Some of my favourite things
Apr. 27th, 2003 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldSome notes made during my visit to the Art Gallery of Ontario last Wednesday:
There was an excellent exhibition of Käthe Kollwitz's work at the AGO. The exhibition opened with this quote, made by her in New York City on 18 April 1917 at the opening of a show there: "These prints are the distillation of my life. I have never done any work cold. ... I have always worked with my blood, so to speak. Those who see my things must feel that." And that, I can testify, is quite true. Since first year of university, when some of her pencil sketches were included as documentation in my history textbooks about popular feelings on the First World War and early Weimar Germany's chaos, I've always felt that.
Kollwitz' life is interesting bracketed by wider events. She was born in East Prussia in 1867, in the ancient core of the Prussian kingdom that in that year formed the North German Confederation that would later become the German Reich; she died on 22 April 1945, at the end of the Third Reich that was a consequence (though not an inevitable one) of that contested German unification of 1866-1871, at the same time that the battle for her Berlin was raging and that her native East Prussia was becoming emptied of Germans (part given to Poland, part kept by the Soviet Union and Russia).
She was not a German nationalist. One of her earliest displayed works (1890-1891) is her Tavern in Königsberg, the metropole of East Prussia and now Kaliningrad; it was inspired by a scene in Zola's 1885 novel Germinal involving worker's unrest. It was a naturalistic work, in the French cultural tradition; she did not reject naturalism, like so many of her German contemporaries, and was thus an internationalist in the truest and noblest sense of the word.
There were many notable sketches: the seven-plate Peasants' War, showing the course of that 1525 German peasants' rebellion condemned by Luther; The Downtrodden of 1904; Young Couple, a work originally done in 1893 but reprised in 1904 showing a young man and a young woman faced with their unexpected pregnancy; 1919's Mothers, modelled on her children; 1931's touching Mother with Child in Arms; and the hopefully despairing 1934 Woman Entrusting Herself to Death.
The two most touching works, though, came at the end of the exhibition. First came 1903's Working Woman with Blue Shawl, her only pencil sketch at the exhibition with colour. Here, it was a faintly luminescent blue, remarkably sensitive and illuminating, touchingly beautiful. The second was a sculpture in bronze, 1940-1941's Farewell, a monument to her departed husband. Kollwitz was brilliant.
On leaving the exhibition, I noticed this quote, made by her in the weeks before her death:
May this one day be true.
- Henry Moore's sculptures, which combine inorganic substances with the organic strengths and complexities of appearance appropriate to bone
- Andy Warhol's 1963 Silver Liz as Cleopatra and his 1964 Elvis I and II
- Carl Beam's 1990 Columbus Suite, a set of 12 photorealistic etchings on paper relating to the Columbian encounter
- George Segal's 1963 The Butcher Shop, at a kosher butcher shop
- Darren Almond's 1995 Schwebebahn, a 13-minute long video of the unusual Wuppertal monorail that is combined with hypnotic dance music to produce an interesting effect
- Cindy Sherman's 1982 Untitled #99, 1995 Untitled #375, and 1996 Untitled #326
- Elizabeth Magor's 1994 Through the Ages, a collection of 18 photographs showing different pairs of men dressed in the military uniforms of different nations and periods
- John Scott's 1979 The L.E.M., a pencil sketch of the Apollo-series lunar module with extensive annotations of all types
- the works of Québec's abstract expressionist les automatistes of the 1950s, including works by Riopelle and Borduas
- Alma Duncan's 1940 painting Young Black Girl and Elizabeth Wyn Wood's 1929 Head of a Negress, each sensitive portrayals
- several sensitive paintings by Emily Carr, including her 1929 Indian Church: French Cove, her Kispiox Village (also 1929) , and her Western Forest (1929-1930)
- in the Group of Seven collection, Lawren Harris' 1920 Algoma Country, 1921 Elevator Court, Halifax, Above Lake Superior (circa 1922) and Miners' Houses, Grace Bay (circa 1925)
- a fascinating collection of model totem poles carved by Charles Edenshaw (Ia.axiigung, between 1890 and 1905) and Isaac Chapman (Skillai, between 1895 and 1905)
- the landscape paintings of Maurice Cullen
- Claude Monet's 1902 Charing Cross Bridge, London: Fog
- Pierre Auguste Renoirs' The Seine at Chatou (circa 1871)
- John William Waterhouse's 1915 "'I am half sick of shadows,' said the Lady of Shalott"
- the late 17th century ivory carving Death Taking a Child from his Mother
- Jan van Goyen's 1641 View of Rhenen
- Cindy Sherman's 1990 Untitled #220, an interesting mockery of Netherlandish portrait conventions for women
- Johannes Fabritus' astonishingly realistic 1703 Still Life: Fish
There was an excellent exhibition of Käthe Kollwitz's work at the AGO. The exhibition opened with this quote, made by her in New York City on 18 April 1917 at the opening of a show there: "These prints are the distillation of my life. I have never done any work cold. ... I have always worked with my blood, so to speak. Those who see my things must feel that." And that, I can testify, is quite true. Since first year of university, when some of her pencil sketches were included as documentation in my history textbooks about popular feelings on the First World War and early Weimar Germany's chaos, I've always felt that.
Kollwitz' life is interesting bracketed by wider events. She was born in East Prussia in 1867, in the ancient core of the Prussian kingdom that in that year formed the North German Confederation that would later become the German Reich; she died on 22 April 1945, at the end of the Third Reich that was a consequence (though not an inevitable one) of that contested German unification of 1866-1871, at the same time that the battle for her Berlin was raging and that her native East Prussia was becoming emptied of Germans (part given to Poland, part kept by the Soviet Union and Russia).
She was not a German nationalist. One of her earliest displayed works (1890-1891) is her Tavern in Königsberg, the metropole of East Prussia and now Kaliningrad; it was inspired by a scene in Zola's 1885 novel Germinal involving worker's unrest. It was a naturalistic work, in the French cultural tradition; she did not reject naturalism, like so many of her German contemporaries, and was thus an internationalist in the truest and noblest sense of the word.
There were many notable sketches: the seven-plate Peasants' War, showing the course of that 1525 German peasants' rebellion condemned by Luther; The Downtrodden of 1904; Young Couple, a work originally done in 1893 but reprised in 1904 showing a young man and a young woman faced with their unexpected pregnancy; 1919's Mothers, modelled on her children; 1931's touching Mother with Child in Arms; and the hopefully despairing 1934 Woman Entrusting Herself to Death.
The two most touching works, though, came at the end of the exhibition. First came 1903's Working Woman with Blue Shawl, her only pencil sketch at the exhibition with colour. Here, it was a faintly luminescent blue, remarkably sensitive and illuminating, touchingly beautiful. The second was a sculpture in bronze, 1940-1941's Farewell, a monument to her departed husband. Kollwitz was brilliant.
On leaving the exhibition, I noticed this quote, made by her in the weeks before her death:
Some day a new ideal will arise, and there will be an end of all war. ... People will have to work hard for that new state of things, but they will achieve it.
May this one day be true.
