Art, culture, politics and society – German art in an expanded field

Art, culture, politics and society – German art in an expanded field: A Colloquium in honour of Dr Shulamith Behr (1946-2023)

International experts on German modernism convened for a one-day symposium to celebrate the scholarship and pedagogical practice of Dr Shulamith Behr (1946-2023), treasured colleague, mentor, teacher and friend to so many in the Courtauld community and beyond. Behr’s outstanding contribution to the understanding of modern experience through art — in Expressionism, in the apperception of exile, in excavating the critical role of women artists for modernism — is underscored through a set of meticulous research practices and inquiries she pursued with rigour across a range of media and theoretical framings. In tribute to Behr’s impact and legacy, a roster of seven renowned scholars of German art in an expanded field presented a range of papers covering pre-war, war-time, and post-war subjects written for this occasion, followed by further discussion in panels and question and answer sessions.

Join us as we reflect upon some of the artists, topics and questions that most interested Shulamith Behr, as scholars offer insight and further the history of art through the lens of her thought.

Convenors:

Dr Robin Schuldenfrei, Tangen Reader in 20th Century Modernism
Dr Glenn Sujo, artist, writer, educator

Programme

Welcome
Introduction, Dr. Robin Schuldenfrei, Courtauld Institute of Art

Panel One

Imaging the Maternal: The Shadow of Death in the Art of Käthe Kollwitz
Professor Dorothy Price, Courtauld Institute of Art

Working Through Woodcut: Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz in the Aftermath of WWI
Dr. Niccola Shearman, Independent Art Historian, London

The ‘Arboreal Expressionism’ of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Professor Christian Weikop, Modern and Contemporary German Art, University of Edinburgh

Art in Exile, Ludwig Meidner, and Holocaust Knowledge
Dr. Michael Tymkiw, Reader in Art History, University of Essex

Discussion panel, questions

Break

Panel Two

Grete Ring (1887-1952): Dealing in Modernism from Berlin to British Exile
Dr Lucy Wasensteiner, author and Director, Liebermann Villa, Berlin

Outside the Canon: Else Meidner in Exile
Dr. Ines Schlenker, Independent Art Historian

The Revealed Hand: Cathartic Marks as Evidentiary Witness
Dr. Glenn Sujo, Artist, Writer, Educator

