them, and above all I fell in very well with Lothar who was a fellow who had very great respect. There were really only two things I can say that he honestly liked: his dog and Ramona. Ramona was actually called Karl-Heinz. At the age of nineteen, she changed her name and started with hormone injections, and she was doing that while I met her. Sometimes she was a man, sometimes she was a woman, and then she was a stripper at the Roxy-Bar on Große Freiheit. And Lothar had done something terrible and had been in prison for ten years. He had a gentleness in the midst of everything that I believe opened for a kind of mutuality.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Lothar, his black poodle and Ramona are also featured in the last section of Anders Petersen’s monograph that came out in 2013. When Petersen returned to Hamburg many years after Lehmitz, Lothar had become a manager of a neighbourhood brothel business in Sankt Pauli. “In the courtyard building he had three older women who worked there, he himself lived in a small outhouse along with one of them. And he had a vegetable patch because he was very keen that everyone should eat well. He cooked for them.” Lothar was one of the Lehmitz jailbirds who convinced Petersen that he should photograph the unseen life inside a penitentiary, an idea that resulted in Petersen’s threefold institutional series (and books) about people in a prison, in the eldercare and in a mental hospital.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">Anders Petersen’s first solo show was at Café Lehmitz in 1970. Three hundred and fifty photographs nailed to the walls, and the object of the game was that anyone who recognised him- or herself in a picture was free to bring it home. Later that year, Petersen showed his <i>Café Lehmitz </i>pictures in Stockholm with sounds from the Hamburg bar filling the gallery. (Liljevalchs has a slideshow room with sounds from Stockholm.) But Petersen had to wait until a fortunate meeting at the Rencontres d’Arles in 1977 to get his work recognised – <i>Café Lehmitz </i>was finally released in a German edition in 1978, and </span><span lang="EN-US">the following year as <i>Le Bistro d'Hambourg</i>. A Swedish print appeared fourteen years after this masterpiece was completed.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Much of the 1970s was a difficult time for Petersen. He tried to photograph for some magazines in Sweden and, as a rather desperate measure, attempted to become a man with a movie camera during his two years at the Dramatiska Institutet (Stockholm University of the Arts). “I was quite sad then and figured that film is still quite close to photography. But they are two completely different things. At that time, I wanted to go out with a small film camera and film in much the same way as I photograph. But it was very difficult because it requires a whole staff of people to take care of it, and that is crazy and not my thing. I am more of a solitaire who builds relationships.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Peter Ustinov is the only light (beside David Bowie) in Hermann Vaske’s misdirected documentary <i>Why Are We Creative? </i>(2018) in which the British actor delineates the case of Albert Einstein who belonged to a yachting club in Zurich, though he preferred to take out his jollyboat on days when there was not even a breeze: “But Einstein, when everything was reduced to the fact that there was no wind, began to notice things he would not have noticed had there been wind. And, therefore for him, it was most important to go sailing on an unpropitious day. He never won any regattas in his time, but he did notice all sorts of things, which eventually led to the ‘Theory of Creativity’.” And that is how Anders Petersen photographed his institutional trilogy (1981–1995) – with the spark of life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“That is a fairly striking image,” Petersen replies, “because it is about taking the time, both as a human being and a photographer, and not looking for the spectacular and dramatic situations. Because if you do, you will end up in a photography that easily depicts the superficial. I am looking to find a photography that unites people instead of isolating them. I want to obtain a photography that people can identify with and recognise themselves in. And when it comes to people, there is no better way than to just sit down and talk with them, it’s that simple. One must absolutely have a curiosity that is true and correct, otherwise it doesn’t work.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Although the <i>Nobody Has Seen It All </i>series from a mental hospital was the last in the trilogy of confined people, Petersen ran into difficulties when he was getting too emotively involved with the patients. “It is a creative act when you start shooting and are in the middle of everything. Sometimes I have been too close and standing with both feet in the situation, and that is not negotiable. And I made many, many mistakes then. I became too emotional so I couldn’t handle it visually. I usually come back and give away pictures but I could not do it then, something was absolutely wrong. I have learned to stand with one foot inside and the other outside the situation. I am like a rubber band so that I have an eye on what is happening and then I don’t get so emotionally engaged.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Petersen talks about photo history as a family tree where he belongs to a branch of photographers with whom he can easily recognise himself. “First, we have Strömholm with his persistence, sensitivity, vulnerability. And then we have Brassaï, the Parisian photographer who came out in the 1930s with his book <i>Paris de nuit</i>. And then Weegee. I especially like <i>Naked City</i>, which came out in 1945, it is such a strong account of its time. Then we have such greats as Lisette Model, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin today, Robert Frank of course, and Daidō Moriyama who now receives the Hasselblad Award.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">What is fascinating about Moriyama’s work? “His waywardness, his amateurishness and that he <i>insists </i>all the time, he releases book after book. Overall, his photography is about his life to begin with, but also about our time. We had an exhibition at the Rat Hole Gallery in Tokyo, and then I was invited to his little place in Shinjuku above a bar, a room with a small sofa. Everything is small. There he puts up his latest pictures. He asked the people in the bar to come up with whiskey and pilsner, and then I sat there talking with Daidō and it was very, very sympathetic. We drank whiskey in a very special way as they do in Japan, one part Japanese whiskey and one part sparkling water.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“This particular episode was in 2008 and then we talked about how it is with students. He himself has had a lot of workshops and he had almost like a school in the late 1970s. He told me that it became too much for him in the end, because the students became like his children and it was difficult to take care of everything. In Japan, it is almost in the national character that it is very passionate – if they are into something, they are into it one hundred per cent. We talked about how important it is to learn from a younger generation and how a relationship with other people can develop. And then I thought about my relationship with Christer Strömholm. It is funny, the pictures that Moriyama took in the 1960s are very similar to the pictures that Christer took in the 60s, but they did absolutely not know each other.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">He narrates an episode during a residence in Rome when a fan-turned-stalker silently followed him for a whole day, trying to mimic his shots and catch some of Petersen’s genius. He loves to teach, though – “They think that I come there as a fucking teacher and they are completely wrong! I am the student! I learn what a younger generation is doing,” he says smiling – but he has cut back on his workshops to only a few times a year. “Mutuality is magical,” says Petersen, “it is what defines life and serves as a springboard into other circumstances and situations.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“It was tough to do <i>Café Lehmitz </i>because I had so many slurs from many parts in Sweden, from the political right and the proletarian people. But one has to stay clear of what others think because it is so devastating. I have my vision and it is completely clear and I know why I do things. And it is obvious that you are not immune to criticism, but you still have to be equipped for it. You learn to deal with it after a while. In France, there is a completely different sense of knowledge than in Sweden, and they can handle the information flow in a completely different way. I try to keep everything as clean as possible and that is the only way. From Lehmitz until today, there is a red thread that deals with reciprocity and a presence in people, where I want to be a part of them and not someone from the outside, whether it is a princess or a homeless person.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">As for <i>Stockholm</i>, Petersen operated much like the old telecom tower of the 1890s, from which 5,500 wires were suspended over the city in order to make a connection with the Stockholmers. Everyone he has connected with is – to quote William S Burroughs in <i>Queer </i>(written in the 1950s) – “like a photon emerging from the haze of insubstantiality to leave an indelible recording”, it’s just that “insubstantial” is never the right word for the individuals in Petersen’s photographs. Whatever these <i>Stockholm </i>people are up to they are quite remarkable. In a picture someone has been drawing a heart and written “I love you” four times without even begging for something in return. Though life is far from perfect, these pictures are.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Somewhere at Liljevalchs is a photograph that Petersen has taken of his notice board at home. It shows (among other things) a press clip with a picture from <i>Café Lehmitz </i>and a cropped image of Robert Doisneau’s <i>Coco </i>(1952) in his bowler hat, and that smile as wide and peculiar as the one on the fugacious snowman on Katarinavägen. <i>Stockholm </i>stands, in a host of ways, with one foot inside those past ages and together with the curious characters who made them real and fulfilling. Half hidden behind the flap of the inner cover at the end of the catalogue is a greeting to Lilly and Rosen, as lustrous, melancholy and life-affirming as everything else in this show: a couple’s tender caress on a bed, a man’s head against a chest, again – and then (you just know it) the whispering words of the receiving naked body, “I love you.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We are in today and Anders Petersen sees what he wants to see.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">All the somebody people.</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiL3oFU0rKNZ50yiycwRJQ0K8yFm1DqUKakRq-zNS0y7VEkutv32peNh-c5uNLoBwhc69MXqQXsBWS7UQT0Nxdb7ohHaw5YOBMG8VhsLWIV1FAlTXZovbLL8SJMVtjD9k2wLFlQBpQHoKu/s1600/anders_petersen.stockholm.liljevalchs4.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1067" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiL3oFU0rKNZ50yiycwRJQ0K8yFm1DqUKakRq-zNS0y7VEkutv32peNh-c5uNLoBwhc69MXqQXsBWS7UQT0Nxdb7ohHaw5YOBMG8VhsLWIV1FAlTXZovbLL8SJMVtjD9k2wLFlQBpQHoKu/s640/anders_petersen.stockholm.liljevalchs4.jpg" width="426" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Anders Petersen, </span><i style="text-align: start;">Stockholm</i><span style="text-align: start;">.</span></span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgckZAgDlW-EC319tarCH6cNzqnREeQLb2QRVSCisxQbolsbp2EUEh55zFbPSaS90kAT_sNzqG5XtLSjYPdNA4dMdsuUFC1FCwmo8ajRBGV-7ELGdQXGbpZsU2dRLruiubxzL6uPdeeqjMc/s1600/anders_petersen.stockholm.liljevalchs5.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1067" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgckZAgDlW-EC319tarCH6cNzqnREeQLb2QRVSCisxQbolsbp2EUEh55zFbPSaS90kAT_sNzqG5XtLSjYPdNA4dMdsuUFC1FCwmo8ajRBGV-7ELGdQXGbpZsU2dRLruiubxzL6uPdeeqjMc/s640/anders_petersen.stockholm.liljevalchs5.jpg" width="426" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Anders Petersen, </span><i style="text-align: start;">Stockholm</i><span style="text-align: start;">.</span></span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2O9vM82O8artbSrKb6WfJR4G0kvbgoeiavJsJhBnx4Nc6wuc2EJ_jCFCLZVjV156qOmSsBROUvOAZbZik_KiY15LZixd77ua7vP9_4aW4RXGRBLm9SeXf3J5M2tFXtmNWGwkw_jbfi6ye/s1600/anders_petersen.stockholm.liljevalchs6.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1067" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2O9vM82O8artbSrKb6WfJR4G0kvbgoeiavJsJhBnx4Nc6wuc2EJ_jCFCLZVjV156qOmSsBROUvOAZbZik_KiY15LZixd77ua7vP9_4aW4RXGRBLm9SeXf3J5M2tFXtmNWGwkw_jbfi6ye/s640/anders_petersen.stockholm.liljevalchs6.jpg" width="426" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Anders Petersen, </span><i style="text-align: start;">Stockholm</i><span style="text-align: start;">.</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Anders Petersen – Stockholm </span></span><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>at Liljevalchs konsthall in Stockholm through September 1, 2019.</i></span></span></span></div>
Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-71040740316148123262019-05-20T21:35:00.001+02:002021-06-26T21:47:30.718+02:00MENSCHEN<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqRA78spBdahm23h7jIovYxZ9ixrPWPCmObrgdDcCvJe3wMQVvqhJkobxNWrgSv1RF3vx6KW5lHZ0mOxA0-0wP1tmT2E6ppNcg_A4nNF7eoIaZH2AF8Z6tfWrZmsY4yEdz9AcVglD1Yp4x/s1600/back_to_paradise1.3829_KirchnerEL_FC_.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="958" data-original-width="1600" height="382" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqRA78spBdahm23h7jIovYxZ9ixrPWPCmObrgdDcCvJe3wMQVvqhJkobxNWrgSv1RF3vx6KW5lHZ0mOxA0-0wP1tmT2E6ppNcg_A4nNF7eoIaZH2AF8Z6tfWrZmsY4yEdz9AcVglD1Yp4x/s640/back_to_paradise1.3829_KirchnerEL_FC_.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;">Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, <i>The Wanderer</i>, 1922. Courtesy of Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau and Institut für Kulturaustausch Tübingen. Photo: Jörg Müller.</span></span></td></tr>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In Expressionism there is an undeniable tendency away from the natural, the plausible and the normal towards the primitive, the passionate and the shrill … In its restlessness and its tendency towards the extreme the Expressionist movement seems quintessentially German, rather than simply modernist.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">– R S Furness, <i>Expressionism</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">“Never look away,” says the pleasant young woman in a pistachio green dress to Kurt, a boy of six, as they move hand in hand through the rooms of Dresden’s <i>Schandausstellung </i>during the first year of the Third Reich, 1933 – though in this significant film by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck the year is set to 1937 – and when the brilliancy of an abstract little painting by Kandinsky makes them stop in their tracks, away from the smear and the snigger of the guide, aunt Elisabeth becomes a careless whisper: “Don’t tell anyone but I like it.” This was the start of Nazi Germany’s “shaming exhibitions” which would swell into the horrendous <i>Entartete Kunst </i>(“degenerate art”) exhibitions a few years later, with its core of genuine German artists who spoke like </span><span lang="EN-GB">Zarathustra: “You must have chaos in yourselves to give birth to a dancing star.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Paul Ferdinand Schmidt was dismissed from his post as the Director of Stadtmuseum Dresden ten years before the National Socialists’ seize of power, for filling the place with a considerable collection of works from the Brücke (Bridge) group and other luminous, knotty artists of the Expressionist movement. <i>Never Look Away </i>(2018) begins with that idiot guide slandering a slightly prismatic painting of a blue horse by Franz Marc who was a founding member of the other major group of Expressionists, the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider). Six hundred and fifty works of art of this kind by one hundred and twelve artists, most of them Expressionists, were selected for the first of several <i>Entartete Kunst </i>exhibitions that would tour the Reich from the summer of 1937.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">On July 19, 1937, the new neoclassical propaganda temple Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) at 1 Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich was inaugurated with another load of animosities from the Aryan soapbox orator Adolf Hitler: </span><span lang="EN-GB">“The mass of the people moved through our art exhibitions in a completely uninterested fashion or stayed away altogether. The people’s healthy perceptions recognised that all that canvas smearing was really the outcome of an impudent and unashamed arrogance or of a simply shocking lack of skill. Millions of people felt instinctively that these art stammers of the last few decades were more like the achievements that might have been produced by untalented children from eight to ten years of age and could under no circumstances be regarded as the expression of our own time or of the German future.” </span><span lang="EN-GB">This was the end of Expressionism, the avant-garde, spirit, life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">Joseph Goebbels, the clubfooted Minister of Propaganda who had the looks to match a puissant Expressionist portrait, contented himself with Wolfgang Willrich’s book of January 1937 </span><span lang="EN-GB">– <i>Cleansing of the German Art Temples: An Art-Political Polemic for the Recovery of German Art in the Spirit of Nordic Style </i>(co-written by the malignant art educator </span><span lang="EN-GB">Walter Hansen) </span><span lang="EN-GB">– which became the template for the purge surrounding the whole <i>Entartete Kunst </i>circus. By June 30, 1937, the Führer commanded his favourite painter Adolf Ziegler, President of the Reichskammer der bildenden Künste (the Reich Chamber of Culture), to “select and impound works of German art of decline since 1910 currently in the possession of the Reich, the states, and the communes, from the fields of painting and sculpture, for the purposes of an exhibition”. </span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">The Munich exhibition was thus followed through in two rapid weeks. <i>The Great German Art Exhibition</i>, with the official daubers and sculptors of Nazi banality and propaganda (Willrich included), took up the whole ground floor of the German art temple on </span><span lang="EN-GB">Prinzregentenstrasse. The show was a public fiasco</span><span lang="EN-GB">. As an overture to enter the exhibition of the “degenerates”, the visitors had to climb some deliberately giddy, shaky steps to the <i>Entartete Kunst </i>exhibition which was exactly what twenty thousand visitors did every day for the almost four and a half months that the show(s) lasted. Up here were works of art that at once expressed their time and the funereal course of the German future. During the second part of 1937, Ziegler’s five-man commission confiscated twenty thousand works by fourteen hundred artists; a quarter of these pieces were thrown into a bonfire on March 20, 1939 outside a Berlin fire station.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">In Berlin on December 18, 1901, the last of the thirty-two kitsch-baroque statues representing the idols of the German past was uncovered at the beginning of the all new boulevard </span><span lang="EN-GB">Siegesallee (at the Platz der Republik). The public found them ridiculous and pompous and on par with their “art expert” sovereign, who made his much famous speech next to a marbled Kaiser Wilhelm I: </span><span lang="EN-GB">“The thought fills me with pride and happiness today that Berlin stands before all the world with artists who are able to produce something of such magnificence. It shows that the Berlin School of Sculpture is at a level which even the Renaissance could not possibly have surpassed,” asserted </span><span lang="EN-GB">Wilhelm II</span><span lang="EN-GB">, Kaiser of the German empire and King of Prussia from 1888 to the end of World War I when he fled the country.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">“</span><span lang="EN-GB">Only the Germans remain and are above others called upon to guard these great ideals to enable the working and toiling classes, too, to become inspired by the beautiful and to help them liberate themselves from the constraints of their ordinary thoughts and attitudes,” the Kaiser went on. “But when art, as often happens today, shows us only misery, and shows it to us even uglier than misery is anyway, then art commits a sin against the German people. The supreme task of our cultural effort is to foster our ideals. If we are and want to remain a model for other nations, our entire people must share in this effort, and if culture is to fulfil its task completely it must reach down to the lowest levels of the population. That can be done only if art hold out its hand to raise the people up, instead of descending into the gutter.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">The Expressionists went down the slippery slopes of human living. “Art as suffering and redemption, as a metaphysical outcry – this seemed to be the secret of the distortions and alienations of form which were supposedly typical of German art since the Middle Ages,” argues Norbert Wolf in <i>Ernst </i><i>Ludwig Kirchner, 1880–1938: On the Edge of the Abyss of Time</i>. The Expressionists were a motley crew of aberrant painters and printmakers (Expressionism was by and by applied to plays, literature, dance and atonal music). They were extravagant and headstrong – most of them were in their early twenties at the beginning of the movement. Their art came with a plan for unrestraint and aesthetic rebellion against the hidebound institutional society of Wilhelmine Germany and a longing for an i</span><span lang="EN-GB">dealist counterworld </span><span lang="EN-GB">through unlearning and revamping </span><span lang="EN-GB">the old creeds.</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">According to Kirchner, one of the original Brücke members (and one of the greatest names in Expressionism), “A painter paints the appearances of things, not their objective correctness; in fact, he creates new appearances of things.” The Expressionists explored t</span><span lang="EN-GB">he sound and vision of the inner worlds </span><span lang="EN-GB">of their unsnarled souls. They used stark, unmixed colours to paint the forms of internality, the subjective self and the whole human cosmos – they were well aware of other dimensions of reality – as Ludwig Meidner put it, “Paint your grief, your entire insanity and sanity out of the whole of your being.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">The Expressionists were for the colourful, the pitchy, the gleeful and the dolorous, instincts, sexual desires, distortions and hyperbole, the writings of Nietzsche, a nostalgia for a Golden Age, a paradise fraught with discrepancies, utopianism, exoticizing fancies about cultures and people of distant (fantasy) lands, the primitivist, the tribal, the late Middle Ages, metropolitan life, the unsullied authentic, internality and bodily merriments, dance, coitus, skinny dipping, new forms, Jugendstil, collaborations, over-excitedness, Arts and Crafts and principles before the industrial revolution, the body and the psyche, Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Dürer, the <i>Isenheim Altarpiece</i></span><span lang="EN-GB">, essences, </span><span lang="EN-GB">Romanticism, </span><span lang="EN-GB">variety shows, vaudeville, the grotesque, circus freaks and the lowly.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This purely domestic modernist movement came to fruition between Scylla and Charybdis, between Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler: “The era of German Expressionism was finally extinguished by the Nazi dictatorship in 1933. But its most incandescent phase of 1910–1920 left a legacy that has caused reverberations ever since. It was a period of intellectual adventure, passionate idealism, and deep yearnings for spiritual renewal. Increasingly, as some artists recognised the political danger of Expressionism’s characteristic inwardness, they became more committed to exploring its potential for political engagement or wider social reform. But utopian aspirations and the high stakes involved in ascribing a redemptive function to art, meant that Expressionism also bore an immense potential for despair, disillusionment and atrophy,” clarifies Ashley Bassey in <i>Expressionism</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“As far as French art is concerned, the light definitely comes to us today from Germany. Not a day passes without an exhibition of a new French artist opening in Berlin, Munich, Düsseldorf or Cologne,” wrote the great Parisian critic and poet Apollinaire in <i>Paris-Journal </i>on July 3, 1914, and he did not overstate it. “Unadmitted envy of the world capital of art, Paris, certainly played a role here, since all of the revolutionary decisions that shaped modern art had been taken in France,” argues Norbert Wolf in his book on Kirchner. “Nowhere were these currents registered more enthusiastically than in the officially so philistine Wilhelmine Germany. Prior to the First World War, liberal museum directors, progressive art historians, open-minded collectors and dealers had ensued that imperial salon painting would not have a monopoly on setting the tone, and encouraged that very ‘gutter art’ the powers-that-be despised.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The remarkable <i>Sonderbund </i>exhibition of 1912 presented more of the French modernists than anywhere in France: twenty-six works by Cézanne, twenty-five by Gauguin and sixteen by Picasso – and a whopping one hundred and twenty-five works by the finally-appreciated van Gogh, and thirty-six by the exhibition’s honouree Edvard Munch (who had received much of his art training in Paris). In a letter to a friend, Munch rejoiced that “There is a collection here of all the wildest paintings in Europe. Cologne Cathedral is shaking to its very foundations.” When the works of these foreign Post-Impressionists were gathered together under the umbrella term “Expressionism” in the early 1910s, true Expressionism was already being created by a group of Germans “of a particularly sensitive, even slightly neurotic, perception of the world, which went beyond mere appearances” (Bassey).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There were no church bells for Munch in 1892, however, when Galerie Verein Berliner Künstler (Union of Berlin Artists) presented the Norwegian artist’s new painting <i>Kiss by the Window </i>and many other of his works – the “scandalous” show was annulled within a week. The wealthy artist Max Liebermann (who later operated on the fringes of Expressionism) founded the Berlin Secession as an immediate response to the Munch debacle and the Verein’s obsolete tastes in art. The Secession exhibited everything else than Wilhelmine art but did worse in presenting something original. After a great row in 1910 when Liebermann’s jury symbolically rejected the Brücke group, Max Pechstein set up their own New Secession.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“My aim is to always get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting – to make the invisible visible through reality. It may sound paradoxical, but it is, in fact, reality which forms the mystery of our existence,” explained Max Beckmann in <i>On My Painting </i>(written in exile in Amsterdam in 1938). “Imagination is perhaps the most decisive characteristic of mankind. My dream is the imagination of space – to change the optical impression of the world of objects by a transcendental arithmetic progression of the inner being. That is the precept.” van Gogh had already achieved this. The first time the Dutch outsider was shown in Germany was at Galerie Ernst Arnold in Dresden in 1905. Here, this very year, four involuntary architecture students who wanted to be bohemian artists decided to form the Brücke – swept off as they were by van Gogh, youthful ideas and <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i>: “I love the great despisers for they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other shore.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Nietzsche’s in the air at the beautiful Millesgården (it is specially a ravishing place in the summertime), an art museum and a sculpture garden on the Lindingö island in Stockholm, and what is shown in the gallery from our millennium is one hundred and thirty-four works (mostly paintings and prints) from 1905 to 1938 by nineteen of the most celebrated Expressionists, sampled from the Häuptli Collection at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Switzerland and the Collection of the Osthaus Museum Hagen in Germany.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Millesgården is the former home and workplace of Carl Milles, the Swedish sculptor famous for his monumental outdoor pieces, who – and how ironical isn’t this? – detested modern art and particularly the “freakshow” that he experienced upstairs at the historical <i>Entartete Kunst </i>exhibition in Munich in 1937. On September 12, Milles wrote to his wife: “We have seen two large exhibitions today. Modern art in a <i>wonderful </i>new art palace, things that the regime allows and then what they do not allow […] I find that they do a great work here when they show this horrible collection.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">One only has to lay one’s eyes on a delight such as Walther Bötticher’s <i>Red Cabbage </i>(1907) in Millesgården’s <i>Back to Paradise </i>show to note that a lot of people are totally wrong. This marvellous oil painting, created by small strokes of greens, blues, yellow, ochre and purple, has an early 20<sup>th</sup>-century vibrancy of a pretty unruffled commotion – the painter’s nervous system laid bare on a plot of soil. Bötticher painted his jittered vegetables before he joined the Brücke in Berlin, the group from Dresden that agreed on a name lifted from a Nietzschean one-liner: “What is great in man is that he is a bridge with no end.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The motto for the Technische Universität Dresden still is <i>Wissen schafft Brücken</i>, Knowledge Builds Bridges. In his “Chronik der Brücke” (written in 1913), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner acknowledged that the Saxony capital “yielded much inspiration through its scenic charm and old culture”. He and his friends Fritz Bleyl (not included in the <i>Back to Paradise </i>show), Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff founded the Brücke on June 7, 1905 with a shared idea of creating an art free from academe and restraints, and a desire to accomplish and refine a bohemian modus vivendi full of song, dance, sex (following the words of <i>Zarathustra</i>: “The day is lost on which you have not danced at least once”). A cluster of works in the show are with naked people romping and playing in the water with the very present nature all around them, like in Kirchner’s <i>Bathers (Fehmarn)</i>, painted on the island in the summer of 1912 in a roughhewn style not unlike a woodcut, and Otto Mueller’s (who joined the Brücke in 1910) intimate, almost masklike <i>Bathers </i>(1920). In the summers of 1909, 1910 and 1911, the gang travelled to the lakes around the Moritzburg Castle to paint their female entourage in an aquatic Garden of Eden.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The shared artistic life between the members of the Brücke began in the garret of Heckel’s parental home where they learned to control the “courageous” lines of life-drawing – in sessions that would never last more than fifteen minutes at a time – using models unaccustomed to posing, who were asked to assume all sorts of bungling positions to enable these novel artists to capture the quintessence of daily life through human bodies. In September 1906, Heckel advanced as the Brücke’s supervisor in their own house at 65 Berliner Strasse near the Dresden Hauptbahnhof. They filled the place with their own designs, their wall and furnishing paintings were bursting with motifs of exotica and carnal knowledge.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Max Pechstein joined the Brücke in the spring of 1906. In his memoirs (which came out five years after his death), Pechstein described how delighted they were “to discover a complete consonance in our urge for liberation, for an art that stormed forwards unconstrained by convention”. When the Brücke published their woodcut manifesto in 1906, it was addressed to a “new generation of born creators and lovers of art”. The manifesto belonged to the first of seven portfolios published each year for their members and patrons, each with three prints and an artist-made front design.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“The technical procedures doubtless release energies in the artist that remain unused in the much more lightweight processes of drawing or painting,” Kirchner enthused. “There is no better place to get to know an artist than in his graphic work.” The raw effrontery of the woodcut, with lively aberrant colours added to the compositions, made it the perfect medium for the Expressionists. Emil Nolde was the ardent Nazi fool who – and how ironical isn’t this again? – became the most castigated artist in the Third Reich. During Nolde’s temporary stay with the Brücke in 1906–07 he taught them how to make etchings. The members produced these pieces with a deliberately obnoxious lack of traditional sophistication and bravura.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Starr Figura curated the important <i>German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse </i>show at MoMA in 2011. In the catalogue she argues that, “This effort to bring forth the distinct expressive potential of each printmaking technique was arguably the most revolutionary of the Brücke artists’ innovations, and it reflects a patently modern point of view. Printmaking was historically tied to craft traditions, and by the 19<sup>th </sup>century was associated with technical exactitude, faithful reproduction, and uniformity from one impression to the next in any given edition. Brücke overthrew all of this, approaching printmaking as a creative rather than a reproductive technique. Their search for what is most distinctive or immediate about a particular technique goes hand in hand with the larger Expressionist goal of conveying the immediacy or urgency of a particular subject.