La fin d'un monde. Lotte Jacobi's Portraits

 "My style is the style of the people I photograph"

Lotte Jacobi

I have just seen  the exhibition of Lotte Jacobi's portraits  at the Käthe Kollwitz museum in Cologne. Unfortunately it was last Sunday, just on the last day of the exhibition and it is now too late to view it. It was really moving to see her chronicle of 1920's Berlin with the rise of National-Socialism in the background. In this respect, a portrait particularly retained my attention, the photograph of actor Hans Otto, murdered by the Nazis, who disguised their crime as a suicide and forbade anyone to attend his funeral. The young photographer Lotte Jacobi documented the artistic and intellectual life of the time; she was very committed to dance and theater and to circles that the nazis called the red Berlin. They viewed Berlin as "the reddest city after Moscow" and wanted to stamp out any form of contemporary art, which they considered as socially disruptive and decadent. Lotte Jacobi was then considered as a great representant of Avant-garde photography and after her emigration to New York never recovered the level of fame she had reached in Germany before the war. 

Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln

Neumarkt 18-24

50 667 Köln

1 Lotte Jacobi, Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weil's wife,Berlin 1928,© Lotte Jacobi Collection, University of New Hampshire, USA  

2 Lotte Jacobi, Art Historian, Leo Katz, © Lotte Jacobi Collection, University of New Hampshire, USA 

3 Lotte Jacobi, Actor Peter Lorre, 1930

 © Lotte Jacobi Collection, University of New Hampshire, USA 

  4 Lotte Jacobi, Actor Hans Otto arrested and killed by the Nazis  November, 24 1933  photo of photo

 5 Lotte Jacobi, Self-portrait with camera, 1929, © JüdischesMuseum Berlin

Later on, she commented this portrait by writing on it " What am I going to do now?"

6 Otto Steinert, Lotte Jacobi, 1976

7 Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Photo J'attends... 

Since 1981, The University of New Hampshire has held the copyright for the photographs and correspondence of Lotte Jacobi.



Do you remember Cabaret, Bob Fosse's film with Liza Minelli adapted from a short novel set in Weimar Germany, by Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin ?

  

An Enormously Tiny Bit of a Lot. Meret Oppenheim's Dreams and Metamorphoses

"Freedom isn't given to you – you have to take it."

Meret Oppenheim

 Without me anyway

Without me

Anyway without way I came near without bread

Without breath but withkin with Caspar

With a cake so round through somewhat square

But without growth of grass with scars with warts with fingers

With sticks with many Os and few Gs

But an enormously tiny bit of a lot

Oh fall you down into your hole oh bury you yourself

And your longwinded hope

Give your ego a kick give your id its reward

And whatever is left of you fry it like little fishes in oil 

You can peel off your shoes

Meret Oppenheim, 1976

"I am a swaddled child, swaddled in an iron grip." Those are the words of Meret Oppenheim at the end of a crisis that lasted almost two decades after the overwhelming success of her work Le déjeûner de fourrure (Breakfast in Fur) that catapulted her to  the status of a myth at the yong age of 23. Once the muse and the object of creativity of men -- she served as a model to Man Ray for a series of photographs entitled Erotique voilée, she still had to undergo their disparagement and  the shrinking of her self by their use of diminutives. Max Ernst had written on the invitation to the opening of the exhibition: "Who covers a soup spoon with luxurious fur? Little Meret. Who has outgrown us? Little Meret." Her father often repeated her that "Women have never done anything in art." She needed all the impetus she put in her work to free herself from men's projections.  

  

2013 célèbre le centième anniversaire de la naissance de Méret Oppenheim. Plusieurs grandes expositions lui rendent hommage.

Les étincelles de Méret. Les surréalismes dans l'art contemporain Suisse

19.10.2012 - 10.02.2013

Kunst Museum Bern

Meret Oppenheim

21.03.2013-14.07. 2013

  Bank Austria Kunstforum

Vienne

Meret Oppenheim - Above the trees

20.02. 2013 - 05.05. 2013

Sprengel Museum

 Hannover

1 Meret Oppenheim  in a paper jacket she created, 1976, source unknown 

2 Meret Oppenheim, The Fur-lined Teacup,  Photograph Man Ray, 1936

3 Meret Oppenheim, My governess, sculpture, 1936

4 Meret Oppenheim, The Couple, 1956

5 Meret Oppenheim, Self-portrait X ray of M. O.'s skull, 1964

6 Meret oppenheim, Table with Bird’s Legs, 1939 

For further reading I recommend the catalogue Meret Oppenheim Retrospective "an enormously bit of a lot", Hatje Cantz, 2007. Very illuminating.

La terre et les pavés. Magritte, la Mercière ambulante et le macadam

Bonne année 2013

A mes lecteurs, je souhaite un pied léger et un oeil neuf pour cette nouvelle année 2013. Merci à toutes et à tous pour vos  passages réguliers ou flâneries occasionnelles. Je suis toujours heureuse et émerveillée de ce partage inattendu et chacun de nos échanges est une fête. 










La sensation de la terre de sable et d'humus sous mes pieds me manque encore plus que le bruit du vent dans les arbres ou la vue des hautes frondaisons et des crosses de fougères dans ma forêt. En ville les pavés sont des mousses sous mes talons. La mercière ambulante ayant senti que je me languissais du bitume parisien m'a fait la surprise de m' en glaner un échantillon bien composé, en fin d'année. Quelle en soit remerciée et qu'elle trouve à son tour ici ces semelles de vent pour arpenter le macadam parisien ou battre la campagne.

1 Magritte Le modèle rouge III, 1937, Boijmans museum, Rotterdam

2  Marie-France Dubromel  Pensées de Macadam pour Katia-j'attends... Glanage, éléments divers ramassés sur l'esplanade du Centre Pompidou, fixés à l'aiguille et au fil rouge sur une feuille de croquis 13,5 X 21cm, 2012

 Arthur Rimbaud, Sensation, Ma bohème, Roman , 1870 via Azurs point net- Thomas