Small flowers have been self-assertion.

Self-assertion and self-erasure

Now man with all his faculties and also with his soul recollects himself and enters into the temple (his inner self) in which, in all truth, he finds God dwelling and at work. Man then comes to experience God not after the fashion of the senses and of reason, or like something that one understands or reads . . . but he tastes Him, and enjoys Him like something that springs up from the “ground” of the soul as from its own source, or from a fountain, without having been brought there, for a fountain is better than a cistern, the water of cisterns gets stale and evaporates, but the spring flows, bursts out, swells: it is true, not borrowed. It is sweet. (Sermon for the Thursday before Palm Sunday)

 

After this, one should open the ground of the soul and the deep will to the sublimity of the glorious Godhead, and look upon Him with great and humble fear and denial of oneself. He who in this fashion casts down before God his shadowy and unhappy ignorance then begins to understand the words of Job, who said: The spirit passed before me. From this passage of the Spirit is born a great tumult in the soul. And the more this passage has been clear, true, unmixed with natural impressions, all the more rapid, strong, prompt, true and pure will be the work which takes place in the soul, the thrust which overturns it; clearer also will be the knowledge that man has stopped on the path to perfection. The Lord then comes like a flash of lightning; he fills the ground of the soul with light and wills to establish Himself there as the Master Workman. As soon as one is conscious of the presence of the Master, one must, in all passivity, abandon the work to Him. (Second Sermon for the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, #5)

-John Tauler (ca. 1300–1361) was a German Dominican and mystical writer, a disciple of Meister Eckhart.

 

Freedom to enter the inner sanctuary of our being is denied to those who are held back by dependence on self-gratification and sense satisfaction, whether it be a matter of pleasure seeking, love of comfort, or proneness to anger, self-assertion, pride, vanity, greed, and all the rest.

-The Inner Experience Notes on Contemplation THOMAS MERTON

 

youtu.be/5fkFB5Dc1pU

-Tangerine Dream, Sun Gate

Miesha

 

Supposedly Wearing a ring on your thumb signifies willpower, strength of character, freedom of thought, and self-assertion.

 

On the "other hand" you might just be mistaken.

 

(Market trader, Taunton, Somerset, UK)

Saturn entered Aries at 11:36 PM last night. This is my first Saturn Return self-portrait of 3 -- this one taken when it goes into the sign of Aries (00°), the second taken when it reaches 01° (the degree my Saturn is in), the third when it reaches 01.19° (the precise degree my Saturn sits at).

 

Saturn in Aries is considered to be in Fall, as it's in the opposite sign to its Exaltation -- that's not a good thing, but it can be a good thing if you work it right. Just in a kinda idiosyncratic way.

 

Saturn is all about hard work and discipline, and Aries is fiery, impatient energy. One of the various strengths of Saturn in Aries is the development of a strong sense of self throughout life via various challenges surrounding identity/self-expression/self-assertion.

 

People born from roughly April 7th 1996 to June 8th 1998 will be experiencing their first Saturn Return at this time (though for those born later, it won't hit exactitude for quite a while). For those who don't have their Saturn in Aries, they will be experiencing this energy more generally; the hard lessons of life will begin to take on a more Martial tinge.

 

Identity, self-assertion, and action will be called for, as opposed to the spiritual restructuring that occurred during Saturn's transit through Pisces from 2023-till yesterday.

 

According to the Ancient Texts, anyway. :)

The great writer from Bergen (født 3. desember 1684 i Bergen), eventhough the danish belive that Ludvig Holberg comes from Denmark...

 

His thinking appears rational and enlightened, but his arguments were always rooted in everyday experiences. Holberg did not much care for theoretical constructions intended solely as intellectual amusement or as a means of self-assertion. It was precisely this approach that made him one of the most widely read authors of his day.

  

Nació en Bergen (Noruega), y estudió en las universidades de Copenhague y Oxford. Más tarde, fue profesor de la Universidad de Copenhague, y en 1747 se le concedió el título de Barón Holberg. En un momento en que la literatura en danés se reducía a algunos himnos y baladas, y las obras de teatro se representaban sólo en alemán o francés, Holberg creó una enorme cantidad de obras de carácter dramático, poético e histórico que sirvieron, casi por sí solas, para fijar el danés como una lengua literaria. En total, escribió más de una docena de obras teatrales, que se representaron con gran éxito. Entre ellas se encuentran las comedias El indeciso (1722) y Henrik y Pernille (1724), que aún hoy en día continúan representándose en los escenarios de Dinamarca. Su poema Pedar Paars (1719), una sátira del modo de vida de su época, es el más antiguo de los clásicos de la literatura danesa. Compuso otras sátiras en verso, como Metamorfosis (1726) y Viaje subterráneo de Niels Klim (1741).

 

Miesha

'What I try to do in my work is mix ideas of attraction and ideas of discomfort - colourful and attractive, but strangely, scarily surreal at the same time.' Hew Locke

 

We have all taken part in some sort of procession. People assemble and move together to celebrate, worship, protest, mourn, escape or to better themselves. Hew Locke's The Procession evokes all such endeavours. It is populated by imagined people who move through this imposing neo-classical space, claiming it for themselves.

 

Locke's installation takes as its starting point the history and character of Tate Britain's building and its original benefactor, the sugar refining magnate Henry Tate. More broadly, with The Procession, Locke invites visitors to 'reflect on the cycles of history, and the ebb and flow of cultures, people, finance and power.

 

The figures travel through space but also through time. They carry historical and cultural baggage: the evidence of global financial and violent colonial control embellishes their clothes and banners. Images of the colonial architecture of Locke's childhood Guyana emblazon the flags and their bearers, its flooded fields and rotten wooden walls vanishing under rising sea levels. Despite this, their attire and stance suggest power and self-assertion.

 

Locke occupies a space that was founded from wealth derived from an industry previously built on the labour of enslaved African people and their descendants, and which subsequent relied on the indentured labour of Asian people. Locke says he 'makes links with the historical after-effects of the sugar business, almost drawing it out of the walls of the building.' The Procession also carries Locke's own past artistic journey, with imagery linked to his previous work incorporating statues rising sea levels, Carnival and the military.

 

Miesha

I believe in self-assertion

Destiny or slight diversion

Now it seems I've got my head on straight

I'm a freak

An apperitian

Seems I've made the right decision

Try to turn back now, it might be too late

And it's off to the morning and back again

Same old day, same situation

My happiness is back as if to say

I wanna stay home today

Don't wanna go out

If anyone comes to play

Gonna get thrown out

I wanna stay home today

Don't want no company

No way

Yeah, yeah, yeah

A simple life's my cup of tea

I don't need nobody but me

What I wouldn't give just to be left alone

I wanna be a millionaire someday

And know what it feels like to give it away

Watch me march to the beat of my own drum

And it's over and over and over again

Same old day, same situation

The happiness is back as if to say

I wanna stay home today

Don't wanna go out

If anyone comes my way

Gonna get thrown out

I wanna stay home today

Don't want no company

No way

Yeah, yeah, yeah

Same rain every day

Everyone just step away

Come another- Come another- Come another day

I wanna stay home today

I wanna stay home today,

I wanna stay home, stay home, stay home, stay h-

I wanna stay home today

Don't wanna go out

If anyone comes to play

Gonna get thrown out

I wanna stay home today

Don't want no company

No way

 

It show off the existence after the change of generation to Skytree.

'What I try to do in my work is mix ideas of attraction and ideas of discomfort - colourful and attractive, but strangely, scarily surreal at the same time.' Hew Locke

 

We have all taken part in some sort of procession. People assemble and move together to celebrate, worship, protest, mourn, escape or to better themselves. Hew Locke's The Procession evokes all such endeavours. It is populated by imagined people who move through this imposing neo-classical space, claiming it for themselves.

 

Locke's installation takes as its starting point the history and character of Tate Britain's building and its original benefactor, the sugar refining magnate Henry Tate. More broadly, with The Procession, Locke invites visitors to 'reflect on the cycles of history, and the ebb and flow of cultures, people, finance and power.

 

The figures travel through space but also through time. They carry historical and cultural baggage: the evidence of global financial and violent colonial control embellishes their clothes and banners. Images of the colonial architecture of Locke's childhood Guyana emblazon the flags and their bearers, its flooded fields and rotten wooden walls vanishing under rising sea levels. Despite this, their attire and stance suggest power and self-assertion.

 

Locke occupies a space that was founded from wealth derived from an industry previously built on the labour of enslaved African people and their descendants, and which subsequent relied on the indentured labour of Asian people. Locke says he 'makes links with the historical after-effects of the sugar business, almost drawing it out of the walls of the building.' The Procession also carries Locke's own past artistic journey, with imagery linked to his previous work incorporating statues rising sea levels, Carnival and the military.

 

About the artist:

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1959, Locke is the eldest son of Guyanese sculptor Donald Locke (1930–2010) and British painter Leila Locke (née Chaplin) (1936–1992). He spent his formative years (1966 to 1980) in Georgetown, Guyana, before returning to the UK to study. He received a B.A. Fine Art degree in 1988 from Falmouth University, and an M.A. in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London, in 1994. In 1995 he married curator Indra Khanna.

Unready means afraid. You are afraid of what you are. Your destination is the whole. But you are afraid that you will lose your identity. This is childishness, clinging to the toys, to your desires and fears, opinions and ideas. Give it all up and be ready for the real to assert itself. This self-assertion is best expressed in words: 'I am'. Nothing else has being. Of this you are absolutely certain.