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Before the late 19<sup>th </sup>century, the graphic arts – one of the most glorious artistic traditions in Germany, going back to the prints and drawings of Albrecht Dürer and other Renaissance masters in the 15<sup>th </sup>century – had become a marginal genre there,” writes Starr Figura. “Printmaking, too, engendered a sense of experimental freedom. For the impecunious young artists, it was a less expensive way of producing work and developing their craft than painting, and, like drawing, offered an immediacy and intimacy that painting could not. Working collectively, the artists shared technical information associated with the various printmaking mediums. Their embrace of printmaking as an avant-garde practice ushered in a new era in the history of the medium and would have a significant influence on the next two decades of German art.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Galerie Ernst Arnold in Dresden supported the Brücke with some favourable outcome. For the first exhibition at Arnold with Kirchner, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff and Pechstein in 1910, a woodcut rendering was produced of each of the paintings by one of the fellow artists for a thirty-eight-page catalogue, this was a very new thing. Max Pechstein presented his <i>Lying Girl </i>in 1910, a painting of a young woman in a Breton sweater, a blue skirt and black stockings – so far so rather normal – but her jaundiced face is a scream in yellow and red signal colours and she is reclining on a bed of hot lava. What an excellent day for an exorcism of the mellifluous naturalism of Mary Cassatt’s <i>Girl in a Blue Armchair </i>(1878).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Pechstein was one of several Expressionists who travelled to a small South Sea island before World War I, in his case Palau east of the Philippines in 1914. In Manila on March 28, 1915, he wrote: “I have been expelled from paradise and am now sitting in the hell of idle waiting, a scattered grain of sand in the universe.” The tropical painting <i>In the Canoe (Outrigger) </i>(1917) is a recollection of this paradise with three dark-skinned natives in a catamaran speeding towards the hot lava-coloured horizon. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner claimed to be the original artist to unite the fanciful elements of Oceanian and African cultures with his own art (he even maintained that Edvard Munch had imitated <i>his </i>style). “Although Kirchner’s work is nowadays undisputedly regarded as the most significant and influential contribution to the Brücke, he developed an almost obsessive urge in later years to emphasise the uniqueness of his own work and his own dominant position,” writes Dietmar Elger in his book <i>Expressionism</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“In retrospect, the early Brücke years were seen quite differently by Kirchner. He believed that during that time, when the artists had developed their own style mainly by working together and influencing each other, they merely benefitted from his own ideas, which they then managed to market in a profitable way. In his Davos diaries and letters, he attempted to play down the significance of the Brücke years for his own artistic development and even deny it. In 1924, after reading and correcting the manuscript of Will Groham’s book [<i>Das Werk Ernst Ludwig Kirchners </i>(1926)], he added a note: ‘That Brücke episode must be taken out again. I don’t want to have anything to do with it. After all, it’s not even related to my work.’”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Kirchner was Kirchner and the painting of himself as the lonely, crummy <i>The Wanderer </i>(1922) on a bridge with no end in the Alps could very well be the work that defines the darker existentialism of <i>Back to Paradise </i>– he is not exactly the <i>Wanderer </i>of Caspar David Friedrich’s, rather a “bundle of distorted limbs,” as Victor Hugo described his hunchback Quasimodo – however, for those who want to go directly to paradise without much of the angsty ruffle there is a host of prewar paintings such as Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s Arcadian bonbon <i>Boats in the Water (Boats in the Harbour) </i>from 1913. Kirchner never recovered from the nervous breakdown he suffered in 1915, after a short time as an artillery driver in World War I, and lived the rest of his life addicted to drugs. He shot himself in 1938.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Numerous from the avant-garde commended the war, and many of the Expressionists enlisted as long as the exhilaration lasted. Max Beckmann, for instance, wrote this to his wife in 1914 when he served as a nurse in East Prussia: “Outside there was that wonderful, magnificent noise of battle. I went outside, through large groups of injured and worn-out soldiers coming back from the battlefield, and I could hear this strange, weirdly magnificent music.” Like so many others who outlived the war, Beckmann had a mental collapse and was discharged. After three years on the Eastern Theatre, Schmidt-Rottluff came back so shell-shocked that he had to kiss his painting goodbye. The War that was said to End All Wars was a catharsis on what was left of the Expressionists’ young selves.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“The spiritual element in Expressionism, its speculative nature, had been there from the start, but it was only now that a public dissatisfied with the war seemed to suddenly discover it,” explains Joan Weinstein in <i>The End of Expressionism: Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918–19</i>. “High profits in the armament industry and few available consumer goods led to a boom in the art market. As prices for older art became prohibitive, it opened a market for modern art, which also benefitted from tax laws favouring living artists. Many of Expressionism’s patrons now came from the newer industrial and financial sectors and often held reformist political and social views.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There was so much Expressionism visible after the war that one reviewer grumbled, “Now it’s Heckeling and Kirchnering from every wall.” The Weimar Republic provided the “Kandinskying” of the Blaue Reiter as well. Wassily Kandinsky was thirty years old when he just left a future career as an academic lawyer in Moscow (and rejected a profession at the University of Dorpat in Estonia) and moved to Munich in 1896 to become an artist. He settled in the Schwabing area where “Everyone painted […] or wrote poetry or made music, or began to dance. You could find at least two ateliers under the roof in every house, where sometimes not exactly very much was painted, but a lot was always debated, disputed, philosophised and conscientiously drunk (which depended more on the state of one’s purse than on the state of one’s morals).”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Kandinsky appeared as the great strategian among the bohemians of Schwabing – these people knew about the art of Paris better than everyone else in Germany but their aim was something else – and collaborated and exhibited with many of the artists in the city until he and his woman, the artist Gabriele Münter, embarked on a five-year journey across Europe (and Tunisia) in 1903. There is a great little painting in <i>Back to Paradise </i>by Münter – <i>Landscape with White Wall </i>(1910) – in which the colours are separated in blocks to build the motif. Unfortunately, there are only two etchings by the genius Kandinsky – <i>Small Worlds X </i>and <i>XII </i>(both 1912) – spatial microworlds of shapes and figures swirling into geometrical forms, which in 1913 would turn wholly abstract.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">His art was a forceful argument to reinstall the “what” in art. “This ‘what’ is the eternal truth embraced by art and which only art can express by means essentially its own,” Kandinsky argued in his famous <i>Concerning the Spiritual in Art </i>(published in 1911), his call for cosmological and spiritual concerns: “The solitary seekers, the hungry of soul, the visionaries are derided or dubbed as spiritually abnormal. Those are souls, however, who refuse to be lulled into lethargy and forever yearn, however vaguely, for spiritual life, advancement, and knowledge, sound disconsolate and lamentful amidst the coarse materialistic chorus of spiritual darkness.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Blaue Reiter was more of a coterie of friends than a group like the Brücke. It was founded in 1911 by Kandinsky and his younger companion Franz Marc who loved horses since his days in the military and who had only recently found a style as an artist that wasn’t retrospective. <i>Small Composition III </i>(1913–14), his painting in the Millesgården show, is surely influenced by his meeting with Robert Delaunay in Paris in the autumn of 1912. Delaunay’s new direction in painting was called Orphism and involved geometry, vibrant colours and sheer abstraction. Marc travelled to Delaunay’s studio in the company of August Macke, who seems to have collected Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s <i>Berlin, Street </i>(1913) (not included in the show) of two fancy prostitutes on a pink sidewalk full of furtive <i>Herren </i>and painted it through a cut diamond for his own <i>Bright Women in Front of the Hat Shop </i>(1913). (The translation of the title in the catalogue is faulty.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“The laws of perspective, faithfulness to anatomy, natural appearances and colours counted for little or nothing; distortion and exaggeration became an equivalent for rendering the material world transparent to the psyche,” writes Norbert Wolf in <i>Expressionism</i>. “Their search for metaphysical foundations or cosmological orders, utopian designs and elementary realms beyond history from which they hoped for a rebirth of unadulterated creativity, the Expressionists developed many an idea that originated in German Romanticism.” When Macke declared that a composition “must transpire out of a source still hidden from us today, full of joy, full of sorrow, powerful, thoughtful, full of farts”, his stance was part Blaue Reiter, part Brücke. Macke was only twenty-six when he painted his last work during the second month of World War I. It is called <i>Farewell</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A planned illustrated folio version of the Holy Writ was postponed due to the war and definitely cancelled with Franz Marc’s death at Verdun in 1916 (he was thirty-six). Four years earlier, he and Kandinsky published the <i>Blaue Reiter Almanac</i>. “The volume is like a cabinet of curiosities, a trove of images combined in ways that are suggestive of unexpected relationships,” writes Ashley Bassey who calls it “the most important single document of prewar Expressionism”: “On one level it is a kind of sourcebook for artists of texts and images. However, taken as a whole, it can be read as an entire argument for a radical revision of art and how we look at it.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Germany officially lost the Great War after a settlement that was reached in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles on June 28, 1919 in less than an hour. At daybreak on November 9 the year before, zealous workers and soldiers joined forces and breezed Berlin’s jurisdictions and public buildings. They and their red flags did not encounter any resistance. The same day the Weimar Republic was declared by the leader of the social Democratic Party, Philipp Scheidemann. Pechstein, who now was part of the November Group which had been formed by Expressionists during the short-lived political eagerness following the outset of the revolution, made a handbill statement with the heading “What We Wish”: “We are as rich in inspiration, readiness to sacrifice, belief in our people, as we are poor in possessions. Let the socialist republic give us trust, we have freedom, and out of the dry earth flowers will bloom in its honour.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Expressionists’ sudden interest in politics stemmed from this gullible conception that the Socialist State would finally be the Eden that would provide them with complete artistic freedom and that art would be everywhere in society. (This is an example of a letter between these artists in the early days of 1919: “News from Russia has finally arrived. Moscow is said to be flooded with Expressionism. They say Kandinsky and the moderns are splashing whole quarters with colour, using blank walls and the sides of houses as the surfaces on which to paint modern pictures.”) In Munich, the Bavarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed. However, when the independent Social Democratic Party called for a general strike in the spring of 1919, the dream of a republic within the republic was squashed with such a level of barbarity that one thousand people lost their lives. Springtime for Hitler.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Under such conditions, Expressionism withered: as an art and a lifestyle,” notes Starr Figura in the MoMA catalogue. “It was too dependent on an optimistic vitality that could not withstand the combined shocks of wartime and post-revolutionary trauma. Its demise was caused in part by being outflanked by other artistic movements that proclaimed very different styles of aesthetic and political radicalism, most notably Dada.” A hundred flowers bloomed while hundreds of millions of human lives were extinguished in the Socialist utopias. What happened to Herwarth Walden – one of Expressionism’s greatest supporters as the publisher of the avant-garde magazine <i>Der Sturm </i>(The Storm) and, from 1912, also proprietor of Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin – was emblematic of what happened to the avant-garde when it was swept away by its Stalinist ravings. Walden went to Moscow in 1933 to teach but perished in a gulag during World War II for talking about the art that he lived for.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It is true that the Expressionists lent themselves to the primitive, the passionate and the shrill – August Macke once confessed to colleagues that maybe what they did was “too big for what they wanted to say” – and that their “gutter” art gave birth to dancing stars, years after Nietzsche and <i>Zarathustra</i>: “Life must overcome itself again and again. Life wants to build itself up into the heights with pillars and steps; it wants to look into vast distances and out toward stirring beauties: therefore, it requires height. And because it requires height, it requires steps and contradiction among the steps and the climbers. Life wants to climb and to overcome itself climbing.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Bassey: “Among the ideas that proved most alluring for artists were his diagnoses of the decadence of contemporary culture and his exaltation of <i>creativity </i>as a force pregnant with the potential for vital salvation. He championed instinct over morality. His writings proffered the idea that they were superior men who could rise above the crowd. His vitalism and ecstatic ‘Dionysian’ affirmation of life, which embraced extremes of both joy and pain, fuelled Expressionism’s passion, while his damning indictment of conventional morality urged on its rebellion.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It is rather appropriate that you have to cross a bridge to reach this tiptop show at Millesgården, but the title’s promise of a return to Paradise is a bit of a hit or miss due to these poles of joy and pain that nurtured and inflamed the Expressionists’ art. Two more paintings and a linocut: Erich Heckel’s <i>Woods by the Sea </i>(1913) is a paradise tainted by conflict skies and a water void of yesteryear’s merry bathers. Three years later he painted <i>Spring in Flanders </i>as if this new reality with a lonesome wanderer moving through a landscape laid waste by war could only be processed in the style of a theatre backdrop. Christian Rohlfs’s wide-format print <i>The Fallen One </i>(1913) is an eternal picture of man expelled from Paradise or just the glory of life. He could be a man in Pompeii 79 AD or the artist himself or a Swedish gentleman of today entangled in the hole of the tarantula.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Don’t look away. Never look away. All that is true is beautiful.</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;">Christian Rohlfs, <i>Fallen Man</i>, 1913–14.</span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Back to Paradise: Masterpieces of Expressionism from the Aargauer Kunsthaus and the Osthaus Museum Hagen<i> at Millesgården in Stockholm through June 9, 2019.</i></span></span></div>
Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-71698175717899148182019-04-12T15:02:00.000+02:002019-05-29T11:21:50.008+02:00THE THOUSAND EYES OF HOYTE VAN HOYTEMA<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Installation photo from <i>Here’s Looking at You</i> at Sven-Harrys in Stockholm.</span></span></td></tr>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">– Walker Evans<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The big black hat encircled by red marigold flowers sways between the figures of death on the balconies around. Its wearer, a lofty <i>calaca </i>– eyes hollow, a tubby cigar, the bare scaffolding of a human carcass – slowly moves through the swarming streets of Mexico City during Día de Muertos. Soon, a sinister figure of flesh and blood appears from the wrong end of the crowd and rounds a man and a woman without the knowledge of who they are and why they are there or that the suit he is wearing isn’t going to stay that white much longer.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The eye goes with this couple who start to walk against the flow of the bony fancy-dress marchers; through a gate, a flight of stairs and the elevator up to agent Estrella’s room 327 at the Gran Hotel Ciudad de México – from Mexico City to Pinewood Studios in London and then back again in one long phenomenal tracking shot – where the cloak-and-dagger nature of the mission makes the 007 moult, and then he just as quickly unloads himself from the rooftop so that the neighbouring building and its denizens are blown to chipotle (and here of course is where the massive beauty fades and the story derails into usual Bond stuff).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">For master cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, the Director of Photography for this <i>Spectre </i>(2015) movie, film is “an experience not very different to music”. Someone who has most certainly responded to the remarkable musicality of his films, and especially the musty glossiness of <i>Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy </i>(2011), is </span><span lang="EN-GB">Dragana Kusoffsky Maksimović who is the new Director of Sven-Harrys (Art Museum) at Vasaparken in Stockholm – a staircase-y art space (<i>not </i>a museum) housed in a five-storey structure sheathed in an amalgamation of metals with a Goldfinger tint. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“It could have been a fantastic exhibition if we had invited a really good photo expert, there are lots of those who would have done something extraordinary. But I wanted the contrast between photography and moving pictures, and easiest for me was to start with some directors who I find interesting. I began with the cinema and what kind of story there was to tell. However, when I started to think about it, it was the film photographer that was dead on target here. And there was no other name than Hoyte van Hoytema. That’s it,” she says with a smile in a room jammed with photographs of people, both from the walls and mounted on a zigzag course of floor stands, and every one of them is eyeing us up. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Here</span>’</i><span lang="EN-GB"><i>s Looking at You </i></span><span lang="EN-GB">is Kusoffsky Maksimović’s first show under her own direction and it is really something, a feast for the eyes, and more, though she claims that it was a hair’s breadth from failure, that the exhibition almost wouldn’t happen. “A little bit, yeah,” van Hoytema fills in. “When Dragana called me, I was not really ready to do something like this. I replied that I would do an exhibition if I get a good idea, and I hoped that I wouldn’t get a good idea because I had a lot of work and a lot of things to do. I woke up the next morning and I had a kind of idea – <i>damn! </i>[he laughs] – so at that moment I took it upon me, and it is a very big treat for a photographer to get access to such an incredible and rich collection of photographs.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Dragana Kusoffsky Maksimović reveals that one of her intentions with Sven-Harrys is to bring out photography, but that this show arrived by chance when she was invited to a dinner at the Moderna Museet in the Swedish capital. After the warm thrill of confusion of finding her name all wrong on the seating card she realised that she had been placed next to Dragana Vujanović Östlind, Chief Curator at the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg, which soon enough accepted to make their group of works available for Stockholm. “And I can assure you, it was not easy to download three thousand photographs from the Hasselblad Collection into a PDF file and email that to Hoyte. And he actually went through each and every photo. One day he was in Latin America, another day in North America, and next time he was in Europe. So that we were able to do this is extraordinary.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">“I think it is amazing that he starts from the eyeline because it is Hoyte’s eyes that I am after,” Kusoffsky Maksimović continues. The curator of the show </span><span lang="EN-GB">explains that eyelines means how the eyes are relating to the lens. </span><span lang="EN-GB">“In the beginning I tried to find a connection to my own job and what images, still photos, do to me and I think I found some parallels very much related to photography language. And one of those parallels, and one of those most important tools in my work, is eyelines. As a cinematographer, eyelines is an extremely important tool in the way you tell stories for instance. It has everything to do with where you put the camera in relation to the actors, where you tell your actors to look, and with that: what do these eyelines mean, how do they empower the story points? And ultimately: how do they connect the viewer with the filmmaker?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There are pencil marks here and there which level a great number of the eyes in the show at 152.4 centimetres from the floor. “There are many different numbers and every country is different. But let’s say that this is an average eyeline, and so if you stand in front of a picture your eyes will be at the same height as the eyes in those images. In film, if you put the camera higher or lower, it tells very different things and you can make a person stronger or weaker or sadder, or disconnect with somebody or create mystery,” says Hoyte van Hoytema. “I figured out somehow that this is a kind of experiment, even for me. I am just very curious about finding and organising photos in terms of eyelines, and putting them together in a story order and let them speak to us as a whole, as a collection.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">The one hundred and ninety-seven photographic portraits in <i>Here’s Looking at You </i>would blaze for just 8.2 seconds if they were frames in a film – as James Monaco writes in </span><span lang="EN-GB"><i>How to Read a Film: Movies, Media and Beyond</i>, “There is something magical and intoxicating about the frozen moment of a still work of art that captures life in full flight” – and they are pictures taken by as many as ninety-eight photographers. </span><span lang="EN-GB">“Most of these pictures are iconic and powerful and extremely interesting in their own right. It is <i>crazy </i>to have so many important photos in a small space like this, and it is a really cool experiment as well,” says van Hoytema in a cheerful tone. “I kind of feel that I have to apologise to every photographer in here because I cannot treat each work with the kind of respect it deserves. But, you know, this very much works for me in a group context.”</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">He is absolutely right. There is a telling behind-the-scenes account from the filming of <i>The Planet of the Apes </i>in Arizona in 1967, where the actors who played the socially differentiated gorillas (workers and soldiers), chimps (scientists and intellectuals) and orangutans (political leaders) additionally behaved and segregated themselves according to their Platonian ape castes in the canteen. <i>Here’s Looking at You </i>has its Richard Avedons, Irving Penns and Yngve Baums, both among the photographers and the photographed, though what this show delivers with bravura is a confident and affirmative perception of our individual and collective humanity – and without a trace of the highfalutin too-muchery of Steichen’s <i>The Family of Man </i>(which was presented by MoMA in 1955 and toured the world for eight years). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">Robert Frank was jailed in Dixieland for a few days in 1955 for the un-American business of just <i>looking </i>when he was working with his Leica on <i>The Americans </i>(his classic published in France in 1958). That sort of preposterous scrutiny has of course been cultivated by the Thought Police ever since the 1970s. In his book </span><i><span lang="EN-GB">What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society</span></i><span lang="EN-GB">, Paul Verhaeghe describes how “Hegel traced the origin of self-consciousness back to the gaze of the other. It is through that gaze, monitoring or loving, that we know that we exist. The word ‘respect’ is very important here: it literally means ‘the art of looking back at’, <i>re-spicere</i>.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues in <i>Staring: How We Look </i></span><span lang="EN-GB">that </span><span lang="EN-GB">“whether they are a challenge or a burden, stares do not necessarily make one a victim; rather, they can make one a master of social interaction” and she speaks about the great benefits of photographic portraits: “They grant us more than permission to stare; they use the clout of high art to transform our staring from a breach of etiquette or an offensive intrusion into an art of appreciation. These portraits enable visual pilgrimages of deliberate contemplation that might be scuttled on a face-to-face encounter on the street. The invitation to look that a portrait offers precludes our skittish staring and instead allows us to look deep and long into these unfamiliar faces made strangely familiar.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“We are often shameless in the way we allow ourselves to share in other people’s eyes,” says van Hoytema. The first wall in the show is like a bulwark against immoderate peepers. The people in these nineteen pictures are all turning their backs on us. Flanking them on the left is a wall full of people with their eyes turned to the right, and then vice versa on the opposite side. The sheer number of pictures to process has made the curator look at this show as a kind of “thesis”. “I think it works in quantities, the more the better,” he states. “You can for yourself decide to get to know the people in this exhibition, observe them and take them in, and you see that you get a very different kind of connection to a photograph.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The panoply of people and their eyes continues on every floor at Sven-Harrys. The fourth wall of looking straight into the camera is broken in the next room with the big windows towards Vasaparken as a green screen to the show. It was in this park that the police helicopter crashed in Sjöwall–Wahlöö’s <i>The Abominable Man </i>which director Bo Widerberg in 1976 turned into one of the greatest Swedish masterpieces of all times, <i>The Man on the Roof</i>. Astrid Lindgren wrote all of her famous children’s books in the house next to Sjöwall–Wahlöö’s fictitious police killer. She is one of the many, many individuals in here who stare, pry and – maybe, hopefully – eavesdrop on us.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“I kind of hoping that by depriving and then giving you the eyes, you will get some sense of understanding of the mechanism of looking,” explains Hoyte van Hoytema. “And I have a feeling that if you keep going to the eyes, your initial connection with these photos is very naked, pure and intimate, and that is why I felt it would be nice to set it up like this and that is why we have images all over the place so nobody is able to step way. Everywhere you look there will be people staring at you, and they are engaging with you, and they will share some intimacy with you. Of course, this is all theory, but when I walk through this room after envisioning this in my head, I kind of feel connected to the people. And the other thing is that I feel a little bit stared at, which is a good thing. Normally you are always on the winning side and the balance is very uneven, right? But with so many eyes on you I felt the pictures were becoming a little more ‘empowered’ as a whole.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A picture of George Bush Sr is a perfect example of how this show works and how well it works, and it is from Avedon’s series <i>The Family </i>for <i>Rolling Stone </i>magazine (issue 224) in 1976. In this venture, Avedon refused to say a word to any of the sixty-nine people of power that he portrayed, and lurched around in his studio just staring forcefully at his subjects while catching that spirit of uncertainty in an eight-by-ten-inch camera. Bush doesn’t look like a nobody, he looks like a somebody, like the rest in here. In her photobook <i>Couples and Loneliness </i>(1998), Nan Goldin laments that “I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.” And yet, <i>Here’s Looking at You </i>shows us again that there is a sorcerous quality to the best photographic images of our fellow human beings. Great photographers do not steal our souls, they capture the perpetuity of human wonder and frivolity. Us.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB">Compare this to Lina Mannheimer’s atomised documentary <i>Mating </i>(2019) in which the young man Edvin and the young woman Naomi filmed themselves for a whole year and provided the absent director with unlimited access to their Me-Myself-and-I canteens on social media. </span><span lang="EN-GB">“What a disappointing 21<sup>st </sup>century this has been so far,” David Bowie told the BBC in June 2002. “I had personally really quite high expectations about the future. I had no idea it would sort of capitulate into this awful mess, and this dreadful feeling of an involuntary kind of lack of ability to be able to do anything about this impending possible disastrous series of consequences, which, you know, one has so many suspicions about what are the real reasons and the real causes to them. It’s not a pleasant way to live.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The last space at the top contains only seven pictures and van Hoytema calls it “a kind of relaxation room after you have taken all these eyes in”. What these people have in common is that they withhold themselves from us as viewers. The human brain has honed its skills to process its verdict on a new face in fifty milliseconds but these people are hiding like elephants when they are happy.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Here’s looking at you” is most famously a line from <i>Casablanca </i>(1942). It was used in another film with Bogart ten years earlier, <i>Three on a Match</i>, when Mike (Lyle Talbot) seeks to woo Ann Dvorak’s character Vivian with a martini and a cheer:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">He: “Well, here’s looking at you.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">She: “At me?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">He: “Yeah! And liking it too!”</span></span><span style="text-align: start;"></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Christer Strömholm, <i>The Pale Lady, Barcelona 1959</i>. © </span><span style="text-align: start;">Strömholm Estate.</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: justify;">Here’s Looking at You </span><i style="text-align: justify;">curated by Hoyte van Hoytema at Sven-Harrys in Stockholm through May 19, 2019.</i></span></div>
Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-69332335657887555402019-01-08T17:30:00.000+01:002019-01-08T17:30:01.541+01:00YOU AND I AND DOMINOES<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-38544144577642207852018-11-04T21:46:00.002+01:002018-11-05T21:39:29.330+01:00A CERTAIN SMILE, A CERTAIN SADNESS<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Lars Tunbjörk, </span><i style="text-align: start;">Skara 1990</i><span style="text-align: start;"> </span><span style="text-align: start;">(from</span><span style="text-align: start;"> </span><i style="text-align: start;">Country Beyond Itself</i><span style="text-align: start;">, 1993). © Lars Tunbjörk Estate.</span></span></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Lars Tunbjörk, </span><i style="text-align: start;">Avesta 2007</i><span style="text-align: start;"> </span><span style="text-align: start;">(from</span><span style="text-align: start;"> </span><i style="text-align: start;">Winter</i><span style="text-align: start;">, 2007). © Lars Tunbjörk Estate.</span></span></td></tr>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Each of us is more than one person, many people, a proliferation of our one self. That's why the same person who scorns his surroundings is different from the person who is gladdened or made to suffer by them.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">– Fernando Pessoa, <i>The Book of Disquiet</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“The moment I open my eyes reality turns unelectrified” is a nifty line from poet Kristina Lugn of Chair number 14 in the pretty vacant Swedish Academy, care of the land of milk and honey. On the contrary, there is no shortage of botched realities in Lars Tunbjörk’s (1956–2015) photography. In his wonderfully opposite way, Tunbjörk never turned a blind eye to the “powerless” algorithms of ugliness. His close affinity with bizarrely awkward circumstances and underwhelming environments creates a myriad of impressions in each of his pictures, tipping from chirpy to trenchant to conversely gorgeous, discords most often sublime. Eyes wide opened to a reality of pure galvanism.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Lars Tunbjörk’s pictures were like falling in love, I was intoxicated! No, this is not an exaggeration. This is how it was,” avows his unconventional and ingenious editor Mika Larsson from the superlative 1980s inflight magazine <i>Upp & Ner</i> (<i>ner</i> is “down” in Swedish), which was distributed to every seatback on the domestic carrier’s beautiful Fokker F28s. “We had a continual narrator and it was Lars Tunbjörk. He was exceptional. His disarming eye made him the Jacques Tati of photographic <i>art</i>. He registered the hilarious in us humans, which he constantly and tenderly captured. Nobody could – or can – capture the flickering moments like he did, time and time again. Early on, he also saw our great loneliness. And by directing his camera eye to the side, he saw our dreams. His eyes could ask for permission, but his magnetism assured him of a response from those he wanted to photograph.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Earth sinks to its grave in Tunbjörk’s elegantly compositional picture from the belly (just forget about the heart) of a dismal Gothenburg car park photographed in a sapless green light. This cake of architecture, feng shuied as it is with thrown-in slabs of trifle Styrofoam that seem to float above the ground, a blue Way Out sign and a spiralling yellow ramp topped by the most pathetic Xmas tree, is a piece of totalitarian junk from the country’s modern history – a history controlled and contrived by the Swedes’ appointed Nurse Ratchet, the Social Democratic Party.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It is perhaps not much known that Susan Sontag lived in Stockholm during the late 1960s, as a guest of the Swedish Film Institute. In her lengthy piece ”A Letter from Sweden”, published in <i>Ramparts</i> magazine in July, 1969, she examined an alien nation “deeply ambivalent about the fulfilment of its sensuality”: “Sweden is the only country I know of where misanthropy is a respectable attitude,” she argued. “Who wouldn't be misanthropic, if one’s personal relations were habitually stifled, loaded with anxiety, experienced as coercive. For most Swedes, human ‘contact’ is always, at least initially, a problem – though in many cases, the problem can be solved, the distance bridged. Being with people feels like work for them, far more than it does like nourishment.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">On the facing page to the car park fiasco in this screamingly magnificent new book from the Stockholm publisher Max Ström – <i>Lars Tunbjörk: Retrospective</i>, which collects two hundred and fifty full-page images of the Swedish photographer’s most precious moments – is a picture of an environment simply too gloomy for any scene in the DDR drama <i>The Lives of Others</i> (2006), and it is from the same year as the Berlin Wall went down: two unsociable people in their time of mandatory <i>fika</i> and an orchestra of two dark-suited undertakers playing a few steps behind – half of this congregation is dimmed by a hapless plant. Tunbjörk’s pictures are like a Theatre of the Absurd: the sweetest, grimmest, most critical, yet most sympathetic postcards of obscure sorrows, pitched to the brink of the surreal. (Sort of, “Greetings from Jollyland – May We All Get Better Together.”)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the book <i>Absurd Drama</i> (1965), Martin Esslin writes that the Theatre of the Absurd operates as an assault on comfortable certitudes which “aims to shock its audience out of complacency”: “But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly […] The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Tunbjörk had merely left his Södermalm apartment building to meet up with his friend Göran Odbratt (the main essay writer in <i>Retrospective</i>) at a Kungsgatan cinema on April 8, 2015 when his heart, out of nowhere, just stopped. A neighbour saw him and called the ambulance. Lars Tunbjörk was declared dead at 2:28 that afternoon. He was fifty-nine years old.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Paul Moakley accurately called him “one of the most influential visionaries in contemporary colour photography” in his Tunbjörk obituary in <i>Time</i> magazine (April 14, 2015): “I’ll always remember the photos he made of [Republican] Rick Santorum at a Buffalo Wild Wings. That day, December 30, 2011, which Lars spent driving for hours to follow the various candidates, Lars lingered after the event had ended and all the press had left. Santorum, surrounded by his staffers, stayed for dinner and Lars was able to photograph him praying over a mountain of nachos. The resulting photography perfectly demonstrated all the artifice and craft of the political theatre and showed something real about the candidate. This was Lars’s approach – subtle and without judgement.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A retrospective, both as a comprehensive book and a show at Fotografiska in Stockholm, was in the making in the spring of 2015. “He was reluctant to do it, however, because he felt that this is something that you would do as a conclusion, and he felt that he wanted to add something <i>new</i> in order to do a retrospective. So he was struggling with it, but he had started to put pink notes in his books,” explains the photographer and documentary filmmaker Maud Nycander as she hands over a scrapbook chockablock with coloured paper strips. “I thought he had done enough for a retrospective, but his demands on himself were just incredible. I can understand that a retrospective is a kind of conclusion, but he thought of it as a halfway phase as well. It was also that his previous books had been out of print for years and that his images were unavailable.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Nycander, who married Tunbjörk on her fiftieth birthday, says that two years passed before she was able to pick up her husband’s work again. “In a way it has been burdensome, but also very meaningful, and what is meaningful is gratifying to me. It is a privilege to take care of and process his photos, also for the sake of my own healing. We met in 1992, so after that I know every job he has done. Lars always sat at the kitchen table with his work. So it’s also like I have been going through our common life.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“In working with the retro book, I sent Lars’s earlier books on referral. I made my choices first, and then others made theirs. If many people liked a certain picture it got a second chance. My selection was maybe ninety per cent of how things worked out, but oftentimes it is the ten per cent that will make it great in the end. My ambition with both the book and the show is not to make any new interpretation of his work, or do my personal interpretation, but to try to put it as close to Lars as possible, so that one should be able to follow his art over time.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Lars Tunbjörk – A View From the Side</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> is the name of the show at Fotografiska, curated by Maud Nycander and Tunbjörk’s older colleague Hasse Persson who shared the same photographic background as Tunbjörk at the local morning paper <i>Borås Tidning</i>. The show is a little bit too tightly presented to be on the same perfect level as the organic elegance of the book, though the prints are lush and of the original intended sizes. Something that is lost in the book is the complete visualisation of a waitress’s pale but pretty face in <i>Karlskrona 1996</i> from Tunbjörk’s profoundly personal series <i>Winter</i> (published in 2007).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In this picture, in the show, you see the photographer in her pupils, raising his homemade flashgun featuring a plastic globe from a bathroom lamp as a diffuser. Tunbjörk said that he was kind of lost without his hallmark flash – on display along with a power pack, a light meter and his favourite camera, the brass-bodied Makina 67 – which was a clever and effective arrangement for his handheld method, and one of the secrets behind his democratic principle that everything in his pictures is of equal importance.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In Sinclair Lewis’s novel <i>Main Street</i> (1920), Carol Kennicott contemplates how an escape from one American small town to another would be a “flight from familiar tedium to new tedium” but that it nonetheless would provide “for a time the outer look and promise of adventure”. It is the “Village Virus” of these places that she fears the most: “The contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonised as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Lars Tunbjörk could never quite agree with the anti-drama of life’s commonplace routines, and had, in Nycander’s words, “a hard time with the usual, rather boring things that we have to do and which occupy quite a bit of our everyday lives. Because he was so talented, he was early on assigned to do the most satisfying jobs. And he had grown up as the only child and was a bit spoiled.” The irony of this is that wherever these fine assignments took him, he somewhat (to some degree or another) always photographed the ho-hum preoccupations and the proud dullness of small-town living. But the beauty in this is that Tunbjörk photographed it like Paul Thomas Anderson filmed the disconnected Barry in the Honolulu phone booth in <i>Punch-Drunk Love</i> (2002). It’s so ugly, it’s so sad – but the moment that Lena picks up the phone, the booth becomes luminous. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The <i>rosso corsa</i> frames that Tunbjörk chose for the pictures in his international breakthrough series <i>Country Beside Itself</i>, published in 1993, were an affirmation to the red colour of the buses in the small city where he was born. He moved to Stockholm when he was twenty and of course later worked all over the world but Borås was always the inception. (As Göran Odbratt puts in his essay, “Lars left Borås but Borås never left him.”) When an artist habitually returns to his or her place of origin it is generally related to grand-style trauma, but Tunbjörk really had a good life there and was properly schooled at <i>Borås Tidning</i> during his teens. In Stockholm he joined a cooperative of photographers and moved on to the morning paper <i>Stockholms-Tidningen</i> until its demise in 1984. His photojournalism was so special (some of these black and white pictures are featured in the <i>Retrospective</i>) that he became the Photographer of the Year in Sweden in 1982.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A personal failure was his pictures from Liverpool two years later. Tunbjörk spent six weeks in the company of alternative Liverpudlians for a set of stills that were used in a film on the Swedish public television broadcaster (SVT). However, when he went back to the UK and showed the result, people just thought it was pretty awful. “Although I tried to explain that they themselves had taken me to the places I had photographed, they didn’t think that my pictures represented reality. It was probably something with the imagery that made them think that the city looked as if it had been observed through the eyes of a stranger. It was an eye-opener and I decided to only photograph what I knew,” he told a photo magazine in 2011. “For a while I thought about only photographing Borås. But I pretty soon realised that I wouldn’t tolerate it. Still, I have essentially been lingering in the Swedish small town and the everyday life there. That is what ultimately interests me, the most common. I want to turn and twist what’s most obvious.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In his book<i> A Philosophy of Boredom</i>, Lars Svendsen dips deeply into life’s principal threadbare staple: “Boredom lacks the charm of melancholy – a charm that is connected to melancholy’s traditional link to wisdom, sensitivity and beauty […] Boredom is not just an inner state of mind; it is also a characteristic of the world, for we participate in social practices that are saturated with boredom. At times, it almost seems as if the entire Western world has become like Berghof, the sanatorium Hans Castorp stayed at for seven years in Thomas Mann’s novel <i>The Magic Mountain</i> [1924]. We kill time and bore ourselves to death.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Tunbjörk enchanted boredom, his pictures hack our brains with dopamine. But he needed the colours, and a bold editor in the 1980s, to make it happen. “Tunis”, as his friends and colleagues called him, was the first person that Mika Larsson engaged when she took over the helm of <i>Upp & Ner</i> magazine. “Tunis was very determined about colour – it was not his tool. Colour was only surface. But he had seen a portrait of August Strindberg in a passage in one of the capital’s metro stations, a black and white photograph against a burning, scorching deep red background. He went back there again and again. The colour photography of ‘Sweden’s biggest fire’ actually became Lars Tunbjörk’s first published image in <i>Upp & Ner</i>. It was in late spring, 1983.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“We had many conversations about this new ‘fad’ – colour photography – and of course I respected his attitude: the Strindberg picture was an exception! I think I have located what was Tunis’s game changer at <i>Upp & Ner</i>: the portrait of the author Klas Östergren. It was unthinkable for Lars to take a portrait in colour. Maybe it was a friendship gesture, I am not sure about that, but he accepted my proposal to take the portrait both in black and white and in colour,” Larson recounts. “I remember his surprise when he saw the result. It was Lars Tunbjörk who chose the portrait in colour that was to be on the cover in the late summer of 1983.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“‘The Mirror of Us’ was published in the next issue – a story entirely in colour about a workshop in Södermalm in Stockholm where mannequins were manufactured, and it was Tunbjörk’s own decision. In the beginning, he treated his colour photography as if the images were taken in black and white. Shadow play and midtones were an important part of the story. But with each new story, his curiosity added to the possibilities of colour photography. The black and white image was soon the exception, despite the fact that the theme of the narratives was increasingly approaching <i>Country Beyond Itself</i>. He found expression in colour for the raising melancholy, the growing darkness.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The beliefs of the world are hanging in suspension in <i>Country Beyond Itself</i>, Tunbjörk</span></span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: large;">’s</span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: large;"> masterful multipack of unflattering Swedishness – bagged during the era when Nurse Ratchet’s almost unlimited control over everything and everyone was weakened and Sweden’s grim outlook vacillated between familiar tedium and a new tedium in the early 1990s. “It was very exciting to travel around Sweden at the time, it was almost like travelling around the US sometimes. It was brand new colours, plastic and glitter that had emerged during these few boom years of the 80s. And it was a kick to shoot at first, till you are fed up with the whole thing.” According to Tunbjörk it was like having too much candy to eat. “I just got angrier and angrier as the project progressed, at the dismantling of the welfare state. And it had only just begun then, it has become worse and worse ever since.”</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A living room in Borås: the eyes go from the legs of a person sitting in a hideous sofa and a big window with a jungle out there, to a fireplace with a fake flame and a white TV set with Sweden’s Maggie Thatcher, a Count who made a political career in the early 90s together with his sidekick “Servant”, the latter who has ever since lined his pockets with money from the very migrant business he despises. <i>Country Beyond Itself</i> is a peepshow of sorts, a multifaceted portrait of a monotonous nation, a phantasmagoria quite like Ari Aster’s marvellous first hour of <i>Hereditary</i> (2018) in which we enter a cabinet of curiosities where reality is just a little different and things occur with a passel of incertitudes. So how are the Swedes doing in Tunbjörkville? They are living la vida loca, in the sole company of themselves, or with others, doing exactly the same things.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Sweden as a spiritual desert and the Swedes as a people of a totalitarian temperament are the key themes in the former Stockholm correspondent Roland Huntford’s book<i> The New Totalitarians</i> (1971). Sweden was the first nation in the world to embody “scientific” Fascism, and the National Institute for Race Biology was founded in 1922 in Uppsala. But Sweden’s worst crimes in the name of “racial hygiene” went on for decades <i>after</i> World War II. Sixty-three thousand people (mostly women) were subjected to force sterilisation and four thousand were lobotomised. There was also at least one locality that had the prerequisites of a Gulag in the Swedish welfare state, <i>folkhemmet</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Difference in the Swedish world has always been something undesirable, half sin, half disease. In the modern Welfare State, its eradication has become an obsession, because its continued existence is a flaw in the system,” Huntford argues. “Personality has been suppressed, the collective worshipped at the expense of the individual. Given the European ethos, this might be expected to arouse rebellion. But not among the Swedes. They love their servitude […] It leads to the paradox that, while the Swede is immersed in the collective, and looks upon community and solidarity as the most desirable of attributes, he is locked up in himself, isolated from other human beings.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Maud Nycander pronounces that what Tunbjörk portrayed in Sweden were also things that took place throughout the Western world. “Alas, in my brief search for the authentic England I did not discover it,” lamented the wonderful Brian Sewell in “A Weekend in the Country”, from his column in the <i>London Evening Standard</i> (April 25, 2000), featured in <i>The Orwell Essays</i>: “It is true that I found byways and backwaters of pedestrianized conservation, but these were self-consciously neat, clean, re-processed and deprived of meaning, reduced to the authenticity of ornaments advertised in Sunday supplements as limited editions and bought for her mantelpiece by Hyacinth Bucket.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“For £99 a night what does one get in provincial England? A building that in its cheap and bleak design (it cannot be called architecture) is as hostile to the soul as a block of workman’s flats on the outskirts of Zagreb […] The ubiquitous McDonald’s is next door, and one step up from it is TGI Friday’s, staffed by terrified mutant bunny girls with fluffy tails sprouting from their shoulder blades, where wild Antarctic salmon is lovingly seared with sticks of glowing charcoal by thigh-looted, whip-cracking kitchen maids especially for you-hoo; in such a place the simple refreshment of a plain vanilla ice cannot be had – one must choose a Chocolate Chunky Monkey or a Strapping Strawberry Wench.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Country Beyond Itself</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> was on show at Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg in 1993, at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm in 1994, and opened at the International Center of Photography in New York on December 1, 1995. Nycander mentions a trip to France in the summer of 1994 that was more than a holiday. “Lars had little international jobs or contacts then and only worked for the Swedish press, and we were passing through Arles and he stood in line to show his photos for Christian Caujolle – and then he joined Agence Vu directly. By Xmas, I was pregnant and we swapped flats with Joseph Rodríguez in New York, he has kids in Sweden, and Joseph gave him a list of people who should receive the book. Lars got a show at the ICP after a year. It was quite overwhelming for him. Kathy Ryan gave him a job at <i>The New York Times Magazine</i> that fall, and Lars worked for them regularly until he died.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Six of Tunbjörk’s first pictures for the <i>Times</i> are in the book (one less in the show), like the one of the cowboy guy who looks like he has lost his human proportions until you see that he is hovering over a trampoline. This was one of the few pictures that Tunbjörk arranged, and how he got the cowboy to bounce like that with his arms tight to his body over the course of five rolls of film is a happy mystery. “I was over the Moon when I saw the 1995 pictures of the rich ranchers because I thought this is clearly an extraordinary eye at work. I love the way Lars cropped his pictures – for me it was an early sign of how he would organise the world in his frame, which was often to create a frame within a frame,” tells Kathy Ryan, picture editor of <i>The New York Times Magazine</i> since the mid-1980s, in a text based on the speech she gave at Borås Art Museum on October 13, 2017, during the inauguration of the Lars Tunbjörk Room. “It makes me feel bad that he was so worried, because everything he did would end up great.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Next to these pictures at Fotografiska (as well as in the book) are some odd and sad and great samples from Paris Fashion Week in 2004 for the French magazine <i>Libération</i>. This batch of photographs combines Tunbjörk, the photojournalist with Tunbjörk, the ironic observer of human behaviour, and it is surely the only time he pictured people with dark sarcasm in the classroom. There are no glam catwalk pictures in this series, only the turmoil and confusion backstage at the fashion shows and scraps from the dejected afterparties with the fashion pack. In a self-portrait in the mirror by some model’s (Monica) clothes rail, Tunbjörk erases himself with his flash. In 1981, when he photographed a Moscow boy wearing a suit jacket big as the one in Talking Heads’ <i>Stop Making Sense</i> (1984), that was also a self-portrait.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Nycander: “He looked a little bit lost as a person, and somewhat it was true that he could be confused, though he had total control of the situation. So there was a duality. He was absolutely not a person who anyone was intimidated by, which is a huge advantage as a photographer. We did a documentary [<i>Road’s End</i> (2013)] together in Latvia, and Lars was filming. I have worked with many film photographers, but he was the one who could get a person to love to re-enact a take for the fifth time. Lars was so sincere about what he was doing that people felt that they wanted to help him and that they too would take it seriously.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">He had photographed Paris before, for <i>Paris 200 Years Afterwards</i> (1989). The idea came from this great lady Mika Larsson during her “honeymoon” at a publishing house of popular literature, and she engaged the then-Paris correspondent of the national broadcaster Sveriges Radio, Herman Lindqvist, because she needed a renown figure to sell the book of this no-name artist. “Herman did not know about Lars Tunbjörk. He had never written about history, he was a columnist and a news journalist. I asked them to give each other a week together in Paris at our expense. Then they could make the decision. I knew that they would say yes and they said yes.” Unlike <i>Country Beyond Itself</i>, and what came later, these diapositive pictures have a clear sense of the “street” and <i>outside</i> – hence not the enclosed dioramas that would follow – but they are unmistakable <i>tunbjörkers</i>, pictures that no one else could have taken.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Herman Lindqvist remembered Tunbjörk as “one of the greatest photographers that I have met” on his Facebook page on April 11, 2015, and described the outcome of their almost wordless meetings in Paris in the late 1980s: “The week afterwards he showed incredible unique fun pictures that never had been taken before in Paris. This he did without speaking a word of French, just a kind of Borås English, loaded with his seriousness. Everyone obeyed him, even the French models who realised that here was a great artist. Rarely have I been so saddened by the news of someone’s demise.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Tedium …” wrote Fernando Pessoa in <i>The Book of Disquiet</i> (published posthumously in 1982), “It is suffering without suffering, to want without desire, to think without reason … It’s like being possessed by a negative demon, like being bewitched by nothing at all.” This is the sense that purveys Lars Tunbjörk’s <i>Office</i> (2001), the boredom of life made manifest by “white-collar” workplaces chiefly in New York, Tokyo and Stockholm. And the latter takes the cake of course. The picture of the far most spacious office, called <i>Stockholm 1994</i>, shows a man behind a boxy grey computer in an unintentionally creepy setting, a half-“lost-in-the-woods”-half-“shack-in-the-archipelago” funhouse (mind the chopping block with the missing axe). Tunbjörk was attracted to these things because he thought “they looked like small prison cells but also like beautiful objects”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“He had a funny relationship towards ugliness,” says Maud Nycander. “He often thought that the ugly was beautiful. Often he didn’t think that what others thought was beautiful was beautiful. He could buy absolutely crazy things, incredibly kitschy – but kitsch with finesse. I learned how he saw a difference between one and the other. Lars did a project about flowers. He was fascinated by flower fairs and how we try to subdue and organise nature.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The world is a no place without the people you love. <i>Home</i> (2002) is Tunbjörk’s bleak elegy to his father. Its centre is the house where Tunbjörk grew up, with bits of Borås and the rest of the country. These pictures are flashes of an afterlife, an overexposed heaven; playgrounds without kids and domestic gardens void of people, places where nothing ever happens.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Happy Nation returned a few years later with a book of “leftovers” from <i>Country Beyond Itself</i> – this time<i> </i>as a wilder form of bacchanalia – and they are a cure for wellness, all right. As Odbratt suggests, “In the book <i>I Love Borås!</i> (2006) Lars invites us all home, certain that what resounds in me resounds in you.” <i>I Love Borås!</i> has a thing or two in common with the Strapping Strawberry Wench reality of Sean Baker’s <i>The Florida Project</i> (2017), one of the greatest films of the decade, with the people in the purple Magic Castle Inn and Suits at US Highway 192, just scraping along in the tacky dusk of Disney World Orlando.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Tunbjörk was tormented by the merciless Swedish winters. <i>Winter</i>, his masterpiece, is a mournful composition of pictures about the depressions that took over his life during this never-ending season. “It was almost like therapy,” he explained. “I usually end up in some kind of darkness in January. With <i>Winter</i> I somehow tried to attack it. It was difficult because I had previously been dependent on the bright and clear light to be able to photograph. But once it worked, I renewed my imagery well and truly. It became faster and harder. On the other hand, it took a year before I thought I had something going on.” Tunbjörk was on an assignment for the morning paper <i>Göteborgs-Posten</i> in 2004 “to travel around Sweden and pretty much do what I wanted for a few weeks”. But it was in the middle of the winter and he was ready to give in when he arrived in the country’s darkest city, north of the Arctic Circle, with its constant nights during midwinter. And he started to click away.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Victorians’ reaction to the world becoming industrial and mechanical was to create dream spheres and fantasy worlds. Some of the pictures in <i>Winter</i> look like Colette’s old snow globes where flakes are falling restfully in self-contained worlds with picturesque fir trees or a dirty snow-cake road junction. However, Tunbjörk makes no attempt to court and spark any of this with hints of whimsy and zestful enthusiasm. You just have to cope. There is no Way Out in this suffering. This time, Sweden is just the backdrop for a shrunken world where the debauchery of ugliness generates disease and everything seems to have grown like this by accident, the isolation too. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="text-align: start;">The fast food place in <i>Avesta 2007</i> has been demolished but lives on as a well of loneliness and tastelessness in Tunbjörk’s unglamorous version of Hopper’s <i>Nighthawks</i> (1942). <i>Winter</i> is altogether graced by the Groke and severe vitamin D deficiency, and the pictures are as dismal as Swedish small-town pizzas</span> and their pervertible all-together-now toppings of you-wouldn’t-believe-it (there is one depicted in</span><span style="text-align: start;"> </span><i style="text-align: start;">Stockholm 2004</i><span style="text-align: start;">), but Tunbjörk attacks and balances his nightmare spheres into sheer excellence. This is a photographic master’s unyielding portrait of his own depression, at his barest human self</span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">How would a <i>Country Beyond Itself</i> have looked today when the lunatics have taken over the asylum? A Creative Mornings event with Fotografiska’s co-founder Jan Broman at the Stockholm venue this year (August 24) attracted one hundred and thirty-one attendees, the bulk of them women with eyes wide shut to everything but their cell phone vanities, a congregation of Your Highnesses unfit to communicate in any way that would require effort or style. “Fotografiska is all about creating conversation,” announced Broman before he pushed a button on his Apple device which presented a slideshow with an ugly Americanised speaker voice:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“The Swedish Museum of Photography have [sic] been deeply engaged in issues concerning democracy, justice and gender equality ever since it opened in 2010. Sweden is one of the most equal countries in the world, but there is [sic] still differences to be found between men and women. For example, men earn, on average, thirteen per cent more than women. To create awareness and to spark debate about the pay gap, the Museum decided to adjust its entry price in an unequal way on International Women’s Day of 2017. This meant raising the price by thirteen per cent for men.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This sales talk went on, unashamedly, with an account of the massive impact that this stunt of bogus Feminism had generated in the press and on social media. Compare the wage gap fallacy to the <i>fact</i> that nine out of ten human beings who die in work-related accidents are men. How about Fotografiska raising the price by ninety-three per cent for women in the name of “democracy, justice and gender equality”? No, go on, tell another lie, and make it huge. This is, after all, the country beyond itself.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Mika Larsson describes Lars Tunbjörk as a low-key character with a magnetic presence. “The years when I knew him he almost always walked with a smile on his face. Except when he was working. He was extremely receptive, extremely focused and extremely demanding with himself. Often when I saw him and his work, I thought of the cello. Tunis was like a cello tone.”</span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOadfnf2KeatP7n2rO1RtnJ4RCxvuLFTe9I2r-Tdl82icDE2VUIg0FoWknBNEK6J4gIW3GQOyp0DrYckaR9PRkLYK54ckma6sdJNZZzVnligE0TqIqRU9f-bqBaSG8nRhNpvU3vkgkVCGG/s1600/%2540Lars+Tunbjo%25CC%2588rk%252C+USA1995.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1290" data-original-width="1600" height="516" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOadfnf2KeatP7n2rO1RtnJ4RCxvuLFTe9I2r-Tdl82icDE2VUIg0FoWknBNEK6J4gIW3GQOyp0DrYckaR9PRkLYK54ckma6sdJNZZzVnligE0TqIqRU9f-bqBaSG8nRhNpvU3vkgkVCGG/s640/%2540Lars+Tunbjo%25CC%2588rk%252C+USA1995.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Lars Tunbjörk, </span><i style="text-align: start;">USA 1995</i><span style="text-align: start;"> </span><span style="text-align: start;">(from</span><span style="text-align: start;"> </span><i style="text-align: start;">The New York Times Magazine</i><span style="text-align: start;">). © Lars Tunbjörk Estate.</span></span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2ycMKZ7DXGHI5jtSf8K1mhbxXszpsYGebhHENX8W3eSg82CCwHONkBQFzlnuHpFspoPO8U_LPG5gjLmo-Psj_-v2isyp9phnquCDCUBHXKy7JptbPvxywfyZaqru3m-CW3upmc2JSnkfN/s1600/%2540Lars+Tunbjo%25CC%2588rk%252C+Times+Square+1996%252C+New+York.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1278" data-original-width="1600" height="510" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2ycMKZ7DXGHI5jtSf8K1mhbxXszpsYGebhHENX8W3eSg82CCwHONkBQFzlnuHpFspoPO8U_LPG5gjLmo-Psj_-v2isyp9phnquCDCUBHXKy7JptbPvxywfyZaqru3m-CW3upmc2JSnkfN/s640/%2540Lars+Tunbjo%25CC%2588rk%252C+Times+Square+1996%252C+New+York.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Lars Tunbjörk,</span><span style="text-align: start;"> </span><i style="text-align: start;">Times Square New York 1996</i><span style="text-align: start;"> </span><span style="text-align: start;">(from</span><span style="text-align: start;"> </span><i style="text-align: start;">The New York Times Magazine</i><span style="text-align: start;">). © Lars Tunbjörk Estate.</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Lars Tunbjörk – Retrospective </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>published by Max Ström, and</i> Lars Tunbjörk – A View From the Side <i>at Fotografiska in Stockholm through December 2, 2018.</i></span></span></div>
Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-7200349841520686392018-10-01T17:15:00.001+02:002018-10-16T18:13:26.528+02:00MARVELLING<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1tJ5laYifSuVoyJkWGjX7jk0fOQYgx_agR2wHR8oaV8IiJYKirNc2T0HB3Qml4Tjhkg1a_b-bswV5uk2aJUoQSwfpi6XT0CZa4vaFUAfIagpOrdKdTjTGLnGpgFLIFrpmNHrl1VWcm0R-/s1600/doisneau1_Mademoiselle_Anita__Paris_1951_webb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="797" data-original-width="800" height="636" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1tJ5laYifSuVoyJkWGjX7jk0fOQYgx_agR2wHR8oaV8IiJYKirNc2T0HB3Qml4Tjhkg1a_b-bswV5uk2aJUoQSwfpi6XT0CZa4vaFUAfIagpOrdKdTjTGLnGpgFLIFrpmNHrl1VWcm0R-/s640/doisneau1_Mademoiselle_Anita__Paris_1951_webb.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Robert Doisneau, <i>Mademoiselle Anita</i>, Paris 1951. © Atelier Robert Doisneau.</span></td></tr>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Seeing sometimes means constructing a little theatre with the materials at hand, and then awaiting the arrival of actors … From experience, I know that the show is always livelier on the poorer outskirts of town. These settings testify to mankind’s struggle. They’re full of nobility because everyday acts are carried out simply, and the faces of people who have to rise early in the morning can be very moving – what a lesson in vitality we get from young women heroically putting on make-up at dawn every day before rushing to the metro. It’s enough to melt your heart.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">– Robert Doisneau<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The octaves leaped from clapper to clapper as all the church bells of Paris poured out their splendid shakes. Now, for the first time since the summer of 1940, the city sang, it really sang. This Thursday evening, on August 24, 1944, General von Choltitz telephoned Berlin with the handset raised against the sonorous Parisian sky. Close to midnight there was only one bell left chiming, the mighty Emmanuel in the south belfry of Notre-Dame, <i>our </i>Lady.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A newspaperman from <i>Le Figaro </i>witnessed the city’s overnight transition as he was leaving the Hôtel de Ville – the City Hall where the Allied troops strategically camped out – the following morning, and found himself “submerged by an enormous crowd that was everywhere, on the streets, the quays, the boulevards, the passages. They applauded. They shouted. They stamped their feet. They cried. On one of the tanks, surrounded by the din of motors and smoke, a cat, a miniscule little cat, calmly sat surveying the scene. The crowd roared their approval. That was what this unique day was like: one part exuberant celebration, exalted, delirious, an incredible lightheartedness that poured out in song, kisses, in unbound joy; the other part, a climate of civil war.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Paris was imagined as a heroic society, a place of extraordinary deeds,” argues Rosemary Wakeman in her book <i>The Heroic City: Paris 1945–1958</i>. “The media spectacle crisscrossed between journalists and participants. Celebrity was for the taking. Public space became a stage for outpourings of public emotion and zany performances that were impulsive, reflexive, and fame seeking. In the photographer Robert Doisneau’s visual portrait of the Liberation, spontaneous rumba lines snake through the streets, young men stripped down to their shorts frolic in the fountains at the Place de la Concorde, people dance impulsively – together, alone – and wave, wrap themselves in, parade with the French Tricolour. The Liberation was […] a seizing, a dizzying transformation of the everyday. Life was reformed, reformulated in a playful speculation on what it might be.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Susan Sontag noted in <i>Regarding the Pain of Others </i>that, “We want the photographer to be a spy in the house of love and death.” Robert Doisneau (1912–1994) was much rather like that cool cat on the army tank, part of the scenery, basking in the hubbub of life, extracting its unknown beauty. For half a century he wandered through the city and its forgotten suburbs. It was in the areas of life where people were doomed to carry on and accept the lousy plots they were given that Doisneau acquainted himself with humanity’s most imaginative powers. The object of Doisneau’s photography is in itself a dizzying transformation of the everyday. “Marvelling is a mission that few photographers have chosen,” he told Frank Horvat in November 1987: “The world I was trying to present was one where I would feel good, where people would be friendly, where I could find the tenderness I longed for. My photos were like a proof that such a world could exist.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Some existential juice from John Steinbeck’s <i>East of Eden </i>(1952) to begin with: “A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: was it good or was it evil? Have I done well – or ill?” You only have to go to Kulturhuset (the House of Culture) in Stockholm to see <i>Robert Doisneau – The Poet of the Paris Suburb </i>– a show sharply and lovingly curated by Atelier Robert Doisneau in Montrouge (where he lived) and produced by diChroma Photography in Madrid – to conclude that this champion of humanist photography did incredibly well. As William Blake put it in his days: “As a man sees, so he is.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Robert Doisneau is one of the modest masters in the history of photography. He is also a photographer with a lot of humour, and he is of course very, very famous for his romantic Paris pictures – the famous <i>The Kiss </i>picture that everyone is asking for – but this exhibition presents Robert Doisneau in a different light,” says Maria Patomella at Kulturhuset, who likewise had a poster of this well-known/hackneyed Doisneau picture <i>Le baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville </i>in her teenage room. <i>The Kiss </i>was an arrangement with two paid actors smacking away on Rue de Rivoli (with the City Hall and Notre-Dame in the background) for a series of kissing couples for <i>Life </i>magazine in 1950. <i>The Kiss </i>is luckily concealed in the only showcase, where you can contemplate the two ominous “faces” that appear in the picture’s lower left corner.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When the fallen major-league gangster Henry Hill goes to Hell in Scorsese’s definite masterpiece <i>Goodfellas </i>(1990), he doesn’t end up in prison but in suburbia. In the film’s end scene, he opens the door to his Witness Protection Program nest to retrieve the morning paper in his light blue bathrobe, makes eye contact with the camera while his voiceover says: “I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life as a schnook.” The saints and the sinners of suburbia were the people most worthy of Doisneau’s camera eye: “I look like them, I speak their language, I share their conversation, I eat like them, I am completely integrated into that milieu. I have my own work which is a bit different from theirs, but perhaps I am sort of representative of that class,” he said. “In those ordinary surroundings which were my own, I happened to glimpse some fragments of time where the everyday world appeared to be freed of its ugliness.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There are one hundred and one prints in the show, fifty-six of them are from the 1940s and thirty-seven from the 1950s, Doisneau’s greatest decades. <i>Les pavés </i>(1929) is a close-shot cubistic flow of cobblestones, the first picture he ever took and an evidence of both his original eye for the unoriginal and of his early diffidence, notably when it came to approaching other human beings, even kids. There are two tentative photos in the show from the 1930s of children (boys) who are playing alone, or just framed as solitary souls, in which you sense the photographer’s uneasiness about achieving more than a distant frame. <i>La chambre de Gentilly </i>(1930) is a fine composition, lonely and dejected as a Hopper painting, of the room of his younger days in this southern Parisian suburb, just across of what is now the Boulevard Périphérique.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“My own suburb was one of two-storey houses, rather grey and dumb, but full of nooks, recesses, makeshift repairs, inhabited by people living between the street and the bistro. Here and there a small workshop, like my father’s plumbing business. From my window, in the early morning, I watched the workmen coming to be hired, then going out on their assignments. If they had a few minutes to spare, they would have a drink in the bistro, then walk out slightly dizzy, fetch the handcart and be on their way to the job, which was sometimes far off.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The intention of Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris (1853–70) was not just to make the city more beautiful and airy, but also to clean away the so-called <i>classe populaire </i>from the heart of Paris. The southern suburbs were a little less unattractive than the <i>banlieue nord </i>with its heavy industry. The wastelands of Gentilly were young Robert’s playground – places like the funky Bièvre, a stream straightened up to a canal that the pious used to follow on their pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, and the Zone (where “you went to play, to make love or to commit suicide”) on the “wrong” side of the fortifications that encircled Paris until the late 1920s. It was Doisneau’s mother who gave him the sense of the marvellous. He was eighteen years old when he photographed <i>La chambre </i>with the eyes of the seven-year-old boy whose mum had just died.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Peter Hamilton, who worked with Robert Doisneau for the retrospective at Modern Art Oxford in 1992, writes in his book that a “combination of creativity, chance, play, even <i>désobéissance </i>[disobedience], contrives to produce a magical effect” in Doisneau’s photography: “His vision of Paris is concerned with how it works on a human level […] as an organic whole, a mass of individual activities which generate the life and energy of this city, what makes it real and distinctive, yet at the same time magical and strange, unlike any other place on Earth.” Yes, and Walter Benjamin was right to argue (in <i>The Arcades Project </i>from the 1930s) that, “Parisians make the street an interior.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“[Parisians] imagined new photos to both capture the world and operate in the viewer’s mind,” suggests Catherine Clark in <i>Paris and the Cliché of History: The City and Photographs, 1860–1970</i>, “photography, photographs, and modes of understanding them changed how people understood, saw, and acted in the world”. For Doisneau to photograph the city he loved, and the people who acted out their lives there, was a means of possessing Paris as a whole magical theatre: “I feel a vague sense of ownership. I’d nevertheless like to remain one of those rare, broadminded owners who always leaves the door wide open.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The camera entered Doisneau’s life as an attempted shortcut device for his shyness when he was studying figure drawing in Montparnasse and wanted to snap people on the street in order to draw them from these photographs he nonetheless did not dare to take of them. Doisneau’s callous aunt put the orphan thirteen-year-old in a backwards crafts school for the printing industry. At seventeen, Doisneau was working with professional photo equipment at a graphic art studio in the city. In 1931, he started as an apprentice for André Vigneau in Quartier Latin. This modernist artist and photographer became a very important source of inspiration for Doisneau, “for Vigneau talked to me of another painting, another philosophy, another cinema”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Robert Doisneau was an avid reader throughout his life and Vigneau introduced him to a host of writers. One of them was the great Jacques Prévert: “Prévert taught me to have confidence in the discovery of everyday objects which people didn’t see any more, because they were contemptuous of them, too used to them. He found ordinary words, used every day, and presented them to people as if they were precious jewels. And he loved to play, to discover new things […] Jacques would ring up and say, ‘Do you know the street where they unroll the big lengths of plywood near the Faubourg St Antoine?’ I would say, ‘Yes,’ and he would say, ‘No you don’t, come and get me and we’ll go there.’ So we would go and look at this, there would be whole logs of this stuff, we’d take in the sound of the work, the colour of the wood, the smell of the sap and the look of it as it came out.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Doisneau did not “shoot” people. Although he could photograph Paris and the Parisians with divine reckless abandon (and thankfully he did), he was at the core of it all – and in his own words – a <i>pêcheur d’images</i>. That the gentle fisherman of images was fascinated by Brassaï’s <i>Paris de nuit</i>, which came out in 1933, is evident from the selection at Kulturhuset. The essence of the pictures in <i>Robert Doisneau – The Poet of the Paris Suburb </i>is an almost metaphysical day-for-night mood. From the time he met his favourite drinking buddy Robert Girard in the late 1940s (Girard was a poet of sorts), there was a change to real-night photography where Doisneau was moving with grace through some darker areas of life among the nocturnal animals of lowlife Paris: “When I am in horizontal position, my brain gets irrigated, like the cork of a wine bottle that’s laid flat. That activates my imagination and stimulates my desire to go out and use my mind. So I rise and go out, eager to see and to marvel.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">From 1934 to 1939, he was hired by Renault as a photographer at the factory on the Île Seguine, not far from where he lived, a period that Doisneau claimed was “the true beginning of my career as a photographer and the end of my youth”. It was not the outbreak of the war that got him fired from Renault but his constant late arrivals (a common theme in his professional life). There were always too many photographic distractions occurring on his way to the plant, and besides, at home, he was rather perfecting his method of doing colour prints in the kitchen lab than getting a good night’s sleep. Doisneau and his wife Pierrette had moved into a new building at 46 Place Jules Ferry (the little park in the middle bears his name today) in Montrouge, a suburban area just south of the Périph. This was where he, true to his mission, was to live for the rest of his life. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Doisneau had just joined the Rapho agency when the Boche began to march in September 1939. His more than dormant nature of disobedience, in combination with what was developing as a case of tuberculosis after six insufferable months as a foot soldier, made the army decide that they had had enough of him too. Assailed by Stuka dive-bomber planes, Robert and Pierrette Doisneau and two million other Parisians, two-thirds of the city’s population, formed the exodus towards safer areas of France in June 1940. The couple returned to Montrouge near the end of 1940.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In 1942, Doisneau was commissioned to photograph the country’s foremost scientists for a book – <i>Les nouveaux destins de l’intelligence française </i>– committed to show that la France, in spite of the Nazi Occupation, was not on its knees. The same year he took the metaphorical Resistance picture <i>Le cheval tombé </i>with his Rolleiflex camera, an image so beautiful and perfect in everything that it has the looks of a tableau vivant. The passersby are gathering on the street in a communal spirit to help the fallen horse get back on its hooves. The white horse, gleaming with light, is almost like a Christ figure here, like the severely abused donkey in Robert Bresson’s <i>Au hasard Balthazar </i>(1966). The thing about Doisneau’s photographs is that they almost never resemble the imagery of the French masters of film, whereas “Doisneau” vibrates all over in their greatest pieces essentially from the 1930s and the 1950s.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Boche called Paris “the city without eyes”. The Parisians refused to even look at their oppressors. “Every morning the Germans paraded down the Champs-Élysées in full uniform with military bands playing and flags flying. Huge swastikas hung from buildings and monuments. In a slap in the face of French sensibilities, even the city’s clocks were set to Berlin time. Street and direction signs were in German. But scenes of hideous repression – neighbourhood hunts and arrests, unmitigated violence and cruelty, the roundups of Jews – were the real public spectacles,” writes Rosemary Wakeman. “Suffice it to say that the graffiti, the jeers and taunting of German officials, the public singing of the ‘Marseillaise’, the distribution of tracts, the surreptitious honouring of key dates in the nation’s history, the displaying of the V sign for victory, the protest marches and demonstrations constituted an extraordinary and highly dangerous public theatre in their own right.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The French term for the early stages of World War II was the <i>Drôle de guerre</i>. The French army outnumbered the Wehrmacht’s divisions by far but the Gallic rooster was all pomp and circumstance, ignorance and inertness. On June 10, 1940, the Government retracted to Vichy in the midst of France and declared Paris an open city. Four days later the Boche owned the city. They put a big V and a huge banner on both the Eiffel Tower and the Palais Bourbon: “Germany Wins on All Fronts.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In 1941, Doisneau found something that was “guiding me to my seat during the horror film of the German Occupation” – his place in this Phoney War was to produce fake documents (“identity cards, <i>Ausweisen</i>, passports, false papers for Jews”) for the underground Resistance movement. There are only a few pictures in the show from the days of the Occupation. From 1944 and on, it is like Doisneau was processing this horror film in his mind through his camera; the pictures are as mournful as they are masterful.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The incredibly melancholy <i>La pleine lune du Bourget </i>(1946) depicts a steamy locomotive on the turntable in this railyard with nine other iron horses behind, all panting and waiting to be turned around, for these engines could only go in one direction. That these kinds of locomotives were about to disappear at the time when this picture was taken is only half of the story. Gare du Bourget was the station from which the French Jews were deported to Auschwitz.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">He cherished the mishmash of these northern suburbs as well: “I always came back to Saint-Denis, even though it’s a long way from my own suburb. This community is an extraordinary mixture, exactly the kind I like: people from all origins, a basilica where the kings of France lie buried, a Communist town hall twenty metres further, a canal, a motorway, some huge public housing projects and endless rows of small suburban houses. It’s the juxtaposition that fascinates me – in fact, all my photos are self-portraits, in the sense that I always show people living in the same absurd surrounding as myself.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Somehow Doisneau belonged to the “Bohemian nation” that Jules Romains was describing in his eight-thousand-pages strong <i>Les Hommes de bonne volonté </i>(<i>Men of Good Will</i>, 1932–1946): ”In contact with the enclosure, all around it, a singular swarm had developed, and almost fixed itself. A membrane of population, just half a kilometre thick, but stretched out over thirty-six; a sort of annular city stuck to the other and alive with its residues. The military zone, which forbade houses, tolerated hovels and barracks. A people of irregulars, nomads, fallen, or immigrants waiting, had taken the opportunity to settle there, clinging to the clay, muddy, clandestine, still half-floating, which was gradually sinking into the soil of habits, traditions, rights.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Doisneau’s 1940s photography is full of extramural life, populated with people living from day to day, half-floating yet fully alive, as the luminous two in <i>La dernière valse du 14 juillet </i>(1949), a tender couple waltzing under the stars. At some other “end” of the city, a group of sideline gardeners is working in a deserted moat in <i>Dans les fosses du Fort d’Ivry </i>(1949). Others, in Doisneau’s considerably more sombre pictures, do what star-crossed people have to do – they live to fight another day.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A highline RER train cuts through the “green” industrial landscape with the Eiffel Tower far off in the distance in <i>La ceinture verte </i>(1949), a picture taken near the Renault plant, and the realism is almost magical here. Doisneau photographed the waterways of Paris – sandwiched between rundown factories and impermanent football grounds or (with a bit of juvenile imagination) African plains, territories annexed by neighbourhood imps – with the embodied feelings of the lovers in Jean Vigo’s <i>L’Atalante </i>(1934). Juliette wants to escape the barge, she wants the lights of the city, but for Jean this is life itself.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Doisneau photographed houses and buildings like Charles Marville photographed houses and buildings in the 1800s, as if they were (lonely) individuals in their own right. <i>La maison d’Erik Satie </i>(1945) is like a posthumous portrait of Satie himself, twenty years after the composer’s demise. Eighteen thousand residential buildings across Île-de-France (the Paris region) were destroyed during the war, and Doisneau’s pictures of the French capital’s gaping holes have a strong resemblance to how the central parts of Stockholm looked like in the 1960s when the Social Democrats wrecked everything in their way. Doisneau’s 1940s are also full of contrasting vistas of good old Paris versus Soviet-style residential blocks for a dull new world.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Erecting a barricade meant collectively performing an act that would exorcise the bad old days. There was an explosive desire for joy in the air, one that made every single woman in the stone-passing chain seem beautiful to the beavers building the insurrectional barricade,” Doisneau remembered. “As I pedalled from one working-class quarter to another, from Saint-Michel to Belleville and from Ménilmontant to Batignolles, I noticed how barricades, like mushrooms, always grew in the same spots. Strangely, the chic neighbourhoods of Passy and Monceau were completely free of them – the soil there must have been completely devoid of the spores required for spontaneous germination.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Doisneau’s <i>Barricade Place du Petit Pont </i>(1944) shows one of those germinated barricades at the beginning of the narrow Rue de la Huchette near Notre-Dame. On August 18, the workers of Paris went on strike. The following day people all over Paris openly joined the Resistance forces together with the police and the Garde mobile to erect barricades and fight the Boche as the Allies were nearing the city. A week later, General de Gaulle paraded down the Champs-Élysées as if he singlehandedly had eradicated the Krauts from the capital. In any case, Paris was free again, if still a turbulent place for years to come. The North American author Saul Bellow called Paris of the time “one of the grimmest cities in the world”. “It was also a moment of vengeance and retribution,” as Rosemary Wakeman explains in <i>The Heroic City</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“German stragglers were dragged out of buildings and beaten by bystanders. French women caught with German soldiers were publicly stripped and their heads shaved, and they were paraded in humiliation through the streets. Avaricious shopkeepers and <i>bofs </i>[black marketers] were rebuked. Locals suspected of collaboration were turned in or gunned down. These acts of community vigilantism were their own form of theatrical tragedy […] Meanwhile, speculators and black marketers scalped everything from cigarettes to penicillin. The nouveau riche, brandishing heaps of bank notes acquired through illicit traffic, bought up everything from families living on the edge of penury […] The malaise deepened. Tempers frayed. Armed robberies became the norm. Fear, pity, and fate were all embodied in the tragic dreams in the streets.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Mon cher Doisneau,” Blaise Cendrars wrote him in a letter of March 1949 when they were working on Doisneau’s first book, <i>La Banlieue de Paris</i>, “You are a genius.” Directly after the war, Doisneau started to work for several magazines. One of them was the exquisitely produced <i>Le Point </i>that had a specific theme for each new issue. Another man who thought that Doisneau was a genius was the editor-in-chief at Paris <i>Vogue</i>, Michel de Brunhoff, who had halted the magazine during wartime. Doisneau worked for <i>Vogue </i>for a few years (he also scouted people from the Rue Mouffetard area for Irving Penn’s “Small Trades” project in <i>Vogue</i>), but fashion photography was not Doisneau’s medium (he described himself as “a mixture of rubble and slag”) and he was never at ease with the snotty models during the photo shoots. The photographer used to show up at fancy parties representing <i>Vogue </i>in a rented tuxedo made to fit with the aid of safety pins.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Sometimes they seem to show nothing other than the poses of a pointless world; but sometimes, in a better light, they seem to illustrate an extremely refined society,” Doisneau said of his <i>Vogue </i>pictures. “With hindsight, I can say why Michel de Brunhoff offered me a contract. I was like a gardener’s son invited to play with the children of the lord of the manor, welcome as long as he brought a new angle to things. In my case, the new angle was guaranteed, because I had never, I mean never, seen such sights.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Heroic Paris continued to be a place of extraordinary deeds. “How could Paris regain such a high cultural standing so soon after the war?” asks Agnès Poirier in her book about the city’s new golden era at the end of the decade, <i>Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940–1950</i>. “Germany was in eclipse. Russian and Eastern European cultural life devastated, Spain isolated by General Franco’s regime, Italy busy recovering from a generation of Fascism, and Britain as marginal as ever to Europe and intellectual debates.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“After 1944, everything was political; there was no escape. World citizens of the Left Bank knew this, and they did all they could to question both US policies and the Communist Party’s views. Paris was, for them, both a refuge and a bridge to think in a different way. They opened up the possibility of a Third Way, ardently embracing the idealism of the United Nations and the glimmer of utopia in what would later become the European Union. These pioneers also reinvented their relationships to others,” Poirier continues. “They also proved, with only a few exceptions, to be very hard workers.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Photography was a vital part of the commemoration when the city celebrated its two thousandth birthday (the Bimillénaire de Paris) in 1951. That year, Robert Doisneau shared the space with Cartier-Bresson, Willy Ronis, Brassaï and Izis in a show with “outstanding reportorial photography by contemporary Frenchmen” as the MoMA presented its <i>Five French Photographers </i>in the press release. Overall, there is a great sense of communion in Doisneau’s pictures from the 1950s, and he had released the breaks on his bashfulness. His café and restaurant pictures are spheres of loveliness – look at <i>Mademoiselle Anita </i>(1951) at La Boule Rouge, caught in a dreamy instant where her hands are folded like the paws of a cat. And look closely and you see the duplicated image of the photographer in the mirror.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">These establishments provided “a better vantage point for taking stock of things” if you were a philosopher with a camera and a great sense of joie de vivre: “So the café was, for me, the reunion of people from different milieus, all of them whom brought together their own ideal. With the excitement of a little wine, these people talked without holding back, without fear of being ludicrous. And what happened was that they really gave of themselves.” One such character was the bowler-hatted <i>Coco </i>(1952) and his forces of potables and friends (the print in the show is unnecessarily cropped though):<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“It was Robert Giraud who introduced us in a panhandlers’ bistro on Rue Xavier Privas. Coco didn’t have much to say, though. Solicited by the red wine in front of him, he obligingly returned the favour. The big attraction was to imitate a drum beat on the seat of a stool, pounding out a legionnaire’s chant, ‘Violà du boudin!’ Suddenly Coco would snap to attention, as of back in the Foreign Legion. Everyone present would laugh, which didn’t really bother him. He seemed to enjoy the mockery.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">La cour des Artisans </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">(1953), from the ninth arrondissement, is “a photographic chance” and one of the greatest pictures in <i>Robert Doisneau – The Poet of the Paris Suburb</i>. A woman is walking over a courtyard in a shabby setting while the four men on the left are locked in their separate ruminations. They all look like actors in a play, with very little to say about the direction. Doisneau explained it as “A picture that seems to me very curious, very bizarre. If I would have models on my disposal, I would never arranged them like that.” And yet, that was just how many of the French authors of the era arranged the characters in their stories, left on their own devices, with four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Reality does not exist for me. I am a false witness,” says Doisneau while he strikes his Gallic nose and smiles in his granddaughter Clémentine Deroudille’s <i>Le révolté du merveilleux</i>/<i>Robert Doisneau Through the Lens</i>, and this TV documentary from 2016 runs nonstop in the show. Another Pierrette who imbued him with an augmented sense of life was Pierrette d’Orient. Doisneau and Girard followed her for days and they both fell under the spell of this strangely attractive accordionist, who “was a pretty little lady indeed. She delivered her song – always the same slow lament, ‘Tu ne peux pas t’figurer comme je t’aime’ – with complete detachment, with a little contempt even,” Doisneau remembered. “Standing before folks moulded by hard labour, who held their fingers clenched even when at rest, she luxuriated in a sense of idleness. Her catlike nonchalance carried the slightest hint of cruelty. Back in the Middle Ages the spell that woman cast would have sparked a bonfire.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Pierrette d’Orient plays her number “You Can’t Imagine How Much I Love You” for the butchers from Les Abattoirs de la Villette too, in the café in <i>Les bouchers mélomanes </i>(1953). One of the men looks straight into the camera, as may happen when a photographer asks a tough guy to turn around and love the music. A world that Doisneau adored was Les Halles – there is a series of pictures of Les Halles meat carriers in the show – and in March 1969, when this fantastic market was to be demolished, only to be replaced by a freakish shopping mall many years later, he noted that Paris was losing its “belly”: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“I had a lot of friends there. In that village-like quarter I was a harmless photographer considered mildly obsessed. I didn’t like these technocrats’ ideas, with their ‘geometric’ goals labelled profitability, specialisation, division of labour, and efficiency. All of this was in diametric opposition to everything I came to Les Halles at night to seek, everything I was trying to picture. Saint-Eustache, the ‘village church’, was itself a mixture of styles and odours. Incense-smelling Gothic on the inside, celery-smelling Renaissance on the outside. And all around, humanity massed in the glow of fairground lights, rich and poor alike, truck drivers and market porters, butchers and Dior customers, grocers and drunkards. Everyone addressed each other in the familiar <i>tu </i>form, and above all there hovered great gaiety and good will, values that electronic computers cannot calculate.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But Paris in Doisneau’s photography was never (apart from a few pictures like <i>The Kiss</i>) treated like a museum from the immovable past. His understanding of beauty’s fleeting essence was just as thoroughly existential as his dislike towards the ghosts of the “car-packed, scheme-laden, jogger-happy Paris”. When Jean-Paul Clébert published his <i>Paris Vagabond </i>in 1952, he dedicated the book to Robert Doisneau:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“It amazes me that neither the Musée de l’Homme nor any decent popular geographical magazine ever pays attention to the city populace, ever offers the public at large an ethnographical view of the poor districts, and that the big dailies would far sooner enlighten their thousands of readers on the rites and customs of the Navajo than on those of the oldtimers of Nanterre; and I am likewise amazed that despite the great mass of books – and good ones – devoted to Paris ancient and modern by chroniclers of the weird and wonderful social life of the capital, Parisians themselves remain ignorant of their city, disparaging it or invariably confining their rote thoughts and observations to the poetry of the quays of the Seine and the virtues of the national art museums, finding it bizarre that an ordinary man, but one who knows how to see, hear and smell, and to use his senses like outsize antennae, might still in this day and age bother himself with new sights and sounds, or be aghast, stupefied, dumbstruck, at a complete loss for words and quite unable to sleep until he has raced over to his friends to tell them of his discoveries and drag them along to share and delight in them.