Discussion panel, questions

Good afternoon l’d like to welcome you to the Courtauld I’m Robin Schuldenfrei tangen reader in 20th Century modernism and I welcome you here along with my co-convenor Glenn Sujo to this day of celebrating the scholarly and pedagogical Legacy of Dr Shulamith Behr and an event we have titled art culture politics and Society German art in an expanded field today we’ve brought together an attribute to Shulamith’s impact and legacy a roster of seven renowned scholars of German art in an expanded field who will present a range of papers covering pre-war wartime and post-war subjects written for this occasion throughout the afternoon in addition to these papers we will also have time for discussion and panels and question answer sessions followed by tributes at 6 pm when I left the Humbolt University in Berlin to take up my post as lecturer at the Courtauld I entered a realm entirely created for me by Shulamith in her honor a former student and then recent MA graduate Nicolai Tangen along with his wife endowed in academic post the “Katja and Nicolai Tangen Lecturer in 20th Century Modernism in honor of Dr Shulamith Behr” as a tribute to sustaining her impact on scholarship and teaching arriving in the UK as a complete foreigner to the multiple systems here Shulamith was always a welcoming and authoritative presence in part she knew just what it was like to arrive at mid-age in a new country and set about continuing a career in art history she took a lively interest in my academic work and settlement while also sharing her own updates conferences contributions to exhibition a steady stream of publications articles exhibition catalogue essays and progress on her magnus opus Women Artists and Expressionism from Empire to Emancipation annually I invited her to give a guest lecture to my MA students enthralling those new generations with her expertise on expressionism especially female artists one of her areas of unparalleled expertise treasured colleague mentor teacher and friend to so many in the Courtauld community and beyond Behr’s outstanding contribution to the understanding of modern experience through art in expressionism in the apperception of exile in excavating dynamic roles for women artists is underscored through a set of meticulous research practices and inquiries which she pursued with rigour across a range of media and theoretical framings these include her three major monographs Women Expressionists from 1988; the Tates volume Expressionism from 1999 translated into nine languages and her magnificent Women Artists in Expressionism from Empire to Emancipation in 2022 her edited volumes assessed from 1993 with David Fanning and Douglas Jarman and Arts in Cultural Exile in Britain from 1933 to 1945 Politics and Cultural Identity edited with Marian Malet her work on exhibitions brought wider broader audiences to German modernism these include her own exhibition Gabriele Munter: The Search for Expressionism 1906 to 1917 in 2005 at the Courtauld Gallery accompanied by a catalog and those she helped organise such as Conrad Felixmüller 1897 to 1997 between politics and the studio as well as insightful essays she contributed to other publications such as New Perspectives on Brucke Expressionism from 2011 edited by Christian Weikop who will be delivering a paper today and more recently Making Modernism at the Royal Academy of Arts edited and curated by Sarah Lea and Dorothy Price who will give our first paper today these publications are an enduring tribute to her beautiful writing as well as her attention to detail her teaching and mentoring of MA and PhD students lives on in the work of those shaping the field today and we are honoured to have so many of you among us today today’s program is being recorded and will be available after the 9th of April easily searchable on the Courtauld youtube channel for any of your colleagues or friends who couldn’t be here today on behalf of Glenn and myself I’d like to take a moment to thank those who have supported this event today from the start then Courtauld director Deborah Swallow immediately lend her support to the event as has current director Mark Hallett Glenn and I are thankful to both we’re thankful to the Behr family Bernard and his two sons Elijah and Gabriel we especially welcome them and their guests here today at the Courtauld a special thanks to Leyla Brumba Research Forum programme manager who has truly gone above and beyond to create a day fitting to the importance of the occasion as well as her team Grace Williams our digital producer Diego Arteche research form events producer and their student assistants to the speakers today Glenn and I are thankful for your contributions and for traveling to London to join the event and speaking from my own side I’m exceedingly grateful to have worked alongside Glenn for the past 11 months and putting together today’s program I’m exceptionally thankful for both his wider vision essential in the early stages of the planning and his keen attention to detail which came into full focus in the leadup to today and now I’d like to introduce our first speaker Dorothy Price FBA is a professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History here at the Courtauld ranging from German modernism to Black and Asian art in Britain her extensive body of research is informed by an interest in the operations of race sexuality and gender in relation to the visual among her many books I single out for relevance here German Expressionism: Der Blaue Reiter and its Legacies from 2020; Making Modernism: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kathe Kollwitz, Gabriele Munter and Marianne Werefkin 2022 also the opponents named exhibition and Weimar Women Photography and Modernity in 1920s Germany from 2019 and that’s just recently she is former Editor of Art History and a prolific curator, currently on view at the RA is Entangled Pasts 1768 to Now Art Colonialism and Change her paper today is Imagining the Maternal the Shadow of Death in the art of Kathe Kollitz please welcome Dot thank you very much Robin for that introduction and as a talisman and right on cue I brought this with me it’s a book that I have treasured and taken much inspiration from throughout my career and in fact as I was starting my PhD at the University of Essex in 1990 Shulamith was just leaving to take up her post at the Courtauld Institute of Art and when I eventually submitted my PhD she was my external examiner and I remember it vividly having my binder in her bijou office in the Courtauld and since then throughout my career my interest in German women artists has absolutely undoubtedly and unshakably been its inputted from her influence so I have Shulamith to thank for a lot of the successes of my career and I was extremely excuse me extremely honoured when she agreed to contribute a catalogue essay for Making Modernism which opened up the RA in November 2022 and what I hadn’t really appreciated and she wrote her essay she wrote a beautiful essay on Jacoba van Heemskerck and Marianne Werefkin and what I appreciated was that she was obviously very unwell at the time but she she wrote her essay and delivered it on time unlike me I was late with mine and it was a beautiful essay I I feel very privileged that it was probably her last catalogue essay which seemed very fitting you know that my career sort of started with her and that I her into that project okay sorry that’s my mini tribute over so without further ado I’m going to talk about Kathe Kollwitz today hence this photograph of Kollwitz with her son’s Hans and Peter before taken before 1914 Kollwitz’s approach to the maternal is complex and that’s what I want to focus on today it was interesting in putting this paper together trying to find a photograph of Kollwitz as a mother actually pictured with her two sons Hans the oldest born in 1892 and Peter four years younger than Hans born in 1896 most photographs of Kollwitz are highly constructed poses of her on her own emulating the gestures we see in her many self-portraits holding a piece of charcoal or her head gently resting in her hands or else her full frontal face but very few with her family and for an artist who specialises in powerful renditions of mothers and children I thought this one on screen at the moment moment was an oddly counterintuitively stiff and emotionally detached photograph although much in keeping with the studio traditions of the era but nevertheless slightly it odds with the powerfully visceral work that she has made in so many of her images of mothers and children Kollwitz disrupts conventional renditions of serene motherhood by depicting the maternal as a state of physical absorption and psychic possession utterly compelling works like Frau mit totem Kind of 1903 and Tod und Frau of 1910 stand outside the Western cultural tradition of spiritual and dematerialised motherhood symbolised at its height by the immaculate conception and the virgin birth Frau mit totem Kind or woman with dead child visualises the unspeakable pain of maternal loss whereas Death in the Woman Tod und Frau hovers in that uniquely liminal space peculiar to Kollwitz between symbolism and social commentary Kollwitz combines the secular figure of the mother with the representation of the nude two poles of femininity that are usually kept apart and publicly sorry usually kept apart the publicly available erotic body and the intimately reproductive one such a focus on dualities between self portraits and nudes nudes and mothers visual representation and maternal origin was bound up with conflict around the role of the artist and that of the mother during the period in which she was working and which she articulates clearly in her diaries letters and journals but what I want to focus on today in particular is the role of death within Kollwitz’s imaging of the maternal Kollwitz’s images of death are complex in many instances they retain a dependent while also inflecting and departing from it responses to the prospect of death in Kollwitz’s earth are seen in many guises from inspiration to revenge from fear pain and sacrifice to its eventual welcome and throughout there remains a strong triadic relationship between the theme of mother child death as many scholars have frequently demonstrated for Edward Munch but not often for Kollwitz some of Kollwitz’s attitudes to death in adulthood might have had their origins in her very earliest experiences of multiple sibling deaths within her family and the complex range of emotions that the child Kollwitz experienced and witnessed in her own mother as she recalls in an account of her childhood in 1922 she wrote before Conrad’s death sorry before Conrad’s birth mother had lost two children she had lost her first as well as the one born after it but although she never surrendered to the deep sorrow of those early days of her marriage it must have been her years of suffering which gave her forever after the remote air of a Madonna and with the death of Benjamin her mother’s last child Kollwitz mistakenly believed herself to blame for having built a toy temple of sacrifice to Venus instead of avowing her love for the god of Christianity during Benjamin’s final hours she wrote I instantly felt certain that this was punishment for my unbelief now God was taking revenge for my sacrifice to Venus I believed myself to blame for my brother’s death then I saw little Benjamin lying on the bed in front in the front room and looking so white and pretty and I thought if only we open his eyes maybe he will come alive after all these psychically rich passages on the death of her siblings and the subsequent funeral of Benjamin and the effects on her mother as recorded in Kollwitz’s journal are quite extensive running over several pages and concluding with a very moving account of her subsequent and related childhood fears for the death of her parents and she writes in those days my love for my mother was tender and solicitous I was always afraid she would come to some harm if she were bathing even if it were only in the tub I feared she might drown once I stood at the window watching for mother to come back for it was time once again I felt that oppressive fear in my heart that she might get lost and never find her way back to us then I became afraid that mother might so mad but above all I feared the grief I would endure if mother and father should die sometimes this fear was so dreadful that I wished they were already dead so that it would all lie behind me lost mother mad mother dead mother the imagining and imaging of death as centered on the experiences of mothers and children in particular never waned throughout Kollwitz’s career death haunts Kollwitz’s world throughout her practice and is often found in proximity to women and children as a motif in her work it is all it is most commonly interpreted if at all as a generic symbolist motif in her pre-war work and as an obvious reference to the fatalities of the first world war in her post 1918 work but as such a frequent motif in the work of a supposedly realist artist preoccupied with political and social injustice how else might want to view it and this is of the Weaver’s Revolt of 1893 to 97 Kollwitz’s first print cycle in 1893 Kollwitz attended the performance of Gerhart Hauptmann’s play the Weavers based on the historical uprising of the Silesian Weavers in 1844 the play was initially banned by the state for its political subversiveness Kollwitz was so moved by it that she immediately abandoned her work illustrating Zola’s germinal and spent the next four years working on this her first major graphic series The Weaver Revolt the cycle consists of six individual plates poverty death council march of the Weavers storm in the gate and end so just starting at the top and and working that way that way they were conceived as a loose interpretation though not a direct illustration of The narrative of Hauptmann’s play the distinction is affirmed in her choice of a title separate from but related to Hauptmann the first three plates were lithographs and the last three were etchings it was an early example of Kollwitz’s response to Max Klinger’s 1891 challenge to develop an epic suite of images linked by ideas its themes of poverty infant mortality populist rebellion conflict and oppression became ones that she was so frequently to revisit throughout the course of her career but what is of interest here for me is the way in which Kollwitz introduces the symbolic figure of death overtly but almost imperceptibly in plate two and how that gesture of death’s hand gently touching the woman whilst at the same time firmly clasping the child around the neck makes its first of multiple subsequent appearances the most paired back version of this can be found towards the end of her career in the last print of her final series the 1934 lithograph The Call of Death what’s interesting in the 1934 series is that the figure of death as both villain and consoler already evident in the single plate of the Weavers is reprised and spread across nine prints almost was a final statement and a closing of the loop of her career in print cycles excuse me in the midst of her work on the Weaver’s Revolt Kollwitz also completed a new sheet entitled From Many Wounds ou Bleed Oh People which had originally been conceived as the final seventh plate of the cycle arranged tripartite structure and bearing the title as an inscription at the top the work clearly derives from iconographic traditions of the lamentation of Christ indeed Kollwitz would not have been short of potential iconographic models for this print France Kollwitz’s 1891 painting being the most recent striking interpretation on the theme in which Christ is notable for the absence of a Halo and there’s a kind of little light at the back but there’s not a sort of it’s not a distinct Halo in the way that that Mary has very much in the spirit of Hans Holbein’s dead Christ in the Tomb of 1521 there was also Arnold Bocklin’s The Mourning of Mary Magdalene over the Body of Christ of 1867 to 8 but this clearly has less of the stillness of the Holbein or the von Stuck but perhaps more of the visceral grief of some of Kollwitz’s later grieving mothers and also of course Max Klinger’s own Holbein inspired rendition of the theme in 1889 what’s particularly interesting though about Kollwitz’s painting the one most closely recalling the Holbein is its retrieval of a very specific kind of approach to the subject of the lamentation of Christ within German literary and visual culture the Marian Clagga the Marian Clagga was an originally medieval tradition that embodied maternal grief by stripping back local or temporal detail in order to specifically focus on that grief perhaps best exemplified in Kollwitz’s 1903 Woman with Dead Child furthermore the stripped back setting of The Entombment likely references the iconographic traditions of the Byzantine Epitaphios typically consisted of a large embroidered and often richly adorned cloth bearing an image of the dead body of Christ often accompanied by his mother and other figures following the gospel account and used during the liturgical services on Good Friday and Holy Saturday to have included from many wounds you bleed oh people in the Weaver’s Revolt would have fundamentally shifted the overall balance of the cycle away from a realist account towards a symbolic one the Michelangelo inspired nudes tied to the columns flanking the central scene on either side further reinforced the symbolic intent and signified a number of possibilities from poverty and shame to suicide and prostitution those are the various iterations of the names that she was giving to this study as she was working on it the redemptive nature of the Marian Clara or lamentation offers a poignant counterbalance to plate two of the Weavers Revolt Death and helps to excavate the symbolic resonance of the cycle more fully than usually accounted for yet Kollwitz was advised against its inclusion by her friend the art historian Julius Elias and the cycle has subsequently been read primarily as a declaration of Kollwitz’s empathies with the proletarian classes nevertheless it’s a particularly telling episode in the historiography of the we’s revolt and Kollwitz could not abandon the theme developing its symbolic program even further in a separate drawing in print of 1900 entitled The Down Trodden whilst as we’ve seen the figure of death in the form of a skeleton makes the first of many literal appearances in Kollwitz’s oeuvre in plate two of the Weaver’s Revolt I would also like to suggest that it fundamentally underpins the visual vocabulary of much of her oeuvre whether physically present or not for example in plate four of the cycle the March of the Weavers the arm of the child seeking protection around her mother’s neck is visually aligned with a centrally placed side held firmly in the hand of the marching weaver behind them so I’m looking at this here this arm and then this side the child and the side become striking reminders of the violence to come and the innocence of the casualties caught up in the path of the Grim Reaper the figure of death was already firmly ingrained within the 19th century revival of print making in Germany in which Kollwitz was also operating and this was not just via her most noted inspiration Max Klinger but also more specifically in political terms through Alfred Rethel and in particular Rethel’s popular six print six plate print cycle called Another Dance of Death produced in 1848 and printed in 1849 and of which is this is plate two Death Rides into Town or Death Rise to the City cycle was produced in response to the failed revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848 prompted by continued political oppression the liberal middle classes had joined forces with the proletariat in a bid to obtain the long promised but consistently denied legislation for Democratic Democratic rights parliamentary representation and the abolition of feudal privileges and censorship in Prussia fighting on the barricades raged for 24 hours until the revolution was bloodily suppressed by King Friedrich Wilhelm’s Army Alfred Boyer the art historian has commented on how little series then and now raises the issue of what precisely constituted a reactionary or a liberal position amid a welter of political and ideological positions existing in Germany at mid century and the scholars remain divided about Rethel’s own position in relation to the uprisings nevertheless whatever Rehtel’s personal politics another Dance of Death was heralded almost immediately as the most poignant aesthetic response to the bloody suppressions so it’s no coincidence that Kollwitz decided to tackle the related 1844 Silesian rising’s almost half a century later in her own debut six plate print cycle the Weaver’s Revolt as Peter Parrot has demonstrated in producing his cycle Lethel deliberately chose to enter into a dialogue with Hans Holbein’s two great woodcut series the Alphabet of Death and Images of Death which had been reissued in print during the 1830s and the 1840s the title of little cycle refers precisely to his intended dialogue with Hans Holbein hence this was another Dance of Death Parrot has noted that the motif of the Totentanz or Dance of Death is documented from the mid 14th century onwards first in the form of processions and dramatic performances then in murals in churches and cemeteries and finally in paintings books and graphics the dance consisted generally of a procession or a continuous chain of couples often though not always a man and a woman about to be carried off by death who was represented either as a skeleton or a decaying corpse Holbein adopted both of these ways of depicting death and but broke up the procession into self-contained images some show only death and his victim in others death singles out one individual from the group and in a few plates several deaths appear for Holbein and his contemporaries death was a leveller and it is this that gives the motif its political leverage for both Rethel and Kollwitz as well Rethel had first treated the theme of death in an 1847 sketch entitled The Cholera which he then developed into a woodcut with the alternate titles of Death as Avenger or Death as Enemy the subject was likely based on Heinrich Heiner’s account of the Cholera Epidemic in Paris of 1831 although as usual with Rethel’s images the exact time and place are deliberately left indeterminate in favour of symbolic effect in the centre and surrounded by the dead and dying dancers death plays a violin made from bones whilst cholera sits on the bench behind him musicians and guests attempt to leave rushing out of the building at the top the powerful visual triangulation between the arms hands and instrument of the central figure of death is also alluded to I think in plate three Whetting the Scythe from The Peasants War of 1902 to 1908 Kollwitz’s next major print cycle after the Weaver’s Revolt although also based on a loose interpretation of historical events rather than illustrative of any specific sources we know that Kollwitz read Wilhelm Zimmerman’s General History of The Peasants War published in 1841 and was particularly inspired by his mention of the figure of black Anna The Peasant woman who incited her appears to peers to rebel Kollwitz’s Peasant’s War consists of seven plates that were made out of sequence and then arranged into a rough narrative cycle once they’ve