Personal Blogs

Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, visited 13/01/17 ‘Out of Chaos’

There is no doubt that the issue of identity and migration feels a pretty important one at the moment from whatever angle or perspective you look at it – even more so the ‘unheimlich’ (‘uncanny’ as it is translated from Freud to English) feeling that what passes under the name of ‘home’ is no such thing, bearing threats under a fragile surface.

‘Out of Chaos’ displays exhibits from the Ben Uri Museum detailing the long experience of migration and identity preservation under the most appalling circumstances of Jewish people. Here we see lots of interiors that feel exposed but also other interiorities that are exposed to an unsympathetic gaze. The wonder of those paintings is that they show us that this gaze might be our own – that of the viewer / voyeur. The huge painting variously identified as ‘The Family’ or ‘The Emigrants’ by Hageman (1910) dominates a long wall, such that it can only be seen by real or virtual (the roving eye) parade across it. What we see as we do so is a line of eyes that engage aggressively or proudly and not at all (as it seems) with our own – whilst others look, especially the young girl nearest our own gaze somewhat afraid of what they see in us. Either that or she is lost in the kind of vacancy of the person supposed to remain unseen and whom supposes herself to be so.

 The reality of anti-Semitism as an enforced aspect of Jewish identity is as evident here as in the more appalling exhibits that paint a permanent record of the Holocaust such as Grosz’s (1938) ‘The Interrogation’ where Jewish flesh softens, quavers and bleeds against the brittle hardness of an appalling interrogation or Herman’s (1941) saga of the flight of Jewish families during the Warsaw night (under the appalling dominion of a black cat devouring a mouse as it stalks roofs smaller than itself.

One painting gave me a sense of the potential of visual art to take on the qualities of poetic narrative epic and has now allowed to see, for the first time, a painter I have struggled to like, Marc Chagall.  ‘APOCALYPSE AT LILAS, Capriccio’ (1945) use spare colours – formed from different kinds of ink and washes together with pencil – to capture the central Jewish Christ (a common icon for Jewish suffering under the Nazis) in all her naked androgyny. Surrounded by smaller discrete finely drawn narratives of rape and dispossession of the symbols of identity, including a Torah, the artist plays with symbols of ascent, descent – of time itself in a huge inverted clock and pendulum – animal and human boundaries – including the metamorphosis of the Nazi to the dog it tramples. I cannot talk about this picture. It is beautiful but painful – and epic.

These motifs do not die out but their political intent changes with context and disturbs. Thus a powerful photograph by Dvir (2007) of the Homesh Evacuation / Taken Down again uses crucifixion imagery – here recalling the deposition genre of Christian art (at its best perhaps in Rubens) on behalf of Israeli West Bank settlers. This is complexly emotional, as Dvir describes it ‘the intensity of belief driving people to extreme and sometimes surreal situations.’(quoted Cork et. al. 2015:147).

What comes home to us is that the themes of Holocaust art are also clearly seen in the painting of those Jewish artists called, it seems, the ‘Whitechapel Boys’, Bomberg, Gertler Soutine & Kossof, These paintings speak of an identity under threat – protective and dislocated. We barely have the comfort of an understandable perspective for instance on the harmonies and disunities of Bomberg’s great oil, Ghetto Theatre (1920). I kept coming back to that.

There is light and shade – the awful angst of Simeon Solomon’s pained exploration of same-sex desire (Night Looking upon Sleep 1895) with its Pre-Raphaelite yearning and tragedy can be compared to Assayag’s (2004) celebration of a male to male marriage (Michael and Elie).

And then there are paintings that merely make us see and are so beautiful. Segal’s ‘Halen, Le Ciotat (1929) is merely a harbour – one that yearns to be seen as style alone on first glance – being an amalgam of effects from Cubism, Impressionism and pointillism but here serving a greater gain that puts these schools in the shade – making us see beyond and behind its prettiness and ‘colours’, assemblages of people on the harbour that appear and disappear – are there but, at the same time, are not. That on the sunny verge of Nazi occupation and devastating loss of those same people. A poem and a painting – whose idyll is deceptive.

All the best

Steve