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Doisneau had a joyous memory from his youth. The girl he secretly loved jumped on his bike one day, and off they went into the woods. And for a few rare hours, life was perfect. Doisneau’s photography was his way to challenge time, to preserve life’s perfect moments. Think of his famous picture from 1952 of a caped gendarme who walks by the devilish mouth opening to the Cabaret de l’Enfer in Pigalle and who tries to keep a straight face. Its hilariously wonderful architecture can be spotted among the street scenes of the early 1930s Paris in the remake of <i>Papillon </i>(2017) – today at 53 Boulevard de Clichy you walk into a less attractive Monoprix store.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Doisneau left the door wide open for those on the margin, for those who always found cunning new ways to get through the day. The world he has preserved for us is a world populated with people who dress, who walk, who talk, who are what they think they are.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Robert Doisneau, <i>La plaine lune du Bourget</i>, 1946. © Atelier Robert Doisneau.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">Robert Doisneau – The Poet of the Paris Suburb </span><i style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">at Kulturhuset in Stockholm through November 25, 2018.</i>Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-60878849153739450032018-07-05T01:03:00.000+02:002018-09-08T18:29:42.592+02:00ALTERED IMAGES<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxoaErRHPcU3MCJtkR-Jvpo-zblZUVC_JcS0cUwmUqSGlSZmOPaparNK2AfNoI2pZU1mFAV2A9ORE1I0xOttwTt-6ZN9OyTmnWIsW7uVTLDSSdv9a7OMTB62bhVr8CoehjYQpFBJJt4OZI/s1600/younane-ramses_utan-titel_1939_modernamuseet_press.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1240" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxoaErRHPcU3MCJtkR-Jvpo-zblZUVC_JcS0cUwmUqSGlSZmOPaparNK2AfNoI2pZU1mFAV2A9ORE1I0xOttwTt-6ZN9OyTmnWIsW7uVTLDSSdv9a7OMTB62bhVr8CoehjYQpFBJJt4OZI/s640/younane-ramses_utan-titel_1939_modernamuseet_press.jpg" width="494" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Ramses Younane, <i>Untitled</i>, 1939. Courtesy Sheikh Hassan Al-Thani Collection, Doha. © Ramses Younane.</span></span></td></tr>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Much of Coptic art is Surrealist. We do not imitate foreign schools but create an art form that has emerged from the tanned soil of this land and that has been running in our veins from the day we used to live by unrestrained free thought until this very hour … The word “Surrealism” is nothing but the modern technical term to what we have always referred to as free imagination: the freedom of expression, the freedom of style, and the orient, since eternity, has been dwelling to all of this.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">– Art et Liberté member Kamel El-Telmisany in 1939<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The man who was Emma Bovary was just twelve years old when he witnessed a giant granite needle jammed with surreal inscriptions from a very different world floating by one day in Rouen-on-the-Seine. The sight of the mighty Luxor Obelisk on the huffing and puffing <i>Louqsor </i>barge during its journey to Paris in December 1833 made the young Gustave Flaubert desire and fancy a country he only knew from the vast supply of extravagant mannerisms which was the certain imagery of Orientalism.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Napoleon’s invasional Egyptian “expedition” of 1798 and onwards produced the comprehensive volumes <i>Description d’Égypte </i>(1809–29) with close to three thousand illustrations depicting ancient Egypt, and then a host of French painters and their special blends of Neo-Classicism and Orientalism. “Egypt’s strangeness – its difference – represented a challenge to Europe’s post-Enlightenment mentally with its claim to universality and to its self-awarded license to decode and subordinate the cultural systems of others,” argues Peter Osborne in <i>Travelling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture</i>. “Long before disembarking, European travellers knew what had to be seen and how it was to be interpreted […] In the minds of European photographers and spectators alike the country was already a set of myths and meanings awaiting evocation. Egypt was, as Barthes might have put it, <i>Egypticity </i>– the signifier of mythical values, already a sign of itself. It was already representation.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Flaubert (who detested the snobbishness of the French) adored the muck and the muss of the country without reserve from the moment he arrived in Alexandria in November 1849. In a letter from Cairo he wrote: ”Here we are then, in Egypt, the land of the Pharaohs, the land of the Ptolemies, the kingdom of Cleopatra (as they say in the grand style). Here we are, and here we abide, with our heads shaven as clean as your knee, smoking long pipes and drinking our coffee lying on divans. What can I say? How can I write to you about it? I have scarcely recovered from my initial astonishment.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“It’s an astounding hubbub of colour, and your poor old imagination, as if it were at a firework display, is perpetually dazzled. As you go walking along with your mouth open gazing at the minarets covered in white storks, the terraces of the houses where weary slaves are stretching out in the sun, the sections of wall that have sycamores growing through them, the little bells on the dromedaries are tinkling in your ears, and great flocks of black goats are making their way along the street, bleating at the horses, the donkeys, and the merchants,” Flaubert penned back to France with much glee. “There is jostling, there is argument, there are blows, there is rolling about, there is swearing of all kinds, there is shouting in a dozen different languages. The raucous Semitic syllables clatter in the air like the sound of a whiplash. You come across every costume in the Orient, you bump into all its peoples.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The eminent Victorians persuaded their way into Egypt and its valuable cotton industry in the summer of 1882 when the Royal Navy bombed major parts of Alexandria to dust. Although never quite a colony of the Empire, Egypt remained in the claws of Great Britain until the 1950s. The Egyptian Revolution of 1952 and the instalment of President Nasser was also the beginning of the end for the country’s internal old regimes – the self-concerned Cairo elites and the powerful landowners alike – by the dethroning of the Nazi-loving King Farouk and the impediment of the nationalist paradigm waved by the considerably popular Wafd Party since the ending of World War I and, from the mid-1930s, several large groups of uniformed Arab Fascists patrolling the streets of Cairo.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“When people think of Egypt and the visual arts, images from the more than twenty-five hundred years of the Pharaonic period usually come to mind. Some might remember that Egypt for nine hundred years was part of the Hellenistic-Byzantine world, or that for fourteen hundred years it has had an Islamic legacy,” considers Caroline Williams in <i>Re-Envisioning Egypt 1919–1953 </i>with a great understanding of the complexity of <i>al-Nahda </i>– or the “special Renaissance” in the arts – which endorsed the fiery fabrication of the nationalist state that began in the 1920s: “The Pharaonic theme most readily allied itself with the new emerging nationalism since it emphasised Egypt’s own authentic and distinct historical and cultural past. This theme also distinguished Egypt from the European background of its British occupier. Thus, although the images produced in this first period did not entail radically new and different art forms, they nevertheless laid the foundation for a manifestly modern Egyptian art movement.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Mahmoud Mokhtar was the <i>Nahda </i>pioneer who blended a 19<sup>th</sup>-century French sculpture style with monumental dictator kitsch that mimicked the particular heritage and the ancient dramatics of the Pharaohs. And as he stated, “When I was a child, there had been no sculptures and no sculptor in my country for more than seventeen hundred years. The images that appeared among the ruins and around the edge of the desert were considered to be accursed and evil idols – no one should come near.” In his most famous work, <i>Egypt Awakening </i>(1928), we see a woman – Huda Sha’arawi, the nationalist who started the Egyptian Feminist Union – relieving herself of her hijab in front of a Las Vegas-y sphinx, as if it were a once-and-for-all statement at a time when Egyptian women, after the age of twelve, were confined to the homes of their fathers, brothers or husbands, and only the ancient goddesses were equal to men.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In his wonderful memoirs <i>My Last Breath</i>, published a year before the filmmaker’s true last sigh in 1983, Luis Buñuel recounts the Surrealist meetings at Le Cyrano on rue Biot or at André Breton’s place at 42 rue Fontaine (both in Pigalle): “Scandal was a potent agent of revelation, capable of exposing such critical crimes as the exploitation of one man by another, colonialist imperialism, religious tyranny – in sum, all the secret and odious underpinnings of a system that had to be destroyed. The real purpose of Surrealism was not to create a new literary, artistic, or even philosophical movement, but to explode the social order, to transform life itself […] It was an aggressive morality based on the complete rejection of all existing values. We had other criteria: we exalted passion, mystification, black humour, the insult, and the call of the abyss. Inside this new territory, all our thoughts and actions seemed justifiable; there was simply no room for doubt. Everything made sense.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">For a bunch of disobedient Egyptian writers and artists, most of them still in their teens or in their early twenties, Surrealism made a lot of sense. They were the people who believed they belonged to a whole world (the fact that almost all Surrealists came from well-off families granted them a free pass towards an itinerant way of life and a range of cosmopolitan manners) and who regarded the highly Francophonic Cairo as their home but Paris as the bellybutton of human culture. The Art et Liberté group conjured their rebellious energy only months after Britain and France had declared war on Nazi-Germany (succinctly, Dada had been centred around a World War that had just ended and Parisian Surrealism around a World War in the making). On December 22, 1938, these new radicals signed the French-Arabic manifesto “Long Live Degenerate Art”. The title itself was a tribute to all the many great European artists who were ridiculed and purged during the twelve-stop <i>Entartete Kunst </i>exhibition tour throughout the Third Reich. It was also a way to leave the door open for the members of the classical avant-garde.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">All roads lead to (and fro) Cairo in the rich and compendious <i>Art et Liberté: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938–1948) </i>show at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, a show that has been on tour since October 2016 when it opened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, with new turns at Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf and Tate Liverpool. “A large preparatory work in putting this together was in fact retracing the stories and the connections and the lives of the people, finding the documents, and I guess it almost made it an obsessive compulsive project over the last years because the stories are so fascinating,” says Till Fellrath of the curatorial duo Art Reoriented to the gathered press. “The Moderna Museet is the grand finale of this show, and it is perhaps also a neutral territory to present it in because in many of the other stations before there was a strong political connection.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But it is Sam Bardaouil who does all the talking here. “Cairo can be seen as a centre when we take the time and effort to go in and understand what was happening there, without being forced to always make these almost too naïve and normative comparatives that there is <i>one </i>canon, and that everything else has to fit that canon, which is really a very outdated and tired approach to thinking about art history. It is a bit surprising that we are always so stunned that these connections existed, simply because we didn’t know. But the more we learn the more we realise that this was actually more the norm than the exception, and we need to catch up with what was happening then,” he pleads.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“This exhibition is about changing our point of reference. It is important to imagine a different art history. When you are looking at all these places that have been considered peripheral, we can start imagining a new narrative that unfolds and we can actually reveal and unpack these beautiful stories and intricate connections, making space for new stories and expand our vision and enriching our understanding of what we thought we knew.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Tremendous work is indeed behind this peculiar show about Surrealism in Egypt. The duo became mesmerised, and obsessed, by Art et Liberté when they discovered this (at the time) obscure group while working on a show called <i>Tea with Nefertiti: The making of the Artwork by the Artist, the Museum and the Public </i>in 2012. They met two hundred people for interviews, they moiled through all sorts of non-digitalised publications from the days of Art et Liberté at the Egyptian National archives, and they travelled to see these (at the time) unknown works spread over twelve countries and forty-six collections. <i>Art et Liberté: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938–1948) </i>has all the beautiful stories and intricate connections that Bardaouil and Fellrath promise, and the Moderna is doing us a service by presenting these things to us. But how does this material of one hundred and thirty artworks – and a salmagundi of historical documents, with quite a bundle of graphical delights – hold up to Parisian Surrealism? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Art is not to be considered as a representation of the world, but its transformation into the wonderful,” were the German multi-artist Oskar Schlemmer’s last words in his diary of 1943, and by “wonderful” he did not necessarily mean beautiful. The titles of the sections in the show – “The Permanent Revolution”, “The Voice of Cannons”, “Fragmented Bodies”, “The Woman of the City”, “Subjective Realism”, “The Contemporary Art Group”, “Writing with Pictures” and “The Surrealist Photo” – are some citations from the voices and writings of the members of Art et Liberté. Most of the canvases in this show appear to have been painted by bedlamites in a world of sad ghosts, stretching from murky amateur Surrealism to folksy realism in a size-reduced vein of Third-World murals in which promulgation always seems to win over poetry. The nook where the photography is presented is a Surrealistic pillow though, a splendid area of solarisation, global modernity and local transformations into the wonderful.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But stop the music for a minute. It is a mystery why international art catalogues – this one comes in different English, French, Spanish, German and Arabic versions (and with the title on the spine running from bottom to top à la the French way of committing things) – so often fail in regard to the editing. This is a catalogue, however, that looks rather swell and the essays do not cling to the usual routine academia care of the art world’s store of garden-variety writers who just love the smell of their own farts. As the great Jonathan Meades recently expressed it in his BBC programme on Jargon: “There is very little jargon, as opposed to slang, which describes, let alone celebrates enjoyment and exhilaration.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And since we are in the capital of vainglory, charlatan goodness and thought policing – every day a new absurdity in the land where the “Feminists” are squeezing the trigger – we are also under the thumb of Big Sister’s very own Ministry of Love in which brainwashing and bully-worship always seem to win over poetry and the solid advantages of humankind. The Swedish press folder presents its bunch of nonsense, and for the millionth time we are introduced to the half-arsed dichotomy of “strong women” (anyone with a vagina) versus the other sex and its fabled <i>male gaze</i>. One of the forty-five things the writer Varlam Shalamov discovered during his fifteen years of survival at one of Stalin’s Gulag camps was that “the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five per cent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.” It is worth a lot of bother to be able to think properly.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“What Walter Benjamin termed the ‘poverty of the interior’ becomes the target of Surrealism and its attempt to transform everyday life,” writes Stephen Bronner in <i>Modernism at the Barricades: Aesthetics, Politics, Utopia</i>. “No other modernist trend had a theorist as intellectually sophisticated or an organiser quite as talented as Breton. No other was as international in its reach and as total in its confrontation with reality. No other fused psychoanalysis and proletarian revolution. No other was so blatant in its embrace of free association and ‘automatic writing’. No other would so use the audience to complete the work of art. There was no looking back to the past, as with the Expressionists, and little of the macho rhetoric of the Futurists. Surrealists prized individualism and rebellion – and no other movement would prove so commercially successful in promoting its luminaries. The Surrealists wanted to change the world, and they did. At the same time, however, the world changed them.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Art et Liberté’s key figure, the poet Georges Henein, became friends with Breton in 1936. “What you are experiencing here is a sort of confrontation,” Bardaouil suggests as he sweeps the whole show and then a big world map of the intellectual trade routes between the Surrealists: “It is an homage to Georges Henein who’s truly the most befitted figure when it comes to the founding of Surrealism in Egypt and bringing the movement there. This is Henein when he was about twenty years old, and this is his press card. He was a critic and he wrote reviews for a lot of cultural magazines. And he was a total enfant terrible, talking about all these scandalous things in a typically Surrealist style. Henein was born in Cairo to an Egyptian father and an Italian-Egyptian mother. He spoke several languages and was very cosmopolitan, similarly to many Egyptians at the time. He spent his teenage years in Madrid, his father was an ambassador there and this is where his connection to Spain comes from. In 1936–37 when the Spanish Civil War broke out, he started writing all this Surrealist poetry, denouncing Franco and the Nationalists.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">While the classical avant-garde was dispersed by the breakout of World War II, the condition was very different in Cairo where writers and artists tried to rejuvenate Surrealism through a plucky kind of anarchy, a notion repeated in the catalogue but scarcely sensed in the show. Here you get the same feeling of restraint and sunny suffocation as in Michael Pearce’s almost perfect <i>Beast </i>(2017) in which the fascinating Moll (perfectly played by Jessie Buckley) is leaving her birthday party – while her voiceover is talking about killer whales going bonkers in captivity – to swap her overbearing family with a presumable homicidal maniac on this tourist biscuit tin in the English Channel. In his first novel <i>The House of a Certain Death </i>(1944), Art et Liberté member Albert Cossery describes how “People and things were urged on by a synthetic animation that pushed them toward the broad horizons of their daily misery.” This is by and large how exciting these paintings are. The group claimed to be part of a world of thought and sharing, however judging from these works they appear to have preferred the reverberating pool sounds of their own misgivings.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“It is very important to recognise the fact that the most active period in the life of this short-lived group was during the Second World War,” says Bardaouil. “Although it was a hidden colony, Egypt was forced to put all its natural resources and infrastructure at the service of the British Empire. So the war started, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were coming to Egypt, and in 1942 one of the main decisive battles of the Second World War was fought on the Egyptian-Libyan border, the El Alamein Battle, when they defeated Rommel and the Italian corps. The war was there, and it was a very strong reality. Some artists, like Amy Nimr, experienced it first-hand. Her son died when they were on a picnic in the desert and he picked up an object that looked like a shiny little toy. Turned out that it was a bomb being thrown out by the axis forces from the sky. And then in 1943 after her son died her works have a very macabre and sombre tone.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Amy Nimr’s paintings, even before the death of her ten-year-old son Mickey, are some of the most macabre in the group, and this group was obsessed with death and injury. She is also the artist with the earliest and easily the best painting in the show, a decade before the “Long Live Degenerate Art” manifesto and the beginnings of Art et Liberté: the forever fascinating <i>Untitled </i>(<i>Girl with Fishnet</i>) (c 1928) is a piece of world-class Surrealism (Nimr was only twenty-one when she made it in Paris) which depicts a trawled-up young woman, either dead or dead in spirit, with her legs covered with black mussels, and the fish that is more about rape and war than food and nourishment. This is like Edward Much (for those of us who do not appreciate Munch) had done a painting in the style of Magritte’s finest and sickest piece <i>Young Girl Eating a Bird </i>(1927), as nauseating as the beach scene in <i>The Tin Drum </i>(1979) with the horse head that is brimming with eels.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Sam Bardaouil mentions Marcel Salinas’s <i>The Purpose of the Contemporary Artist</i>, published in 1938, “and in the book he described Surrealism as falling under two categories: on one hand you have the Surrealism of Dalí and Magritte that is totally meditated, everything is planned beforehand, it’s not about the subconscious anymore, it’s too contrived. On the other hand, a second form of Surrealism is that of automatic drawing and writing – which is too much about the subconscious – and that’s not actually informed by what’s happening in society, they are not creating the revolution that Surrealism promised when it became too self-involved. For Art et Liberté, a new form of Surrealism was important, and that new form was called Subjective Realism – subjective, meaning the freedom to work in any style, any form, any topic that they were interested in; realism, meaning being connected to the reality of where they existed and the public that was seeing the works.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“The Surrealists in Egypt came to Surrealism through Subjective Realism in 1938,” he explains. “Now, what we must keep in mind is that at the time Surrealism was being negotiated in so many different parts of the world, and all these younger artists who were from a second generation of Surrealists were thinking, ‘Wait a second, Surrealism is a little bit outdated with the whole Freudian, Marx and Hegelian thing – we need to find a new language, a new theory.’ So Art et Liberté engaged in this conversation.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“The fragmented body was a very important motif in order not only to show the effect of war or the effect of social inequity, poverty and starvation. Egypt was definitely not a Utopia, rural labourers and working class were living below the poverty line, so they wanted to comment on these things. But it was also a way of creating a cultural revolution,” he adds.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“This is a work by Ramses Younane that exemplifies what Subjective Realism is all about. He chose to work as a Surrealist in an aesthetics that many Surrealist artists were using at the time. This broken female figure is a direct reference to the ancient goddess of the sky, Nut, who is always portrayed with her body arched over the sky as a sign of fertility, as a sign of life. But in this case she is more a sign of starvation, suffering and death. There is a beautiful hybridisation of a Surrealist aesthetic and local contents. This is their way of being internationally connected yet being locally minded.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Yes, Younane’s untitled painting from 1939 is a rare piece in the show as it switches between the ghastly, grim and gruesome, and a Surrealistic form of beauty, just like the arched Nut who swallowed the sun god Ra in the evening and gave birth to him again every morning. Except, here is a world wedged into a constant twilight zone where nothing can sprout, and gone are the stars and the planets that were her children. There is a charming ink drawing by the British Surrealist Roland Penrose in the show, <i>Lee as Nut </i>(1938), with a naked Lee Miller – whom he would marry after the war – bent the other way round in a space where different realities conspire. <a href="https://thestockholmreview.blogspot.com/2017/10/a-perfectly-bona-fide-yank-from.html" target="_blank">Lee Miller</a> was at the time married to the wealthy and considerate Cairene businessman Aziz Eloui Bey, but like most foreigners who came to Egypt she never could adjust to her new life there, as described by Carolyn Burke in <i>Lee Miller: A Life</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Lee’s gloom was not unusual among expatriates. ‘Many people find exile in Egypt difficult out of all proportion to the trials which at first appear to be tangibly involved,’ [British writer and diplomat] Robin Fedden wrote. The climate unhinged Europeans due to the lack of seasons ‘and the recurring stimuli they offer,’ he continued, but also because the landscape was ‘boneless and unarticulated’ – except for the desert. The realisation that Egyptian fields ‘are not soil but bone-mould and excrement’ was known to produce ‘claustrophobic panic’. Only Egyptologists or Muslims could appreciate the country. The isolation of the expatriate was deepened, he thought, by the ‘nightmarish unreality’ of Cairo, where ‘the black satin and pearls are complimentary to rags and tatters’ – the situation he described as ‘Levantine unreality’.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Lee Miller called Art et Liberté a group of misfits. She was something of a “misfit” herself, always on the run, always ready for a daring new escapade, another escape from herself. (“You see darling,” she wrote to a lover in 1939, “I don’t want to do anything ‘all for love’ as I can’t be depended on for anything. In fact I have every intention of being completely irresponsible.”) Her Egyptian photography can be seen as her interim period between the early days with Man Ray in Paris and her state-of-the-art photo studio in New York in the first half of the 1930s, and her absolutely sensational work for British <i>Vogue </i>during World War II. Her pictures of the deserts around Cairo in the show are void of both people and Surrealist “props” but superbly executed and superbly other-dimensional. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The first time she met the wealthy and unconventional Roland Penrose was in the early summer of 1937 at a Surrealist costume party in Paris during one of her many escapes from Egypt (Penrose had painted his right hand and left foot blue for the occasion), and they spent the rest of this time together in Miller’s bed at the five-star Hôtel Prince de Galles. Miller introduced her main man to Henein who offered Penrose to preside over Art et Liberté’s general assembly on March 8, 1939.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Penrose published the group’s manifesto in its original form in the following issue of <i>The London Bulletin </i>that spring: “The victories of Fascism do not fail to provoke reactions and awaken an activity which is creative as well as defensive. In Cairo a newly founded group Art et Liberté led by the Surrealist poets Georges Henein and Georges Santini and the painter Telmisany has recently published a manifesto in Arabic and French entitled ‘Long Live Degenerate Art’ containing a reproduction of Picasso’s <i>Guernica</i>,” he wrote in his introduction. “It is signed by thirty-six intellectuals and has been widely distributed. In spite of a press boycott the group is constantly active, holding meetings and protesting vigorously when a new menace to their liberties becomes apparent.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The largest painting in the show looks like an explosion in a shingle factory. The size and the bang considered – disjointed arms and legs and torsos stretched beyond saneness in a silent chord of shapes that shouldn’t be – one would expect a bigger splash than a visual mess. “This is a work by Mayo from 1937,” says Bardaouil, “the same year that <i>Guernica </i>was done, and it is called <i>Coups de Bâtons</i>, the blows of sticks, and it is kind of depicting that moment when the police would raid one of those underground cafés with Leftist writers and painters. Maybe they are writing their manifestos, just about to go out and distribute them on the streets. And it is a beautiful painting because it shows a moment, an explosion frozen in time. There is so much tension, so much energy. It is again showing us that Surrealism was not the end in itself but a tool towards creating a language that could actively reflect on the local political context what these artists were concerned with.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Georges Henein, in Breton’s words, was “the imp of the perverse”. On February 4, 1937, he talked about Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Dada and the unconscious mind during his blistering speech “Appraisal of the Surrealist Movement”, which was broadcast over Egyptian Radio, at the avant-garde collective Les Essayistes’ club in Cairo. And on March 24, 1938, he returned to this club together with his friends to make a racket when Marinetti (the Alexandria-born hotspur and founder of Italian Futurism, who published his “Manifesto of Futurism” in 1909 and who co-wrote the first “Fascist Manifesto” in 1919) came to Egypt on a delegation to talk about Futurism, the machine and the advantages of war in a lecture called “The Motorised Poetry”. “And he came as a member of the Reale Accademia d’Italia, as a delegate of the Fascist state,” says Bardaouil, “and this was the event that triggered this group to come together.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Art et Liberté grew by a continual accumulation of ills. The catalogue’s main text is by Sam Bardaouil who describes that their “sense of freedom was augmented by the realities of a raging war, and articulated with a pressing awareness of the growth of Fascist and totalitarian ideologies within Egypt”. As Patrick Kane writes in his book <i>The politics of Art in Modern Egypt: Aesthetics, Ideology and Nation-Building</i>: “The isolation of the elite nationalist road for art and its limited utility to the state raises the question of whether it had been intended to be shared among the masses, despite its rhetorical programs and pedagogy. Indeed, the revolt of the Egyptian Surrealists and their successors who had been sent as art teachers to rural schools in the late 1930s [and who were appalled by the conditions they found] is indicative of the dissidence within the national program of the arts.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Despite the fact that Surrealism everywhere was primarily a literary movement, one cannot pretend that the “Long Live Degenerate Art” manifesto is anything else than a dull piece of writing. On the occasion of the Art et Liberté manifesto Henein produced a little side description of their objectives: “a) The affirmation of cultural and artistic freedom, b) To promote awareness of works, individuals, and values, knowledge of which is indispensable to understand the present time, c) To maintain a close contact between the youth of Egypt and current literary, artistic and social developments around the world.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Basically they began with a bulletin, and then they started publishing a biweekly magazine called <i>Don Quichotte</i>. And then a journal called <i>Al-Tattawwur </i>[Evolution] in Arabic that appeared for one year before it got censored. They then opened a publishing house, Les Éditions Masses, and a second one called La Port du Sable,” explains Bardaouil. Anwar Kamel, the editor of <i>Al-Tattawwur </i>(the journal that placarded itself as “the premier review of art and literature in the Arab world”), was another literary name in the Art et Liberté group. He became known in 1938 with a collection of prose poetry, <i>The Outcast Book</i>, which was a call for a grand revival of desires.