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Excerpt from I Am That by Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

Painting by Van Gogh

  

There is more than one way of telling what the forthcoming sunset would be like. Still, in the presence of your own biting heart and pounding your chest in self-assertion, how many times you have been let down by yours “all considered” only to look like a newbie with plucked feathers and red, envious face. As for my own comfort I then run my hand over my face to change it for a happy expression and mutter to myself "do better next time” putting regrets to the side. Well, you can't get them all, do we ?

Picture - more lucky dips with sunset light over river Bug in Poland.

Cette jeune femme rousse incarne avec audace et liberté cette nouvelle vague de la jeunesse espagnole, qui s’affranchit sans complexe des tabous et des convenances !

  

Son shooting en petite tenue reflète une génération fière, décomplexée et résolument moderne, à l’image de ce renouveau culturel espagnol où l’ouverture d’esprit et l’affirmation de soi dessinent un futur sans scrupule ni pudeur !

  

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

  

This young red-haired woman boldly and freely embodies the new wave of Spanish youth, breaking away from taboos and conventions without any complex !

  

Her photoshoot in minimal attire reflects a proud, uninhibited, and truly modern generation, representing a cultural revival in Spain where open-mindedness and self-assertion shape a future without scruple or modesty !

  

credit : Lua Ribeira,

  

_______________________________________PdF_______

Poetry is the deification of reality.

— Edith Sitwell

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NO GIFS AND ANIMATED ICONS, PLEASE!

"Heschel writes, “It is for us to decide whether freedom is self-assertion or response to a demand.”17 Our humanity, as we have seen, is constituted by our capacity to rise above the selfish ego. So, Heschel reminds us, is our freedom."

-Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence by Shai Held

 

"The greatest beauty grows,” Heschel writes, “at the greatest distance from the ego."

--Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence by Shai Held

 

“In the 1950s kids lost their innocence.

They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term ---the generation gap.

  

In the 1960s, kids lost their authority.

It was a decade of protest---church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it.

  

In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self.

Self-image, Self-esteem, Self-assertion....It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference.

  

In the 1980s, kids lost their hope.

Stripped of innocence, authority and love and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future.

  

In the 1990s kids lost their power to reason. Less and less were they taught the very basics of language, truth, and logic and they grew up with the irrationality of a postmodern world.

  

In the new millennium, kids woke up and found out that somewhere in the midst of all this change, they had lost their imagination. Violence and perversion entertained them till none could talk of killing innocents since none was innocent anymore.”

― Ravi Zacharias, Recapture the Wonder

 

Please don't use any of my images on websites, blogs or other media without my explicit written permission. © All rights reserved.

  

Sigi Kolbe Photography website

Getty Images

The Street Walker

 

Sitting on sidewalk on Elm Steet in Manchester, NH......re-edit and square format.......I asked if I could photograph him while he told me a secret with his stare and he agreed to let me....

 

I realized I snapped a fleeting look caught between two worlds—the stubborn spark of self-assertion and the quiet weight of surrender. The cigarette become both shield and statement, the gaze both challenge and confession. This portrait lingers in the tension between resistance and weariness, offering no simple resolution—only the raw presence of a man suspended in his own truth.

 

It's always wonderful to re-discover images from the archives.....❤️❤️🙏🙏

 

Chinatown, Yokohama

Qiu Zhijie was born in 1969 in Zhangzhou, China, and lives and works in Beijing and Hangzhou. He is known for his text- and calligraphy-based practice, which encompasses photography, performance, installation, painting, video and explores the struggle of self-assertion, particularly with reference to Chinese history..

 

In 1992, he graduated from the Printmaking department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art), Hangzhou. The artist’s break-through exhibition was in 1992 with China’s New Art, Post-1989 at the Hanart Gallery and Hong Kong Arts Centre. By 1999, his work began receiving international interest with his inclusion in Revolutionary Capitals: Beijing-London, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. In 2005, his work was exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum‘s Between Past And Future: New Photography And Video From China, including Tattoo 1, which explores Qiu’s assertion that in our media-saturated age, “signs and codes have overpowered actual human beings, and our bodies have become merely their vehicles.” The character bu-meaning “no”-is written across the artist’s body and on the wall behind him, creating the illusion that it floats free of the body. The ironic mixture of an ancient method of transmitting texts with contemporary content provokes people to rethink the relationship between tradition and today’s society. He is also a curator, art critic and professor. He has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the world at prestigious institutions and events, including MoMA PS1 (1998) and Queen’s Museum (2001), both New York; The Sao Paulo Biennale (2002); The Shanghai Biennale (2004); The Moscow Biennale (2007); Fondazione Querini Stampalia (2013), Venice; the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and Fondazione Berengo (2015), Venice. He was the curator for the 2012 Shanghai Biennale. He is currently a professor in the School of Cross-Medium Art at the China Academy of Art.

Who lit the wonder before our eyes and the wonder of our eyes? Who struck the lightning in the minds and scorched us with an imperative of being overawed by the holy as unquenchable as the sight of the stars?

-Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion by Abraham Joshua Heschel

 

Endless wonder unlocks an innate sense of indebtedness. Within our awe there is no place for self-assertion. Within our awe we only know that all we own we owe. The world consists, not of things, but of tasks. Wonder is the state of our being asked. The ineffable is a question addressed to us.

-Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion by Abraham Joshua Heschel

Albrecht Dürer - Selbstbildnis, [1498]

Madrid, Museo del Prado, Inv. Nr. P 2179

Holz, 52 x 41 cm

Signiert und datiert unterhalb des Fensters:

1498 / Das malt Ich nach meiner gestalt / Ich war sex vnd zwanzig jor alt / Albrecht Dürer / Monogramm

 

********************************************************************************

I. Detailed Description of the Painting

The Self-Portrait of 1498 presents Albrecht Dürer as a half-length figure, turned slightly to the left in three-quarter profile, while his gaze is deliberately displaced from this axis and directed straight at the viewer. This controlled manipulation of pose and gaze creates an immediate sense of presence and self-assertion. Head and upper torso occupy almost the entire pictorial field, positioning the figure close to the picture plane and enhancing its sculptural effect.

The upper body, together with the gently bent arms, forms a stable pyramidal composition. Dürer’s right arm rests casually on a stone parapet that marks the frontal boundary of the image, while his hands, encased in elegant grey gloves, are loosely clasped. The gesture conveys composure and effortless authority rather than ostentation.

The spatial setting behind the figure is shallow and functions more as a backdrop than as a fully articulated interior. To the right, a stone-framed window opens onto a distant mountainous landscape, partially snow-covered, beneath a blue sky animated by drifting clouds. This glimpse into depth does not compete with the dominance of the figure; instead, it subtly expands the pictorial space. The slight overlap of Dürer’s shoulder with the window frame blurs the boundary between interior and exterior and reinforces the illusion of spatial continuity.

Face and hair are rendered with extraordinary refinement. The skin is smooth and evenly modelled, the physiognomy precise and self-possessed. Beard and hair are carefully differentiated, enlivened by fine blond and golden highlights that lend the head vitality and luminosity. The portrait balances meticulous observation with a degree of idealisation, suppressing signs of ageing in favour of intellectual clarity and concentration.

Particular emphasis is placed on the clothing. Dürer wears a finely smocked and pleated white shirt adorned with gold embroidery, over which lies a deep-cut black-and-white doublet, loosely fastened with a twisted cord. The strikingly striped sleeves echo the colouring of the pointed cap and enhance the fashionable character of the ensemble. The costume is clearly chosen with deliberation and signals social distinction and cultivated taste.

Beneath the window is the prominent inscription, including date, monogram and an autobiographical verse stating the artist’s age. This text explicitly asserts authorship and self-representation, transforming the painting into a conscious and public statement of identity.

________________________________________

II. Art-Historical Evaluation

In comparison with Dürer’s earlier painted self-portrait of 1493, the Prado self-portrait marks a decisive shift towards greater confidence and representational ambition. No longer the introspective young artist, Dürer here presents himself as a refined and fashionably dressed gentiluomo, a term he would later use to describe himself in correspondence with his friend Willibald Pirckheimer. The image is carefully staged, self-aware and imbued with a strong sense of artistic self-worth.

The composition draws on a portrait type established in early Netherlandish and Italian painting from the early fifteenth century: the half-length figure set before a window opening onto a landscape. Dürer adopts this convention with assurance, combining it with a restrained spatial construction that serves to isolate and emphasise the sitter. The mountainous landscape—sometimes interpreted as an allusion to his travels to Italy—remains deliberately ambiguous, functioning less as narrative content than as a sign of intellectual breadth and worldly experience.

For a long time, Dürer’s sumptuous attire was thought to violate Nuremberg’s strict sumptuary laws; this interpretation has since been convincingly dismissed. Rather than an act of provocation, the clothing corresponds closely to contemporary depictions of well-born young men in German manuscript illumination and painting. It is now generally accepted that Dürer faithfully represents his own ceremonial dress, underscoring a redefinition of the artist’s social status.

The date of the painting situates it at a crucial moment in Dürer’s career. In 1498 he published the Apocalypse, the woodcut series that would secure his international fame. Even before this success fully unfolded, Dürer fashioned an image of himself as a new kind of artist: educated, cosmopolitan and intellectually autonomous. This perception was shared by contemporaries; as early as 1499, the humanist Conrad Celtis hailed him as “Apelles Germaniae”.