been made the Whetting the Scythe gathering arms outbreak battlefield and the prisoners other than black Anna who appears in plate five Outbreak the cycle was not based on specific events or people but rather on the imagined stages of a of a revolution Kollwitz chose to focus on the human cost for women and the suffering of the victims of poverty and oppression rather than the perpetrators Beim Denglen or Whetting the Scythe as this one’s called exists in multiple versions each impression slightly different from the last and it was the final choice selected from a long process of different versions including the 1904 to 1905 prints inspiration on the left and Frauen mit Sense or Woman with Scythe on the right it’s clear from the many preliminary drawings and sketches for inspiration that Kollwitz laboured over the conception of this piece and in particular the muscular figure in whose lap the woman is cradled as she is being instructed while some scholars have interpreted the background figure as simply another peasant inspiring the woman how to wield her weapon ofrRevenge upon the landowners perhaps a more plausible explanation is that the woman is in fact being instructed on how to use the side by the strong but shadowy personification of death again a painterly iconographic precedence for the whispering inspiration of both angels and death abound within the history of art with which Kollwitz would have been familiar from her trips to Italy France and the museums of Berlin as well as the plethora of art periodicals produced during the era so for example you have Rembrandt’s version of the inspiration of St Matthew Caravaggio’s version of the same scene but perhaps the closest symbolic avocation of death as inspiration closer to home can be found in Arnold Bocklin’s self-portrait with Death as a Fiddler from 1872 yet unlike Bocklin’s skeleton which is content to influence the artist through the vehicle of sound with barely any physical contact between them Kollwitz’s inspirational Figure of Death makes vigorous physical contact placing its hand firmly on top of the woman’s commanding her movement whilst keeping the other hand clenched over her shoulder the physicality of the figure of death its muscular posture derived from Kollwitz’s exposure to Rodin whose studio she visited just before making this print Rodin’s crouching woman as well as the gates of hell with their muscled figures and representations of damned souls in constant motion throughout eternity appealed to Kollwitz determined as she was to dedicate her art to the theme of human suffering Abschied und Tod 1923 to 24 Farewell and Death as if further support was needed for an analogy of the whispering figure of death as inspiration can be found in subsequent works showing death whispering in the ear of the sitter for example this 1923 lithograph by By Kollwitz the of death in Kollwitz’s work is both omnipresent and complex the visceral emotional responses experienced from contemplating Woman with Dead Child of 1903 has suffused many subsequent receptions of her oeuvre and however much one can diligently track iconography back to its sources both historic and contemporary nothing quite accounts for its continuing hold thank you [Applause] thank you so much for that really rich and really wide talk and I think there’ll be lots to talk about but let me introduce first our next speaker Dr Shearman is an art historian specializing in German and Austrian 20th century art who received her PhD from the Courtauld under the supervision of Shulamith her research interests lie in histories of print making in theories of perception originating in the Gestalt school and the careers of women artists and writers in 1920s Berlin Vienna and in exile in the UK Publications include “Reversal of Values on the woodblock and its print in German modernist art” and “Emotional viewing: On Finding a Visible Relief in the German Woodcut Print Circa 1450 to 1921” her paper today is “Working through the Woodcut: Ernst Barlach and Kathe Kollwitz in the aftermath of world one” please welcome Niccola and I’d just like to preface my talk briefly with recognition of Shulamith’s definitive chapter on Kathe Kollwitz in her much lorded book from which amongst many things I learned in fact not only that of course Shulamith recognised that for Kathe Kollwitz who was a reluctant expressionist that Ernst Barlach was pretty much the only other artist in that working in that register with whom she was prepared to associate effectively I also learned how closely Kollwitz was associated with Max Wertheimer founder of the Gestalt school of perception which forms the background to much of the empathy theory that I will be exploring so to begin one of very few personal encounters between Ernst Barlach and Kathe Kollwitz took place in the former Studio at Gustrow in Mecklenburg in October 1938 Kollwitz had traveled from Berlin for the wake after Barlach’s death on return she executed a mournful sketch of the gaunt figure in his coffin reflecting in her diary on his diminished form and how much he had suffered in recent years yet at the same time she remarked how his work had never seemed so large and compact in its expression as it did to her on that encounter and indeed amongst the sculptures in the studio which made for a substantial presence was the bronze head of the famous Gustrow Memorial universal as taking on Kollwitz’s own likeness the head of the Angel figure had been cast separately in addition to the main work it seems odd perhaps that despite mentioning this work she made no comment on her likeness here however the weight of evidence for what has been called the collaborative conversation between the two artists means it is like likely that she would have felt the contrast in volumes the gulf between the fullness of the sculptor’s work and his fragile body ready to from the physical world she would have been acutely aware of another significant absence too that the angel memorial had the year before been removed from its place in the cathedral by Nazi officials the lamentation probably began the following day attests to the substantial impact of that visit after which as the same diary entry relates she found herself quotes in an expansive frame of mind unquote feeling she wrote as if Barlach has given me his blessing a fragment in relief such as might appear on a gravestone it depicts the burden of grief witnessed by both artists over the years in an ancient melancholia motif behind the two hands that clasp the face half to conceal half in support we see the familiar contours of a self-portrait that reflects an individual and a universal pain one person’s death reflected in the face of another is the assessment of Elmar Jansen original director of the B? foundation in the GDR eyes closed voice silenced yet the hand over the mouth serves to amplify the outcry in the perception of the beholder as we sense the effort of maintaining composure in face of injustices that were multiple so what has been said about this family likeness despite sparse relations contemporaries would make the connection in both content and form one that without an avert expressionism yet overcame convention by spanning realism and formal simplification in his book on the reciprocal relationship between the two Jansen cited amongst various commonalities for instance an antipathy to the bourgeoise art world and of course to the regime of the late 1930s underlining those decades of mutual regard Jansen wrote how without ever fully becoming close they met each other halfway in what he called a shared gravitational field conceivably that statement also defines the emotional and physical weight of their two oeuvre which trade in archetypes of formal integrity solid figures with simple bold contours and an active emotional core whether or not the depiction suggests motion the viewer is arguably moved by this unity of form and content to investigate this to ask what affected Kathe Kollwitz is to enter the territory of visual empathy the various art historical applications of this term cover a spectrum from archetypes of cultural memory to the physiological mechanisms of perception an example of the first that undoubtedly has potential for Barlach and Kollwitz is the pathos formula or pathosformel first conceived by their contemporary Aby Warburg with an emphasis both on the outer contours and an emotional core of potential energy as he described it this term denotes the means by which salient forms migrate across time to resonate again in a new cultural context time is limited here so I will just briefly define this before moving on best sums up in the words of philosopher Giorgio Agamben who writes that the pathos formula can be regarded as an indissoluble intertwining of an emotional charge and an iconographic formula in which it is impossible to distinguish between form and content at the opposite extreme research into mirror neurones in the premotor cortex of primate brains has brought a theory of what is called embodied simulation as applied by Art historian David Freedberg for instance this hypothesis is extends beyond iconographic factors to suggest that we also react to the gestural trace in abstract works especially powerful in cases of vigorous material handling a recent study by Art historian Ladislav Kesner acknowledges a multi-level process of affective response that occurs reciprocally across the spectrum by means of affective elements or affordances that correspond to components of an image and its cultural associations such factors therefore would range from the macro temporal level of Warburg’s formula to the micro temporal precognitive workings of perception even on the latter level there is evidence that individual psychology and collective historical experience influence ways of seeing I won’t blind you with science beyond that but to embed ourselves just a little bit more in empathy theory it first appeared in the border work of Robert Vischer and his essay entitled on the optical feeling for form of 1873 this explored the idea of a dynamic perception that actively fields itself into the object world and the German term there is Einfuhlung thus with reference for instance to a weeping willow he wrote how quotes an objective but accidentally experienced phenomenon always provokes a related idea of the self in sensory or motor form along with inheritors of this idea in the 20th century was the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty applying his research on embodied perception to the artistic practice of Paul Cezanne amongst others Merleau-Ponty considered how a viewer of the paintings might experience sensations parallel to those experienced by the artist and work his system of exchanges as he calls them begins with the sensibility of the artist who as Merleau-Ponty describes it lends their body to the world and in so doing transmits an internal equivalent of that world through the work itself we will note I think the physiological register when Merleau-Ponty asks further why shouldn’t these correspondences in turn give rise to some tracing rendered visible again in which the eyes of others could find an underlying motif to sustain their inspection of the world their thus there appears a visible to the second power a carnal essence or icon of the first through an examination of the wood cut practice of Barlach and Kollwitz I shall argue here for a similar system of exchanges already an established sculptor dramatist and lithographer Ernst Barlach took cut wood cut printing in the closing months of the first world war in order as he wrote not to fall apart the context was one of both material shortages and depleted emotional circumstances peopled with trouble types struggling with the elements his the stark themes of faith and fallibility are echoed in the uncompromising formal conditions his first work Der Kopf consisted of illustrations to an epic poem by Russian prisoner of war Reinhold Von Walter about a world turned upside down under the rule of a despotic disabled beggar and here is the eponymous head held aloft on a pedestal in front of an imploring crowd such beggar figures first appeared in Barlach’s work after a formative journey through the Russian steps today’s Ukraine in 1906 here is where we see him in Merleau-Ponty’s world lend his body to the world recalling in his diary how immediately he recognised what he called the plastic reality of the world about him the rolling landscape inhabited by the bulky forms of peasants and ancient stone figures he wrote look it is the same outside as in it is all real beyond measure the new compact unity that marks his work from this point acknowledged by Kollwitz in her comment cited above translates explicitly into the woodcuts with their striking symmetry or means and expression as the pictorial elements are concentrated by material necessity into a tight web of salient line and rhythmic space with no gray areas the result underpins the rrgent plight of human beings in adverse conditions it was demanding work physically and emotionally on completion of seven large sheets in late 1919 Barlach wrote to his cousin I’d almost like to entice you to try the woodcut it is a technique that forces a confession compels one to say in no uncertain terms what one really means what does he mean by this and how does it register in our perception the central work of Christ in Gethsemane offers some answers Barlach scholars have established in this work an amalgam of postures from Christian conventions of the passion in especially in works by Hans Holbein the Elder a print of Christ carrying the cross for instance and by Albrecht Durer Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane analyzing the formal structure of the work we observe first the unifying effect of a plastic surface rhythm that incorporates the central figure with the contorted landscape of the Mount of Olives where sleeping Apostles are in-folded in the exposed roots of the trees mirroring elements from the collapsed Body of Christ if we close in and I’ll just do this oops if we close in on that central figure on the heavy drapery folds and their counterparts in the deeply lined face and hands clasp one over the other one if one feels there something of that weighty rhythm then according to empathy theorist Robert Vischer and his original writing this is because when viewing the world as he wrote I wrap myself in its contours as in a garment Kathe Kollwitz’s theory War Krieg published in 1922 and 3 is the distillation of a long struggle to commemorate the death of her younger son Peter in October 1914 barely 10 days after he first left for the front initially she embarked on a sculptural memorial before becoming frustrated with the conventional form and lack of substance where is the new form for the content of these recent years she asked in some despair after years of painful searching she subsequently began work on the graphic cycle only to abandon in turn first etching and then lithograph then in June 1920 she saw Barlach’s woodcuts in an exhibition at the secession and immediately recognized a form that would be adequate to the content declaring herself bowled over by the encounter she had to acknowledge that lithography wasn’t adequate to the strength of feeling Barlach has found his way and I have not yet found mine she wrote as it depicts the suffering of those on the home front the war series also marks a shift in the artist’s attitudes to the conflict as she put it herself quotes it begins in glory and ends in utter darkness thus the first sheet depicts a heroic sacrifice a woman vulnerable in her nakedness offers her newborn child in service to the great cause this and the volunteers are faithful to the Patriotic Spirit which swept Peter and his friends into the arms of death and that is the fig of death there is her son Peter using minimum means for maximum effect the stark material choices have condensed these banded brothers into a single ecstatic wave suspended under a rainbow ideal feet not touching the ground sheet three of the grieving parents is the crystallization of a shift in attitudes and formal solutions in observed in drawings and other sculptural models and here there’s a lengthy but really significant backstory to the eventual memorial that is to be created no time to go into that here supporting each other in their sorrow hands standing in for hidden faces the fused figures create a new monument to replace the abandoned plaster model the parents who in that earlier composition had stood at head and foot of the outstretched body much like the lamentation conventions that Dot was showing and Barlach are now united in the sons notable absence into one immutable block one that might stand in for a headstone the solid relief chiseled against an empty background and overlaid with sparse white lines placed towards the end of the series the mothers stamps an impression of resolute defiance on our perception the impenetrable weave of women those voluble hands clasping a single protective cloak around their precious children we present both an emotional containment and a new confidence in the expression finally as Kollwitz remarked on completion of the series she had found the means to express what all had suffered as she said throughout those unspeakably difficult years one might observe here how the woodcut has returned her to her center of gravity for both Barlach and Kollwitz a study of the original printing matrices brings us closer to the demands of this physically resistant medium including I think the mental agility entailed in the process of reversal and reduction to withstand a greater print run Kollwitz’s wood blocks were faced with copper and then recast a zinc plates through a process of electrolysis just explains the um appearance here looking at the plate of the mothers the act of excavation is evident every mark a deliberate decision no covering up for mistakes without having to start the whole process again arguably the inverted material surface contains a gestural trace of the emotional force that defines this work evidently the artist found strength in the productive engagement she might still be afraid of working in sculpture as her diary dates at that time however since embarking on the woodcut she felt she could see quotes all sorts of potential continuing that it was even possible to conceive of creating this work one day as a sculpture in the round as with other wood blocks preserved in the Barlach archive in Gustrow the graceful ribs and gleaming hollows of the Christ block show the mastery of an accomplish sculpture working in a tight grain fruitwood unlike the excised mass of Kollwitz’s example Barlach’s composition takes up the entire surface playing out in a remarkably rhythmic hole again we are aware that each line on the printed surface is the result of an exacting process to create a tight web of raised bars shored up from beneath to concentrate the material weight in the act of printing I would suggest that a view of the printing blocks reveals certain constitutive elements that underpin the viewer’s response to the finished print these elements correspond to particular elements of empathy theory and may indeed help us to may help to elucidate Barlach’s point for instance about working in this medium being akin to a confession certainly the productive response from Kollwitz’s test to a convincing transaction Elmar in Elmar Jansen’s view it gave Kollwitz the courage for a concentration of massive form simple contours reduction of clothing and surface to essentials I’m coming to my final slides here and that statement I think makes a good description of the ultimate memorial that took form after she prized those grieving parents of heart again when originally erected in 1932 the figures flanked the entrance to the cemetery at Roggeveld in Belgium here the arrangement of substance and space accentuated the absence of the son’s body an absence felt by visitors who passed between the the pair to confront their own loss amongst countless grains laid out before them isolated in their personal pain yet united in the compact volumes that shape them from within the parents introversion keeps the viewer at a respectful distance while also inviting a reciprocal introspection Barlach’s Gustrow Angel was completed in 1927 just as Kollwitz was getting to work again on her memorial quizzed on the adoption of his fellow artists face Barlach insisted that this came to him quite unintentionally acknowledging nonetheless that she was certainly worthy of the honour Jansen regarded the two memorials as a collaborative work and he employs an explicitly empathic register I think when he writes how each one hand quote felt their self into the pictorial concept of the other we might extend that concept to the way each work trades in the distribution of space and substance if The Grieving Parent makes one feel the gulf between the two volumes with the angel sense is what is one of gravitational contradiction the obvious material weight of the bronze figure dematerialised by the hovering stance a couple of meters above the floor I would like to observed here is a quotes vision comes about in the object unquote the image created is not a secondary thing but contains always a texture of the real the artwork is the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside he said not only did Barlach observe precisely this when he made that breakthrough in Russia but Kollwitz would indeed quote him when she wrote in a memorial statement that and as in his own words it is both inside and outside form and content are identical one of the most powerful manifestations of this is in the tower of mothers the result of her tentative ambition to sculpt again when in fact on return from Barlach’s week that October she reported on the burst of productivity it was in part due to her satisfaction on finding in her studio the first bronze cast of this work by now the subject had returned with a new urgency at the prospect of another generation of youth being sent to war her own grandchild among them we feel them here like the kernel of a nut within the powerful mass visible to the second [Applause] so much I think there’s going to be a lot to talk about in the panel to follow but first let me introduce Christian Weikop he’s professor and modern and contemporary German art at the University of Edinburgh his research focuses on both pre and post-war post 1945 German art from expressionism and Dada to Gerhard Richter George Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys he’s contributed widely to edited volumes and exhibition catalogues and his most recent book the “Strategy: Get Arts 35 Artists Who Broke the Rules on the ‘Takeover’ of Edinburgh College of Art by Artists Associated with the Dusseldorf Scene” he’s also series editor for Peter Lang’s German Visual Culture a book series his paper today is “The Arboreal Expressionism of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff please welcome Christian [Applause] thank you very much Robin before I begin just say a few words about Shulamith I’ve been aware of Shulamith’s work on German art going way back to the early 1990s and like Dot I was at Essex University sadly I missed Shulamith by about three years she’d already moved to the Courtauld in 1990 but her reputation went before her so I got to know about her very quickly from Peter Virgo and others and I had the honour of hosting her much