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Ramses Younane wrote in the fifth issue of <i>Al-Tattawwur </i>(May 1940) that bourgeois society faced “a crisis of poetry, enjoyment and delirium; a crisis of movement, growth and openness”: “On a cultural level, the bourgeoisie worked to replace blind faith with rational analytical reason. But the glorification of reason, insightfulness, and commercial shrewdness moulded life into a technological mechanical system that did not allow for the caprice of imagination and the pleasure of a free spirit. Natural instincts and deep-seated affections whose nature it was to search for pleasure were exploited and distorted by commercial battle and competitive struggle.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Art et Liberté exhibited their works together about once a year from 1940 to 1945. When their first show opened on February 8, 1940 – as Caroline Williams describes it in her book – “most of the paintings revolved around the theme of the human psyche as it was affected by the war. The group felt their duty was to open the public’s eyes to the horrible realities of cruelty and ruin that were the products of war. They shocked their audiences with images featuring distortion, the absurd, and the unnatural. Their canvases featured strangely shaped tree trunks with breasts, staring hollow-eyed faces, separate and maimed body parts in wasted and empty landscapes.” One such painting from the Cairo show in 1940, and Stockholm 2018, is Mahmoud Saïd’s <i>La Femme aux bouncles d’or </i>(1933) – surprisingly one of the few pieces in the show that actually depicts a bit of urban life – and it stars a somewhat genderless Goldilocks with an indelicate <i>Mona Lisa </i>smile.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“These artists were Feminists to the core,” asserts Bardaouil, “and it has to do with a lot of things. First of all, there were a lot of woman artists in the group that were not left to the margins as for the use of the main artist to paint them in an eroticised manner, nor were they just companions faded into the background. They were <i>equally </i>incorporated as authors, as thinkers, as poets, as visual artists and painters, but also as prominent patrons. It so happens that several members of the group, like Amy Nimr and Marie Cavadia, who were actually from very wealthy backgrounds, supported younger artists. And sometimes they were lovers as well – that always adds a nice twist to the story.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The curators have arranged three dismal paintings by Kamel El-Telmisany – <i>Nude </i>(1941), <i>Nude with a Rose </i>(1940) and <i>Nude </i>(1941) – as a haunting triptych. “Each of these deformed female figures has another face hidden in the body, some sort of animal that’s about to jump out and devour the person standing in front of that woman. And this is a discreet reference to an important poem by Georges Henein called ‘Saint Louis Blues’,” explains Bardaouil. “When you look at this, it is really about showing the suffering, the female figure as a place where there is a certain war going on that leads to the breaking down of the figure,” he ponders. “There were 140,000 soldiers stationed in Cairo at the time and the poverty led to arising prostitution. These artists were asking people not to condemn women if they were forced to go into prostitution, but to find ways to helping them out. They were asking for equal rights for women to vote, to take ownership of their own bodies, their own sexuality. So this is really visionary when you think about it.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Samir Rafi worked on his painting <i>Nudes </i>(1945) for several years. It is a piece about the massive destruction of Alexandria – an abattoir of wretchedness turned into a cannonade of visual effects and excessive rhetoric. Firearms, mutilated bodies, war skies and ominous birds, and the hairy monster that crashes businesswoman Ines Conradi’s naked party in Maren Ade’s classic <i>Toni Erdmann </i>(2016) – Hieronymus Bosch as kitsch. A bird in Surrealism is a symbol of the unconscious. Mayo’s cyclopic <i>L’Oiseau </i>(The Bird) from 1937 is high on the wings of her rhythms, as if Miró had painted something pretty great for a change, and it is known from Egypt’s ancient stories that the soul rose from the swarthiness of the tomb to become a bird in the sky and returned to its body at nightfall to bring the comfort of daylight. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The arboraceous paintings that Inji Efflatoun exhibited at Art et Liberté’s third group show are quite excellent. Efflatoun was only eighteen years old in 1942, but she is the real thing. Sam Bardaouil has a lot to say about her <i>Boy and Lamp </i>(1941), which he calls “a very striking image of a little boy wrapped by some sort of monster, and a forest in the distance. This is taken from a short story by Albert Cossery called ‘The Barber Killed His Wife’, and it is a very telling story of what Art et Liberté really stood for. In this story, a young boy comes running to his father’s tanning studio in the slums of Cairo, and he comes in with a penny in his hand. But the father is trying to break the news to him that this penny is far from enough to buy anything really and celebrate. And as they are having this conversation, a policeman comes in from the city, which the author describes as ‘a jungle of monsters’, and in the distance is a blood moon up in the dark blue sky. The policeman starts to intimidate the little boy, saying that he cannot go to the city, that he will never leave his place or amount to anything. But the boy is determined to never give up, to keep hoping that there could be a better life in the future. The whole scene happens under a lamppost, at number 13 in the dark alley.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the darkness at the Studio des Ursulines stood a very nervous filmmaker on the sidelines of the cinema on June 6, 1929 for the premiere screening of <i>Un chien andalou</i>. Luis Buñuel had filled his pockets with stones, <i>en cas de malheur</i>. Everybody was there: Cocteau, Picasso, Le Corbusier, André Breton, Max Ernst, Paul Éluard, Tristan Tzara, Magritte, René Char, Jean Arp, Yves Tanguy – “the <i>tout</i>-Paris” – and a young woman of the world named Ida Karamian. This was the film that made her want to become a photographer. Two thousand five hundred years ago the Greek historian Herodotus wrote that concerning Egypt “there is no country that possesses so many wonders, nor any that has such a number of works that defy description”. The dream (or nightmare) logic of Ida Kar’s Surrealistic photography, from a perspective of praise, belongs to that characterisation.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Two black and white photos are covering the entrance walls downstairs at the Moderna. The oldest is from 1927 and it shows King Fuad I as he opens the Salon du Caire exhibition which was organised by Société des amis de l’art each year in December. The monarch has a lot of men behind him and a few (Western only) women tucked away in a corner. The other picture is taken at Art et Liberté’s group exhibition in 1941 and there is not a woman in sight.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There are screens in the show with moving images of urban life and the war. Art et Liberté belonged to the unwholesome fire of World War II, with that anger gone the group imploded. Another bunch of artists was in the wings of making new “revolutionary” Egyptian art when Henein wrote his formal goodbye to Breton in the summer of 1948. The works by The Contemporary Art Group at the Moderna Museet are easily recognised by their ugly awkwardness and the dilettantish Social Realism, exhibited in abundance in Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar’s painting <i>The Beloved of the Sayyidah </i>(c 1950) and, to a lesser degree, in his celebrated spaceman portrait <i>The Green Fool </i>(1951). A decade earlier, Kamel El-Telmisany had worded that “There is no bigger crime in the world of art than for an artist to limit his art within a specific piece of land.” The Contemporary Art Group was purely Farmland, Egypt.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Bardaouil writes in the catalogue, “As far as Art and Liberty were concerned, the movement was not a fixed static entity. On the one hand, it was a faltering art movement of different schools whose various evolving styles and methods had not arrived yet at one conclusive definition. On the other, it was a project of social revolution that was still figuring out how to articulate, in concrete terms, the tangible role that art could play in the implementation of that revolution,” echoing Ramses Younane’s words from 1938: “Since Surrealism is still in the face of experimentation, it has not managed to discern its abilities and limitations, and is constantly hesitating in its methods. For sometimes it deviates towards the right and at other times to the left. It makes advances in one direction, but eventually retracts – like an archaeologist who does not fully know where treasures hide or what treasure will the belly of the earth surprise him with.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Joyce Mansour, whose poetry is a compound of dark Surrealism and Egyptian mythology, did not partake in Art et Liberté but had a history similar to many of its members: she was born in England (to Egyptian-Jewish parents), lived in Cairo, died in Paris. In <i>Cris </i>(Cries), her first collection of poetry from 1953, Mansour writes: “I will fish up your empty soul / In the coffin where your body mildews / I will hold your empty soul / I will tear off its beating wings / Its clotted dreams / And I will devour it.” It is a poem about female concupiscence and the outrage of refusing a soul to rise as a bird to collect the sunlight and salvage some life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Anwar Kamel had this to say in the fifth issue of <i>Al-Tattawwur </i>(May 1940): “As for those who still insist that we are corrupting people’s minds through our ideas, we now announce that if liberating minds from superstition and reactionary myths is corrupt, if liberating people from bondage and slavery is corrupt, then from hereon our mission and message in life is: to corrupt the minds of men.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But Art et Liberté was never about a mind pleasantly out of control. It all happened under a lamppost, at number 13 in a dark alley.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfYpHJG7gJKuv_q2UtqraPgGI8HPKyoB6RSXiaKM2rl3Ix8b7UdbPyyvNcUqXNps06XVmgjv6BZo37dr25XTidJ4H5eaKF1hVnq3XvzBfKtAW-OPE_3ep0fi7o58ZqSUOFWnS1KDpT9s1z/s1600/efflatoun-inji_composition-surrealiste_1942_modernamuseet_press.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1370" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfYpHJG7gJKuv_q2UtqraPgGI8HPKyoB6RSXiaKM2rl3Ix8b7UdbPyyvNcUqXNps06XVmgjv6BZo37dr25XTidJ4H5eaKF1hVnq3XvzBfKtAW-OPE_3ep0fi7o58ZqSUOFWnS1KDpT9s1z/s640/efflatoun-inji_composition-surrealiste_1942_modernamuseet_press.jpg" width="548" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Inji Efflatoun, </span><i style="text-align: start;">Composition surréaliste</i><span style="text-align: start;">, 1942. © Inji Efflatoun.</span></span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Art et Liberté: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938–1948) </span></span><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm through August 12, 2018.</i></span><span style="font-family: "verdana";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-57283650637921866562018-04-22T23:27:00.000+02:002019-10-26T18:17:24.501+02:00A RESONANT SPACE<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMxl-KRTftQczGMhr7aDOhENFzGykw3-SfCKS7XAfdWgY8gwp9rX6KlMd1b3D7vdfXIrErTM1VjG0cT0-KUoJUC_nO6C_rY-llwt2HfYYhaiIaZkCt-smYFHZuBV778ZNFftbd0N3TCXIM/s1600/lauand-judith_concrete-61_modernamuseet_press.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1590" data-original-width="1600" height="634" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMxl-KRTftQczGMhr7aDOhENFzGykw3-SfCKS7XAfdWgY8gwp9rX6KlMd1b3D7vdfXIrErTM1VjG0cT0-KUoJUC_nO6C_rY-llwt2HfYYhaiIaZkCt-smYFHZuBV778ZNFftbd0N3TCXIM/s640/lauand-judith_concrete-61_modernamuseet_press.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Judith Lauand, <i>Concreto 61</i>/<i>Concrete 61</i>, 1957. The Museum of Modern Art (promised gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros). © Judith Lauand..</span></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This revolution in form (and politics) manifested itself in the displacement of attention from the pictorial plane – painting as a container and object of contemplation – to the edge of the canvas and beyond.</span></span></i><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">– Mónica Amor, <i>Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, 1944–1969</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Devo is about that clean face of the future,” explained the group’s guiding philosopher Gerald Casale in the early 1980s when he talked about the need to get rid of “the self-destructive characteristics of beliefs that are no longer applicable or humane in the world situation” and to replace them with some new traditions: “We picked the happy astronaut as a symbol. An astronaut keeps his troubles behind him.” In 1935, shortly after his return to Montevideo after tens of years in the company of the fizzy historical avant-garde in Europe, the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García published his manifesto illustrated with a map of South America turned on its ear. It was as if he was emptying a whole continent’s garbage can of political and artistic entropy and flabby beliefs. Out went the prospect of a grimly uncertain future.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">As Mónica Amor argues in <i>Theories of the Nonobject</i>, “These semantic negotiations speak to a crisis of mediums and representations that stimulated a series of aesthetic investigations by artists in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela – investigations that departed from the trajectories of Soviet Constructivists and European geometric abstract art that influenced the cultural landscapes of those countries in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. At that time and in those places, myriad international references – Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism, Soviet Constructivism, Bauhaus, Parisian Concrete art, Swiss Concrete art, and the work of such artists such as Alexander Calder and Max Bill – shaped the efforts of South American artists to negotiate local cultural realities and construct an avant-garde practice based on the pure forms of geometry.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">That’s right, the pure forms of geometry. In the forth issue of their Purist magazine <i>L’Esprit Nouveau </i>in 1920, Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant summoned “for an art free of conventions which will utilise plastic constants and address itself above all to the universal properties”, concluding that “The highest delectation of the human mind is the perception of order, and the greatest human satisfaction is the feeling of collaboration or participation in this order.” Ten years later, Theo van Doesburg’s “Concrete Art Manifesto” devised this new term for the art world in his single-issue magazine <i>Art Concret</i>, in which he declared that it was time to endorse “concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a colour, a surface” – everything else was disregarded as “illusionistic, vague and speculative”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">These painters, designers and architects were in many respects the early explorers of space, with a variety of ideas that decades later started to converge in the minds of a new avant-garde of bright young artists who were working in various fields of applied arts in Latin America – specifically in Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina – in the midst of World War II. Enormous energy was poured into this grand inquiring call to order.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The meat of the matter for these radical social theorists was a quest for certainty by way of a concretisation of thought and a scientific perception of space. In her book on Hélio Oiticica (<i>Folding the Frame</i>), Irene Small explains how this art – “As opposed to being ‘abstracted’ from the world” – “was self-referential and nonrepresentational – a ‘concrete’ reality in and of itself. Compositions were meant to operate according to an internal rather than illustrative logic.” Nonetheless, the acuity and coherence of these methodically derived compositions were positively aimed to resound without delay in the notional (“universal”) mind of the viewer.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“In my case, this period of anguish began in 1943 and lasted for several years. My reflections and anxieties at the time revolved around that very urgent need we felt to enter history so that we might be saved from oblivion.” This is the voice of Carlos Cruz-Diez in Ariel Jiménez’s conversation book about this Venezuelan artist who after the war moved to Paris to join Los Disidentes (The Dissidents) in order to catch up with the modern world (and to experience works of art in more vivid forms than in scarce art books in black and white), and from there surge into the future: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Anyone with even the slightest historical consciousness, who is able to gauge the immense inequalities in our country, cannot help but be pained by them. Dissatisfaction with the present inevitably awakens a desire for change and, among some of us, a desire to contribute through our work to help make that change possible. It makes perfect sense, then, that at the close of one of the longest dictatorships in Venezuelan history [in 1935], that of Juan Vicente Gómez, young Venezuelans would feel a need to transform the reality they had known.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Matilda Olof-Ors talks about Mid-Century Latin American Concretism as a time when much of the inspiration traversed and vanquished all sorts of borders, confines, frontiers, verges. <i>Concrete Matters</i>, her wonderfully originative and most exquisitely effectuated show at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, is made of star stuff. “When you face the show, the artworks may at first glance look quite similar,” she explains. “However, behind these idioms there are different agendas. There are artists who used this concrete language to shape a mathematical reality. And there are others who more acquired a spiritual perspective, approaching this on the basis of discernment and perception. What is also interesting to see is how many artists saw this as an idiom whereby they would formulate their ideas about how to transform the world with fairly related political agendas.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Concrete Matters </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">is designed in association with architect Albert France-Lanord and the show is like a better-arranged universe. “What we talked a lot about were practical issues because many works are quite small,” says Olof-Ors, “so I wanted an architecture that both creates intimate meetings between the works but where there is also an openness. We also talked a lot regarding this thing about movement, the visitors’ movement in terms of experiencing the works. We were talking about shapes of course, about the importance of colour. When he came back with a suggestion, one of the overall thoughts was also to slightly modify the shape of the room. It is basically a very straight square and through this solution he wanted to make a more rectangular shape and find a rhythm and a way to stage the works. And I noticed that the works did not have to be displayed on the same wall to be seen together.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The curator was not the innate Hispanist that one would assume when this curious opportunity landed on her desk at the Moderna. “It is always the same names that are taught at universities and institutions, and that you often meet in museums, so a closer look at names and places that we have not done before is extraordinary satisfying. I also had several blind spots in regard to this material.” There are twenty-six artists in the show and some eighty pieces (mostly paintings) of concrete greatness, predominantly from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros that kept the works for Stockholm before they will be permanently domesticated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “And I can only congratulate the MoMA, really,” smiles Matilda Olof-Ors with infallible mirth in her voice.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, according to Olof-Ors, “has always worked to change the image of Latin American art. Donating is a step in this work, and that is very effective of course if you want to widen or nuance the historiography. She is an <i>incredible </i>art lover, she feels for these works. She collected in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, and I think the first artist she started with was [Jesús Rafael] Soto because they are both from Venezuela.” Last year señora Phelps de Cisneros expressed that, “I think we can say that Latin America has finally arrived at its rightful place in global art history.” Inversely, what this reassessment of Concrete art with its true beauty and powerful deep resonances evocates is an urgent need to enter history where this movement once revolved.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In <i>Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader</i>, Jennifer Jolly writes about the conviction to start afresh in the New World in her chapter on Joaquín Torres-García: “Exploring pre-Columbian art in Paris’s museums, he realised that the basis of art’s order and structure did not have to stem from ancient Greek classicism, but had precedents in ancient American art forms. Such archaic traditions provided formal structure and symbolic content and evoked a time when art provided a ritualistic social unity […] Thus when Torres-García returned to Uruguay, he had already began a process of intellectual inversion, rethinking traditional <i>and </i>avant-garde European ideals, even before reacquainting himself with his homeland.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The earliest piece in the <i>Concrete Matters </i>show – <i>Locomotora con casa constructiva</i>/<i>Locomotive with Constructive House </i>(1934) – is by this Uruguayan artist who disfigured the European paragon of Neo-Plasticism – straight black grids filled with primary colours on crisp white grounds – with slack rectangles and muffled colours in accordance with his concept of “Constructive Universalism” in which the global permeates the local and the local permeates the global.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“We have two works by Torres-García, who lived in Paris and knew Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, and was in that context, but at the same time chose not to completely embrace it but made it his own. It is also exciting how he after <i>forty years </i>abroad, working with Gaudí in Barcelona, returned to Montevideo and started an art school and attempted to enforce this combination of the new with the native culture. He had a spiritual attitude towards the form that the new artists in Argentina did not have. It is interesting how close they are in some aspects, but so incredibly far in others,” says Olof-Ors – and adds, “He was the person who many could oppose.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Torres-García’s Escuela del Sur (School of the South) – mind the inverted South American map with Uruguay sunny side up – and “the second renaissance” of his art journal <i>Círculo y Cuadrado</i>, a great remainder of his thrilling European history and the short-lived Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square) group that he cofounded in Paris in the late 1920s, and other related matters made him a figure of wide-ranging influence for a younger generation of artists in the Rio de la Plata.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“One of the most sweeping of the several implications arising from the destruction of conventional modes of representation was the idea that painting should be an absolute entity with no relation to the objects of the visible world, and that it should be composed of completely abstract forms whose origins were in the mind,” writes Hershel Chipp in <i>Theories of Modern Art </i>about Cubism, this angular ism that sprouted in the first decade of the 1900s. “Art constructed according to this ideal, having avoided all taint of the material world, and being free of any personal influence of the individual artists, would be completely autonomous and obedient only to universal laws. Because of this belief art was often considered as a sort of idealist model for the harmonious relations which were believed ultimately possible for both individuals and for all of society.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The problem for many of his students was that Torres-García’s embryonic art looked liked ironed Cubism drizzled with sensuousness and emotion, and that it was rooted in the past. The Latin American vanguard wanted only colour, line and space – the pure elements of painting, the clean face of the future.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Argentinian wall (facing Torres-García’s two oil paintings) begins with a Dadaesque and two-and-a-half dimensional rendering of a “Mondrian” by Juan Alberto Molenberg, <i>Compsición</i>/<i>Composition </i>(1946), one of the rare pieces in the show that utilises the Dutch painter’s palette of colours. This wall displays the irregular shapes of these playful and highly beautiful works from the Madí and AACI groups in Buenos Aires that pursued the dictum of Rhod Rothfuss’s manifesto “The Frame: A Problem in Contemporary Art” – published in the scanty yet very important one-issue journal <i>Arturo </i>in April 1944 – which stated that “the edge of the canvas is made to play an active role in plastic creation. It is a role it should always play. A painting should be something that begins and ends in itself. Without interruption.” These artists adopted the anatomy of European geometric abstraction while turning its principled hegemony on its ear. In addition, out went the legacy of the rectangular illusionistic “window” for a framework of rationality and intellect.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Matilda Olof-Ors affectionately calls the Argentinian works “hardboiled” and remarks that, “Many of these artists were members of the Communist Party and it certainly looked like this art was also a way of propagating the Marxist message. They believed that representational art did not coincide with their political interest because it rather created a passive viewer. They wanted to put the viewer in connection to the direct objects.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">That was also the overall thesis when eighteen artists of the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención movement signed the “Inventionist Manifesto” in March 1946 – that Concrete art “acquaints humans with things rather than with the fiction of things”: “The age of representational fiction in art has come to an end. Man is less and less sensitive to illusory images. That is to say, he is progressing in his sense of integration in the world. The old phantasmagorias no longer satisfy the aesthetic appetite of the new man, formed in a reality that demands of him his total presence, without reservations.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Tomás Maldonado was the most drastic advocate of Concrete art’s union with revolutionary tactics in Argentina (he was too radical for the Communist Party which ousted him in 1948) and he argued that, “The biggest lacks in nonrepresentational art were caused by its failure to achieve either new composition or the definitive removal of the illusory. Thus we began by breaking with the traditional format of the painting.” His painting <i>Desarrollo de un triángulo</i>/<i>Development of a triangle </i>(1949) is the only “Russian” piece in the show. It is great but also, ironically, anachronistic.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“For the artists and critics of this generation, Concrete art was far more than a formal style – it provided the road map to the new materials and techniques that would populate the future. With newfound access to technical education, Concrete artists were exposed to new working methodologies and gained critical thinking skills that ultimately allowed them to re-evaluate many of the long-held conventions that governed their approach to fine art. In the modern economy, manual labour was no longer prized; instead innovation came to be rewarded,” informs Aleca Le Blanc in the catalogue to <i>Making Art Concrete </i>at the Getty Center (fifteen of the works in <i>Concrete Matters </i>came directly from Los Angeles) about their endeavours to modernise Argentina and Brazil. “Artists were quick to engage with the effort and took active roles in shaping its direction as architects, designers, and educators […] They were now the generators of new ideas and systems, optimistic about their process of research and development, with the imagined ends of making their modern cities appealing and efficient places to live and work.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">What we have to understand, however, is that Concrete art flourished and perished under the thumb of Juan Perón’s despicable presidency 1946–55, which he modelled on a miscellany of tyrants. Maldonado published his “Present and Future of Concrete Art” manifesto in 1951: “Despite all its efforts, today Concrete art fails to surmount the obstacles which prevent it from having a wider, more generous influence; but no doubt, its more deeply hidden vocation, almost its raison d’être, is to succeed in acting on very wide sectors someday, to become a public art, open to millions of men. We can say, in fact, that the true meaning of Concrete art lies in what it may become, rather than in what it is at present.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Maldonado realised the magazine <i>Nueva Visión: Revista de cultura visual </i>in Buenos Aires (which had a better longevity than similar publications), and became a teacher of design and theory at the new Ulm School in southern Germany, cofounded by Inger Aicher-Scholl (sister to Sophie Scholl who was guillotined by the Nazis in 1943) and the versatile Swiss artist Max Bill who was an impressively important figure of inspiration for the Latin American Concretists. Max Bill is the crucial “foreign” name in <i>Concrete Matters </i>with his gorgeously “synthetic” oil painting <i>1–8 in vier Gruppen</i>/<i>1–8 in Four Groups </i>(1955–63).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Independent Salon in Buenos Aires showed propaganda paintings of Peronist working class heroes. The Concrete artists routinely encountered hatred from all areas of society: “Today people who are failures, who have anxieties over the future, who desire an easy posterity, without study, without talent and without morals, have found a refuge in abstract art. This morbid, perverse, and infamous art has progressively led to the utter degradation of art. It reveals the visual, intellectual and moral aberration of a group, fortunately small, of misfits,” expressed the Minister of Education in a public speech in 1949, just twelve years after the <i>Entartete Kunst </i>exhibition in Munich. “Morbid art, abstract art, does not fit in; there is no place for it in our young and blossoming country. It is not in line with Peronist doctrine, which is a doctrine of love, perfection and altruism that has heavenly ambitions for the people.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Venezuelan Concrete art began with a capital rejection. “‘NO’ is the tradition we want to establish,” spurred the members of Los Disidentes in their 1950 manifesto. “We came [to Paris] to confront problems, to struggle with them, to learn to call things by their names, and for this reason we cannot remain indifferent faced with the climate of falsity that is the cultural reality of Venezuela.” Apart from the rather unoriginal graphic design of the <i>Concrete Matters </i>catalogue (which is following a template that has been the norm in Sweden since the early 1990s), it is a classic and helpful publication based on these groups’ magniloquent manifestos.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“It is a way to listen to the voices of the artists,” hints the curator. “And also because the works on so many levels appear to be so similar – but then you read the texts and you understand that there were artists who really did not like each other’s ideas, and that was something I wanted to emphasise. It is really here that they puff their chests and declare to us what they want to do. The manifestos were such an important entry to the period and it is great to have them translated, and some are actually presented for the first time.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“The texts are so incredibly different,” she continues. “Some are quite clear both in tone and what they want to convey, some are pretty abstruse. But I thought that they were very rewarding to read as well, because here it somehow becomes audaciously obvious that here is where the age of the descriptive image is facing its end. And it is also exciting with this discrepancy that sometimes their bombastic words do not correspond to what they will actually achieve in their art. It is evident how young some of them are, and how they want to attain distinction in their current time, and that in itself is something that is super exciting.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Military conspirators gave rise to eighty victorious coups d’état in Latin America between 1920 and 1966. Venezuela – with more petroleum than Saudi Arabia and all the monetary prerequisites for a swift and pleasant modernisation of the country – looked very promising for a few years after the end of World War II, only to be overthrown again by a new band of sanguinary generals who restored the status quo.