The self-portrait thus stands at the beginning of Dürer’s mature self-conception. His contemporaneous graphic works—such as The Men’s Bath, Hercules and the Sea Monster—as well as his growing engagement with theories of proportion and his close ties to humanist circles, all attest to this ambition. The Prado self-portrait gives pictorial form to these aspirations: not an expression of vanity in the superficial sense, but a measured declaration of artistic identity.

Dürer appears here as a young man at the threshold of his career, yet already conscious of his role within a new generation of artists—one that understood artistic creation as an intellectual and enduring endeavour.

  

Qiu Zhijie was born in 1969 in Zhangzhou, China, and lives and works in Beijing and Hangzhou. He is known for his text- and calligraphy-based practice, which encompasses photography, performance, installation, painting, video and explores the struggle of self-assertion, particularly with reference to Chinese history..

 

In 1992, he graduated from the Printmaking department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art), Hangzhou. The artist’s break-through exhibition was in 1992 with China’s New Art, Post-1989 at the Hanart Gallery and Hong Kong Arts Centre. By 1999, his work began receiving international interest with his inclusion in Revolutionary Capitals: Beijing-London, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. In 2005, his work was exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum‘s Between Past And Future: New Photography And Video From China, including Tattoo 1, which explores Qiu’s assertion that in our media-saturated age, “signs and codes have overpowered actual human beings, and our bodies have become merely their vehicles.” The character bu-meaning “no”-is written across the artist’s body and on the wall behind him, creating the illusion that it floats free of the body. The ironic mixture of an ancient method of transmitting texts with contemporary content provokes people to rethink the relationship between tradition and today’s society. He is also a curator, art critic and professor. He has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the world at prestigious institutions and events, including MoMA PS1 (1998) and Queen’s Museum (2001), both New York; The Sao Paulo Biennale (2002); The Shanghai Biennale (2004); The Moscow Biennale (2007); Fondazione Querini Stampalia (2013), Venice; the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and Fondazione Berengo (2015), Venice. He was the curator for the 2012 Shanghai Biennale. He is currently a professor in the School of Cross-Medium Art at the China Academy of Art.

The Judgendstil Estonia Theatre of 1913 was once Tallinn's largest building. Designed by Finnish architects Armas Lindgren and Wivi Lönn, it was built as a national effort by an Estonian élite groping towards national self-assertion. It was heavily damaged in the Soviet air raid on Tallinn on 9 March 1944. It was reconstructed in a classical and Stalinist style, and reopened in 1947. It now houses the Estonian National Opera and the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra.

Qiu Zhijie was born in 1969 in Zhangzhou, China, and lives and works in Beijing and Hangzhou. He is known for his text- and calligraphy-based practice, which encompasses photography, performance, installation, painting, video and explores the struggle of self-assertion, particularly with reference to Chinese history..

 

In 1992, he graduated from the Printmaking department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art), Hangzhou. The artist’s break-through exhibition was in 1992 with China’s New Art, Post-1989 at the Hanart Gallery and Hong Kong Arts Centre. By 1999, his work began receiving international interest with his inclusion in Revolutionary Capitals: Beijing-London, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. In 2005, his work was exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum‘s Between Past And Future: New Photography And Video From China, including Tattoo 1, which explores Qiu’s assertion that in our media-saturated age, “signs and codes have overpowered actual human beings, and our bodies have become merely their vehicles.” The character bu-meaning “no”-is written across the artist’s body and on the wall behind him, creating the illusion that it floats free of the body. The ironic mixture of an ancient method of transmitting texts with contemporary content provokes people to rethink the relationship between tradition and today’s society. He is also a curator, art critic and professor. He has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the world at prestigious institutions and events, including MoMA PS1 (1998) and Queen’s Museum (2001), both New York; The Sao Paulo Biennale (2002); The Shanghai Biennale (2004); The Moscow Biennale (2007); Fondazione Querini Stampalia (2013), Venice; the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and Fondazione Berengo (2015), Venice. He was the curator for the 2012 Shanghai Biennale. He is currently a professor in the School of Cross-Medium Art at the China Academy of Art.

Awakening

 

All of my life I’ve been waiting for you.

The time flew up and down full of irritation .

I created a lot, but it was never new.

I was losing something main, my self-assertion.

 

The words which always are passing through me,

I’ve never heard the splitting force of them.

I’ve never felt consuming sense and never seen

The spacious horizons of every human gem.

 

I was a kind of the closed space,

And no one could see my stars.

And everything that did a mind trace,

Was missing throw, just stream of lies.

 

When walking hard alone across the life,

I always speak to you and every time I have the answer.

By now, I’m charged with feels, I was revived,

After the whole life of self-image disaster.

 

Leading the way, across denouncing views,

You’ve never tried to be a former idol.

You waked me up and got to be my muse.

You fed my heart and broke the made-up idyll.

 

translation

 

Qiu Zhijie was born in 1969 in Zhangzhou, China, and lives and works in Beijing and Hangzhou. He is known for his text- and calligraphy-based practice, which encompasses photography, performance, installation, painting, video and explores the struggle of self-assertion, particularly with reference to Chinese history..

 

In 1992, he graduated from the Printmaking department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art), Hangzhou. The artist’s break-through exhibition was in 1992 with China’s New Art, Post-1989 at the Hanart Gallery and Hong Kong Arts Centre. By 1999, his work began receiving international interest with his inclusion in Revolutionary Capitals: Beijing-London, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. In 2005, his work was exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum‘s Between Past And Future: New Photography And Video From China, including Tattoo 1, which explores Qiu’s assertion that in our media-saturated age, “signs and codes have overpowered actual human beings, and our bodies have become merely their vehicles.” The character bu-meaning “no”-is written across the artist’s body and on the wall behind him, creating the illusion that it floats free of the body. The ironic mixture of an ancient method of transmitting texts with contemporary content provokes people to rethink the relationship between tradition and today’s society. He is also a curator, art critic and professor. He has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the world at prestigious institutions and events, including MoMA PS1 (1998) and Queen’s Museum (2001), both New York; The Sao Paulo Biennale (2002); The Shanghai Biennale (2004); The Moscow Biennale (2007); Fondazione Querini Stampalia (2013), Venice; the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and Fondazione Berengo (2015), Venice. He was the curator for the 2012 Shanghai Biennale. He is currently a professor in the School of Cross-Medium Art at the China Academy of Art.

Albrecht Dürer – Hercules at the Crossroads [1498]

(also: Jealousy) (engraving version from Städel, Frankfurt)

 

The starting point of our investigation was the question of whether Dürer’s Hercules at the Crossroads should primarily be read within the context of late medieval demonology – particularly the Malleus Maleficarum – or whether another interpretation, more closely related to the emergence of subjectivity, might prove more convincing.

We took the historical context seriously: the Nuremberg printings issued by Anton Koberger in 1494 and 1496, the presence of inquisitorial discourse, and the iconographic identification of the satyr with the incubus. All this initially made it plausible to understand the “satyr” as a demonic figure of libido and to associate the woman with the sphere of witch-theoretical conceptions.

Yet, upon closer examination, this interpretation proved insufficient to explain the centre of the print. The decisive turning point lay in the physiognomic analysis of the hero and of his bodily expression.

________________________________________

1. The Hero as One Already Resolved

In the shadowed profile of Hercules we observe:

an open, tension-charged mouth

a thrust-forward chin

a focused, purposeful gaze

This is not a figure in a state of hesitation.

It is a body at the moment of activation.

The crossroads therefore appears not as an open discursive space but as the instant before action. Consequently, the interpretative emphasis shifts from the surrounding context to the inner axis of the figure itself.

________________________________________

2. The Headgear as a Signal of Self-Assertion

The “helmet” worn by Hercules is not a classically antique attribute. It appears fashionable, almost contemporarily updated (for example reminiscent of a tournament helmet). When compared with Dürer’s self-portraits – such as the Self Portrait with Thistle – a structural parallel becomes visible: self-confidence is articulated through fashionable markers.

Hercules thus appears not as a figure of mythic antiquity but as a Renaissance subject.

This iconographic updating suggests that the print represents not merely a moral exemplum but a form of self-positioning.

________________________________________

3. Panofsky’s Theory of the Subject as Theoretical Framework

By returning to the ideas of Erwin Panofsky – particularly the Renaissance conception of Hercules emphasised by Martin Warnke – the interpretation gained conceptual clarity.

What determines the outcome is not divine grace but inner disposition.

The hero becomes an autonomous chooser.

This perspective proves far more consistent with the physiognomic evidence of the print than a demonological reading.

________________________________________

4. The Reinterpretation of the “Clothed” Woman

A decisive corrective concerns the clothed woman.

Her posture appears aggressive, almost fanatical. Structurally she recalls:

the militant archangel Michael

the angel with the flaming sword before Paradise

the executive severity associated with inquisitorial enforcement

She therefore embodies not sensual temptation but radical moral zeal.

The constellation of the scene thus shifts fundamentally.

The opposition is no longer virtue versus vice, but rather two extremes:

sensual entanglement

fanatical moralism

Hercules does not stand between good and evil, but between excess and intolerance.

This ambivalent constellation explains why Hercules restrains both women. His gesture is directed not only against sensuality but simultaneously against moral fury. He rejects both excesses. The decision therefore favours neither libertine indulgence nor fanaticism, but a third path: a self-determined moderation grounded in intellectual self-discipline.