later on in 2005 for the centenary conference for the Brucke and she contributed a brilliant essay I have to say to the edited volume that arose from that conference Robin showed you the cover of that book earlier earlier on everything she did was brilliant in fact and subsequently we shared a platform at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for a research seminar connected to an exhibition organised by Starr Figura and that was an exhibition called xpressionism the Graphic Impulse and Shulamith was also very much the star of my radio 3 documentary on Kandinsky and I had the pleasure of interviewing her in the Courtauld galleries in 2016 I also had the privilege of examining two of her PhD students both of whom are here today and giving giving papers Nicola and and Lucy in short Shulamith was an absolutely wonderfully warm person super intelligent woman a great scholar and I’m so pleased that we’re here today to celebrate her life and work so I’ll begin more woodcuts I’m afraid of you haven’t had enough woodcuts already so this paper is called the arboreal expressionism of Karl Schmidt-Rotluff this is an old school paper for me goes back to my early interest in pre 1945 expressionism these days I tend to work more on post 45 German art but I’ve sneaked one post 45 German artist into this paper as well to make a connection I’ll begin whilst a love of wood as material and the forest as place is of course not exclusively confined to Germany many have argued that it has been far more pronounced in German culture and society than elsewhere and that the history of the German forest and the development of a German national consciousness go together but by 1900 the Forest Glade or Oak Grove repeat with all its national ideological associations had become so well established in the German visual cannon it was almost an overused motif Karl Schmidt-Rotluff was a core member of the Brucke in English bridge circle of artists constituting that first flourish of what was later defined as expressionism and the Brucke frequently represented the wood or forest in their work often as a backdrop to their free body culture what the Brucke understood was that they could not simply reproduced cliche subject matter if they were to develop an authentic form of visual language in defining their new German art they went beyond the arboreal imagery evident in northern Renaissance prints and paintings or in indeed the Romantic paintings of Casper David Friedrich and his followers by stressing the grain age-rings and the irregularities of timber in their wood cut and wood carving it could be argued that they were attempting to shift the matrix of cultural nationalism from the wood or forest as national symbol to wood as artistic material Karl Schmidt-Rotluff’s fascination with trees and the artistic possibilities of the raw material of wood can be traced back to his earliest wood cuts Trees in Winter looks like an even more abstract version of a wood cut by his fellow Brucke member Fritz Bleyl also showing a winter scene or it might be a response to Japanese inspired woodcuts with an arboreal theme by Vienna secession artists such as Carl Moll and Carl Muller whose work they had seen in Ver Sacrum the organ of the Vienna Secessio which they read avidly as students in addition the inspirational Japanese print making particularly the work of Hiroshige can be seen in Schmidt-Rotluff’s bridge woodcuts of 1905 it would however be incorrect to state that these works were simply derivative through their intense contrast of black of black and white and through the stark but expressive rendering of bridge structures Schmidt-Rotluff also signaled the way forward for the Brucke beyond their appreciation of Jugendstil and their understanding of Japanese technique effectively creating strong symbols of group identity through through his relief print making in the very year of the group’s formation Schmidt-Rotluff made no wood cuts at all in 1907 and 8 but his wood cuts of 1909 to 11 that utilise the grain of the block and exposed chip carving in the overall composition composition owe much to Edward Munch’s print making technique while achieving perhaps even a greater simplification of form and until 1913 as Rosa Shapire noted in her catalog raisonne of Schmidt-Rotluff’s graphic work the artist printed all his own wood cuts and continued to explore the surface of the wood block to create texture and depth the motif of the tree became increasingly important to Schmidt-Rotluff as he experimented in his graphic work particularly in the woodcut medium the art historian Robin Reisenfeld has argued that Schmidt-Rotluffused the wood grain in his prints to express an organic relationship she writes as a product the image created from the wood block became an extension of his experience of nature this sense of oneness with trees and natural surroundings can be seen in woodcuts such as woman in the woods which might be seen as an expressionist updating of Caspar David Friedrich’s Forest Romanticism one of several Friedrich inspired prints from this year for which Schmidt-Rotluff deployed Friedrich’s Ruckenfigur figure device the art of the Brucke often exemplified a male gay’s sexual utopianism even after the group’s disbandment in 1913 Schmidt-Rotluff will have produced wood cuts of an erotic nature towards the end of the war however there was a shift in emphasis from sexually charged representations of courtesans in studio settings to a more sobering religious imagery this was in keeping with the emergence during this period of what has been referred to as Messianic expressionism a phenomenon that went hand in hand with a newfound appreciation of the emotive work of that northern Renaissance artist Matthias Grunewald and in particular his Isenheim Alterpiece one might argue that an Barlach shown by Nicccola was also part of that phenomenon of Messianic expressionism Rosa Schapire was Schmidt-Rotluff’s most loyal supporter and avid collector a figure about whom Shulamith Behr was a world leading authority after the war Schapire co-edited and contributed to two Weimar-era expressionist journals Die rote Erde and Kundung Schapire wrote an important article on Schmidt-Rotluff’s religious woodcuts for Die rote Erde in which she proposed that the artist was the greatest exponent of this Messianic aspect of expressionism as conveyed through his wood culture she waxed lyrical about his ability to find new aspects in age-old materials and she argued the innermost secrets of the soul are disclosed in black and white in line and surface his creations are not illustrative but new interpretations of Christ’s words intriguingly at this time the Biblical word was often appropriated by patriotic German art critics and commentators in order to describe the cultural achievement of the expressionist woodcut for example in writing about the Hans Goltz exhibition Der expressionistiche in 1918 which displayed a number of woodcuts with religious subject matter including those by Schmidt-Rotluff the poet Rudolph Adrian Dietrich would state the simplest medium the wood block is enough each cut of the knife is a cut into the inner self this wood is indeed flesh of thy flesh and in 1920 taking a different approach but also reflecting on Schmidt-Rotluff’s use of wood the critic Wilhelm Valentiner interpreted the German sensitivity to organic craft material in terms that revealed a strong cultural nationalism and Valentiner wrote it is as if the structure of the rough trunk and its knotty, misshapen shape that nevertheless submits to the passionate carving knife were especially suited to the half barbaric half sentimental self-sacrificing German character an unconscious racial instinct also motivated Schmidt-Rotluff who turned with passion towards these activities it’s one extraordinary passage that it is also worth observing that the wood had earlier been celebrated by a revitalised German arts and crafts movement as a symbolic bastion against other work materials that had been introduced in the process of industrialisation moreover this emphasis on the authenticity of traditional hand craftsmanship was somewhat at odds with the Kaiser’s own faith in technological industrial progress in the formation of a new Germany like his Brucke colleagues Schmidt-Rotluff produced handcrafted wooden furniture for his atelierwohung in Berlin-Friedenau and started to experiment with other forms of wood carving his Relief with Two Female Nudes from 1911 is a notable example as Gerhard Wietek has pointed out there is clearly some interrelationship between this wood relief and woodcuts such as Nudes on a Rug II in this respect the work seems to have grown out of the woodcut but stopped short of the three-dimensionality of wood sculpture it is also suggestive of those wood bas-reliefs created by Paul Gaugin in Tahiti during the late 1880s as well as referencing the simplified figuration evident on the Palau-wood beams which Schmidt-Rotluff would have seen in the in the Dresden ethnographic museum some time before the group moved to Berlin Schmidt-Rotluff’s wood relief is striking in that two stylised female moods formed from flat painted surfaces appear to be breaking free from a mass of rough almost petrified bark their action is framed by the much smoother outer surfaces of the block which also feature engraved but uneven parallel lines the work simultaneously expresses the artist’s submission to and overcoming of the resistance of the organic material the act of looking at the raised and subtracted surfaces stimulates a vicarious experience as we mentally reconstruct the physical strain of the activity that brought the relief into existence the creative interaction between different media and Schmidt-Rotluff’s experimentation with wood is noteworthy and similarly to Brucke colleagues Heckel and Kirchner his motifs often developed through a series of medial transformations in his sketch for a sculpture from 1912 that you see here Kirchner effectively illustrates a key aspect of what I’ve defined as arboreal expressionism the pencil and chalk sketch depicts a naked male and female contained by two tree branches the shapes of the branches dictate their forms but they appear to be breaking out as if at the end of a metamorphic cycle Kirchner stated evocatively it is such a sensual pleasure when blow by blow the figure grows more and more from the trunk there is a figure in every trunk one must only peel it out in their unique studios culture the Brucke artists really took up an anti-academic position by carving figures out of raw wood and using intense colour that appeared to seep out of the fibrous material they were challenging the prevailing notion of the aesthetic purity and superiority of white marble classical sculpture an idea first developed during the Enlightenment principally by Joachim Winckelmann idea which dominated the art academies of Europe even as late as the first half of the 20th century this rejection of the marmoreal academic tradition through expressing a relationship to both tribal African and oceanic wood carving as well as to their native Gothic wood sculpture tradition is significant critical supporters of the Brucke and particularly those based in Hamburg such as Gustav Schiefler Max Sauerlandt Whilhelm Niemeyer and Schapire all recognise this important aspect of their art Sauerlandt who was director of the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg went so far as to argue that it was the Brucke’s method of non-concealment of revealing tool marks and arboreal material in the work of art itself that made them even more authentic than the medieval woodcuts at the heart of the Germanic artistic tradition a series of Schmidt-Rotluff’s woodcut self-portraits produced between 1913 and 1914 focus on heads as does a 1915 woodcut portrait of Schapire although a number of these represented heads imply three-dimensionality and in this respect can be seen as imaginative preparatory studies that signal his progression from relief carving to the fully sculptural between 1911 and 1912 Schmidt-Rotluff have produced a few highly distinctive mask-like wood reliefs of bearded men these look vaguely tribal but are not as indebted to African and oceanic prototypes as some of his later three-dimensional head sculptures these wood reliefs you see one here on the left cannot be regarded as crafted in any conventional sense as the wood blocks are left more or less in their original state the natural physical presence of these blocks is manifest and ancient faces reminiscent of historical images of woodwoses appear to emerge from the arboreal surface with the minimal intervention of tools later on on a military post into Lithuania 1916 Schmidt-Rotluff found himself surrounded by ancient forests here he took his raw artistic material directly from its source he deeply admired the use of wood as a craft material by the native population although it is notable that Schmidt-Rotluff’s work appears to be relatively uninfluenced by local wood carving instead he produced many head sculptures which seem to have been conceived from his appreciation of African prototypes or indeed Echo Polynesian forms in that they often possess the appearance of scaled down versions of giant Easter Island figures Wilhelm Niemeyer was one of the first art historians to underline the significance of wood as an artistic material in the oeuvre of Schmidt-Rotluff in the utopian journal Kundung (Herald) which he coedited with Schapire and which was printed in a workshop of the Hamburg Kunstgewerbeschulen he even dedicated a Waldlied to the artist articulating the importance of the tree wood as material and forest in his work it should be noted that the that creative writing on trees and forests has a long history in German literature and poems on the forest still appealed in the early 20th century often published in journals by writers associated with literary expressionism the enthusiasm of Schmidt-Rotluff and Niemeyer for all things arboreal why therefore also be seen in this context together with the tradition of celebrating the arboreal in German visual culture the kinship of the forest of the German people was repeatedly stressed later on in National Socialist doctrine Heinrich Himmler’s Ancestral Inheritance Foundation a Nazi think tank which was set up in 1935 even had a special department of 100 men dedicated to researching the place of the forest and tree in German culture and history the national socialists were keen to encourage a Waldbewusstein of forest consciousness the nationalistic appreciation of the wood in terms of place and material appeared in many publications such as Franz von Mammen’s The Forest as Educator and Hubert Schrade’s Tree and Forest furthermore Hans Weber writing for the Nazi publication Die Kunst I’m Deutschen in April 1940 argued only the Nordic race has achieved such perfection in the treatment of wood and only it possesses such a decided feeling for the beauties that lie in the material in the grain and colour of the various kinds of wood this cultural nationalism was perhaps not so very different from the rhetoric of Weimar era supporters of expressionism but while National Socialist art history was shot through with eugenic theories earlier critical endorsers of expressionist wood culture such as Valentiner Niemeyer and Sauerlandt were not opposed to the wood carving from Cameroon and South Sea Islands that inspired powerful emotional emotional statements in modern German art Hans Weber’s Nazi propagandist sense of cultural patriotism meant that he deliberately emitted from his discussion any other nation whose people had worked with wood and especially the corpus of wooden objects from Belgium France and the German and the French and the German colonies sorry eulogised by modernists such as the influential German Jewish writer Carl Einstein Einstein nonetheless used the racist terminology that was so commonplace in this period even among progressive leftists as you can see here in this well-known publication from 1915 Weber’s celebration of German arts and crafts carefully avoided any mention of the expressionist woodcut and wood sculpture which was viewed by many National Socialists as un-German and highly degenerate precisely because of its indebtedness to Cameroonian and South Sea Island tribal artefacts a connection that had been articulated in earlier Weimar era exhibitions Schmidt-Rotluff for instance was the headliner artist for a Kestner-Gesellschaft exhibition in 1920 in which his artworks were juxtaposed with ethnographic objects the cover of the Hannover catalogue clearly attempted to capitalise on the success of Einstein’s book in artist circles Schmidt-Rotluff’s wood cuts and wood sculpture fell firmly into the Nazi category of degenerate the network of Jewish patronage for the likes of Schmidt-Rotluff was deemed conspiratorial and Jewish dealers collectors and curators were all accused by the Nazis of contaminating eugenically pure Germanic culture by seducing German artists into seeing the world unnaturally totally ridiculous argument there you are the Nazis pointed to the distortions and deformations of the human figure in expressionist art as evidence of this unnaturalness Rudolph Herrmann’s poster for the Hamburg Entartete Kunst degenerate art exhibition played on different aspects of the notion of degenerate the narrow eyes and elongated nose of the imagined head sculpture negatively refers to un-German influences which inspired the likes of Schmidt-Rotluff as well as attacking Jewish support for expressionism the anti-semitic aspect is drawn out by the fact that Herrmann’s fictive head sculpture is curiously reminiscent of Otto Dix’s unflattering portrait of the Jewish art dealer Alfred Flechtheim and is shadowed far less subtly by a Shylock-like charicature in 1934 during the of national socialism Karl Schmidt-Rotluff painted his uprooted trees signalling a disturbance in Germany one might ask was it the artist himself who felt uprooted in the postwar period the artist Georg Baselitz further explored the idea of the tree broken and bleeding as a symbol for a Germany turned upside down by historical events the nurturing locale of so much German romantic painting now seemingly ruptured in the mid 1960s Baselitz became one of the first German artists to emphatically take up the woodcut again effectively renewing the medium that was so associated with expressionism and the Brucke style and that revealed much of the wood blocks organic irregularities in the gouged composition but it would be inaccurate to consider Baselitz’s woodcuts exclusively in relation to first generation expressionism like his predecessor Otto Dix Baselitz was also drawn to Italian mannerism to the work of Pontormo and Bronzino as well as 16th century wood cuts by Northern mannerist artists in West Germany the careers of the surviving Brucke artists were restored in the post-war period these artists who had formed a rebellious avant-garde group in Dresden in 1905 and who often took up emphatic anti-academic stances during the Wilhelmine era had by the 1950s become respectable elder statesmen of the arts establishment and were hardly influential on the younger generation Baselitz has confirmed this in interview with me although he has also stated that he felt a certain dependence on his fellow Saxon artist Schmidt-Rotluff and he has portrayed him in single or group portraits many times since the 1980s and I’ll just read what he said here on the screen about Schmidt-Rotluff and I’m coming to my last slide in a moment Baselitz wrote Schmidt-Rotluff was an expressionist and one of the few in Germany who survived the war with a painting ban he was a professor in the school in West Berlin where I was a student I was not in his class but he was around and I talked to him I wondered why such a famous artist did not have any backing nobody paid any attention to him and he had hardly any students he was totally unfashionable if it wasn’t for the fact that he’d gifted many works to the city of Berlin in the late 1960s which formed the basis of the Brucke Museum nobody would have seen his work the market for Schmidt-Rotluff only came later but there was a reason why Schmidt-Rotluff was ignored by the others that was simply that we had lost the war and the writers philosophers and artists and musicians of that period were all somehow implicated whether they were opponents of the regime or not didn’t matter Georg Baselitz like the Brucke artists bits collected African wood carving through although rather more extensively one has to say maintaining particular interest in Lobi ‘bateba’ and ancestral woodcut figures from the Bateke tribe in the Republic of Congo as Shulamith Behr has identified you might be interested to know that Sulamith published on Baselitz for the catalogue of the Royal Academy retrospective in 2007 everybody knows her work on the women artist of expressionism maybe not so much her work on Baselitz Baselitz his own wood sculpture reveals a surface that has been roughly hewn directly from the trunk with chainsaws and axes an expression of his desire for what he calls raw primordial form Baselitz has argued that when one thinks of primordial form sculpture one always thinks of sculpture from Africa there is no doubt that like Kirchner and Schmidt-Rotluff before him Baselitz is fascinated by the idea of the recurrence of ancestral traits especially as suggested by cutting through the growth rings of arboreal material in wood carving and like them his activistic impulses have not been exclusively localised on German identity he is an artist who is delighted in giving new growth to old wood thank you very [Applause] [Applause] much thank you so much for that really really extraordinary talk the fourth speaker in this session is Dr Michael Tymkiw reader in Art History at the University of Essex his research largely focuses on issues of spectatorship and Modern Art and visual culture and his writings include his monograph “Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism” from 2018 and a series of articles in the Art Bulletin Art History Journal of Design History and from and the Oxford Art Journal his paper today is “Art in Exile Ludwig Meidner and Holocaust Knowledge” [Applause] before beginning I should like to thank Robin and Glenn for the kind invitation to take part in what has thus far been a fascinating I came to know Shulamith Behr’s work before I knew much about the history of art it was 2005 while I was a rather clueless MA student with minimal training in art history at that point one of my professors recommended her introductory book expressionism for anyone with little familiarity with the movement which was certainly the case for me while this text provided me a useful entry point into expressionism much like it has for many undergrad students to whom I now regularly assign this book it was Behr’s writing about Ludwig Meidner’s art and exile that perhaps most shaped my own research and approach to German art by providing a model for thinking through the stakes of art made in response to the holocaust here I’m referring to a trio of essays that had been wrote in the last decade of her life that discussed the holocaust related works of Meidner an artist who in 1939 fled to Berlin or Berlin to Britain where the artist remained for almost a decade after World War II in many respects Behr’s interest in Meidner’s work is not especially surprising after