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It really comes as no surprise that young Venezuelans utilised these purist ideas of arithmetical computations and the certitudes of geometry to locate the radio waves of the mind and to block out the emotive forces of our animal nature. “In Venezuela, the non-figurative idiom was attacked in a different way,” explains Matilda Olof-Ors. “There was a greater interest in perception, for our perception. What happens when we physically encounter a work of art – how does colour occur, how does movement occur?” We are the motor in this array of kinetic art.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Soto’s stripy, layered and serenely energetic optical pieces, like the <i>Kinetic Box </i>(1955), must be strolled to take effect in the mind. (The paintings of Cézanne and the Cubists were his first love in art.) Soto returned to Venezuela in 1952 together with Cruz-Diez and Alejandro Otero when the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva asked them to join the league of great modernists who were creating the public art for the magnificently utopian Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas (1940–60). Otero’s three Mid-Century Modern gouaches in the show are like delicious little hors-d’œuvres. They swirl like waves in space and solely follow their own individual arranging principles.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Otero moved to Paris as soon as the World War II was over. And as for the rest of the Concrete artists who thought they worshipped Mondrian until they saw his works for real, Otero went to the Netherlands only to discover how handcrafted and (relatively) imperfect they looked compared to the reproductions. The tall <i>Tablón de Pampatar</i>/<i>Pampatar Board </i>(1954) is an “improved”, corrected or deconstructed “Mondrian” of rhythmical narrow stripes of red, blue and yellow, and black and white, which appear to move upwards-downwards and sideways, more to do with computerised movements than a boogie-woogie on Broadway.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Geometric abstraction, in an atmosphere of less opinionated perfectionism than abroad in Paris, was discussed, created and exhibited at home in Caracas where artists gathered around the Taller Libre de Arte. “We don’t paint faces, we invent things,” they stated in the catalogue to the first effort to show Concrete art in Venezuela in October 1948. “We are very keen on colour and are seduced by geometry. We also try to be sincere about the truth of the plane and the space.” The Open Air Studios was backed by the junta’s Ministry of Education, how was that possible? This fascination for the system of geometry seemed to pass as a fairly auspicious endeavour, innocuous as the children’s activities in Spanish director Victor Erice’s mysteriously subversive masterpiece <i>The Sprit of the Beehive </i>(1973), which totally went over the heads of Franco’s little helpers.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The last work in the <i>Concrete Matters </i>timeline is Gego’s <i>Esfera</i>/<i>Sphere </i>from 1976, a pulpy three-dimensional body of syncretised, unsymmetrical wires suspended over a flat podium. “It is as if the technical engineer in Gego was at odds with the architect-artisan, each one constantly trying to undo the other,” suggests Mari Carmen Ramírez in <i>Questioning the Line: Gego in Context</i>. Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt was a Hamburg professional whose life was rendered worthless after the Night of Broken Glass.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“It is very exciting to examine these physical movements of people who for various reasons had to flee from Europe, like Gego for instance. She was an architect in Germany but ended up in Venezuela, a country where she didn’t speak the language or had any contacts but eventually came to work as an artist. And you also think of the world situation today where there are still, regrettably, people on the run every day,” says Olof-Ors.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The purview of Gego’s works in the show – from the planar ink drawing of her skeletal nets to the galactic <i>Sphere </i>– is like a three-piece evolution chart of the course that Concrete art took in the next country, where the Museo de Arte Moderno turns Museu de Arte Moderna. In <i>Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-20<sup>th</sup>-Century Latin American Art</i>, Alexander Alberro notes how “the colonial history of Brazil – a narrative defined by transplantation – facilitated the revolutionary desire to create something new in a territory that, lacking any trace of ancient civilisation, provided modernism’s ideal tabula rasa: a place of endless new beginnings”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But as Mónica Amor argues in her book, these artists responded “to a crisis of representation in general and not just a crisis of pictorial representation” – “they employed strategies that emphasised the wall, the exhibition space, the urban environment, spectatorship and subjectivity, and public address. These stratagems were executed under the aegis of Constructivism and Concrete art, but they were often manifested in crisis and displaced the tenets and forms associated with these artistic legacies.” Brazilian Concrete art originated from an understanding of national identity and universal inclusiveness, invention and vicissitude, aided by the steady squabbles between the contrasting groups Ruptura in São Paulo and the much more samba-minded Frente in Rio de Janeiro.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“In the mid-50s, the artists in Rio and São Paulo were in the same shows, but eventually a schism arose between them,” says Matilda Olof-Ors. “In São Paulo, it was considered that the artists in Rio had a far too experimental approach to the concrete idiom and had misunderstood the whole thing with Concrete art. And mutually, in Rio they thought it was the other way around, that the artists in São Paulo had misunderstood everything. It was rather a focus on colour than the black and white on the other wall. The artists in Rio introduced a more subjective gesture and an entirely experimental approach.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Ruptura embraced a little of the same thoughts that Max Bill had worked on in how this geometric, concrete idiom can be used to mathematically shape an idea where the artwork is rather the result of something that already has been thought out. A good example of this is the black and white painting by Geraldo de Barros [<i>Função diagonal</i>/<i>Diagonal Function </i>(1952)], based on a principle where the framework really defines the entire shape of the piece. It is first divided into its midpoint and draws a new square in between which is then divided into its centre, and so on and so on. Another example is Waldemar Cordeiro, born in Italy, who also ended up in Brazil. He was very interested in the golden ratio, in the logarithmic spiral. [<i>Idéia visivel</i>/<i>Visible Idea </i>(1956)] is also a work where the principle has already been devised and the work becomes a formation of that principle.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">(László Moholy-Nagy was the artist who – in the 1920s, during his Professor years at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau – initiated this rationalising method of having a principle established in advance that would altogether shape what would come out in the end: he used to telephone his instructions in codes to a sign painter who would then produce these exact works of art for him.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The two MAM institutions in Brazil’s largest cities were both established in 1948. The one in São Paulo was built by the industrialist Ciccillo Matarazzo who also presented the first Bienal de São Paulo in the fall of 1951, a truly international event with works from nineteen countries. Matarazzo engaged the Belgian art critic Léon Degand in that same international vein as the Founding Director of MAM-SP. The first thing Degand curated there was a show called <i>From Figurative Art to Abstract Art </i>which charted art’s forwardness in history, from the bottom of the painterly illustrative to the highest achievements in geometric abstraction.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Grupo Ruptura was formed by seven artists in 1952 while they were participating in a show at the MAM-SP. “The only female artist who was in Ruptura was Judith Lauand, there are three works in the exhibition, and she was also engaged in gestalt psychology – how the work is perceived as a perceptual whole, even though the lines are divided – and brought motion into the works,” says Olof-Ors. Lauand’s <i>Concreto 61</i>/<i>Concrete 61 </i>(1957) is a highly graphical piece – alkyd on hardboard as the Brazilians liked it – of twenty straight black lines of various sizes in an agitated symmetry which creates a propeller-like effect that ripples through space.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Grupo Frente was formed in Rio de Janeiro in 1954. The manifesto (if one can call it that) was written the following year by the group’s ideologue Mário Pedrosa whose personal belief was that art must show the public how “to fully exercise their senses and to shape their own emotions”. Olof-Ors mentions Pedrosa’s “ability to bring together people, but also conduct an art-critical discussion and highlight different art historical and philosophical reasoning that were very important for the way this art developed”. There is a great, untitled work from 1954 by Ivan Serpa in the show. Serpa was teaching young people how to paint at MAM Rio’s Ateliê Livre – a project that had been initiated by the museum’s forward-thinking Founding Director Niomar Moniz Sondré – where many in this group met for the first time. One of them was Aluísio Carvão. His painting <i>Construção 8</i>/<i>Construction 8 </i>(1955) emits a ciphered message of small rectangular bits that whisper until they reach the mind of the viewer. It is the most beautiful thing.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The members of Grupo Frente were attacking spatiality in different ways, whatever it took to break up the flatness of the surface. Matilda Olof-Ors talks about Lygia Clark’s painting on plywood, <i>Planos em superficie modulada</i>/<i>Planes on a Modulated Surface </i>(1956), one of the curator’s many favourites: “Above all, this is the painting where she physically attacks the framework and manages it in such a way that the boundary between the work and the space around it is blurred, and how she developed her idea about what a line may be – that it is not a character that you always need to apply to a surface, but a line can also occur between two colour fields that are joined, where interstices can also be a line. All her reasoning which later resulted in the rejection of the flat surface – that it was merely an illusion,” explains Olof-Ors. “Lygia Clark literally aggressed the frame, but in a different way than the artists did in Argentina. She simply painted over the frame, and in some way it is also here where the boundary between the artwork and the surrounding space is defined, and she further continued to literally erase the boundary between art and life which became more and more disintegrated.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Aleca Le Blanc writes in the Getty catalogue how “Many Concrete artists took advantage of symmetry, doubling or mirroring their forms in their paintings.” One such example is a gouache from Hélio Oiticica’s series <i>Metasquema</i>/<i>Metascheme </i>(1957) in which wide ink lines form geometrical diagrams of repetitions and deviations, void of both personal stuff and the spurs of intuition. Looking at these works today is like listening to Kraftwerk’s music before the development of MIDI technology in the early 1980s, when there was always still an underlying <i>Mensch </i>to be sensed in their concept of the Man-Machine. Saul Bass’s title sequence to <i>The Man with the Golden Arm </i>(1955) with the protruding white rectangles against a black fond was four years later mirrored in reverse in Oiticica’s <i>Pintura 9</i>/<i>Painting 9</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Irene Small expresses in <i>Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame </i>that “In Brazil in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some works of art were folded things. They displayed physical folds: pleats that drew space between them, creating inner cavities and hidden clefts, or bends that pressed flat planes into three-dimensional figures, cutting through space and organising form against it. But their folded character was virtual as well: a free-floating notch seemingly displaced from a plane, a temporal twisting, a hinge between work and world.” One such work is Oiticica’s untitled and hovering piece from 1959 that is both a painting and a sculpture, or perhaps none of it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Lygia Clark’s rubber sculpture <i>Estudio para obra mole</i>/<i>Study for Soft Work </i>(1956) and her origamic <i>Bicho, Radar</i>/<i>Creature, Radar </i>(1960) sculpture of hinged aluminium triangles are two pieces that have made a way through this space. “<i>Bichos </i>are meant to be interactive meetings with the person who is playing with the pieces, and there is no front and back, no upside down, right or wrong way to arrange it. It is the living organism she lifts into an art form that is not referring to a world around. I had to put on my gloves and shape and it was great fun,” reveals Olof-Ors.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“However, <i>Book of Creation </i>is unrivalled, I think,” she continues. “I am very happy to have had the possibility to lend Lygia Pape’s fantastic artwork from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is a work that she created in 1959, just in the process of signing ‘The Neo-Concrete Manifesto’, and this, similar to Lygia Clark’s <i>Bicho </i>sculpture, was a work that was created to be interacted with. There is some sort of loosely consistent narrative about Creation in which we ourselves are creating. There is a loose narrative that she sometimes also featured on signs, about how it was at first the water and the water retreated. So this can also be read as a story of human development with incredibly simple means. It is weird that we cannot touch them, but we have been able to present a film where we see the artist interact with them.” <i>Livro da criação </i>is a pop-up book of sixteen gouache-on-cardboard “pages” – from the blue water to the bright yellow sun – based on the equations of Concrete art, and it is every bit as superb as Matilda Olof-Ors describes it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Modernist buildings were erected as emblems of a new era and artists were involved in the formation and definition of public space,” writes Ira Candela in her book on Lygia Pape (<i>A Multitude of Forms</i>). “The construction of the city of Brasilia between 1956 and 1960 epitomised the reimagining of Brazil and President Juscelino Kubitschek’s promise of ‘fifty years of progress in five’. Yet the promise was short-lived, and the risk of the invention of history materialised in the country’s regression after the coup d’état of 1964.” Pape was carried off by force by three men with machineguns in 1973, “Little bird in the cage,” they triumphed. She was incarcerated for three months. She was tortured. She was an artist.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Art cannot be merely illustrations of a priori concepts,” argued the poet and critic Ferreira Gullar in “The Neo-Concrete Manifesto”, published on March 22, 1959 in the arts and culture supplement of the Rio de Janeiro daily <i>Jornal do Brasil</i>. “Such statements might lead one to believe that Neo-Concrete artists want to shun objectivity and lose themselves in subjective chaos. But in fact, we seek a kind of deeper objectivity resulting from the intimate integration of material with mankind’s feeling and mind.” As the principal ideologue for the Neo-Concretists in Rio, Gullar imparted what was wrong with the theoretical Concretists – how they spoke “to the machine-eye and not to the body-eye”. And the “body-eye” was the Neo-Concretists’ new thing, along with reception theory and a return to the wisdom of artists such as Mondrian and Malevich.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“While Gullar and the Neo-Concrete artists were empiric in their rejection of theory as a referential horizon – they objected specifically to Concrete art’s reliance on references imported from mathematics and science and its correspondence with systematic compositional methods (seriality, permutations, gestalt) – their attraction to philosophy, especially the phenomenology of the French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, was undeniable,” explains Mónica Amor in <i>Theories of the Nonobject </i>(a term she purposely picked up from Gullar).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Alexander Alberro mentions <i>In Abstraction in Reverse </i>that “philosopher Theodor Adorno argued that critical theory functions like ‘bottles thrown into the sea’ for future readers, whose identities cannot be known”. One such bottle has reached the Stockholm Galaxy in our time. <i>Concrete Matters </i>is like a happy astronaut from the past, with a belief in inquiring and affirmation that might also carry the rest of us through.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7Y9vogPu_ZLr7WnJ9Tz_UMdP-KFz_gjaCOeMCFsviptRuCWpxNs7uCgpby8exoehqgnXKPckpe9o3bPubnwp9u2QcjbakN6zPxsK90XC_qHq5CydH71FESm21OlFu83c9RACGBpQ1DVUe/s1600/concrete_matters.pape-lygia_pintura_modernamuseet_press.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1595" data-original-width="1600" height="638" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7Y9vogPu_ZLr7WnJ9Tz_UMdP-KFz_gjaCOeMCFsviptRuCWpxNs7uCgpby8exoehqgnXKPckpe9o3bPubnwp9u2QcjbakN6zPxsK90XC_qHq5CydH71FESm21OlFu83c9RACGBpQ1DVUe/s640/concrete_matters.pape-lygia_pintura_modernamuseet_press.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Lygia Pape, </span><i style="text-align: start;">Pintura</i><span style="text-align: start;">/</span><i style="text-align: start;">Painting</i><span style="text-align: start;">, 1954–56. Courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape and Hauser & Wirth. © Projeto Lygia Pape.</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Concrete Matters </span><i style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm through
May 13, 2018</i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">.</span></span></div>
Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941609949069409491.post-16664041959303816122017-10-25T18:16:00.003+02:002020-10-13T16:37:44.433+02:00A PERFECTLY BONA FIDE YANK FROM POUGHKEEPSIE: LEE MILLER THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ6Sg0D0xasOobLiv_lY3p3v2UBVjnxmE9gbQjzrOaygFohh2DqoR93l3-DZc6eDkF_UhGWvV3ZWnSUnacf3UzWzFZgwEj8fAyDz4NE3UDpmWPMrR4vpc8PJnq4e_HEeHbwTSjtdCcXkr7/s1600/LM_1%252CModel+wearing+Digby+Morton+Suit+shot+through+arch+revealing+bomb+damage%252C-%252CLondon%252CEngland%252C1941%252CVN%252C%25273884-5%2527_press.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1537" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ6Sg0D0xasOobLiv_lY3p3v2UBVjnxmE9gbQjzrOaygFohh2DqoR93l3-DZc6eDkF_UhGWvV3ZWnSUnacf3UzWzFZgwEj8fAyDz4NE3UDpmWPMrR4vpc8PJnq4e_HEeHbwTSjtdCcXkr7/s640/LM_1%252CModel+wearing+Digby+Morton+Suit+shot+through+arch+revealing+bomb+damage%252C-%252CLondon%252CEngland%252C1941%252CVN%252C%25273884-5%2527_press.jpg" width="614" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;">Lee Miller, <i>Model Wearing Digby Morton Suit, Shot through Arch Revealing Bomb Damage, 1941</i>. © Lee Miller Archives.</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">This woman is immaculately dressed, perfectly poised, and it is as
if she is saying, “You can drop as many bombs on London as you like, people
like me will </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">never ever<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> give in.” And I think that is a really important statement. That image
is a gesture of defiance.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">– Antony Penrose<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Come in, Lancaster. Come in,
Lancaster.” It is night over Europe on the second of May 1945 when the voice of
an American radio operator in the Women’s Auxiliary Force coalesces with the
singular voice on a burning Avro Lancaster heading back to British soil after a
bombing raid over Berlin. Peter Carter (David Niven) knows he is doomed. “I’ve
got no parachute,” he tells the wonderfully helpful and empathic June (Kim
Hunter) in The Archers’ celestial war romance <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Matter of Life and Death</i> (1946). Peter recites poems and asks June
to take a goodbye message to his mother and begs her not to be frightened (she
is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> frightened) when he will come and
see her as a ghost, and he wants to know her whereabouts and where she comes
from – “I love you, June. You are life and I’m leaving you” – and they chat for
all they are worth till her voice cracks because all of this is nonsense, is it
not? “No, it’s the best sense I ever heard. I was lucky to get you,” the airman
assures her before he bails out to eternity.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">These phenomenal women in the
Auxiliaries and in the Voluntary Service (they were a quarter of a million and
almost a million strong respectively in the UK), and of course all possible
female home-front bravura, were the best sense a nation could ever wish for during
the Second World War – as my London friend recently told me, “There was for
probably the only time ever here genuine equality and civic feeling. There was
some kind of spirit when it was understood what the enemy was and what would be
lost” – in its battles against the starless and bible-black formation of a
schizophrenic country’s ideas of a master race with a Final Solution and a Thousand
Year Reich.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">After the end of the war, a very
angry woman with a big pair of scissors walked into <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>’s studios in London and began destroying the negatives of the
pictures she had taken in Dachau, the consummate hell outside Munich, in the
morning of April 30, 1945. “And she said, ‘I don’t want anybody to witness what
I saw, but I am going to leave just enough that there can be no doubt that it
happened.’ They tried to stop her but in the end they couldn’t. I so regret that
she destroyed these negatives – I would have wanted every single one of them
today. It is very hard to say but probably between forty and fifty negatives
were destroyed, and there is about the same number left. The ones that are left
behind, they are very tough. But if she was destroying the worst ones, it’s
hard to imagine what they could have been like,” says Antony Penrose, the only
child of the legendary Lee Miller (1907–1977).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Two Mid-Century Modern chairs in one
of the Brutalist exhibition spaces at Kulturhuset (the House of Culture) in
Stockholm will be our station for an hour’s conversation just before the opening
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lee Miller – War and Fashion</i>. This
British gentleman who used to play with Picasso as a child but at the other end
of the story had to endure his mother’s lack of basic maternal instincts and
her alcoholic tantrums during his upbringing – “She could do all the damage she
wanted with words – and she was very vivid with words” – is a man who so much
rejoices in the stories about Lee Miller and her unparalleled work (especially her
WWII photography). And here we are in the exhibition he calls “a very bold
take” and a “really inspired choice”. It is the day before he turns seventy and
Mr Penrose is as delighted as if he had just received the birthday present of
his life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“It is one that has really engaged
with Lee Miller as a personality. And I think it will bring a lot of new
understanding about Lee herself, and I am grateful for that. Lee was able to
fit fragments of life together, into a meaningful pattern, and that I think we
see here. Wherever she is – if it is on the streets, or in Paris during the
war, or in London in the postwar years, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>’s
studio or whatever – we see this excitement about improvising, about making
something out of nothing,” he says. “Now, it would have been easy to fill half
of this gallery with combat images from the war. But I think what Karina is
saying is that people have seen that stuff before. Just because we don’t see
explosions and guns and bombs doesn’t mean to say that the war isn’t present in
these photographs.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Karina Ericsson Wärn is the
Director of Art, Design and Fashion at Kulturhuset and the curator of this
unexampled exhibition in Gallery 3. “For me, Lee Miller belongs to the same
family as Isadora Duncan, Marlene Dietrich, Elsa Schiaparelli and in more
modern times Miuccia Prada and Vivienne Westwood. None of them is a photographer
but it doesn’t matter – it is more of an attitude towards the outside world and
an individual expression that unite them. While I was working on the
exhibition, I became more familiar with Lee Miller and found a woman who was
very fragile, who was carrying a sonorous tone of sadness,” she tells me. “If I
say that in my eyes she was really a mediocre fashion photographer, it seems
quite crazy. But Lee Miller’s photographs are so much more than individual
fashion shots, they are a litmus paper of their time, and she is highlighting a
woman who can empower others. She is also a pioneer, she took the models to the
streets and placed them in everyday situations.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Perhaps it must be stressed again
and again that the Second World War was not a spurious little Catalonian
revolution of credulous flag-waving and nationalist sentiments but history’s
worst and bloodiest conflict, a six-year-long carnage in which the world
population was decimated by three per cent, or in human numbers seventy million
people. Lee Miller pulled rabbits out of hats and totally excelled at British <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i> during the WWII, a war that she
lived and photographed like no other. In a letter to her parents in the United
States (dated December 14, 1941), Miller confided that, “It seems pretty silly
to go on working on a frivolous paper like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>,
though it may be good for the country’s morale, it’s hell on mine.” Simultaneously,
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lee Miller: A Life</i>, Carolyn Burke
considers her “levelheaded response to the charge of frivolity made against the
industry. While she agreed that ‘seductive clothing has little to do with the
starving bodies behind the scenes,’ she pointed out that it had ‘a lot to do
with the starving souls’.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">One must understand that Miller’s
fashion photography was produced under dire circumstances but that the war made
her glow with anger and excitement – she was after all a natural-born
Surrealist – and that these pictures were hugely instrumental to the war effort.
Fashion as a disruptor, fashion as an animating force, fashion as bold
resistance – they are anything but mediocre. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lee Miller – War and Fashion</i> is a delightful testament to the stuff
that women are made of. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I ask Mr Penrose what he likes
about Lee Miller’s fashion photography. “That it is humorous and unexpected,
and we get the quirky, and it’s also <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">incredibly</i>
elegant,” he replies within a flash of a second. “She lets the women always
look beautiful in quite mundane situations. There is always a story behind the
image. Sometimes it is a big story and sometimes a little one. There is always
a microscopic episode of life in that moment. The picture with the big blow-up,
the woman standing with the feathered hat and behind her the bomb damage – that
is such a beautiful image, technically, artistically, and it’s so eloquent. And
you have to remember, these photographs were being seen in America, and it was
very important for the British propaganda to try and influence America to get
them to come into war. Pearl Harbor [December 7, 1941] hadn’t happened.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">At 4:00 pm on September 7, 1940, all
hell broke loose when the Luftwaffe launched its Blitzkrieg offensive on London
with 348 bombers and 617 fighters that returned two hours later for an attack which
went on all night, and this continued in uninterrupted order for fifty-seven
nights (the Blitz persisted till the following spring) and the Brits dreaded German
encroachment. The only blunder in the show is the lack of a print of Lee Miller’s
probably most deliciously poetic fashion shot (which was published in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Picture Post</i>), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Model Wearing Digby Morton Suit, Shot through Arch Revealing Bomb
Damage, 1941</i>, the blow-up on the wall that Antony Penrose is talking about
and in which elegance and defiance triumph over rack and ruin. The model is as
gorgeous as Bowie sings the line in “Wild Is the Wind”: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don’t you know you’re life itself?</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Geraldine Howell describes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wartime Fashion: From Haute Couture to
Homemade, 1939–1945</i> how “Certain uniforms, such as the Women’s Royal Navy
Service Standard Dress, had been conceived partly in imitation of the civilian
dress fashionable at the time. That the smart two-piece skirt suit very quickly
established itself as a ubiquitous wartime style for the duration not only
reflected a desire for relatively practical and durable clothes, but also for a
smart look that, like uniform, signified a war-ready attitude. The authority
and sense of purpose invested in a business suit or uniform now became a focus
for women’s civilian wear, emblematic of new responsibilities and a changing
sense of status and role within society.” Digby Morton (and other British
couturiers) furthered that imitation back to the fifteen per cent of the
production scheme which allowed for non-utility clothing, and pronounced that
he wanted to create “the simplest smart line – spruce-like, slick, a general
sort of trimness”, the sharp aesthetics that blazes in the Miller shot.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“I implore you to believe this is
true,” Miller cabled Audrey Withers, the great force behind British <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>, when her pictures from Dachau reached
the magazine in London. Withers, with her highbrow instincts and wonderful regard
for human issues, published much of Miller’s wartime photography, including the
unspeakable scenes from the extermination camps. Her colleague Michel de
Brunhoff decided to suspend the Paris edition of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i> during the war (“There was no honourable way of publishing a
magazine under the Germans, there was no way without compromise and collaboration.
I stalled and formed slippery answers to the Germans,” he explained), but Withers
went the other way to aid the government. Her magazine provided British women
with a true voice of encouragement, guidance, leadership, and “that touch of
brightness and hope for tomorrow”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">As Withers wrote in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lifespan</i>, her autobiography of 1994: “Women’s
magazines had a special place in government thinking during the war because,
with men in the forces, women carried the whole responsibilities of family
life, and the way to catch women’s attention was through the pages of magazines
which, in total, were read by almost every woman in the country. So a group of
editors were frequently invited to briefings by ministries that wanted to get
across information and advice on health, food, clothing and so on. And they
sought advice from us too – telling us what they wanted to achieve and asking
how best to achieve it.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Mr Penrose is evidently affectionate
about his mother’s by far most important editor-in-chief. “Oh god, that woman
was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">amazing</i>! She was really an
enlightened person. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>’s greatest
good fortune was that she was part of that team, and the other incredible piece
of great fortune was that no other editor could have done what she did. To get
the paper ration, Audrey had to agree with the British Ministry of Information
to print a certain amount of work that reflected positive aspects of Britain at
war. Also, it was to reflect women’s role in the war, and it was a ‘duty for
beauty’ – the women were supposed to look elegant and lovely, which was
encouraging morale. They were supposed to always be there to cheer up the men
going off to fight and maybe never coming back, to look glamorous in war-torn
London. It was also a gesture to the American readership to say, ‘Look, we are
not giving in, these are our values.’ And Lee with Audrey collaborated on a
book called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Grim Glory: Pictures of
Britain under Fire </i>[1941] and that was marketed wildly in the United
States, and it became part of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. It’s
quite simple really, without all of that Audrey would never had gotten the
paper or the ink to keep printing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“A booked return flight, and my own
fatigue, finally set the limit as to how many negatives and contact prints I
was able to go through,” says Karina Ericsson Wärn who spent some beautiful
September days near the Long Man of Wilmington in East Sussex “in the idyllic
little village Chiddingly, which is like an old Agatha Christie setting” where
Miller settled down (as much as she could ever settle down) at the Farley Farm
House together with the wealthy and eccentric Surrealist Roland Penrose in 1949.