________________________________________

5. The Biographical Horizon

Against this background the personality of Albrecht Dürer becomes decisive.

Dürer was:

disciplined

ambitious

theoretically oriented

committed to achieving intellectual renown

His later work – especially Melencolia I – demonstrates an uncompromising claim to intellectual height.

It therefore seems plausible to understand the Hercules not as a sinner oppressed by moral temptation but as a young subject consciously rejecting extremes.

________________________________________

6. Conclusion

Our argument leads to the following result:

The demonological context forms an important historical resonance, yet it is not the interpretative centre.

The secondary figures embody extremes of human possibility – sensuality and fanatical severity.

The physiognomically determined Hercules stands not in doubt but in the act of self-determination.

The fashionable headgear updates him as a Renaissance individual.

The print thus appears as the self-positioning of a young artist between excess and dogma.

Hercules at the Crossroads may therefore be read as an image of an autonomous decision in favour of intellectual moderation – neither libertine nor fanatical, but directed toward the conscious formation of the self.

________________________________________

Text: “ChatGPT 5.2 and Petrus Agricola”

11 March 2026

  

Marc Zakharovich Chagall (/ʃəˈɡɑːl/ shə-GAHL;[3][nb 1] born Moishe Zakharovich Shagal;[4] 6 July [O.S. 24 June] 1887 – 28 March 1985) was a Russian-French artist of Belarusian Jewish origin.[1] An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in virtually every artistic format, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints.

 

Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century" (though Chagall saw his work as "not the dream of one people but of all humanity"). According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be "the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists". For decades, he "had also been respected as the world's preeminent Jewish artist". Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra.

 

Before World War I, he travelled between Saint Petersburg, Paris and Berlin. During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his idea of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He spent the wartime years in Soviet Belarus, becoming one of the country's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for Paris in 1922.

 

He had two basic reputations, writes Lewis: as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernism's "golden age" in Paris, where "he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism". Yet throughout these phases of his style "he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of Vitebsk."[5] "When Matisse dies," Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is".[6]

 

Contents

 

1 Early life and education

1.1 Early life

1.2 Art education

1.3 Artistic inspiration

2 Art career

2.1 Russia (1906–1910)

2.2 France (1910–1914)

2.3 Russia and Soviet Belarus (1914–1922)

2.4 France (1923–1941)

2.4.1 The Bible illustrations

2.4.2 Nazi campaigns against modern art

2.4.3 Escaping occupied France

2.5 United States (1941–1948)

2.5.1 Aleko ballet (1942)

2.5.2 Coming to grips with World War II

2.5.3 Post-war years

2.6 France (1948–1985)

2.6.1 Ceiling of the Paris Opera (1963)

3 Art styles and techniques

3.1 Color

3.2 Subject matter

3.2.1 From life memories to fantasy

3.2.2 Jewish themes

  

Early life and education

Chagall's Parents

 

Marc Chagall was born Moishe Segal in a Lithuanian Jewish family in Liozna,[7] near the city of Vitebsk (Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire) in 1887.[note][8] At the time of his birth, Vitebsk's population was about 66,000, with half the population being Jewish.[5] A picturesque city of churches and synagogues, it was called "Russian Toledo", after a cosmopolitan city of the former Spanish Empire. As the city was built mostly of wood, little of it survived years of occupation and destruction during World War II.

 

Chagall was the eldest of nine children. The family name, Shagal, is a variant of the name Segal, which in a Jewish community was usually borne by a Levitic family.[9] His father, Khatskl (Zachar) Shagal, was employed by a herring merchant, and his mother, Feige-Ite, sold groceries from their home. His father worked hard, carrying heavy barrels but earning only 20 roubles each month (the average wages across the Russian Empire being 13 roubles a month). Chagall would later include fish motifs "out of respect for his father", writes Chagall biographer, Jacob Baal-Teshuva. Chagall wrote of these early years:

 

Day after day, winter and summer, at six o'clock in the morning, my father got up and went off to the synagogue. There he said his usual prayer for some dead man or other. On his return he made ready the samovar, drank some tea and went to work. Hellish work, the work of a galley-slave. Why try to hide it? How tell about it? No word will ever ease my father's lot... There was always plenty of butter and cheese on our table. Buttered bread, like an eternal symbol, was never out of my childish hands.[10]

 

One of the main sources of income of the Jewish population of the town was from the manufacture of clothing that was sold throughout Russia. They also made furniture and various agricultural tools.[11] From the late 18th century to the First World War, the Russian government confined Jews to living within the Pale of Settlement, which included modern Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, almost exactly corresponding to the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth recently taken over by Imperial Russia. This caused the creation of Jewish market-villages (shtetls) throughout today's Eastern Europe, with their own markets, schools, hospitals, and other community institutions.[12]:14

 

Most of what is known about Chagall's early life has come from his autobiography, My Life. In it, he described the major influence that the culture of Hasidic Judaism had on his life as an artist. Vitebsk itself had been a center of that culture dating from the 1730s with its teachings derived from the Kabbalah. Chagall scholar Susan Tumarkin Goodman describes the links and sources of his art to his early home:

 

Chagall's art can be understood as the response to a situation that has long marked the history of Russian Jews. Though they were cultural innovators who made important contributions to the broader society, Jews were considered outsiders in a frequently hostile society... Chagall himself was born of a family steeped in religious life; his parents were observant Hasidic Jews who found spiritual satisfaction in a life defined by their faith and organized by prayer.[12]:14

 

Chagall was friends with Sholom Dovber Schneersohn, and later with Menachem M. Schneerson.[13]

Art education

Portrait of Chagall by Yehuda (Yuri) Pen, his first art teacher in Vitebsk

 

In Russia at that time, Jewish children were not allowed to attend regular Russian schools or universities. Their movement within the city was also restricted. Chagall therefore received his primary education at the local Jewish religious school, where he studied Hebrew and the Bible. At the age of 13, his mother tried to enroll him in a Russian high school, and he recalled, "But in that school, they don't take Jews. Without a moment's hesitation, my courageous mother walks up to a professor." She offered the headmaster 50 roubles to let him attend, which he accepted.[10]

 

A turning point of his artistic life came when he first noticed a fellow student drawing. Baal-Teshuva writes that for the young Chagall, watching someone draw "was like a vision, a revelation in black and white". Chagall would later say that there was no art of any kind in his family's home and the concept was totally alien to him. When Chagall asked the schoolmate how he learned to draw, his friend replied, "Go and find a book in the library, idiot, choose any picture you like, and just copy it". He soon began copying images from books and found the experience so rewarding he then decided he wanted to become an artist.[11]

 

He eventually confided to his mother, "I want to be a painter", although she could not yet understand his sudden interest in art or why he would choose a vocation that "seemed so impractical", writes Goodman. The young Chagall explained, "There's a place in town; if I'm admitted and if I complete the course, I'll come out a regular artist. I'd be so happy!" It was 1906, and he had noticed the studio of Yehuda (Yuri) Pen, a realist artist who also operated a small drawing school in Vitebsk, which included the future artists El Lissitzky and Ossip Zadkine. Due to Chagall's youth and lack of income, Pen offered to teach him free of charge. However, after a few months at the school, Chagall realized that academic portrait painting did not suit his desires.[11]

Artistic inspiration

Marc Chagall, 1912, Calvary (Golgotha), oil on canvas, 174.6 × 192.4 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Alternative titles: Kreuzigung Bild 2 Christus gewidmet [Golgotha. Crucifixion. Dedicated to Christ]. Sold through Galerie Der Sturm (Herwarth Walden), Berlin to Bernhard Koehler (1849–1927), Berlin, 1913. Exhibited: Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon, Berlin, 1913

 

Goodman notes that during this period in Russia, Jews had two basic alternatives for joining the art world: One was to "hide or deny one's Jewish roots". The other alternative—the one that Chagall chose—was "to cherish and publicly express one's Jewish roots" by integrating them into his art. For Chagall, this was also his means of "self-assertion and an expression of principle."[12]:14

 

Chagall biographer Franz Meyer, explains that with the connections between his art and early life "the hassidic spirit is still the basis and source of nourishment for his art."[14] Lewis adds, "As cosmopolitan an artist as he would later become, his storehouse of visual imagery would never expand beyond the landscape of his childhood, with its snowy streets, wooden houses, and ubiquitous fiddlers... [with] scenes of childhood so indelibly in one's mind and to invest them with an emotional charge so intense that it could only be discharged obliquely through an obsessive repetition of the same cryptic symbols and ideograms... "[5]

 

Years later, at the age of 57 while living in the United States, Chagall confirmed this when he published an open letter entitled, "To My City Vitebsk":

 

Why? Why did I leave you many years ago? ... You thought, the boy seeks something, seeks such a special subtlety, that color descending like stars from the sky and landing, bright and transparent, like snow on our roofs. Where did he get it? How would it come to a boy like him? I don't know why he couldn't find it with us, in the city—in his homeland. Maybe the boy is "crazy", but "crazy" for the sake of art. ...You thought: "I can see, I am etched in the boy's heart, but he is still 'flying,' he is still striving to take off, he has 'wind' in his head." ... I did not live with you, but I didn't have one single painting that didn't breathe with your spirit and reflection.[15]

 

Art career

Russia (1906–1910)

 

In 1906, he moved to Saint Petersburg which was then the capital of Russia and the center of the country's artistic life with its famous art schools. Since Jews were not permitted into the city without an internal passport, he managed to get a temporary passport from a friend. He enrolled in a prestigious art school and studied there for two years.[11] By 1907, he had begun painting naturalistic self-portraits and landscapes.