all not only did it dovetail with her own research and teaching interests in the work of exiled artists it also exemplified a wider interest among art historians and curators in the work of artists in exile during the National Socialist period within this larger field of inquiry be was hardly the only scholar or curator to have explored miners work in exile nevertheless she did offer an unusually nuanced account of this work with a particular emphasis on how such art revealed what she terms quote the different textures and methods that constitute holocaust knowledge end quote in my talk today I wish to explore Behr’s approach for teasing out such different textures and methods which I do by considering the link between the role of holocaust knowledge in Meidner’s art and the concept of traumatic realism to which Behr refers in two essays about the artist’s work in exile as I’ll propose in what follows Behr’s writing on Meidner casts attention to the formidable challenges associated with his artistic attempt to develop what he called a realistic response to the holocaust at the very moment when knowledge about its horrors was becoming publicly disseminated in Britain and other allied countries perhaps just as importantly because bear considered not only Meidner’s own response to such knowledge but also the way that he sought to address spectators through his art her writing reveals how such works function as catalysts for holocaust knowledge above all by inviting audiences to think more critically and reflectively about its traumatic events as they were unfolding over real time for those less familiar with Meidner ‘s work in exile a few basic points are worth mentioning at the outset Meidner who is Jewish fled Germany in August 1939 for England where he arrived in London not long thereafter he was interred between 1940 and 1941 initially at a Liverpool transit camp and then on the Isle of Man in Hutchinson the site of a camp for many so-called enemy aliens often known as the artist camp given the concentration of artists living there most of whom were Jewish in late 1942 roughly a year after his release from the interment camp in Hutchinson Meidner settled in Berlin where he began a cycle of works titled Suffering of the Jews in Poland as Behr notes although considerable uncertainty still surrounds the quote quantity dating and sequencing end quote of these watercolours and drawings what remains incontestable was Meidner’s attempt to use this cycle as an artistic response to the massacres of Jews in Nazi occupied Poland as Meidner explained in a 1943 letter written soon after beginning the cycle one of the most central challenges of this artistic response was quote to strike a balance end quote so the works remained again in his words faithful and clear without glossing over anything at the same time he wanted to avoid them being as he put it sensationalistic or exaggeratedly stark the solution Meidner elaborate elaborated was to quote depict the tragic tragedy realistically even if mysticism sporadically broke broke through for example through works that depicted biblical figures as we see here as Meidner explained such occasional moments of what he called mysticism loosely recalled the work of William Blake with whom the German artist envisioned a kinship given Meidner’s stated attempt to depict the tragedy of the holocaust realistically or as he put it in German darstellung realistisch he perhaps not surprisingly turned to the concept of traumatic realism as a lens for analyzing Meidner’s cycle coined in 2000 by literature and memory study scholar Michael Rothberg the notion of traumatic realism was meant to quote provide an aesthetic and cognitive solution to the conflicting demands in representing and understanding genocide end quote and here I borrow Rothberg’s words as he elaborated traumatic realism centres unquote how the ordinary and extraordinary aspects of genocide intersect and coexist thus mediating between the realistic and anti-realistic positions that have often defined holocaust studies end quote in several respects Behr’s decision to invoke Rothberg’s concept of traumatic realism when writing about minor holocaust related works makes sense for one thing traumatic realism seems like rather a natural fit with the artist stated intention to depict the tragedy of the holocaust realistically and on a more historiographic level the concept of traumatic realism emerged as a key reference point in much scholarship about the visual culture of the holocaust in the decades after Rothberg’s account in no small measure because of the challenges inherent in accounting for what he called the everyday aspects of the holocaust and their intersection with the genocides extreme nature yet what remains insightful about Behr’s engagement with traumatic realism was less her decision to engage with this concept to but more the care with which she examined how Meidner sought to depict the tragedy realistically as Behr notes even if Meidner may have created the cycle at a relatively safe remove from such atrocities he considered it a moral imperative of sorts to depict these traumatic events in quote faithfully and clear without glossing over anything end quote the rub of course was just how to do this given the incomplete nature of Meidner’s knowledge about the holocaust for Meidner embarked on this series in late 1942 less than a year after the National Socialist implementation of the so-called final solution the details of which were not fully known at the time especially by members of the general public although Meidner may have been operating with a less than complete knowledge of the holocaust while working on this cycle they convincingly demonstrates that there was quite quite a bit he did know as an exiled artist in Britain one source of knowledge was the 1940 book the German Invasion of Poland which included extensive photographs of this invasion another was the evidence gathered by the Polish resistance and polish government in Exile which had formed the basis of an address to the United Nations in December 1942 that right around this time was published as a book yet another source was a a speech by the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs delivered to Parliament in December 1942 that elaborated on Poland’s role is quote the principal Nazi slaughterhouse of Jews end quote a speech that had a very strong effect on Meidner who wrote about it in a letter shortly thereafter as Behr observes more local sources also undoubtedly inform Meidner’s knowledge about the holocaust which Behr painstakingly traces these include an article penned by the chief Rabbi responsible for the area where miners synagogue was based or a 1942 article in the Sunday Express about the mass murder of Jews through gassing taken together all of these data points reveal that Meidner derived a knowledge of the holocaust from numerous accounts of the National Socialist Mass extermination of Jews in Poland knowledge that however incomplete led him to use his art to Behr witness to these words in my view his decision to do so cuts to the very fraught nature of the Holocaust ostensibly extensible un-representability in a nutshell if Theodor Adorno spoke of the barbarity of writing poetry after Auschwitz what were the stakes of doing so during or more precisely of creating art that responded to the holocaust atrocities while they were occurring as for Meidner’s art that he made in response to the holocaust he certainly felt a direct kinship with those who are perishing this is suggested not only by the fact that Meidner a Jew fled Germany to escape persecution but also by the way that in 1943 he described the cycle suffering of the Jews in Poland as forcing himself to quote think constantly constantly of the fate of my brothers end quote yet beyond such a perceived connection with fellow Jews being persecuted and murdered in Poland Meidner almost certainly understood the works as a platform for heightening awareness about the holocaust somewhat in the spirit of his 1914 series of graphic artworks titled War which sought to direct attention to the atrocities of World War I as Behr rightly notes this motivation suggests that Meidner’s minor cycle suffering of the Jews in Poland may be situated within a wider interest among artists in making serial artworks to cast a spotlight on the horrors of war with Francisco Goya’s the disaster of war the disasters of war from 1810 1820 and Otto Dix’s 1924 cycle War serving as important precedents however whereas go and dicks made such works in proximity to war crime atrocities be it by residing in the same country as Behr remarks was the case with Goya or by serving in the army on the battlefields as with Dix’s Meidner created these works in an ambivalent position of exile on the one hand he occupied a position of relative safety on the other hand he remained estranged from his country as an exiled artist and for a time from those in his immediate proximity in Britain as occurred when living in an internment camp see from this vantage point even if Meidner’s position as an artist in exile did not encompass the same kind of trauma associated with the horrors of mass extermination it nevertheless constituted one facet of trauma inhabited and experienced by the artist thereby adding texture to the form of traumatic realism captured by his work in short however information about the holocaust may have been in late 1942 and 43 among those living in Great Britain and other allied countries Behr’s analysis draws attention to the basic but crucial fact that much did remain known about holocaust related atrocities at the time just as crucially Meidner’s response to these atrocities through his works casts attention to how he as an artist in exile to make sense of such information and the occasional gaps in such information in indeed what seems significant here is not simply that Meidner himself responded to such information with his art becoming a visual record of his own awareness of the holocaust more specifically there’s careful analysis reveals that many of the formal choices he made were almost certainly meant to spur critical thought and reflection among audiences about the holocaust as a case in point consider what Behr’s incisive comments about Meidner’s Steel Chambers with Burning Corpses and I’ll quote her comments here at length to clarify just how she considered the works formal vocabulary a means to heighten a spectator’s own holocaust knowledge in her words the iteration of the rectangular ovens directional flames and smokes do not prevent the spectator from attempting to reconfigure the bodies amid the conflagration as fore-shortened body parts and feet protrude into our space there is no safe psychological distance between the viewer and the two-dimensional representation as Meidner takes advantage of the kinetic implications of extending action and motion comparable to the reading of cartoons or filmic vision indeed even when focusing on the repetition of hieroglyphic and dynamic figural movement as in his other work recoiling people from around the time Meidner prompts the viewer into anticipating an unseen perpetrator beyond the frame of reference the before and after of the bodily and mental anguish of the Jewish people of Poland to my mind one key reason for this passage’s significance is that Behr demonstrates how Meidner uses formal devices such as serial movement and framing to make facets of the holocaust more visceral to spectators despite the in complete nature of publicly accessible information this was evident for example in what Behr calls the quote iteration of rectangular ovens and quote to collapse a spectator’s psychological distance from the image and by extension from the quote body parts and feet and quote within these ovens this was further evident what she deems the implicit temporality of this work’s framing devices which in her reading and anticipate the temporality of Jewish suffering and the looming presence of a spectator just beyond the image’s borders through such observations be persuasively positions the work shown here as one that draws on certain ideas and features of filmic and proto-filmic imagery and in so doing she expands our understanding of how certain aspects of modern visual culture became deployed to heighten awareness of Nazi pressure among other implications this encourages us to consider the overlaps and disconnects between Meidner’s holocaust related work and the imagery of other modernist artists in exile who sought to depict aspects of Nazi aggression such as John Hartfield if Behr comments exemplify her interest in issues of spectatorial address and by extension in the ways that Meidner used formal devices to heighten holocaust knowledge among those viewing his works these remarks also point to how she nuanced wider discussions of traumatic realism among scholars of visual art to this end briefly consider the 2002 monograph memory effects the holocaust and the art of secondary witnessing by Art historian and cultural critic Dora Apel who used Rothberg’s notion of traumatic realism to examine art created from the 1990s onward by artists born after the holocaust in this important study Apel followed the rather familiar rhetorical move of using the concept of traumatic realism to analyse how artists represented the holocaust as a form of self-expression and she does so by specifically considering how such artists served as quote secondary Witnesses end quote who did not experience the holocaust firsthand Apel’s engagement with the concept certainly has parallels with the way that there draws on the notion to consider how Meidner responded to the events of the holocaust violent exile that said there shifts at least part of the emphasis away from issues of self-expression toward issues of spectatorial address in so doing she pressed a move that Rothberg himself would make much later through his concept of implicated subjects the title of a book he authored roughly 20 years later following his influential account of traumatic realism after all although Behr does not probe the fraught territory occupied by subjects who are neither purely victim nor perpetrator as Rothberg did in his words in his exploration of implicated subjects she does pay considerable attention to the formal strategies used by an artist to make spectators reflect on their own relationship to an an artwork and by extension to their own implication within the forms of violence and Injustice represented a significant but largely overlooked aspect of Rothberg’s recent work in this respect there is instantiates a larger ongoing attempt among historians of art and visual culture to develop new methodologies for making sense of how artists have represented responded to and attempted to deepen an audience’s knowledge of the trauma associated with the holocaust with Griselda Pollock’s 2018 book Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory being but one notable recent example in closing it is worth noting that after the war Meidner did not consider the suffering of the Jews in Poland an effective artistic response to the holocaust as Behr points out in a 1945 letter to former student Meidner wrote that the works quote look like a complete reduction to absurdity completely harmless and cozy next to the photographic documentation of the gruesome reality end quote for Behr this response points to a possible quote begrudging envy of photography as a medium necessary and perhaps better suited to bearing witness end quote yet what Behr’s work open my own eyes to is both the necessity of accounting for how artists sought to bear witness to the holocaust in the face of incomplete information and how they did so by developing formal vocabularies that would speak to audiences in different ways than photographs and other forms of evidence that may broadly be considered documentary indeed if we learn anything from applying art historical methods to studying the holocaust it is that a rigorous contextual formal and conceptual interrogation of imagery matters deeply for it is only that through such an interrogation that we may deepen our own knowledge of the holocaust of an image’s connection to these events and more fundamentally a visual cultures connections to forms of authoritarianism and genocide across the thank you Dot unfortunately couldn’t stay for the afternoon session but I think we’ve got a lot to talk about amongst ourselves so thank you for these three really remarkable papers and I see lots of points of distinction and differentiation and I’m especially appreciative of the reflection on Shulamith’s work in the final paper but all through the papers the threads of that what I’m interested in asking you about is this tension between the kind of medium as subject medium as bodily representation the physicality of making these objects and then the remove the un-representability of it as points of overlap and contrast and also connectivity and so I was wondering if I could ask each of you to so to reflect upon how some of these works in fact material-wise and method wise and the kind of the artist’s own experience figure in if that seems clear as a sort of process because I actually do see even though there’s some obvious overlaps with trees and wood and paper I see some very complicated entanglements with the way in which these papers work together and I think also with with Dot’s paper to start with would you jump in and because we’re recording we are going to be a bit pedantic with our microphones okay can you hear me good thank you yes indeed on representability was the preoccupation of Kathe Kollwitz for nearly 10 years until she produced her wood cut series in which it was evident from letters and diaries that she had really finally got something off her chest and mean and this has been written about in psychoanalytic terms in terms of mourning Shulamith also refers to this and in particular to if you witness a series of drawings and attempts at a sculpture at a Memorial Sculpture that she went through you see with reason why she became frustrated it and abandoned one medium after another until in fact she came across woodcut and it is as if some spark triggered something in her there was an emotional connection and she recognised that this was a medium in which I think the physical and the mental effort together and the concentration that is required well it evidently had a cathartic effect and that that’s how she writes about it and in in fact you can see in some of her drawings and and Shulamith points this out in her in her chapter on Kollwitz the way she would work and overwork and work at a charcoal drawing in order to really seal something in and she was writing at the time in her diaries Kollwitz that when she did manage to draw which depended on her mood she did feel that she was becoming closer to her lost son in the work so that’s how I think you can see that there’s something invested there that brings results yeah absolutely yeah I mean just to pick up on Niccola was saying there it strikes me also during your paper when you mentioned Barlach saying that he turned to the wood cut so as not to fall apart there’s something interesting about the the act of woodcut making during that first world war period of course wood is a readily available material in wartime you can still access wood if you can’t access canvas it becomes a form of art therapy for all of these artists isn’t it Schmidt-Rotluff makes similar statements about and so does Meidner that it’s the only medium for me now that’s right and that came through in your paper and Ludwig Meidner also makes extraordinary woodcuts so there’s something about the woodcut medium and also the phenomenon of Messianic expressionism which connects Barlach maybe Meidner and Schmidt-Rotluff as well during that first world war period that quote cut into inner self like literally that was a beautiful quote and just sort of the figure out of the material you could look at trees and see what’s emerging but I think for these artists it was really really profound and deep in there for Meidner I think it was a bit well one of the things that struck me about Meidner’s work on the holocaust was how he used materials so differently than his earlier expressionist works with which were perhaps most familiar I remember vividly looking at those with a thick impasto and it just has such a incredible materiality with the watercolours and drawings that form this the cycle that I was referring to I haven’t seen them in person so I can’t state for certainty but one of the things that strikes me in looking at the reproductions is this blurring it’s not complete but it’s you see it around the edges and it’s certainly present in the charcoal drawings but also in the watercolours by definition with that medium it bleed to water and one of the questions I wrestled with was to what end and it seemed to me that he may have been doing two things and I’m throwing a hypothesis out here rather than a firm statement but one is that there is that conflation of and there I think specifically of this image of bodies kind of kind of going like a a flood into out of out of train wagons and I feel like that was this this like a a visualisation of blurring that for him was kind of unrepresented the dehumanisation of bodies how bodies become subject becomes object so I felt like that might be at play there I also thought that there was something with that blurring between ultimately life and death and I think here of images I don’t know if I showed them but they were corpses suspended from from trees and for that it it pointed to an ambivalence yeah I’d like to open up questions comments observations from the audience yes sir are you going to thank you thank you all very much indeed of course but Michael I’d like to ask you to say whether the works were exhibited or published in an album or what and were they made where where did you say they were made in London they were made well yeah he was in exile in Britain and pardon after he was came down from the yes exactly yes so we don’t know and this is I mean Behr has we don’t know exactly to my knowledge whether these were exhibited during the World War I and so if if anybody can clarify that point I’d be grateful but and so there is if we think about questions of the audience then one of the natural things where it’s not so much for the the audiences of that moment although he may have intent he may have envisioned them as such but he’s speaking to audiences more broadly about audiences then and now or then at different moments of time about the it’s at once a response to the holocaust and an attempt to make sense through these visual features of of that of that of those events so and then afterwards they definitely were exhibited I don’t know the exhibition history but I there was a German exhibition that was that showed them at least in the 1980s and then they very well probably were exhibited beforehand but but that obviously would be useful to know about these questions of audiences just a point Shulamith wrote an essay about an exhibition that was held at in 1946-47 on subjects of Jewish interest and the number of his holocaust related images were red then I don’t know off the top of my head without checking the catalogue which images were included obviously a strong relationship thank you so definitely worth checking with the yes the way that interesting overlaps in our work just considering