This is also the place where Miller died and where Antony Penrose and his
first-born daughter Ami Bouhassane supervise the Lee Miller Archives, based on
the 60,000 negatives and 20,000 prints and contact sheets that were found, purely
by chance, by Bouhassane’s mother in the attic at Farley in 1977. Antony
Penrose was thirty years old then. He tells me that the discovery of this vast
treasure gave him a mother he never even thought of.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“When she died, I remember feeling
… not overly emotional. I had put many emotional barriers in the way of her and
me. Defensive structures, if you wanna think of it like that. Suzanna
discovered the material, and then I began exploring it and writing Lee’s
biography. And that was absolutely <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cathartic</i>
because little by little I had to completely reevaluate the person that I had
known, the person that I had been so contemptuous of, angry with. It was deeply
upsetting, and over a period of maybe eighteen months I began to see her
differently. I began to first of all admire her, and understand what she has
done is unique, brave, totally remarkable. And then, completely unexpectedly, I
began to like her. And then, which was totally unexpected, I began to love her.”
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">He considers how “there was a
conflict in Lee’s life, and a very serious one. Basically, as a woman in a
man’s world, she had spent so much of her energy fighting for getting
recognised. She didn’t want to go on doing that. She was bored with the whole
thing. She wanted to move on, not surprising. So what happened was that at the
end of the war, at the end of her career in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>
in the 1950s, she just put everything in boxes, sealed them up, tied them
fourways with string and just put them aside. Nobody bothered with them. In a
way she herself knew the historical importance of those images, but it wasn’t
going to be her who made them important, brought them the recognition they now
have.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“She was deeply affected by her war
experiences. And she came home with what is now recognised as posttraumatic
stress disorder, and this made her into a different person. When people used to
talk about the prewar Lee Miller I could not recognise her because she was so
different from the deeply troubled, deeply depressed, very changeable,
driven-by-alcohol person she was.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Lives of Lee Miller</i> was published in 1985 as a significant part of his long
journey towards reconciliation. “When I started working on it, a great many of
Lee’s old friends were still alive and I was just in time to get into them
before they died. Of all the people that were key witnesses, only two of us are
alive now. It was a case of timing, it was a case of access that these people
were prepared to talk to me, and that’s what put the picture together because
Lee left very little in the way of diaries or anything like that.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The walls in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lee Miller – War and Fashion</i> are painted in the same colourway as
the Farley Farm House walls: odd pink, odd blue, odd green, odd yellow, odd
brown. And just like the war is both there and not there in Lone Scherfig’s
decent <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Their Finest Hour </i>(2016) – with
Gemma Arterton as Catrin Cole, a screenwriter of propaganda films for the
Ministry of Information – it is mostly referenced in the seventy-one
photographs in the exhibition (they are all new silver gelatin prints and a smaller
number of c-prints from the original negatives, all black and white and mainly
in the Rolleiflex format). It is a pretty exciting thing to consider that
forty-two of these are made up as photographs and shown for the first time.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Fire Masks, Downshire Hill, London, England, 1941</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> is a wonderfully wanton piece of Surrealism with two masked <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i> models – one wearing a helmet, the
other clasping a whistle in her perfectly manicured hand – fully equipped to go
down the rabbit hole of an air-raid shelter – a pink and blue make-do shelter that
Roland Penrose dug out in the garden of their Hampstead home at the beginning
of the Blitz – to hole up at a masquerade party? It is a humorous piece but
what it is really saying, what the women are saying, is: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We are not frightened.</i> Miller, in Roland Penrose’s words, “innocently
enjoyed the stimulus provided with the danger”. The reply she got from her dear
friend Dr Goldman when she told him that she felt jaded and depressed was that “There
is nothing wrong with you, and we cannot keep the world permanently at war just
to provide you with excitement.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Lee Miller, the quicksilver girl, was
a highly intelligent, highly daring individual who craved the trouble spots of
life (warfare, risky adventures, promiscuity) to supply her unusual creativity.
She had to do these things to sail on from the childhood trauma that she kept
quiet about all through her life. “The rape was traumatic in itself, a dreadful
event,” says Antony Penrose, “but what followed was in a way even worse because
she was infected with gonorrhoea, and this was in 1914 and the invention of the
drug needed to cure was fifteen years away. And particularly, to begin with,
she had to carry that disease at a clinical level, receiving treatments by her
mum who fortunately was a nurse. And they were highly invasive, highly painful,
and this was a seven-year-old child! We don’t think she was cured until the 1930s
in Paris. Then she went to the American Hospital and there was a guy there
called Dr Dax, and we believe that she then was cured by the use of some early
antibiotics.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A monitor in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lee Miller – War and Fashion</i> shows her covered with thick white
paint in Jean Cocteau’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Blood of a
Poet</i> from 1932, in which she plays a statue that comes alive to tell the
artist that the only way out of the studio is through the looking glass (and from
there he enters the Hotel of Dramatic Lunacies). Miller habitually went into
these mirrors herself; explored, discharged something precious. Ten years
later, when the alliance between the United States and Britain finally took
hold, she met the cheerful American photojournalist David Sherman from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life</i> magazine with whom she would roam
the European continent as a US Army correspondent for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>: “The two phenomena, no-Kleenex-in-the-midst-of-plenty and
the threat of being left out of the biggest story of the decade almost drove
poor Lee mad until I suggested that she too, a perfectly bona fide Yank from
Poughkeepsie, apply for accreditation.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the evening of April 30, 1945,
Lee Miller soaked in Adolf Hitler’s bathtub. “Mein host was not home,” she
messaged Withers. Miller had been photographed in a bathtub before, at the
Grand Hôtel in Stockholm in December 1930 by her engineering father (who worked
for the Swedish company DeLaval), a Lewis Carroll of the day with a stereoscopic
camera and a weakness for naked young girls and Lee as his Alice Liddell. Miller
and Sherman were doing things in the Führer’s bed in his plain old nine-room
apartment at Prinzregentenplatz 16 in Munich when the news came on the BBC at
midnight about Hitler’s suicide in the Berlin bunker. Mr Penrose calls these
most peculiar events sequenced in the twelve Rolleiflex pictures on the contact
sheet “something of a Surrealist poem in itself”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“So this is a Sherman shot, he takes
six pictures of her,” Antony Penrose says as he describes the bathroom setup. “This
is a little sculpture by Rudolf Kaesbach. It is hideously kitsch. And this is
her way of saying, ‘If this is your choice of art, it’s shit.’ This is a
photograph of Hitler by Heinrich Hoffmann who was Hitler’s pet photographer and
it’s actually a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hugely</i> important
portrait because that image was used on the Nazi posters that went all over
Germany: ‘Ein Volk, ein Rich, ein Führer.’ And to put the photograph on the
edge of the tub was a fabulously clever idea.” So was the boots on the tiny
floor space. “These boots carried Lee Miller around in Dachau that morning so
now they are staining the nice, clean bath rug. We know that Sherman is second
in because his uniform is on top of Lee’s. You see, she tilted the camera up to
include the showerhead. Now, that’s really important because the shower baths
were the gas chambers. Sherman was Jewish. He is sitting under Hitler’s
personal shower – I wonder if that one would squirt Zyklon.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Cleanliness was one of the
derangements of the Deutsches Reich. Olga Lengyel wrote about the young SS
guard Irma Grese, the satanic Hyena of Auschwitz, in her memoir <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Five Chimneys</i> (1946): “Her immodest use
of perfume was perhaps the supreme refinement of her cruelty. The internees,
who had fallen into a state of physical degradation, inhaled these fragrances
joyfully. By contrast, when she left us and the stale, sickening odour of human
flesh, which covered the camp like a blanket, crept over us again, the
atmosphere became even more unbearable.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Miller and Sherman went to Eva
Braun’s house the next day. Mr Penrose says that they have her perfume spray at
home at the Farley Farm House. “It sat on Lee’s dressing table all the time,
ever since I remember, and she never told me where it came from. We have Eva
Braun’s powder compact. It is beautifully made, it’s leather-covered, it’s
metal, there is a mirror and an ostrich feather for application, and you can
smell the powder. When I do that it’s just the most hideous thing because that
powder was on the face of the woman Hitler loved.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Miller described her younger days
like this: “I was terribly, terribly pretty. I looked like an angel, but I was
a fiend inside.” Paris was the ideal city for an eighteen-year-old careless
flapper with unspecified artistic ideas and a devotion to culture, fashion and
the carnal (“I loved everything, I felt everything opening up in front of me”),
and she stayed there for seven months in 1925 until her mother came and brought
her back to Poughkeepsie, New York, and depression. One day in New York City, while
Miller was studying at the Art Students League, a swift hand pulled her back to
the curb and rescued her from being crushed by a car. The man who saved her was
magazine publisher Condé Nast. In March 1927, Lee Miller was on the cover of
American <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Beyond Miller’s control, a
photograph of her taken by Edward Steichen began to circulate in full-page ads
for menstrual hygiene pads in the summer of 1928 and onwards. In the eyes of
the moral public, Lee Miller was dead. In 1929, she moved to Paris in order to
approach photography quite differently, as described by Carolyn Burke in the
biography: “To our ears, ‘entering photography from the back end’ is a
suggestive way to describe her decision: since Lee’s childhood, the
photographic apparatus, the experience of posing, and the darkroom itself were
all charged for her with sexual meaning. Becoming a photographer would make it
possible to explore much unfinished business.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A visible mark in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lee Miller – War and Fashion</i> of her few
but furiously intense years with Man Ray in Montparnasse are the five solarised
photographs from her luxurious New York City studio, which she set up there
after breaking loose from Man Ray in 1932, and from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i> Studio in London a decade later. Man Ray taught her the
importance of being very precise about details through all the steps of the
process in his miniscule darkroom. There was an episode with a fortunate
accident, however, when a rat ran over her feet while she was developing one of
Man Ray’s rolls and Miller forgot herself and turned on the lights which, as a consequence,
charged the twelve pictures of a nude female model with a Surrealistic tint of
reversed order.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Lee had a huge freeing aspect to
Man Ray’s photography,” Mr Penrose explains. “And when she went out cruising
with her camera in Montparnasse, the kind of pictures she was taking were what
I call ‘found images’, just little moments stolen from place and time, and
contain something that is quirky Surrealistic and hard to define. I think that
in a way Man Ray was watching and began to see that fraction creep into his
work. Also, they collaborated very strongly, and more importantly they fought
like crazy because Man Ray was jealous. They had this ‘free love’ idea and he
didn’t see why this should apply to Lee, it was very one way. She simply did
what she wanted, so off she went – and Man Ray almost went crazy. And he made
several works which actually refer to his jealousy in a subliminal way.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The lips that fill the sky in Man
Ray’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Observatory Time – The Lovers</i>,
which he painted 1932–34, are Lee Miller’s. “Your mouth becomes two bodies
separated by a long, undulating horizon. Like the earth and the sky, like you
and me,” he wrote. His work <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Object of
Destruction</i>, made in 1932 and destroyed twenty-five years later, is a
metronome with a photo of Miller’s eye secured to the pendulum. It is
referenced in one of the six portraits Picasso painted of her – it was likely
the first portrait he made after completing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Guernica</i>
in the summer of 1937 – and you can catch a glimpse of it in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Skirts, Downshire Hill, London, England,
1950</i>, Miller’s great fashion shot of a woman split in half by a doorway. “When
Picasso painted that they were all sitting on the beach and Man Ray was there,
and I can just imagine Picasso teasing Man Ray. And then of course Picasso goes
back and puts the metronome in the chest like a ticking heart. That was the
kind of way Lee influenced, by creating reaction.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Miller was carrying a genuine
female body part on a plate through the streets of Paris one day. She managed
to take a picture of the piece surrounded by cutlery on a clothed table before
both she and the breast were thrown out of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>’s
studio. There is a broken plate on the table in the enhanced little 60s-style
kitchen and a broken mirror in the tiny 1940s wardrobe – two lovely and concentrated
set designs conceived by a prop master at Kulturhuset’s adjoining Stadsteatern theatre.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“The kitchen was a carte blanche
when I began,” explains Petra Jansson. “I knew I did not want to do a museum
installation. The imagination had to fly higher than that. Naturally, I did a
lot of research on Miller and her life at the Farley Farm, because the room
would still have an air of her and fit into the exhibition. I considered her
connection to Surrealism by engaging it with my own creative process.
Nonetheless, the expression eventually landed in a kitchen in the country, and
the nods to Lee Miller are many but absolutely not declarative or documentary.
Of course, Miller’s gastronomy inspired the ingredients of her Green Chicken to
be on the shopping list, for example. Mr Penrose found many references to his
mother in the kitchen, even among things that I just added.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The function of her wardrobe
installation is to provide an almost documentary illustration to Miller’s
fashion shots from the bombed-out areas in London, and to show that women individually
and culturally held on to a kind of femaleness that, in spite of the austerity
regulations and the shortages, truly intensified their power and beauty. Jansson:
“I think that during the war it became even more important for women to work
hard to maintain their position, their value. All this is difficult to convey
in a scenography without an actor who embodies how it really was. Therefore I
focused on a perception of a wardrobe of a regular woman during the war,
colour-wise, fashion-wise and in terms of content. Karina and I picked up a lot
from Stadsteatern’s fantastic costume store.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Roland Penrose paid Picasso fifty
pounds for the portrait of Lee Miller with the metronome ticking away between
her breasts, and Miller brought it back to Cairo where she was officially
living with the wealthy Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey (whom she divorced
in 1947). “As for me, I frankly don’t know what I want, unless it is to ‘have
my cake and eat it’. I want the Utopian combination of security and freedom and
emotionally I need to be completely absorbed in some work or in a man I love. I
think the first thing for me to do is to take or make freedom – which will give
me the opportunity to become concentrated again, and just hope that some sort
of security follows – even if it doesn’t the struggle will keep me awake and
alive,” she wrote to the poor man in a letter dated November 17, 1938. “Goodbye
darling – and good luck until I return and even if I don’t.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">She alarmed another good-natured
lover that she was a “faithless hussy”: “You see darling, I don’t want to do
anything ‘all for love’ as I can’t be depended on for anything. In fact I have
every intention of being completely irresponsible.” Men were infatuated with
the unsubduable Lee Miller. It was her perpetual good fortune that she was the
one who could always harm them and not the other way round. “In terms of deep
emotional connection she was very limited, she was what we would call
dissociated, but in terms of everyday relationships she was capable of the most
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">incredible</i> warmth and generosity and
empathy,” says Antony Penrose. “Lee had a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">passion</i>
for helping those who were less advantaged than her, and she was very generous
at that. The working guys, the people who didn’t have that much of a chance,
they all loved her. She was not patronising ever, but she always wanted to
help.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Harry Dean Stanton is the old-timer
who regards the world with sour bemusement in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lucky</i> (2017). It is that same awareness and lament in here as when
the piano lid goes down for good in Johnny Cash’s “Hurt”, because everyone goes
away in the end. Lucky looks up the word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reality</i>
for his daily crossword and tells the clientele in the bar that, “Realism is a
thing. It is the attitude or practice of accepting a situation as it is and
being prepared to deal with it accordingly.” A woman knocks on a door in the
excellent thriller <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wind River</i> (2017),
it is outside and daylight, and a man answers those knocks and opens the
door to a loving woman, a night scene, and we are cunningly thrown into a most brutal
flashback. And that is how Miller dealt with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reality</i> – she never just accepted it as a plain thing. Lee Miller
loved crossword puzzles, she loved to fill up the grids; she loved her whims,
her “jags”, her adventures and indulgences, whatever would fill up the void.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Why all this fuss about a
photograph when the country is fighting for its life?” asked Anne Scott-James for
persuasive effect in a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Picture Post</i>
(October 26, 1940) photo essay about Lee Miller’s work in London, a question which
she also answered: “Because now standards are more important than ever.” When
British <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i> finally hired Miller for
eight pounds a week in January 1940, she hadn’t been that active with her
photography for a very long time. (Her uninhabited pictures from barren Egypt
are laconic, surreal and superb, but they are not that many.) The Blitz totally
activated Miller’s creative instincts, her audacity and ingenuity and the rest that
made her shine. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In 1983, David Sherman recalled
when he was assigned to London as a twenty-five-year-old and how he met “the
already legendary Lee Miller”: “I had the eternal good fortune to be invited by
Roland to visit his house in Hampstead. Its halls were completely covered with
what I thought were absolutely first-rate copies of the work by Picasso,
Braque, Miró, Tanguy, de Chirico, Brancusi, Giacometti, Tannard, Max Ernst,
René Magritte and a dozen by Roland himself. Only they were not copies, Lee
explained to me patiently […] The house was mind-boggling and so were Roland
and Lee’s regular soirées, the guest lists of which read like a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Who’s Who</i> of modern art, journalism,
British politics, music and even espionage, though we did not know about the
latter until years later. Communists, Liberals and Tories drank and jostled one
another in an amicable <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mélange</i> that
will never be seen again.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Lee Miller’s war against Nazi oppression
was hardcore, trenchant and not without deep elements of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MASH</i>-like humanity and farce. She photographed the D-Day (June 6,
1944) casualties and the meatball surgery in some US Army field hospitals in
Normandy, the napalm bombings of Saint-Malo (late August to early September
1944), the Battle of Alsace (early in 1945), Buchenwald, the Nazi mass suicides
in Leipzig, and she was there with the infantry boys when the rats were
discharged from the Berghof stronghold in the Bavarian Alps. Miller’s base
during the last stretch of the war was room 412 at the Hôtel Scribe in Paris
(this luxury hotel had been the centre of operations for the Nazi press during
the occupation) where she typed her stories, developed and printed her pictures
in the bathroom, and just tried to hold herself together day by day with devastating
quantities of cognac, bennies and sleeping tablets.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Lives of Lee Miller</i>, Antony Penrose describes his mother’s
hatred of the Nazis after witnessing what was going on in Luxembourg in 1944:
“She wrote of the stupid niggling humiliations of Nazi occupation such as not
being allowed to speak French; there was a ten marks fine for simply saying <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bonjour</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">merci</i>. French family names had to be changed to their nearest
German equivalents, cafés were labelled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rathskeller</i>.
Intellectuals, teachers and lawyers were shot as traitors. Reprisals were taken
against civilians at any opportunity and early on the Jews vanished without a
trace.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In fact, she could not stand the thought
of Germans at all by the end of the war: “No Germans, unless they are
underground resistance workers or concentration camp inmates, find that Hitler
did anything wrong except to lose. I know that I will never understand them.
I’m just like the soldiers here, who look at the beautiful countryside, use the
super-modern comforts of their buildings, and wonder why the Germans wanted anything
more.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">For Miller, however, it was an
impossible endeavour to say goodbye, farewell and amen to the war. She
travelled to “the suckers and the mugs” of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Third Man</i> (1949) Vienna. She travelled around in Hungary in order to be as
close as she could to agony and ecstasy, misery and Moscow. In British <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i> (January, 1945), Miller disputed: “The
pattern of liberation is not decorative. There are the gay squiggles of wine
and song. There is the beautiful overall colour of freedom, but there is ruin
and destruction. There are problems and mistakes, disappointed hopes and broken
promises. There is wishful thinking and inefficiency.” In a letter to Roland
Penrose (which she never posted) she wrote that, “This is a new and
disillusioning world. Peace with a world of crooks who have no honour, no
integrity and no shame is not what anyone fought for.” The Second World War did
not really end in Miller’s head until more than a decade later when she became
a kitchen goddess and a creator of purposefully bizarre dinners, and built a
library of two thousand cookbooks.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When Audrey Withers looked at the
fashion sense in London compared with Paris she had a clear winner. “We wanted to
be ready for anything asked for us,” she argued, as opposed to the Parisians and
their quite not similar circumstances: “Occupied by the Germans, its people
wanted to cock and snook at them, distancing themselves by being flagrantly
unpractical and putting on the most outrageous fashion show they could. So,
with no transport but bicycles and a limited metro service, they were wearing
shoes with platform soles inches high, and towering hats.” Lee Miller’s fashion
shots from post-liberation Paris show Parisiennes on bikes and models wearing
Schiaparelli at the Place Vendôme, while facing Hôtel Ritz where Gabrielle
Chanel lived and frolicked with the Nazis.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Miller’s photography from WWII
Paris was not liked by Edna Woolman Chase, the editor-in-chief at American </span><i style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Vogue</span></i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">, and Miller did what she always
did in these cases, she contacted Withers: “I find Edna very unfair – these
snapshots have been taken under the most difficult and depressing conditions –
in the twenty minutes a model was willing to give of her lunch hour – most of
which was being taken up with further fittings for unfinished dresses – or
after five o’clock in rooms with no electricity – using the seeping daylight
from a courtyard window – with a howling mob around and the amount of daylight
that reaches through the couloir to the can. Any suggestion that dames du monde
could and should have been used is strictly out of this world. Edna should be
told that there is a war on.”</span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Lucien Lelong, who was heading the
Syndicat de la couture, managed to persuade the Nazis that the ateliers had to
remain in Paris. Germans did not seem to be that interested in haute couture
anyway: only two hundred couture cards were admitted to German women in 1941;
in France, that year, the figure was twenty thousand. Lelong had urged Elsa Schiaparelli
when she moved to New York to “Please go for all of us. Try to do all that you
can so that our name is not forgotten. We should like it to remain as it was.
You must represent us over there. Assure everybody that our work will start at
the first opportunity.” But in 1945, in a game of nasty politics, Lelong’s tribunal
went after Schiaparelli and preposterously accused her of having Fascist
leanings, whereas Chanel was saved by Churchill so as to protect the Crown.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We are in front of a two portraits
that Mr Penrose describes with gentlemanly fervour: “Actually there’s an
interesting double here, because this is Elsa Schiaparelli and this is Marlene
Dietrich. And this is Paris post liberation. Schiaparelli has returned.
Dietrich is there and she is modelling Schiaparelli’s gown. Schiaparelli left
Paris because she could not, would not, work under the Nazis. Other fashion
designers including Chanel were collaborators and in a gesture of solidarity
Dietrich offered to model a Schiaparelli gown and Lee photographed them. She
had already known Schiaparelli from way back in 1929 in Paris. There is
something very moving about this triangle, and it is a theme that comes back
and back and back – how Lee loved to support people who were disadvantaged in
the careers arena at the time.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In British <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>’s Victory edition of June 1945, Withers – always an advocate
for social reform – called for the necessity of maintaining the level of
equality gained from the war effort: “And were do they go from here – the
servicewomen and all the others who, without the glamour of uniform, have
queued and contrived and queued, and kept factories, homes and offices going?
Their value is more than proven, their toughness where endurance was needed,
their taciturnity when silence was demanded, their tact, good humour and public
conscience; their continuity of purpose, their submission to discipline, their
power over machines […] how long before a grateful nation (or, anyhow, the men
of the nation) forget what women accomplished when the country needed them?
It’s up to women to see to it that there is no regression – that they go right
on from here.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Lee Miller’s accomplishments were
sealed in boxes, lofted and forsaken, and when she died on July 21, 1977, it
was not even worth mentioning in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New
York Times</i>. Her last fashion shots in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lee
Miller – War and Fashion</i> are some swimsuit pictures, quite a lot of
pictures from Sicily and too many from Farley Farm and its surroundings (though
the indoor shots still have the verve one would expect). “She was a pioneer
even with the Sicily images. Today we are spoiled with photo essays that
combine fashion with food and travel, but then it was an unusual recipe. But I
agree that Lee Miller’s fashion shots from Farley Farm are more due than
exciting solutions,” responds Karina Ericsson Wärn.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Intractable depression,
incapability and agony, entrapment in the past is the predicament of any
survivor of severe trauma, but those who survive must do more than merely go on
surviving. A friend of Miller’s said that she was “in a world of her own, yet
totally in the present”. Roland Penrose’s later exploits in celebrity – he
founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London together with Herbert Read
in 1947, wrote biographies on modernist masters and was knighted in 1966 – overshadowed
Lee Miller’s life and work as they grew older together. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“She never talked about the photos
in the attic, never. The homes were crammed of art but there were only two
photographs by Lee Miller. One was called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Procession</i> and it was the ripples of sand with bird footprints in them, and
the other was called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On the Road</i> and
it was a dead ox in a cart and horns sticking out. I think they may have gone
off to some place which is why they were nicely framed, and then they were just
stuck on the wall and nobody took any notice of them,” says Antony Penrose.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“As time went on, people began to
take an interest in her with her connection to Man Ray. And occasionally I
remember young art historians arriving at Farley Farm and they would talk to
her and they would say, ‘Tell me what it was like, what you were doing.’ And
she would always deflect the questions, ‘Oh, I did not do anything. But, you
know, it was so interesting with Man Ray, let me tell you about him.’ She just
did not want to go back there, she had done that, closed the door and started
all over again as a gourmet cook.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Since she wasn’t a staff <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i> person, the Lee Miller Archives owns
everything that Miller did for them. “And this we had to prove legally at the
beginning, and we proved it successfully to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>’s
satisfaction. They stopped trying to claim copyright for them. It was tough, it
was one of the most difficult and acrimonious things that I ever had to do,” Mr
Penrose explains. “There are very few prints in captivity elsewhere. Some ended
up in Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Art Institution of Chicago because a
very wise and clever curator called David Travis bought them from the estate
when [Miller’s New York art dealer] Julien Levy died, and that’s how they ended
up there. Otherwise, the only time a Lee Miller comes on the market is when
it’s part of somebody’s estate and they died. And they are always far more
expensive for us to afford.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The exhibition at Kulturhuset is
all for the glory and perseverance of women – just like French <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vogue</i>’s Liberation issue from January
1945: “One essential fact strikes those who are waging war, which will strike
its historians – women’s contribution in all areas, social, medical and
military – their full participation in the immense effort that each nation is
making.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
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<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When Technicolor returns to the
world in Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Matter of Life and Death</i> (filmed in the autumn of 1945), the
airman wakes up in the arms of the woman who directed him back to life:</span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“We
won,” he throbs.</span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“I know, darling.”</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX_nBBkvW9OuNlROO-J_8TOOWIXm-gmTn6CZDawupj6-Fwnp3wtLGIBBmmKDlcSj8aKSHngicD2IGpOK7T0hGediJ8yECXkZb08mCmXrK7zpo6tbVgV7dMZUkAh7fHwzyrNzjBxSMeqVBP/s1600/LM_2%252CLeaving+the+Pierre+et+Rene+hairdresser+poodle+travels+in+bicycle+basket%252C_%252CParis%252CFrance%252C1944%252CVN%252C%25275958-47%2527_press.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1534" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX_nBBkvW9OuNlROO-J_8TOOWIXm-gmTn6CZDawupj6-Fwnp3wtLGIBBmmKDlcSj8aKSHngicD2IGpOK7T0hGediJ8yECXkZb08mCmXrK7zpo6tbVgV7dMZUkAh7fHwzyrNzjBxSMeqVBP/s640/LM_2%252CLeaving+the+Pierre+et+Rene+hairdresser+poodle+travels+in+bicycle+basket%252C_%252CParis%252CFrance%252C1944%252CVN%252C%25275958-47%2527_press.jpg" width="612" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;">Lee Miller, <i>Leaving the Pierre and René Hairdresser, Poodle Travels in Bicycle Basket. Paris, France, 1944</i>. © Lee Miller Archives.</span></span></td></tr>
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<div class="Verdana12engelska" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Lee Miller – War and Fashion <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">at Kulturhuset in Stockholm through March 4,
2018.</i></span></span></div>
Tintin Törncrantzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02749823374397106386noreply@blogger.com