 

Between 1908 and 1910, Chagall was a student of Léon Bakst at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting. While in Saint Petersburg, he discovered experimental theater and the work of such artists as Paul Gauguin.[16] Bakst, also Jewish, was a designer of decorative art and was famous as a draftsman designer of stage sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes, and helped Chagall by acting as a role model for Jewish success. Bakst moved to Paris a year later. Art historian Raymond Cogniat writes that after living and studying art on his own for four years, "Chagall entered into the mainstream of contemporary art. ...His apprenticeship over, Russia had played a memorable initial role in his life."[17]:30

 

Chagall stayed in Saint Petersburg until 1910, often visiting Vitebsk where he met Bella Rosenfeld. In My Life, Chagall described his first meeting her: "Her silence is mine, her eyes mine. It is as if she knows everything about my childhood, my present, my future, as if she can see right through me."[11]:22

France (1910–1914)

Marc Chagall, 1911–12, The Drunkard (Le saoul), 1912, oil on canvas. 85 × 115 cm. Private collection

Marc Chagall, 1912, The Fiddler, an inspiration for the musical Fiddler on the Roof[18]

 

In 1910, Chagall relocated to Paris to develop his artistic style. Art historian and curator James Sweeney notes that when Chagall first arrived in Paris, Cubism was the dominant art form, and French art was still dominated by the "materialistic outlook of the 19th century". But Chagall arrived from Russia with "a ripe color gift, a fresh, unashamed response to sentiment, a feeling for simple poetry and a sense of humor", he adds. These notions were alien to Paris at that time, and as a result, his first recognition came not from other painters but from poets such as Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire.[19]:7 Art historian Jean Leymarie observes that Chagall began thinking of art as "emerging from the internal being outward, from the seen object to the psychic outpouring", which was the reverse of the Cubist way of creating.[20]

 

He therefore developed friendships with Guillaume Apollinaire and other avant-garde luminaries such as Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger.[21] Baal-Teshuva writes that "Chagall's dream of Paris, the city of light and above all, of freedom, had come true."[11]:33 His first days were a hardship for the 23-year-old Chagall, who was lonely in the big city and unable to speak French. Some days he "felt like fleeing back to Russia, as he daydreamed while he painted, about the riches of Russian folklore, his Hasidic experiences, his family, and especially Bella".

 

In Paris, he enrolled at Académie de La Palette, an avant-garde school of art where the painters Jean Metzinger, André Dunoyer de Segonzac and Henri Le Fauconnier taught, and also found work at another academy. He would spend his free hours visiting galleries and salons, especially the Louvre; artists he came to admire included Rembrandt, the Le Nain brothers, Chardin, van Gogh, Renoir, Pissarro, Matisse, Gauguin, Courbet, Millet, Manet, Monet, Delacroix, and others. It was in Paris that he learned the technique of gouache, which he used to paint Belarusian scenes. He also visited Montmartre and the Latin Quarter "and was happy just breathing Parisian air."[11] Baal-Teshuva describes this new phase in Chagall's artistic development:

 

Chagall was exhilarated, intoxicated, as he strolled through the streets and along the banks of the Seine. Everything about the French capital excited him: the shops, the smell of fresh bread in the morning, the markets with their fresh fruit and vegetables, the wide boulevards, the cafés and restaurants, and above all the Eiffel Tower.

 

Another completely new world that opened up for him was the kaleidoscope of colours and forms in the works of French artists. Chagall enthusiastically reviewed their many different tendencies, having to rethink his position as an artist and decide what creative avenue he wanted to pursue.[11]:33

 

During his time in Paris, Chagall was constantly reminded of his home in Vitebsk, as Paris was also home to many painters, writers, poets, composers, dancers, and other émigrés from the Russian Empire. However, "night after night he painted until dawn", only then going to bed for a few hours, and resisted the many temptations of the big city at night.[11]:44 "My homeland exists only in my soul", he once said.[20]:viii He continued painting Jewish motifs and subjects from his memories of Vitebsk, although he included Parisian scenes—- the Eiffel Tower in particular, along with portraits. Many of his works were updated versions of paintings he had made in Russia, transposed into Fauvist or Cubist keys.[5]

Marc Chagall, 1912, Still-life (Nature morte), oil on canvas, private collection

 

Chagall developed a whole repertoire of quirky motifs: ghostly figures floating in the sky, ... the gigantic fiddler dancing on miniature dollhouses, the livestock and transparent wombs and, within them, tiny offspring sleeping upside down.[5] The majority of his scenes of life in Vitebsk were painted while living in Paris, and "in a sense they were dreams", notes Lewis. Their "undertone of yearning and loss", with a detached and abstract appearance, caused Apollinaire to be "struck by this quality", calling them "surnaturel!" His "animal/human hybrids and airborne phantoms" would later become a formative influence on Surrealism.[5] Chagall, however, did not want his work to be associated with any school or movement and considered his own personal language of symbols to be meaningful to himself. But Sweeney notes that others often still associate his work with "illogical and fantastic painting", especially when he uses "curious representational juxtapositions".[19]:10

 

Sweeney writes that "This is Chagall's contribution to contemporary art: the reawakening of a poetry of representation, avoiding factual illustration on the one hand, and non-figurative abstractions on the other". André Breton said that "with him alone, the metaphor made its triumphant return to modern painting".[19]:7

Russia and Soviet Belarus (1914–1922)

 

Because he missed his fiancée, Bella, who was still in Vitebsk—"He thought about her day and night", writes Baal-Teshuva—and was afraid of losing her, Chagall decided to accept an invitation from a noted art dealer in Berlin to exhibit his work, his intention being to continue on to Belarus, marry Bella, and then return with her to Paris. Chagall took 40 canvases and 160 gouaches, watercolors and drawings to be exhibited. The exhibit, held at Herwarth Walden's Sturm Gallery was a huge success, "The German critics positively sang his praises."[11]

People's Art School where the Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art was situated

 

After the exhibit, he continued on to Vitebsk, where he planned to stay only long enough to marry Bella. However, after a few weeks, the First World War began, closing the Russian border for an indefinite period. A year later he married Bella Rosenfeld and they had their first child, Ida. Before the marriage, Chagall had difficulty convincing Bella's parents that he would be a suitable husband for their daughter. They were worried about her marrying a painter from a poor family and wondered how he would support her. Becoming a successful artist now became a goal and inspiration. According to Lewis, "[T]he euphoric paintings of this time, which show the young couple floating balloon-like over Vitebsk—its wooden buildings faceted in the Delaunay manner—are the most lighthearted of his career".[5] His wedding pictures were also a subject he would return to in later years as he thought about this period of his life.[11]:75

Bella with White Collar, 1917

 

In 1915, Chagall began exhibiting his work in Moscow, first exhibiting his works at a well-known salon and in 1916 exhibiting pictures in St. Petersburg. He again showed his art at a Moscow exhibition of avant-garde artists. This exposure brought recognition, and a number of wealthy collectors began buying his art. He also began illustrating a number of Yiddish books with ink drawings. He illustrated I. L. Peretz's The Magician in 1917.[22] Chagall was 30 years old and had begun to become well known.[11]:77

 

The October Revolution of 1917 was a dangerous time for Chagall although it also offered opportunity. By then he was one of the Russia's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, which enjoyed special privileges and prestige as the "aesthetic arm of the revolution".[5] He was offered a notable position as a commissar of visual arts for the country[clarification needed], but preferred something less political, and instead accepted a job as commissar of arts for Vitebsk. This resulted in his founding the Vitebsk Arts College which, adds Lewis, became the "most distinguished school of art in the Soviet Union".

 

It obtained for its faculty some of the most important artists in the country, such as El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich. He also added his first teacher, Yehuda Pen. Chagall tried to create an atmosphere of a collective of independently minded artists, each with their own unique style. However, this would soon prove to be difficult as a few of the key faculty members preferred a Suprematist art of squares and circles, and disapproved of Chagall's attempt at creating "bourgeois individualism". Chagall then resigned as commissar and moved to Moscow.