something overlaps and much enjoyed your discussion Michael Rothberg’s text yes Rachel I think is on to something there that exhibition was followed in 1947 I believe by two person show of Meidner and Else 49 in which perhaps some of those drawings were seen again is that right and I wondered what you meant to suggest that Meidner continues to work on the on the cycle when he returns to to Germany he so that was in 1953 he returns to does he return to the cycle at that point no not to my knowledge no I mean in part because he struggled so much with the how to rework those those pieces in light of all that evidence that was coming to and all question blurring it is the case that he had information course see photographs but he was still working from a historical precedence and from his own imagination too yeah so there is one of for some of the blurring yeah potentially I mean I think that he was working from well over a 100 photographs I mean if if we look at that one book alone that Behr points out as a very likely source so he did have some photographic evidence but I mean I think he’s he’s choosing I this is perhaps to strengthen what you’re saying it’s if he’s trying to differentiate it from photography perhaps that’s one further reason for that blurring I propose that we keep to our schedule and first of all I would like to thank all four speakers in our first panel it’s the day off to a roaring start I would say and I would like to just make a few announcements so we’ll reconvene and start at 4:30 on the dot we’re doing this in the spirit of German modernism and so we will carry on in that manner so let us recommence because we have three additional wonderful talks in the lineup this afternoon Dr Lucy Wasensteiner is director of the Liebermann Villa in Berlin she studied law at Bristol and Oxford universities and completed her MA and PhD in art history when we won her over those other fields at The Courtauld Institute under the supervision of Shulamith her research explores the art of German speaking Europe from 1871 National Socialist cultural policy and its international implications UK German cultural relations and providence research her recent books include 20th century German art answering degenerate art from 1930s London from 2019 and her edited volume sites of interchange modern politics and culture between Britain and Germany 1919 to 1955 which came out out in 2021 and includes an essay as you her paper today is “Grete Ring: Dealing in Modernism from Berlin to British Exile” welcome to [Applause] Lucy yes thank you very much thank you yeah thank you all for coming today and thank you for the kind introduction Robin and thank you Robin and Glenn for the invitation to give this presentation today again I’d like to start with a couple of brief words about Shulamith we met when I came from my interview for the MA programme back in 2009 also rather clueless coming from a different field and from the moment we met I I felt this this amazing knowledge but also this guidance this kind of desire to to guide and to bring people together and that’s really something that that I that I experienced throughout the time of knowing her she guided me through my PhD she was a constant source of advice after its conclusion and an important contributor to many of my later projects as we’ve just heard I owe Shulamith so much and so it really is a real privilege to be able to speak here today so as many of you will know and as we’ve heard already today much of Shulamith’s research into German modernism was concerned with both the specific role and experience of women within it and on the impact of exile after 1933 so when the Liebermann Villa was approached with an idea for a research and exhibition project concerning a little known female dealer of modernism in Weimar era Berlin who then fled to Britain in exile in 1938 I was perhaps preconditioned to jump at the idea our museum on the outskirts of Berlin is dedicated to the painter Max Liebermann leading German impressionist founder of the Berlin secession and later president of the Berlin Academy of Arts and the museum is located in his former summer home on the banks of Lake Wannsee as we can see here at the Liebermann Villa we already knew of the name Grete Ring we knew she was born in Berlin in 1887 and indeed she was a niece of Max and Martha Liebermann her mother was a sister of Martha Liebermann we knew she had completed a PhD in art history in 1913 under Heinrich Wolfflin concerning a Dutch portrait painting in the 15th and 16th century we knew that from around 1919 she’d worked for Liebermann’s most important dealer Paul Cassirer in his firm the Kunstsalon Cassirer and here we see the opening wall of our exhibition in Berlin where the main protagonists were displayed so in the centre we have Grete Ring bottom left Paul Cassirer we knew that at the Cassirer firm Grete Ring had worked alongside Walter Feilchenfeldt who we see here at the bottom sitting in his car and that following Cassirer’s suicide in 1926 Grete Ring and Feilchenfeldt had taken over the Kunstsalon Cassirer together beyond this however Grete Ring was something of an unknown many of the papers from the Kunstsalon Cassirer before 1933 didn’t survive the war and as far as we could see there was no archive or library holding the Grete Ring papers as it turned out after Ring’s death in 1952 leaving no spouse or children a portion of her papers had been inherited by her business part Walter Feilchenfeldt and his wife the photographer Marianne Breslauer who is the fourth face we see here on the wall and these papers were now in the possession of their two sons the family approached us offering access to these materials and then we were awarded a grant from the Berlin senate which crucially allowed us to expand the research into other sources between Britain in Germany and the results of this research were presented in an exhibition at the Leibermann Villa last autumn which was also accompanied by a catalogue it was really remarkable what we were able to uncover about Grete Ring in such a short period of time for those of you experienced with exhibitions it’s always an extremely condensed process working to the catalogue deadline but what we were able to discover about her her achievements her network the reputation she enjoyed both as a dealer and as an art historian in Germany and internationally from the 1920 right through to the early 1950s we really had the feeling we had only scratched the surface and what I would like to try and do today is give a sense of this remarkable career and how we conducted the research what sources we were able to find and to ask the question then why has she and her impact been so overlooked in the years since her death in 1952 is it really as simple as because she was a woman in a man’s world or were other factors at work this is of course a complex question and I only have 20 minutes and so I would like to approach the presentation through Ring’s work for and with one particular German modernist artist with whom she connect remained connected throughout her career and who is also a many ways connected to the Courtauld Oskar Kokoschka what do her interactions with Kokoschka and the evidence left of them today review about Grete Ring’s career and how we remember it so we’ll start in the 1920s already before actually starting a little early even before Grete Ring had joined the Cassirer firm Kokoschka one of was one of the key artists promoted by them Kokoschka’s first Berlin exhibition took place at the Kunstsalon Cassirer in 1910 Cassirer published Kokoschka’s Four Dramas in 1919 and once Grete Ring had joined the company around 1919 1920 these Kokoschka projects continued an exhibition of Kokoschka landscapes in 1925 for example or an exhibition an auction of drawings in 1926 together with the firm of Hugo Helbing in Munich as we see here in the materials from these projects in the 1920s Grete Ring isn’t named this was typical for many of the catalogues and brochures produced by the Kunstsalon Cassirer at this time and indeed her colleague Walter Feilchenfeldt wasn’t named either indeed looking at this catalogue one would think that Paul Cassirer himself had held the auction although by October 1926 he had been dead for 10 months but Kokoschka and Ring certainly knew each other and they were close enough for Kokoschka to paint Grete Ring’s portrait sometime around 1923 this fantastic watercolour was almost certainly a gift from Kokoschka to Ring but we don’t know anything about its providence didn’t form part of the Grete Ring materials held by the Feilchenfeldt family after Ring’s death rather it was found by chance by our exhibition preparations by searching online auction result databases luckily we managed to contact the lender and agree and he agreed to lend it for the show when one researches around the activities of the Cassirer firm at this time and indeed the art market in Berlin more generally it’s clear that both Grete Ring and Walter Feilchenfeldt were well known as the faces of the Kunstsalon Cassirer in particular after Cassirer’s death in January 1926 indeed they were so well known that they could be caricatured in the art press without being named this is a drawing published in the journal Kunst and Kunstler in 1928 covering another major auction stage by jointly by their firm Cassirer and Hugo Helbing and here we see all the main protagonists clearly recognisable from the bespectacled Helbing standing in the middle to the somewhat dashing Feilchenfeldt seated almost in the background and in the for the rather skeptical looking Grete Ring the way Ring is depicted here gives us a lot of clues about how her personality was perceived she was clearly known for her directness and that she didn’t suffer fools gladly here in the words of her friend Marianne Breslauer writing in her memoirs in the 1980s I quote Grete Ring was an absolutely unusual woman irresistible admired by everyone and indeed a little feared indeed a little feared because she was afraid of nothing and no one and further she was feared by many for her disarming directness it seems that this impression of Ring was shared by a number of others indeed she was known already in the Berlin of the 1920s by the nickname The Witch even by her own friends and by the mid 1920s Ring is indeed calling herself this and there’s a series of letters about the house she built in Sacrow near Berlin in the 1920s that she refers to throughout the correspondence as The Witch’s House Breslauer later wrote that this name came from Ring’s habit of regularly flying with airplanes rather unusual at the time and these were then referred to as her witch’s broom but this name appears with such regularity and also after her death one wonders if it arose as a way to deal with a perhaps unusually difficult woman and in turn if it came to have an impact on how she was remembered by her contemporaries by the late 1920s Ring’s success and her personality were also being recognized abroad in 1928 she was involved with another high-profile Kokoschka project namely a solo exhibition of his paintings at London’s Leicester galleries this was a significant early showcase for Kokoschka in London with 34 oil paintings on show and what’s great is the example of this catalogue in the Berlin art library is annotated works sold and you can see that a good portion of them were sold according to these annotations and it was also recognised as as a success in the German press as one newspaper in Cologne described it for the first time London has had the chance to see an expressionist artist one can say that no private exhibition of the last few years has enjoyed such crowds on its opening day as this one and no exhibition of recent times has attracted so much general interest now again looking at this catalogue looking at the exhibition materials you would have no idea that Grete Ring was involved but luckily there exists an article from the Yorkshire post published to coincide with the opening which confirms Ring’s central involvement the article was written by the journalist Sybil Vincent and appeared in the Yorkshire post’s column for Women of Today Sybil Vincent was I think it’s relevant to mention her uncle was Viscount D’Abernon the British ambassador to Germany between 1920 1926 and Vincent later went on to marry Tate curator ?? so she knew the art world she knew Germany and Vincent describes Ring in the article as follows a quote the only women art the only woman art dealer in Europe of real importance as far as I know one of the foremost living experts on the Flemish school of painting but if Grete Ring does not concentrate entirely on old masters pictures by the most modern painters of every school are frequently shown at her gallery in Berlin at the moment she is in England for the exhibition which she has arranged at the Leicester galleries of the pictures of Oskar Kokoschka Vincent was clearly enamoured with the then 41-year-old Ring as she describes her further a small neat figure always well-dressed still young enough to enjoy her work and pleasure to the full she begged to be taken to dinner and once there if I hadn’t bothered her to talk about her career she would have enjoyed herself like a child and this is by the way Mariana Breslauer’s portrait with Grete ing from around this time the article then goes on to explore Ring’s position as a woman dealer on the European art market although only briefly Ring is quoted for example as follows no I don’t think there are any other established women art dealers with the exception perhaps of your Miss Dorothy Warren women are involved in dealership businesses she explains but mainly a support for their husbands she’s also asked why she thinks this is and Vincent quotes her as follows I suppose it’s chiefly a matter of luck of course being an art dealer is a hard life and I’m constantly traveling from one country to the other it’s difficult to enter the big firms and few women possess sufficient capital to start on their own anyhow to start a new venture of this kind nowadays requires an almost superhuman ability and knowledge clearly Ring was not too comfortable ruminating on the particular difficulties faced by women on the art market Vincent’s article concludes as follows at this point Ring declined to say anything more about herself or discuss the possibilities of the art expert’s career for women she returned to the Austrian painter whose pictures she is delighted to have helped assemble in London this is the only evidence we found of Ring speaking about the specific challenges facing women on the art market clearly it was unusual for a woman to have such a career as Grete Ring at this time but there’s no evidence that Ring actively advocated for women to be more present on the market and even in Vincent’s article we sense her reluctance to speak in detail on the topic Ring was however prepared to stand up against the developing cultural politics of the national socialists skipping forward four years I would like to briefly mention a series of commercial exhibitions organised by Ring back in Berlin together with the Düsseldorf art dealer Alfred Flechtheim from 1932 these shows under the title The exhibition Living German Art was staged between Autumn 32 and spring 1933 in the rooms of the Kunstsalon Salon Cassirer in Berlin and they showed a selection of the artists later derided as degenerate in Germany including Oscar Kokoschka for this show Ring was sure to appear as author of the catalogue forward in which she advocated explicitly for Modern Art and openly criticised cultural conservatism to he briefly quote any dividing line between old and new art is random and unjustified serving only to restrict and confuse those interested in art both Grete Ring and Walter Feilchenfeldt and indeed his partner Mariana Breslauer were of Jewish heritage and all three of them were ultimately forced to leave Germany Feilchenfeldt and Breslauer went to Holland and then on to Switzerland and Grete Ring to Britain where she arrived in 1938 aged 51 she started a new life in London the 1939 she was able to establish a London branch of the Cassirer company the Paul Cassirer Limited in premises at 11 Cleveland Road close to Green Park and it’s actually fantastic that we have this drawing because we went to Cleveland Road to try and get a photograph of this building and it is such a narrow street you basically can’t you can’t take this photograph of this building so it’s nice to have Ring was able to bring a selection of materials with her from Berlin to London her most important letters documents photographs and a private collection of around a 100 French and German drawings but of course exile was a significant disruption not only to her life and her career but also to her personal archive yes the materials today with the Feilchenfeldt family are highly valuable but important important pieces of the story are missing and following Grete Ring’s Network in Berlin and in exile was particularly valuable for us during the research one example here is her friendship with the artist and illustrator Katerina Wilczynski Wilczynski and Ring knew each other already in Berlin both then came to Britain as emigres after 1933 there’s some evidence that they lived together for a while in London and certainly they remained close friends Wilczynski repeatedly produced such greetings cards for the Cassirer business in London and for Ring personally and in Wilczynski’s estate at the Berlin art Library we found this fantastic drawing of Grete from 1949 here is another example of the scattered Grete Ring archive bringing us back to Ring’s connection with Kokoschka this drawing was made by Kokoschka for Ring in December 1951 by this time Ring was already ill with cancer she would die the following year in 1952 at the age of 65 Kokoschka writes on the drawing in a fantastic combination of German and English ‘fur meine Gretchen klein nikolo’ so for my little Grete for Christmas and then in English be good and cheer up in order that we have a nice party soonest in London in your house love yours okay 51 we know from the Kokoschka literature that Grete Ring was actively selling for the artist after 1945 and the extent the exact extent of this business relationship remains to be researched this drawing evidently researched reached Grete Ring in the hospital but again its provenance after her death is not known like the portrait of Ring it was first discovered on the art market decades later as my last point today I would like to refer briefly to what are arguably the two most significant moments for Grete Ring’s legacy after her exile to Britain on the one hand her monograph her only monograph A Century of French painting 1400 to 1500 published by Phaidon in 1949 notably in English and in the French edition and the gift made of her collection of drawings to the Ashmolean museum in Oxford in accordance with her will in 1954 as I mentioned this was a collection of around 100 French and German 19th century drawings it became clear to us during the research that Ring’s book remained for decades a standard text for those working in the field and the gift of the Ashmolean was also recognized and how is recognized until today as the core of their collection and we can see here on the slide how in the catalogue of the Ashmolean drawing collection Marianne Breslauer’s photographic portrait of Grete Ring is published in the opening pages of the volume so important is greater Ring’s gift but neither of these outputs really serve to put Grete Ring on the map why again there’s probably a number of answers to that question but I would like to draw attention to one both the monograph and the donation were not concerned with the newest modernist developments would she have found greater renown in postwar Britain if she’d been more clearly seen as having brought artistic modernism to Britain as so many other contemporaries have since been portrayed Grete Ring was clearly a remarkable figure a trailblazing woman dealer who managed to build a career in Weimar era Berlin and continue it in British exile but researching her life we also quickly recognize a number of factors which have obscured her work in the years since the fact she was a dealer she was even in Berlin often working behind the scenes as an intermediary producing for example sales catalogues which were later particularly in the years before digitization quickly forgotten added to this her career was interrupted by exile perhaps for this reason she produced only one monograph during her lifetime as a successful woman art dealer she was also clearly something of an outlier and unusual figure with a direct personality resulting for example in nicknames which undermined her significance and in British exile she was not so clearly associated with the newest developments of modern at that modernism at that time being forced out of Nazi Germany despite her ongoing work for such artists and thus perhaps falling out of narratives exploring the modernist influence of such emigres on the British scene without a family her death after her death her archive was scattered yes a large portion was left to the Feilchenfeldt family but significant gaps remain to be researched luckily for us Grete Ring was clearly very popular highly respected among those who knew her and it’s this network which has already helped us fill in the gaps and which promises potential for the next step I’d like to close today and sign a letter from Oscar Kokoschka written to Walter Feilchenfeldt in August 1952 shortly after he did after Grete’s death as he wrote dearest Feilchenfeldt today is the darkest day it’s been all week clouds rain cold and I’m also sad as is older because the poor good old Grete is no longer riding around on her broomstick I can’t stand the thought that it has to be this way that she’s now lying on the under the earth and not rattling around in her house in London and offering me a whiskey I’d rather it was me and that she was still alive many thanks thank you so much it’s really interesting what provenance research can do when layered on art historical contemplation and also the liveliness of the social cultural political aspects I think really is impactful in that way and our next Bieber more in this in this really impactful period Dr Ines Schlenker is an art historian with a research focused on National Socialist degenerate and emigre art her 2007 monograph ‘Hitler’s Salon’ chronicles salon chronicles the officially approved art in the the Third Reich as shown at the Great German Art Exhibition other publications include the catalogue raisonne of the painter paintings of Vienna-born emigre Mary-Louise von Motesiczky from 2009 and co-editing the artist correspondence she’s a member of the committee of the research centre for German and Austrian exile studies welcome [Applause] thank you very much and thank you and very much for the invitation to speak today it’s a real honour and privilege to to be here in her magisterial Women Artists and Expressionism Shulamith Behr is concerned with women artists written out of the cannon among further artists deserving of recognition is the German born Else Meidner my fascination with her work first emerged in 1997 when was writing an article on her for the dictionary of women artists this happily coincided with Shulamith’s interest in Ludwig Meidner expressed in a symposium at the Courtauld in 2002 on the couple and their cultural