Thursday, 30 July 2015

POST 19: The perfect circle: the social fabric of the times.



On the subject of the circle:

I remember that my father, who would be 101 if he were alive now, had been able to draw a perfect circle freehand.  It was part of his art school training in Budapest.

So it was a surprise to visit the Black Mountain School (California) exhibition currently on at the Staatliche Museen (SMB) in Berlin. The exhibition as a whole focusses on the historical period when the Californian school invited many artists over from Germany following the Nazi closure of the Bauhaus.

A short film shows  Josef Albers slowly rotating a large disc in his hand. His mesmerised students trace circles and ovoids in the air.
(You can view the footage here: 
http://albersfoundation.org/teaching/josef-albers/introduction/)

Of course, Albers' most famous works focus on the purity  of the circle and the square. My father was a neo-classicist: the circle never became his subject-matter; the human form retained supremacy in his work.

But I did a double take whilst reading one of Albers' philosophical treatises: this was the reflection, the tone, the discourse I sometimes read in my fathers' notes. With a jolt I suddenly realise he could have been a student of Albers for a short time in Germany just prior to 1933. But like a duster on a blackboard, he had erased that part of his life—in fact, of most of his experiences before the war and his stint at the Russian front--from what he brought to conversation. Except for the story about the perfect circle, which he always executed to perfection.

Berlin has wide streets and  a slower pace than London. My friends Heather and Graham live in a commune, a hangover from the squats of the 1980s, which eventually received government assistance for maintenance. There are still original squatters who live there.







Following dinner, Heather and Graham asked if I'd like to go to the "Bowlo". They took me here, beneath a small bar near Reicherstrasse:

photo: Graham Anderson

Photo: Heather Boyer



Two strikes in one.



c. Z Soboslay 2015.








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