 

In Moscow he was offered a job as stage designer for the newly formed State Jewish Chamber Theater. It was set to begin operation in early 1921 with a number of plays by Sholem Aleichem. For its opening he created a number of large background murals using techniques he learned from Bakst, his early teacher. One of the main murals was 9 feet (2.7 m) tall by 24 feet (7.3 m) long and included images of various lively subjects such as dancers, fiddlers, acrobats, and farm animals. One critic at the time called it "Hebrew jazz in paint". Chagall created it as a "storehouse of symbols and devices", notes Lewis.[5] The murals "constituted a landmark" in the history of the theatre, and were forerunners of his later large-scale works, including murals for the New York Metropolitan Opera and the Paris Opera.[11]:87

 

Famine spread after the war ended in 1918. The Chagalls found it necessary to move to a smaller, less expensive, town near Moscow, although he now had to commute to Moscow daily using crowded trains. In 1921, he worked as an art teacher in a Jewish boys' shelter in suburban Malakhovka, which housed orphaned refugees from Ukrainian pogroms.[6]:270 While there, he created a series of illustrations for the Yiddish poetry cycle Grief written by David Hofstein, who was another teacher at the Malakhovka shelter.[6]:273

 

After spending the years between 1921 and 1922 living in primitive conditions, he decided to go back to France so that he could develop his art in a more comfortable country. Numerous other artists, writers, and musicians were also planning to relocate to the West. He applied for an exit visa and while waiting for its uncertain approval, wrote his autobiography, My Life.[11]:121

France (1923–1941)

 

In 1923, Chagall left Moscow to return to France. On his way he stopped in Berlin to recover the many pictures he had left there on exhibit ten years earlier, before the war began, but was unable to find or recover any of them. Nonetheless, after returning to Paris he again "rediscovered the free expansion and fulfillment which were so essential to him", writes Lewis. With all his early works now lost, he began trying to paint from his memories of his earliest years in Vitebsk with sketches and oil paintings.[5]

 

He formed a business relationship with French art dealer Ambroise Vollard. This inspired him to begin creating etchings for a series of illustrated books, including Gogol's Dead Souls, the Bible, and the La Fontaine's Fables. These illustrations would eventually come to represent his finest printmaking efforts.[5] In 1924, he travelled to Brittany and painted La fenêtre sur l'Île-de-Bréhat.[23] By 1926 he had his first exhibition in the United States at the Reinhardt gallery of New York which included about 100 works, although he did not travel to the opening. He instead stayed in France, "painting ceaselessly", notes Baal-Teshuva.[11] It was not until 1927 that Chagall made his name in the French art world, when art critic and historian Maurice Raynal awarded him a place in his book Modern French Painters. However, Raynal was still at a loss to accurately describe Chagall to his readers:

 

Chagall interrogates life in the light of a refined, anxious, childlike sensibility, a slightly romantic temperament ... a blend of sadness and gaiety characteristic of a grave view of life. His imagination, his temperament, no doubt forbid a Latin severity of composition.[6]:314

 

During this period he traveled throughout France and the Côte d'Azur, where he enjoyed the landscapes, colorful vegetation, the blue Mediterranean Sea, and the mild weather. He made repeated trips to the countryside, taking his sketchbook.[6]:9 He also visited nearby countries and later wrote about the impressions some of those travels left on him:

 

I should like to recall how advantageous my travels outside France have been for me in an artistic sense—in Holland or in Spain, Italy, Egypt, Palestine, or simply in the south of France. There, in the south, for the first time in my life, I saw that rich greenness—the like of which I had never seen in my own country. In Holland I thought I discovered that familiar and throbbing light, like the light between the late afternoon and dusk. In Italy I found that peace of the museums which the sunlight brought to life. In Spain I was happy to find the inspiration of a mystical, if sometimes cruel, past, to find the song of its sky and of its people. And in the East [Palestine] I found unexpectedly the Bible and a part of my very being.[15]:77

 

The Bible illustrations

"The Prophet Jeremiah" (1968)

 

After returning to Paris from one of his trips, Vollard commissioned Chagall to illustrate the Old Testament. Although he could have completed the project in France, he used the assignment as an excuse to travel to Israel to experience for himself the Holy Land. He arrived there in February 1931 and ended up staying for two months. Chagall felt at home in Israel where many people spoke Yiddish and Russian. According to Jacob Baal-Teshuva, "he was impressed by the pioneering spirit of the people in the kibbutzim and deeply moved by the Wailing Wall and the other holy places".[11]:133

 

Chagall later told a friend that Israel gave him "the most vivid impression he had ever received". Wullschlager notes, however, that whereas Delacroix and Matisse had found inspiration in the exoticism of North Africa, he as a Jew in Israel had different perspective. "What he was really searching for there was not external stimulus but an inner authorization from the land of his ancestors, to plunge into his work on the Bible illustrations".[6]:343 Chagall stated that "In the East I found the Bible and part of my own being."

 

As a result, he immersed himself in "the history of the Jews, their trials, prophecies, and disasters", notes Wullschlager. She adds that beginning the assignment was an "extraordinary risk" for Chagall, as he had finally become well known as a leading contemporary painter, but would now end his modernist themes and delve into "an ancient past".[6]:350 Between 1931 and 1934 he worked "obsessively" on "The Bible", even going to Amsterdam in order to carefully study the biblical paintings of Rembrandt and El Greco, to see the extremes of religious painting. He walked the streets of the city's Jewish quarter to again feel the earlier atmosphere. He told Franz Meyer:

 

I did not see the Bible, I dreamed it. Ever since early childhood, I have been captivated by the Bible. It has always seemed to me and still seems today the greatest source of poetry of all time.[6]:350

 

Chagall saw the Old Testament as a "human story, ... not with the creation of the cosmos but with the creation of man, and his figures of angels are rhymed or combined with human ones", writes Wullschlager. She points out that in one of his early Bible images, "Abraham and the Three Angels", the angels sit and chat over a glass of wine "as if they have just dropped by for dinner".[6]:350

 

He returned to France and by the next year had completed 32 out of the total of 105 plates. By 1939, at the beginning of World War II, he had finished 66. However, Vollard died that same year. When the series was completed in 1956, it was published by Edition Tériade. Baal-Teshuva writes that "the illustrations were stunning and met with great acclaim. Once again Chagall had shown himself to be one of the 20th century's most important graphic artists".[11]:135 Leymarie has described these drawings by Chagall as "monumental" and,

 

...full of divine inspiration, which retrace the legendary destiny and the epic history of Israel to Genesis to the Prophets, through the Patriarchs and the Heroes. Each picture becomes one with the event, informing the text with a solemn intimacy unknown since Rembrandt.[20]:ix

 

Nazi campaigns against modern art

 

Not long after Chagall began his work on the Bible, Adolf Hitler gained power in Germany. Anti-Semitic laws were being introduced and the first concentration camp at Dachau had been established. Wullschlager describes the early effects on art:

 

The Nazis had begun their campaign against modernist art as soon as they seized power. Expressionist, cubist, abstract, and surrealist art—anything intellectual, Jewish, foreign, socialist-inspired, or difficult to understand—was targeted, from Picasso and Matisse going back to Cézanne and van Gogh; in its place traditional German realism, accessible and open to patriotic interpretation, was extolled.[6]:374

 

Beginning during 1937 about twenty thousand works from German museums were confiscated as "degenerate" by a committee directed by Joseph Goebbels.[6]:375 Although the German press had once "swooned over him", the new German authorities now made a mockery of Chagall's art, describing them as "green, purple, and red Jews shooting out of the earth, fiddling on violins, flying through the air ... representing [an] assault on Western civilization".[6]:376

 

After Germany invaded and occupied France, the Chagalls naively remained in Vichy France, unaware that French Jews, with the help of the Vichy government, were being collected and sent to German concentration camps, from which few would return. The Vichy collaborationist government, directed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, immediately upon assuming power established a commission to "redefine French citizenship" with the aim of stripping "undesirables", including naturalized citizens, of their French nationality. Chagall had been so involved with his art, that it was not until October 1940, after the Vichy government, at the behest of the Nazi occupying forces, began approving anti-Semitic laws, that he began to understand what was happening. Learning that Jews were being removed from public and academic positions, the Chagalls finally "woke up to the danger they faced". But Wullschlager notes that "by then they were trapped".[6]:382 Their only refuge could be America, but "they could not afford the passage to New York" or the large bond that each immigrant had to provide upon entry to ensure that they would not become a financial burden to the country.

Escaping occupied France

 

According to Wullschlager, "[T]he speed with which France collapsed astonished everyone: the French army, with British support, capitulated even more quickly than Poland had done" a year earlier. "Shock waves crossed the Atlantic... as Paris had until then been equated with civilization throughout the non-Nazi world."[6]:388 Yet the attachment of the Chagalls to France "blinded them to the urgency of the situation."[6]:389 Many other well-known Russian and Jewish artists eventually sought to escape: these included Chaim Soutine, Max Ernst, Max Beckmann, Ludwig Fulda, author Victor Serge and prize-winning author Vladimir Nabokov, who although not Jewish himself, was married to a Jewish woman.[24]:1181 Russian author Victor Serge described many of the people living temporarily in Marseille who were waiting to emigrate to America:

 

Here is a beggar's alley gathering the remnants of revolutions, democracies and crushed intellects... In our ranks are enough doctors, psychologists, engineers, educationalists, poets, painters, writers, musicians, economists and public men to vitalize a whole great country.[6]:392

 

After prodding by their daughter Ida, who "perceived the need to act fast",[6]:388 and with help from Alfred Barr of the New York Museum of Modern Art, Chagall was saved by having his name added to the list of prominent artists whose lives were at risk and who the United States should try to extricate. Varian Fry, the American journalist, and Hiram Bingham IV, the American Vice-Consul in Marseilles, ran a rescue operation to smuggle artists and intellectuals out of Europe to the US by providing them with forged visas to the US. Chagall was one of over 2,000 who were rescued by this operation. He left France in May 1941, "when it was almost too late", adds Lewis. Picasso and Matisse were also invited to come to America but they decided to remain in France. Chagall and Bella arrived in New York on 23 June 1941, the day after Germany invaded the Soviet Union.[11]:150 Ida and her husband Michel followed on the notorious refugee ship SS Navemar with a large case of Chagall's work.[25] A chance post-war meeting in a French café between Ida and intelligence analyst Konrad Kellen led to Kellen carrying more paintings on his return to the United States.[26]