identity in exile in which we both participated I had hoped to take our research further together but other projects had always got in the way I would like to pay tribute to the best PhD supervisor imaginable whose wisdom generosity and kindness were limitless and my much loved friend through this exploration of Elsa Meidner’s life and work in exile and the factors that contributed to her exclusion from the cannon Elsa Meidner was born into the family of a wealthy liberal Jewish doctor in Berlin in 1901 determined to become an artist against her parents wishes she found encouragement from Kathe Kollwitz and Max Slevogt in 1925 she attended Ludwig Meidner’s drawing class at the Studienatelier fur Malerei und Plastik they were married two years later Else struggled to assert her own artistic identity alongside her more reclusive deeply rich religious husband 16 years her senior and already a celebrated painter intent on discovering her own subject matter and style she declined his offer to work jointly on paintings soon she started to be noticed and in 1928 her etching portraying the writer Alfred Doblin was awarded a prize by the artists group Die Schaffenden her first solo exhibition at the Juryfreie in Berlin in 1932 was well received by the critics one critic seeing a promising future for her with the national socialists rise to power this future was dramatically altered despite the inclusion of Ludwig’s work in the infamous Munich exhibition of degenerate art in 1937 the Meidner’s were reluctant to leave Germany and only decided to immigrate to England in August 1939 object poverty characterized their existence at first Else accepted a position as a servant in Sydenham while Ludwig found a dwelling in Camden Town upon his release from interment in 1941 the couple moved in together in Golders Green yet they would increasingly grow apart and develop their own artistic visions the claustrophobic living conditions are captured in this drawing from 1944 it shows father and son working at opposite ends of the table in a dark sparsely furnished room where a small stove provides scared comfort with great effort Ludwig managed to earn a meagre living for the family with occasional portrait commissions and drawing lessons Else was forced to beg for clothes and food in a letter to France in 1942 Ludwig described Else’s situation my wife is very downcast because the struggle for existence leaves her no time for her art she has had little luck in the meantime her great power as an artist has not been recognized by anyone here she has been lonelier than ever before Ludwig identified three of the main issues Else struggled with both personally and artistically as a woman she was responsible for raising their son David and running a household thus unable to focus her energy on creating art in 1968 she summed up this common dilemma quoted when a man becomes a painter he does nothing but paint but women are expected to all the mundane things too and that’s what ruined me in quote a lack of artistic recognition which Ludwig mentions next overshadowed Else’s entire life in exile where her continental roots and training which shaped her art in both style and subject matter marked her out as different in 1938 Herbert Read summed up the prevailing attitude towards contemporary German art quote it would not be untrue to say that the general public in Great Britain Modern Art is totally un-modern German art is totally unknown even among those who are particularly concerned with modern art art critics collectors and dealers it is almost entirely neglected and after the war her adherence to fictive arts in obvious contrast to the dominating contemporary abstract trends which she abhorred further marked her out as unfashionable her works were shown in a few exhibitions in London Frankfurt and Damstadt during her lifetime yet sustained critical recognition and commercial success failed to appear besides an indifferent public Else was faced with a husband who although generally supportive could be confrontational and severely critical at times by 1948 the Meidner’s economic circumstances had worsened and they had to limit themselves to one room Else responding perhaps in protest to that desperate situation began employing vivid often shocking coloration in her pictures Self-portrait and Nude are two examples of her new style Ludwig did not hide his dislike of what he disparagingly called the new look in her work which to him resembled quote a kind of peasant art primitivism a la West End art salon and quote that he found deplorable despite such condemnation Else carried on creating art perhaps because she possessed an inner need to tell a human story by way of painting engraving and drawing as the emigre art historian Joseph Paul Hodin put it her large oeuvre would eventually comprise 2,200 works many portraits self-portraitsl landscapes and still lifes there was no shortage of inspiration for her since as she conceded in old age she drew it from the pain she experienced for life has afforded me little joy the third issue Ludwig mentions Else’s loneliness would only become worse over time in 1951 David emigrated to Israel and two years later Ludwig returned to Germany Else felt that quote the Germans have destroyed my love for Germany root and branch burning it with a glowing iron for my heart quote she refused to go back and stayed on in London on her own and yet although she received British citizenship in 1954 she could not suppress a feeling of alienation go here in London I walk around as in a dream and wonder why I am here there are plants that thrive everywhere when you transplant them but I could never grow new roots my roots have stayed in Berlin in 1959 she noted resignedly I have no friends at all in this drawing part of a series from the early 1950s Else depicts an area of her garden fence and a massive tree give the impression of enclosure and confinement the painting interior from the late 1950s amplifies this sense of isolation it shows a corner of her crowded studio in which a radio and a phone provide her only link to the outside world in the 1961 drawing seated woman perhaps a selfportrait else it presents the sitter with a back to the viewer a total refuse of engagement is the ultimate expression of withdrawal and yet Else was not without friends in England mainly drawn from the circle of fellow immigrates they supported her financially and artistically among them were the art dealer Siegfried Oppenheimer and the above mentioned Joseph Paul Hodin a staunch promoter of emigre artists in post London upon meeting the Meidner’s in 19553 he publicized Else’s art in numerous articles and in 1979 edited Aus den Erinnerungen Von Else Meidner from the memories of Else Meidner which combined a review of her life with an appreciation of her work the Ben Uri Art Gallery was also a loyal supporter in 1949 it put on a joint exhibition of Else and Ludwig the show attracted several positive reviews yet according to Hodin went basically unnoticed and Ludwig later likened it to a second class funeral Uri had a retrospective exhibition of Else’s work in 1964 soon after her return from Germany where she had spent a few months with her husband who had become increasingly ill yet the couple had not got on and Else had been unable to find much support for her art there the exhibition received little attention and the press response was either reserved or negative Else having sold only one drawing especially lamented the apathy of her fellow Jews quote our people do not buy pictures you can’t eat them you can’t wear them and you don’t need them I just recovered my expenses and quote the lack of response only reinforced Else’s long-held view of rejection quote I am a Jew and nothing else I wish I could collaborate on a Jewish culture but I’m not allowed to do that here no one knows about me quote now in her mid-60s an arthritic condition made work increasingly difficult for Else shortly after Ludwig’s death in 1966 she gave up painting all together both for health reasons as well as resignation her last pictures reflect the mounting seclusion depression and bitterness that she felt the circle of people portrayed would ever smaller until almost all that remained were self-portraits and depictions of her sister Hildegard her last dated work is from 1967 the following year she confided in Hodin now I am broken in 1969 she stated I’ve lost life’s battle Else died in 1987 was buried in bushy Jewish cemetery in Hertfordshire Hodin served as executive of her estate his sizable collection of her work became the basis for her inclusion in an exhibition of emigre artists that John Denham put on at his gallery in West Hampstead in 1990 Else who had once resignedly called herself the greatest collect collector of Else works is now represented in just a few public collections in the UK two portraits acquired in the late 1980s belong to the Ben Uri the other two works found respectively at the Tate and the British museum are dedicated to the allegorical motif of Death and the Maiden popular with German artists in the Middle Ages and also with Kathe Kollwitz Else was preoccupied with it all her life in 1983 Hodin had presented two of her works to the Tate the trustees although interested in the artist and her history did not feel they should do more than except one work for the connection this haunting image was the reaction of the teenage Else to the serious illnesses and multiple deaths she witnessed through her father’s medical practice the British Museum’s version of Death and the Maiden was created some 30 years later in this striking large rendering a kneeling nude holds a skeletal winged death who comforts her tenderly she seems to welcome death as a gentle friend the only companion left to turn to in her loneliness and desperation Else’s estate was first kept at Kibbutz Shluchot where David had lived in 2001 it found a permanent home in the Ludwig Meidner-Archive at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt later this year a series of small displays of Else’s portrait drawings will be shown there and around 70 orks will be published in the Musmeum’s online collection Elsa Meidner had misfortune of being left out of the cannon twice rejected by the national socialists she was removed from public consciousness in Germany for decades the foreign style and subject matter made no impact on a largely indifferent conservative British audience who proceeded to ignore her and even the Jewish community paid no attention to her and her art exiled defined and limited her art she’s still waiting to be discovered thank you so much so much more to learn our next and final speaker is Dr Glenn Sujo artist writer educator he focuses his attention on the recovery of drawing language in art education and the discourses of visual culture after the holocaust underpinned by his vibrant studio practice these activities inform discourses of art of the holocaust complexity and meaning in The Cambridge History of the Holocaust forth coming from Cambridge University Press also Yehuda Bacon: The Cursive Hand in The Cold Shower of a New Life the Postwar Diaries of a Child Survivor in 2019 and Muselmann a Distilled Image of the Lagers in Concentrationary Memories from 2014 earlier curatorial projects included Legacies of Silence the Visual Arts and Holocaust Memory Imperial War Museum in London 2001 Artists Witness the Shoah Graves Art Gallery Sheffield 195 1995 and Drawing on these Shores a View of British Drawing and its Affinities which toured nationally between 1993 and 94 his paper today is ‘The Revealed and Cathartic Marks as Evidentiary Witness’ welcome what an extraordinary moving occasion this is and I feel very privileged to be part of this panel of one of our one speakers it’s become a kind of it feels like an intimate conversation we’re having many overlock many interesting shared concerns this really is my tribute to a dear friend Shulamith Behr The Revealed Hand: Cathartic Marks as Evidentiary Witness trawling through Behr’s catalogues books articles lectures in preparation for this day I’m reminded of that two-way dialogue of entwined voices sparked by our meetings in the altruistic space of learning the dialogue this essay and the wider context of the colloquium can seeks to revive at the root of it is the realisation that artworks are always more than passive repositories of an aestheticising gaze but exercise a profound influence of spectator in a review of Horst’s ‘Image Acts: a systematic approach to visual agency’ art historian Matthew Rampley noted that works of art exercise a quote Medusa like power over the spectator they do so through an array of visual devices inscriptions that speak in the first person or gaze back at the beholder living images understood not merely as representations but as a quote substitution for the real thing quote self-referential and seemingly self-aware in the cross-weave of image and text found Behr’s authoritative Women Artists and Expressionism from Empire to Emancipation Princeton 2022 readers encounter an array of learned literary philosophical and not historical illusion footnotes offer tantalising avenues of research such that in her chapter Kathe Kollwitz the expressionist milieu and the making of her career we encounter the concept of the Augenblick the decisive moment figuratively speaking in the blink of an eye that instant of time that in philosopher Koral Ward’s phrase inscribes the human inexorably in the temporal world in this twinned study of the artist Kollwitz’s left hand clenched and surpine we recognise one such moment the liminal passage from single into married life inscribed in the ringed finger of the hand this two-part iteration reworking produces a flash point of great emotive force where the interaction of body the visually centred eye the sensory haptic condition of touch conjure what Horst described as preconditions the capacity to think and perhaps also to feel the drawing strikes us with its curious reflexivity the hand drawing the hand its assured steely sharpness brought into relief by the deft movements practiced inflections of muscle tendon ligament the balls of the fingers effortlessly transposed into hieroglyph marks of an unnamed truthfulness and directness hand and wrist advance in a diagonal pathway as purveyors of truth witness to an urgent exchange the term Handzeichung loosely translated as the hand-drawn sketch linguistically elides the thinking hand and the hieroglyph mark as partners in a single pictorial scriptorial act in an essay aptly titled In Praise of Hands Paris 1938 art historian Focillon observed I quote the hand means action it grasps it creates at times it would even seem to think could referring to hands as this other intelligence describing the moment when the learned physician in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp1632 reaches for the cadaver’s left arm prizing it to demonstrate the hand’s nervous reflexes his life articulate hands placed conspicuously alongside the dead man’s limp ushers the following remark from Focillon hands are the instruments of creation but even before that they’re an organ of knowledge his words echo the eminent 19th century physician called about now remark that quote a skilful hand without the head that directs it is a blind instrument the head without the fulfilling hand remains powerless a fully developed study of Kollwitz’s left hand proceeding at the betrothal to Karl Kollwitz on June 13th 1891 unleashes tempestuous brush strokes from steely lines attesting to what the artist and critic Deanna Petherbridge refer to as quote the mystic marriage line and wash here fingers clutch at folds of drape that illuminate from a source beyond the drawing’s edge glean whiter than the page in a scintillating display of light from fine tints to intense shades of black where hands and faces are laid there exposed to scrutiny Kollwitz scholar Frances Carey observes quote hands were after all a kind of portrait quote a point that would not have escaped the German filmmaker Hans Curlis whose later cinematic portraits of artists that were collectively titled Schaffende Hande (Creative Hands) claim futurity for Kathe Kollwitz’s drawings drawing hand through the medium of film the relationship of hand and head in Kollwitz’s early self-portrait studies is always present with me Behr writes quote it signifies the status in the sphere of activity previously regarded as manual which was to become invested with indexical markers of genius Kollwitz’s emergence as the leading graphic artist of her generation transformed to practice that as Behr has shown remained until then the preserve of male artists there Carey and Elizabeth Behr all agree on the timely nature of the encounter of young Kathe Schmidt she was then and her instructor the Swiss-born portraitist Karl Stauffer-Bern who recognising her extraordinary gifts gently steered her away from painting towards drawing introducing her to the work of his fellow draughtsman print maker and theorist Max Klinger in the drawing we’re privy to a conversation between the two friends the studied and formality of the drawing its apparent state of unfinish was doubtless calculated to impress connoisseurs and collectors of Stauffer-Bern’s work in turn Klinger’s cycle of etchings Ein Leben (A Life)1884 and more importantly his theoretical writings In Defence of Drawing Malerei und Zeichung proved decisive for the direction of Kollwitz’s work Klinger coined the term grifelkunst in that from the German for stylus the Grifel a pointed drawing tool pencil quill or metal point to distinguish drawing from other art forms arriving at a thoroughly modern formulation quote a work of art can be perfect only if it’s created with materials that give the fullest expression to its underlying premise expression then is contingent on the materials used and quote every material has its own spirit and its own poetry Klinger Kollwitz felt personally addressed by Klinger’s remark that quote the terrible contrast between the beauty they the artists seek and the awfulness of existence which comes screaming towards them must not be silenced he expands this idea in a later reference to what he calls the abhorrent subject all things ugly gruesome or repulsive when broached with extreme emotion adding quote if these contrasts are not to be lost there must be another art beyond painting and sculpture that art is drawing the tumultuousness of his visions contained in the suite Ein Handschuh (A Glove) 1881 the strange parable of a young man’s hopeless infatuation with an elusive fetish love prefigures the obsessive imagery of surrealism the oddities of scale and irrational juxtapositions preclude an anchoring in reality and emotionally charged betray a disturbed subjectivity in out farewell the figures translucent or liquid appearance produces an hypnotic effect her hourglass contours almost extinguish by multiple erasers with the ulnar surface of the hand retain some semblance of the living breathing figure these observations bring to mind Klinger’s insistence that drawing was complete only in the viewer’s imagination bodies are portrayed not as things but as phenomena it’s instructive to compare this study with other related studies Abschied here on the right the suggest of the skeletal armature and short skull-like heads linked arms provide an anatomical underpinning never detracting from the indissoluble bond and upward spiral that allows the figures in Behr’s words to quote forego gravity highly attuned to the early inchoate gestative states of Kollwitz’s drawing manner and to the kinetic challenges that human figures in motion pose for the artist Abschie offers a point of departure for Behr’s reflections on the nature of artistic agency of graphic in this sense Behr and I share fascination for the arching and rhythmic improvisatory sequences of the figure and motion that became a centrepiece of my pedagogy at the Royal rawing scShool in London and the National Academy in Jerusalem for 20 years I move on to part two of my presentation some distance from Kollwitz’s world and maybe not we’ll see human creations are easily destroyed and science and technology which have built them up can also be used for their annihilation Freud’s essay the future of Illusion 1927 criticise religion and religiosity in general as a delusion a compensatory escape from the harsh reality of existence a response to Romain Rolland’s notion of the oceanic feeling as a sensation of eternity the source of limitless creativity openness to speculation the stepping out of rigid nationalist frameworks 40 years later Theodore Adorno and Marx Horkheimer warned of the alarming conjunction of instrumentally rational means and irrational ends that they saw as Nazism Nazism’s legacy it was this virtually unlimited technological potential to realize limitless ambitions that in Michael Rothberg’s view quote gave human cruelty its distinctly modern touch and made the Gulag, Aushwitz and Hiroshima possible perhaps even unavoidable Lea Grundig’s Blasphemer in the Valley of Death from a cycle of 17 drawings first published in Tel Aviv in 1943 and then again in Dresden in 1947 locates the expressionist impulse in disturbing reflections on the fate of Jewish communities in occupied Europe exiled to Palestine in Spring 1943 following her incarceration in a Gestapo prison the Dresden born artist and activist drew on early reports of atrocities in Poland to bring us face to face with the victims of Nazi terror her lasphemer in the Valley of Death with terrifying gaze flailing arms and ensnaring hands is a wretched prophet of doom amid a sea of fallen victims if clothed then the ghetto dystopian antechamber to the death camps a containing barbed wire fence already visible in the middle distance celebrated as a painter of expressionist apocalyptic landscapes described by there as Behr as a subterranean experience of cosmic eruptive forces unquote Ludwig Meidner is known also as a prolific graphic artist draughtsman poet and a contributor to specialist journals in the rapidly expanding German print culture of the early 20th century we’ve already heard a great deal about Meidner in Michael’s wonderful talk earlier in this self-portrait study with the textual accompaniment ‘I battered lump of clay ostracised apocalyptic my skull swept by the wind’ Meidner negotiates I quote the complex dynamic between German and Jewish identities in the early decades of the 20th century assuming the guise of a visionary prophet that in Behr’s words testifies to the construction of his artistic identity the sketchbooks 51 of them now collected in catalogue raisonee only edited by Eric Riedel and Gerd Presler record the techniques of drawing there again as I quote performative versus subjective agency and outsider status the emboldened gestural line like the calligraphy forging his mark and name simultaneously alluding to an earlier self-portrait we reduced on the cover of the May 1913 copy of a journal Meidner help co-edit Behr observes the future the futurist dynamism of the city is allowed to infiltrate the transparent features of the face the one embodying the other and vice versa primacy being given to the creative energy or spark of the artist’s hand those qualities inform the manipulations of line in the brilliant likeness Self-portrait with Burin executed in Berlin in 1920 there self-consciously invokes Klinger’s notion of the Grifelkunst artist Meidner experiences