United States (1941–1948)

Photo portrait of Chagall in 1941 by Carl Van Vechten

 

Even before arriving in the United States in 1941, Chagall was awarded the Carnegie Prize third prize in 1939 for "Les Fiancés". After being in America he discovered that he had already achieved "international stature", writes Cogniat, although he felt ill-suited in this new role in a foreign country whose language he could not yet speak. He became a celebrity mostly against his will, feeling lost in the strange surroundings.[17]:57

 

After a while he began to settle in New York, which was full of writers, painters, and composers who, like himself, had fled from Europe during the Nazi invasions. He lived at 4 East 74th Street.[27] He spent time visiting galleries and museums, and befriended other artists including Piet Mondrian and André Breton.[11]:155

 

Baal-Teshuva writes that Chagall "loved" going to the sections of New York where Jews lived, especially the Lower East Side. There he felt at home, enjoying the Jewish foods and being able to read the Yiddish press, which became his main source of information since he did not yet speak English.[11]

 

Contemporary artists did not yet understand or even like Chagall's art. According to Baal-Teshuva, "they had little in common with a folkloristic storyteller of Russo-Jewish extraction with a propensity for mysticism." The Paris School, which was referred to as 'Parisian Surrealism,' meant little to them.[11]:155 Those attitudes would begin to change, however, when Pierre Matisse, the son of recognized French artist Henri Matisse, became his representative and managed Chagall exhibitions in New York and Chicago in 1941. One of the earliest exhibitions included 21 of his masterpieces from 1910 to 1941.[11] Art critic Henry McBride wrote about this exhibit for the New York Sun:

 

Chagall is about as gypsy as they come... these pictures do more for his reputation than anything we have previously seen... His colors sparkle with poetry... his work is authentically Russian as a Volga boatman's song...[28]

 

He was offered a commission by choreographer Leonid Massine of the Ballet Theatre of New York to design the sets and costumes for his new ballet, Aleko. This ballet would stage the words of Pushkin's verse narrative The Gypsies with the music of Tchaikovsky. While Chagall had done stage settings before while in Russia, this was his first ballet, and it would give him the opportunity to visit Mexico. While there he quickly began to appreciate the "primitive ways and colorful art of the Mexicans," notes Cogniat. He found "something very closely related to his own nature", and did all the color detail for the sets while there.[17] Eventually, he created four large backdrops and had Mexican seamstresses sew the ballet costumes.

 

When the ballet premiered on 8 September 1942 it was considered a "remarkable success."[11] In the audience were other famous mural painters who came to see Chagall's work, including Diego Rivera and José Orozco. According to Baal-Teshuva, when the final bar of music ended, "there was a tumultuous applause and 19 curtain calls, with Chagall himself being called back onto the stage again and again." The ballet also opened in New York City four weeks later at the Metropolitan Opera and the response was repeated, "again Chagall was the hero of the evening".[11]:158 Art critic Edwin Denby wrote of the opening for the New York Herald Tribune that Chagall's work:

 

has turned into a dramatized exhibition of giant paintings... It surpasses anything Chagall has done on the easel scale, and it is a breathtaking experience, of a kind one hardly expects in the theatre.[29]

 

Coming to grips with World War II

 

After Chagall returned to New York in 1943, however, current events began to interest him more, and this was represented by his art, where he painted subjects including the Crucifixion and scenes of war. He learned that the Germans had destroyed the town where he was raised, Vitebsk, and became greatly distressed.[11]:159 He also learned about the Nazi concentration camps.[11] During a speech in February 1944, he described some of his feelings:

 

Meanwhile, the enemy jokes, saying that we are a "stupid nation." He thought that when he started slaughtering the Jews, we would all in our grief suddenly raise the greatest prophetic scream, and would be joined by the Christian humanists. But, after two thousand years of "Christianity" in the world—say whatever you like—but, with few exceptions, their hearts are silent... I see the artists in Christian nations sit still—who has heard them speak up? They are not worried about themselves, and our Jewish life doesn't concern them.[15]:89

 

In the same speech he credited Soviet Russia with doing the most to save the Jews:

 

The Jews will always be grateful to it. What other great country has saved a million and a half Jews from Hitler's hands, and shared its last piece of bread? What country abolished antisemitism? What other country devoted at least a piece of land as an autonomous region for Jews who want to live there? All this, and more, weighs heavily on the scales of history.[15]:89

 

On 2 September 1944, Bella died suddenly due to a virus infection, which was not treated due to the wartime shortage of medicine. As a result, he stopped all work for many months, and when he did resume painting his first pictures were concerned with preserving Bella's memory.[17] Wullschlager writes of the effect on Chagall: "As news poured in through 1945 of the ongoing Holocaust at Nazi concentration camps, Bella took her place in Chagall's mind with the millions of Jewish victims." He even considered the possibility that their "exile from Europe had sapped her will to live."[6]:419

With Virginia Haggard McNeil

 

After a year of living with his daughter Ida and her husband Michel Gordey, he entered into a romance with Virginia Haggard, daughter of diplomat Sir Godfrey Digby Napier Haggard and great-niece of the author Sir Henry Rider Haggard; their relationship endured seven years. They had a child together, David McNeil, born 22 June 1946.[11] Haggard recalled her "seven years of plenty" with Chagall in her book, My Life with Chagall (Robert Hale, 1986).

 

A few months after the Allies succeeded in liberating Paris from Nazi occupation, with the help of the Allied armies, Chagall published a letter in a Paris weekly, "To the Paris Artists":

 

In recent years I have felt unhappy that I couldn't be with you, my friends. My enemy forced me to take the road of exile. On that tragic road, I lost my wife, the companion of my life, the woman who was my inspiration. I want to say to my friends in France that she joins me in this greeting, she who loved France and French art so faithfully. Her last joy was the liberation of Paris... Now, when Paris is liberated, when the art of France is resurrected, the whole world too will, once and for all, be free of the satanic enemies who wanted to annihilate not just the body but also the soul—the soul, without which there is no life, no artistic creativity.[15]:101

Bought this great old puzzle from a BCD friend after he showed it at a BCD meeting some time ago.

 

Gladstone and Disraeli were great rivals who differed in their views on many things, among them the British Empire, Disraeli being the imperialist while Gladstone saw the empire as a burden the country didn't need to bear.

 

305 pcs

18" x 12"

 

www.britishmuseum.org/collection:

Parody of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" with the ghost of Disraeli conjuring an image of Queen Victoria's Christmas dinner table for a sleeping man; the Queen seated at head of the table hosting multiple nationalities, representations of the Empire; servants serving a large Christmas pudding; presentation illustration to "St Stephen'sReview" (25 December, 1886).

Chromolithograph

 

www.pbs.org/empires/victoria/text/empiregladstone.html

The two rivals also disagreed on Britain's imperial destiny, Gladstone seeing colonies as more burden than boon, and attempting to disengage from empire and its expense.

 

victorianweb.org/history/empire/ljb1.html

Disraeli is commonly viewed as the great pro-active imperialist who hoped to unite the classes under the banner of Empire. Indeed, such an attitude might be seen as justified in the light of his glorious rhetoric, exemplified in the Manchester and Crystal Palace speeches of 1872. However, such an overly simplistic approach ignores the facts; the Imperial territories did not extend nearly as greatly between 1874-80 as they did under Gladstone, the supposed proponent of "the rights of the savage." Rather, Disraeli took a consolidatory approach, often opportunistic, but always with the definite objective of preserving the Empire according to his principles of "ToryDemocracy."

 

A summary of Disraeli's ideas of imperial action can be seen in his decision in 1876 to make Queen Victoria Empress of India. although it is clear that it was opportunistic, in that it gained him and his party favour with the Queen, it simultaneously asserted British control of India by providing a personal link, especially effective as a warning to the Russians that the Empire was there to stay.

  

www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/disraeli_gladsto...

What really mattered to Disraeli, however, was not home affairs but foreign and imperial policy. He was a strong supporter of empire and of English nationalism. This was a traditional Conservative mantra, but as long as Palmerston was leader of the Liberals it was hardly possible for the Conservatives to outbid them in terms of patriotic self-assertion. Palmerston's death left a vacancy. Gladstone was altogether more internationally minded - the protagonist of an ethical foreign policy that sometimes meant compromise over some of Britain's interests. Disraeli was all for cutting a dash - as with his purchase of the Suez Canal Company's shares, and, though somewhat less enthusiastically, with the passing of the Royal Titles Act in 1876, making the Queen Empress of India.

Qiu Zhijie was born in 1969 in Zhangzhou, China, and lives and works in Beijing and Hangzhou. He is known for his text- and calligraphy-based practice, which encompasses photography, performance, installation, painting, video and explores the struggle of self-assertion, particularly with reference to Chinese history..