the brutality of armed conflict in two world wars found an outlet in a regained spiritual pacifism in the ritual practices of Orthodox Judaism and in the portrayal of Old Testament prophets that reveal in Behr’s phrase could Meidner’s frequent negotiation of his self image when in 1933 Jakob Steinhardt the Berlin educated artist and co-founder with Meidner and Richard Janthur of the short lived Die Pathetiker group was briefly detained and forced to flee Germany for Eretz Yisrael Mandatory Palestine the affinities that had once informed their work appear to wane for a time remarkably within a year of the end of World War II those shared bonds resurface in a group of heads of prophets and praying Jews that begin to configure a Jewish response to the unprecedented losses in the Shoah philosopher Rosalyn Diprose whose views on ethics embodiment generosity and difference lie within the ambit of Behr’s reading of Nietzsche’s work notes that the relationship of self and other is governed by quote the will to power not a being not a becoming but a pathos Nietzsche’s phras for pathos and term described by Diprose as the condition of transient affectivity several events in Meidner’s life as we heard the rising wave of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and with it the curtailment of his teaching and exhibiting outlets confiscation of his paintings from collections the Kristallnacht pogroms of 9th 10th November 1938 and the burning of historic Roonstrasse synagogue in Cologne where Meidner and his wife Else had established a home the preceding year compelled the couple to flee Germany and travel to England arriving on the 2nd of August 1939 within weeks of the start of the war in a letter his friend in exile Hilde Rosenbaum Meidner lays bare his existential suffering quote this disdainful fatherland is for us a treacherous step-fatherland to which I never want to return when against the theatre of war the British home office stepped up its interment of German and Austrian citizens under the provisions of the enemy aliens Act Meidner was detained at Mooragh Camp on the Isle of Man Behr explains that the for Meidner interment offered security from a blitz-torn London an instant community of German speaking intellectuals models to draw from and a strongly observant Jewish Jewish circles to interact with when within a year of interment Meidner was offered discharge he chose instead to remain in confinement for a further nine months spending the last six weeks on the island in Hutchinson Cap in Douglas where other notable artists among them Kurt Schwitters, Fred Uhlman and the art historian Klaus Hinrichen were also interned there as Behr acknowledges in her notes the memorial lecture delivered in Leicester in May 2014 I was present at and I knew ? Was there for that too and of course her very devoted family lecture called the expressionist of Ludwig Meidner exile creativity and holocaust awareness the group of 17 sketchbooks produced by Meidner under these conditions attest to a quote re-engagement with the public sphere beyond the bound one nothing quite prepares us she writes for the visceral conjuring of atrocities within a concentrationary universe the encounters in Meidner’s cycle Leiden Der Juden in Polen Suffering of the Jews in Poland that followed a year or so after his release cycle does not constitute a homogenous unified structure rather it’s composed of perhaps some 40 works in a range of techniques that together address the theme of genocide it suggests a complex interplay of allegory and a response to history Meidner found a role model in the English visionary William Blake whose works he recalled seeing both during and soon after the war in the artist retrospective at Tate Gallery in 1947 writing to his friend and fellow exile Hilde Rosenbaum he remarked for the last few weeks I’ve been working on a new cycle of watercolour drawings by such means I am compelled ever more perpetually to think about the destiny of my brothers these sheets will be vivid clear without glossing over neither sensational nor excessively crass they capture the tragedy realistically mysticism is far from these works and yet elsewhere he appears to contradict himself writing I quote imagination and divination are gaining power over me similar to that of the great William Blake that mystical painter from London in the second of Blake’s Continental Prophecies Europe composed in 1794 Blake presents in mythopoeic form glimpses of the opposing forces that dominated the revolutionary area era he lived through: the American and French revolution configured in apocalyptic and biblical terms foreshadowing events in my Meidner’s own lifetime I quote from Blake from that sheet you see in front of you from from Europe the prophecy sitting in fathomless abyss of my immortal shrine I seize their burning power and bring forth howling terrors all devouring fiery kings devouring and devoured roaming on dark and desolate mountains in forests of eternal death shrieking and hollow trees the prophetic voice as much as the sheer painterliness of the individual and colour palettes appeal to Meidner then at work on the cycle Suffering of the Jews in Poland having earlier addressed our celebrated if absent colleague formally here as Behr here I will transition to the more familiar Shulamith as many of us knew and remember what we didn’t learn then we make up for later in recalling our work together and when scouring the libraries for her published works in past weeks a wide field of learning open before me together with fellow speakers we have accounted for only a small part of that learning impossible to resume in a 2 to 3000 word essay a longer appraisal awaits but here I wanted to record a rare WhatsApp message that arrived on the 25th of December 2020 we were all I recall in lockdown just days earlier Shulamith and I had exchanged seasonal Channukah greetings but on this occasion the piercing image of Kollwitz’s Handstudie arrived without excursus or accompanying message the full graphic and emotive force of the image Kollwitz’s hand reaching forward drawing implement in hand an image so redolent of the moment an epistolary exchange now conducted in the ether reminds me today how inexorably our lives are inscribed in the present moment a mere wink of an eye thank you very [Applause] much thank you can we invite the three speakers up wonderful thank you to all three of you for really beautifully researched and really deeply moving papers and thinking about how these elements go together look I’ve lost my own sheet as well how I might start off by putting them together in some way in some sort of dialogue and it seems to me that in fact gaps is the actually connected sinew between these things what is present what is no longer present what was once present and is no longer with us the role of theory and and I really appreciate the different formulations that we saw Freud and Nietzsche and others Focillon really I thought brought them together in that way and so yeah and so I wanted to sort of address these kind of gaps and how we as researchers contend with them because that’s actually we’re looking in the archive we’re looking for things always we’re looking for the answers and the connectivity right and so we have to sit with the gaps what we don’t know and I like how each of you elucidated what we don’t know and and how we don’t know it and and it’s not that it’s necessarily unknowable right these archives have been destroyed history has destroyed them exile has destroyed them the 20th century and its effects into the 21st century has destroyed them and so what I found really moving about all of your works and the relationships also that relationships you’ve all vividly with true with husband and wife right complicated relationships there also husband and wife and other people involved possibly who knows so I also found that interesting what is the gaps between human relationships and how how we strive to connect in many ways and so I wanted to just sort of throw that back in some ways we can start with Lucy because she has made a career of putting filling gaps that seem un-fillable right she just keeps digging and she probably has some sparkly powder that she’s not going to about some of the things that she finds so I just want to allow you each to sort of ruminate for a moment on the importance of gaps on the unknowable and how that is actually enriching for the PhD students who are in the audience and those of us just searching for answers in our own work and our own lives yeah I can I’m very happy to start on that topic because it was one of the things that I really took from Shulamith very early on was this idea of where are the archives what are the archives and I think again when you come from bachelor to master you’re kind of thinking okay what can what can I write about oh here there’s lots of books that’s great I’ll start with that and and I remember one of the first essays I wrote for Shulamith was by Herbert Reed and I found all the literature about Herbert Reed and I very faithfully reproduced everything and and she was kind of like yes okay but where’s the archives where you know what’s new here what have you found and being having to say ah yeah and that is something that I then have told my own students that I supervise and any anyone who care to listen this kind of drive to find some the traces that people leave behind and I think that’s what then brought me to provenance research as a way of highlighting in the case of my PhD an historical exhibition as a new way you know this exhibition that I researched there was no archives in the institution there was no archives with any of the people who had organized it but we more or less knew what had been shown and so provenance research allowed us to put together the story of the exhibition from these traces so something that’s been very influential I think for my for my career for my research and I think it’s a very nice simple driving idea for anybody studying art history to think what what what am I dealing with with yes I think you’re absolutely right for me the one of the greatest joys reading art history is making new discoveries so it doesn’t have to be the Rembrandt in the attic but just an archive unexpected find a find in the archive just completely unexpected not necessarily under the name Else Meidner it might be you might be researching but completely unconnected you find something which you go aha that’s exactly the piece I need and while I was writing on my piece on Else Meidner I was thinking I I still haven’t managed to go to Frankfurt and see the 1,300 works they have there and they’re not online yet only a small selection will be available soon but I haven’t seen the bulk of of the works so I had to rely on the published works in catalogues that just happened to be published so probably a slightly if not hope hopefully not too different picture of Else Meidner will appear once all the works can be actually seen traveling to Frankfurt so but we don’t know what what there is still how much is still not published or easily accessible well I remember Shulamith always say with slight exasperation in her voice but Glenn where is the methodology that’s the other one and I didn’t have an answer I don’t think I have an answer but this was really a way a chance to back into the bare literature and really to think about the nature of the dialogue we had so much in the learning teaching learning relationship is is not verbal it’s something about the example or presence of the person the silence is listening so much so important and it’s sort of trying to recover that to get back into that privileged space that the Courtauld provided to be over decades of my life but focus now on the figure of Shulamith and one question that you I think the really I think about what what Shulamith left in me it was a kind of I had to do a vault first had to go back to look at the culture that my father and his family had fled from in 1934 Berlin was their home yes they had also had homes in Latin America before that that they could return to but nonetheless it meant an interruption to rich life and the question that has grown in me and I know that there are people in this room who have answers to this question is how did Shulamith do it with her you know Lithuanian background with a household where parents spoke Jewish to all other and I saw in the 20 years that I used Shulamith an increasing ? to the traditional to the ritual observances she made close friends with her synagogue with her Rabbi in her local synagogue community and and so the question for me was how did how did Shulamith hold these two worlds together and what drew her to the German language above all and then to German culture not in the sort of dystopic through the kind of dystopic lens that I was looking at it through my with my Holocaust studies hat on but in in a sort of positive positive agency really and that has in sense changed my life because it’s opened up again a culture language people experience history that I really avoided by at all costs for long periods of my life I think you know understandable yes I I think that answers your question thank you thank you I’d like to open up to the audience thoughts and also over the course of the day hopefully all of you I’ve learned a huge amount and this is already something I you know a you familiar with but yeah questions for the panel or thanks much you address certain issues we’re sitting in a country that in the 20th century elected to forget or neglect dislike quite a lot of art and thinking of Grete Ring her lack of success say in one sense there wasn’t a very fertile ground I think and it’s history that is repeated many times most works by German or Austrian artists were given very few Liebermann’s last self-portrait is in the Tate selection probably shown last 30 years ago great painting in the National Gallery but I think so there’s Grete Ring was unfortunately not wealthy enough to gone and bought all she could have all kinds of exhibitions where German artists work were very expensive and all of those opportunities certain progress in certain areas but those elections here have the last two being Birmingham National Gallery and here in London and before that years ago the beautiful so I think have to change the atmosphere in this country to allow things to happen slowly has to happen in the opening up of the archives people talked about so then not least that 30 years ago the idea of an émigré archive being accessible here was almost unheard of now and be digitised so it’s in a sense trying from my perspective to draw together certain evolutions between and after the second world war and that neglect be take visiting very generous recognise those achievements right up to now opportunities back going to the archives finding out what’s in the archives because there are countless treasures and they are beginning to be catalogue beginning to be ordered beginning to be partially digitised and they’re not in Frankfurt they’re in London so I think that Shulamith’s legacy can actually take us from this rather dire position which she worked so diligently on so many years to possibly a better more understanding place you thank you thank you I think everybody in the you wonderfully rich and indeed frequently very moving after many many thanks but I remain quite perturbed by the fact that the one in terms of those going back to Shaun’s comments those who came to the safety of England the term that has been used again and again by nearly everybody in exile now I’m not the first or the last one to bring up this obviously but the notion of exile suggests a yearning for a homeland and I think the two quotations there several quotations from both Meidners which made it very clear even though Ludwig actually made the decision quite a difficult one to actually go back in the 1950s this you know they it wasn’t exile in fact it was force displacement and on the back of that I just like to just again back to Shaun’s comments about the wealth of archives that still remain to be explored in this country that actually what we need to think about is and this is going on from you know the on German art in Germany but we’ve heard about this we heard about the holocaust many times over the course of this afternoon but to actually look at the richness of the cultural interactions the influences that they bring with them yes so the consensus of cultural symbiosis is perhaps something that’s been slightly neglected today and just going back again to the the neglect I mean I was very intrigued and I don’t think I knew this when I give talks about Kokoschka in this country you know I always say he was a great grand old man of Austrian German expressionists are barely known or certainly not admired in this country but one of you mentioned the 1928 Leicester galleries show a sellout I mean a sellout but it’s so well it’s a reminder that it’s not quite that simple it’s very easy to say but was philosophy it just about got to terms with French impressionism but you know art thank you for all sorts of complicated reasons but you know you mentioned Herbert Reed that there were there you know there are key figures who were really important in mediating between that Germanic and rather alien culture as it seems in this country and and the reception of those who gave absolutely and I can definitely confirm that from my own research looking at the 1938 German expressionists German modernism show is that I wanted to research this idea you know this idea that oh it was all unknown and the British didn’t like it and everybody was disappointed wasn’t the case and yeah of course then there was the war and that had its own impact but I kind of make the argument in my book that if it hadn’t been for the war that was actually quite a growing interest in German modernism in London and and to you know a lot of the you know like I say this this annotated catalogue we found seems to suggest around half was sold that’s a pretty good result in 1928 for any artist I would have imagined you know so yeah and just to just to clarify as well Grete Ring was successful in exile and I think it also then ties to your point as well Monica of different experiences of coming to Britain different very very different you know you have someone like the Meidners essentially penniless struggling Grete Ring clearly came with with property still and assets and was able to set herself up and she was very well connected and she’d been very wealthy in Berlin and and she I think the impression we’ve got this post-war career we could only kind of sketch over but she was working a lot with in the direction of America Switzerland hat that was a successful career although only then seven years after the war because of because of her illness too bad I just want to thank you for a really terrific panel discussion I’m from New York her one of the nephews and I really consider myself incredibly fortunate to be here today and heard beautiful talks one of the things that we really know what incredible work she was doing over all these years because she was so modest and so quiet in her ways and one of the things that I learned I learnt a lot about Shulamith but one of the things that I learned about her is how from today’s talk but also that I’ve been able to discover over the years I’m a psychoanalyst in Texas Shulamith would always pay tremendous attention to very close detail of what people would say and what how they would be and that I think she brought to this incredible work this archival discovery work that she that she would do and it’s so wonderful for me to know that there’s this woman in my past and in the present I didn’t know that that was capable of paying such close attention to really beautiful things that people were doing and she brought to life so many things I just have one question do you think that there was an identification with Grete Ring just impression on my mind and your last quote was profound yeah it’s really funny that I when I was actually this morning reading through the talk again and this idea of a fantastic woman being recreated through her network I didn’t even put those two things together but obviously that’s what we’re doing today I my research into Grete Ring started in started a year ago so Shulamith didn’t know anything about it but of course it just you know makes you think this idea of the traces someone leaves behind and how a person is spoken about and that being part obviously of their legacy is exactly what we’re doing today and I think just again to say thank you for organising it because it’s just such a wonderful thing and as you know there are people here who knew Shulamith a lot better than I did but I think she would have loved it one more question Now he died in 37 38 yeah it’s a good question and I would have to go and look for those letters because there’s nothing in the things that she left to the Feilchenfeldt nothing but the Feilchenfeldt’s that I found about that relationship but that does not mean that it doesn’t exist and we’ve found so much amazing stuff just by chance that you know like I say we really have only scratched the surface I would have to have a look yeah he was know I also want I just wanted to say something about my research with Shulamith I found an exhibition catalogue in the library that was relevant to what I was working on and I showed it to her while I was you know working on the thesis and she said oh this great have you heard of the Wiener library you might find a review of this exhibition so I did I did you know and it was really useful you she just knew that it was there and it would be good question this is just a quick follow up to the previous question about Grete I’m sorry to say again but if she lived till 1950 what relationship did she have (52) what relationship did she have or not have with a new generation of immigrates who ran the Norwood gallery and Hanover Gallery and Judah and so forth I mean yeah I don’t know it’s something we really have to research we found brief mentions of her doing deals like I say in the direction of America she must have known these figures she was like I say very successful after the war we found her by chance when we went to the Ashmolean to look at the gift we found that there was a probably 500 letters between Grete Ring and Julius Held there going all the way through up to 1952 and she’s talking about how much she’s traveling after the war doing working as a dealer she’s she’s in Venice Paris Switzerland every two weeks she’s somewhere else and so that whole aspect of her life is something that I said as I say for time reasons we had six months to put something together that we just had had to just leave to one side but it would be fascinating to find out what an impact she had in those seven years until can I ask you something are you Lucy Wasensteiner [Laughter] yes when I say something about your MA yeah that’s me and I think that perfect segue and to the conclusion of our wonderful day thank you again to all of the speakers who have come the family of Shulamith and of course the audience here we are going to Glenn we are going to go next door to have a festive and convivial event to which all of you are invited if you’d like to take a short break to any of the loos please do and then please grab a glass and a little snack and we will recommence in about sort of 10 minutes so thank you all so much