 

In 1992, he graduated from the Printmaking department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art), Hangzhou. The artist’s break-through exhibition was in 1992 with China’s New Art, Post-1989 at the Hanart Gallery and Hong Kong Arts Centre. By 1999, his work began receiving international interest with his inclusion in Revolutionary Capitals: Beijing-London, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. In 2005, his work was exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum‘s Between Past And Future: New Photography And Video From China, including Tattoo 1, which explores Qiu’s assertion that in our media-saturated age, “signs and codes have overpowered actual human beings, and our bodies have become merely their vehicles.” The character bu-meaning “no”-is written across the artist’s body and on the wall behind him, creating the illusion that it floats free of the body. The ironic mixture of an ancient method of transmitting texts with contemporary content provokes people to rethink the relationship between tradition and today’s society. He is also a curator, art critic and professor. He has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the world at prestigious institutions and events, including MoMA PS1 (1998) and Queen’s Museum (2001), both New York; The Sao Paulo Biennale (2002); The Shanghai Biennale (2004); The Moscow Biennale (2007); Fondazione Querini Stampalia (2013), Venice; the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and Fondazione Berengo (2015), Venice. He was the curator for the 2012 Shanghai Biennale. He is currently a professor in the School of Cross-Medium Art at the China Academy of Art.

I recognize some of those megalomaniacal male tendencies you are describing, and why wouldn’t I (DUH!)? I know that ‘lost boy’ behaviour. It’s even attractive until one reaches a certain age, then it slopes off through unfortunate, and heads downhill rather swiftly towards downright tragedy. Applying the brakes at that stage is no party, let me tell you. Sometimes I feel as if I had been worn down up to the knees, a would-be demi-legged, own-trumpet-blowing, Falstaff, (if only those Jesuits had gotten hold of me) but then this isn’t about me. All these men searching for mammys, what can I say other than sorry about my gender, and thank Yahweh that I am a cis-gender homo (can I call myself that anymore?).

 

I think you can tell that I have arrived at the point that I am at, now, not at all sure what I am, or am not, permitted to call myself. I fear that I, at last, know what and who I am, but I am not at all sure if being that is acceptable in an evolving world. Luckily, we will all be dead soon enough. Now that’s something to really look forward to for the terminally bewildered. I like the idea of ‘A Death’ as the inflexion point of this ‘Comedy’ we are constructing. I have that funny death story to tell yet properly. That one where Jeffrey suddenly shot upright, screaming at his parents who were quibbling over what to watch on the TV. He screamed fiercely at them “I’m dying, I get to choose the video!”. It was gloriously well said. I do love the tyranny of the dying. I do love the abject tyranny of the victim (my specialty). Feck it, I will go the whole hog. I do love tyranny. I also love saying ‘Feck’, when everyone understands that you are insinuating another vowel in the place of that ‘e’. I love that feck is proper and Irish, a softening of that blow, liked a dropped ‘h’, that sort of softening and lilting.

 

He chose 'Singing in the Rain' and collapsed back into bed raving madly about having to make three different types of pies to prepare for some party or other in his head.

 

I did my job. I pressed the button and released more morphine, through the catheter in his chest, awash in the 'poor meeees'.

 

mea culpa, mea culpa,

mea máxima culpa.

 

Later, I made a drawing about his wonderful, life-affirming, self-assertion. I photographed myself beside it, the drawing that is, but discovered, whilst looking at it later, that I seemed to have disappeared.

 

I guess that's how things go. (Secretly, I love removing myself (with photoshop), but don't tell anyone).

 

John: A fine eulogy, full of life.

 

Ruin: I want to reply to this, a little later. I might even have to go into the third person, to get a little distance from the answer, and what it means. This will be an important part of 'the book'. I am putting this here as a sort of commitment.

 

Anyway, to start, another extended version of this 'story' begins under this photo (the title in parentheses below) below this. It starts with “I’m dying, I get to choose the video”, about halfway down. But I now want to write something a lot more personal, a lot more 'private' perhaps. So far I have been writing about what I call the 'Wild Geese', a recognised phenomenon in Irish history and culture. Now I want to talk about something a little more close to home. and that's the cuckoo gene. That born out of desperation taking up domicile in the 'nests' of other birds, that type of 'taking over'. I think of it slightly relative to that 'banquet idea' that excess, like a pheasant being stuffed with a quail, and the quail in turn being stuffed with a starling, or any smaller bird, that decadence. Anyway, I want to look at that goose initially stuffed with a cuckoo, that idea of the self as a desperate exploiter, but also looking at it as a survival strategy, a Darwinian ploy, even. I am still brewing it in my head, so it will stutteringly along.

 

‘On Universal Innocence and The Forgiveness of Freckles’.

 

But back to Geese and cuckoos.

 

‘The Rôti Sans Pareil Is 17 Birds Stuffed Inside Each Other and It Is Delicious’. So ran the headline.

 

"The recipe calls for a bustard stuffed with a turkey stuffed with a goose stuffed with a pheasant stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a duck stuffed with a guinea fowl stuffed with a teal stuffed with a woodcock stuffed with a partridge stuffed with a..."

 

There is a sort of madness there, manifesting, perhaps, one of the reasons we don't deserve to be here at all. Not that deserving has anything to do with it anyway.

 

Chickenman, Wild Geese, and now Cuckoo, this sounds like I am on a type of fowl trajectory. Here's to soaring, or swansonging, or attempting both, even!

 

John: The cuckoo was a popular metaphor in the 1950's, quite possibly in response to the aftermath of WWII and your revival gifts greater depth. One of the explorations of Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow was the impossibly undermined reconstruction of male identity, no matter what roots they sought to revive. The cuckoo, with its echo of cuckold, the returners from war rewarded with the ghost of doubt of paternity, puts all into those same murky depths of identity which artists equally embrace or flee. As ancient mythology evidences, we have always had a need to understand and belong. Post wars and natural disasters our need for the perceived solidity of information is greatly enhanced.. Technically, having a family formed of my partner's and her ex's three daughters, I am a cuckoo.

 

Apart from the actual people (greatly rewarding) I have also wondered if I was defying my sense of unbelonging by consciously electing to be the cuckoo, which, unlike artist, is I believe a choice.

  

Ruin: Yes, that would be true, that returning soldier thing. I would guess it has always been the case, have soldiers not been returning since time immemorial? I didn't make the connection between cuckoo and cuckold, a 'duh!' moment for me. Of course, it is there. I particularly like the cuckold personage. If I was going by the evidence of Reddit, or wherever, cuckolding seems to be enjoying a huge revival in the fetish world currently. I would guess it was all part and parcel of dealing with the diminished, and further diminishing, male, that area of 'twixt and 'tween being generated by an excess of hormone disruptors now in the environment (in plastics and whatever). But I have a whole theory about that relative to the possibility of the human animal evolving from sexual reproduction to bifurcatory splitting, that laboratory assisted dividing known as cloning, the copying of the self, whilst we are at that point of the Y chromosome being, apparently, at 3% of its former glory. Scientists tell us that it appears to be stable at 3%, but infinity is funny like that relative to stability.

 

The only place we would differ on here is that "unlike artist", which I am pretty sure we might partially agree on anyway. I don't see making art (or writing, even), any form of communication really, as a 'choice'. I see it both as an instinct and a compulsion, and for the most part a disruptive nuisance, an itch. I would have to fight very hard to resist it, that scratching called art making or communicating. I would have to go totally against my 'natural' self.

 

But this is something I will continue to work out until I no longer can, compulsively, this awful/wonderful itch. I like writing here, simply because it is immediate communication, and sometimes the feedback like yours is invaluable. There is this idea that writing needs to be done alone, like art, but I don't think that is necessarily 'true'. I think you have to work it out the best way you can, and there are no rules.

 

When I quote you, should I call you John Seven, or just John.? I have been calling you John, but thought I should ask. As in "John: A fine eulogy, full of life." Would you prefer John Seven?

 

John: Well, I don't know what went wrong with my sentence construction there, as I intended to state that artist is not a choice (nor a guarantee of quality). Now amended. Regarding my name - John used to be the skinhead universal form of address, as in "Y'want bovver Jon?"

It was also, in the the year I was born, the Mohamed, Muhammad, Muhamad, or Mohammad of its day, the most common male name in the world. In its many forms - Ian, Iain, Ifan, Sean, Shaun, Shane, Jens, Jean, Joan, Johan and so on.

 

I am happy with whatever you choose.

 

Ruin: I guessed we were on the same page relative to art, or writing, this 'fever' to communicate, is uncontrollable. It’s not a choice at all. But I feel the same about this cuckoo behaviour and this catfishing too. I see them both as survival manoeuvres, generated mostly out of desperation. Anyway, that's the point I will be starting from for this 'chapter'. I will be using the text generated here, and pulling it through the pronoun mangle, writing it in the third person, to get some distance, some overview.

 

Blimey, he realised, his behaviour had been stark raving cuckoo. He found it as difficult to think about as to write about this, but felt in the writing of it, that some liberation might be found there. The working out of it was going to have to be in the present, but there would be references and stories that harked back to his ‘Wild Goose’ history, his wandering, his running away. He knew too that he was going to have to stop playing with words, stop trying to entertain, this was not the way to go. By this he meant that “meself” as opposed to myself, that ‘cod Irish’, that “at all, at all”. That would naturally fall away anyway, as he moved away from childhood, as he learnt to speak, to communicate, even. His leaving Ireland was, in a way, his learning to talk. Before that period, he had been that oft-described stuttering, nervous, entity, floundering between church-generated guilt, and maintaining his secret, that abuse, that incest, that familial interference that could only serve to completely sunder him from family, and any semblance of security, of a feeling of belonging or of ever having been nurtured. It was nobody’s fault. Those who haven’t been nurtured have no idea how to nurture, and similarly those who have never been protected have no way of knowing how to proffer protection. Both his parents had, in their turn, being abandoned as children. It was all they knew. This was somehow part-and-parceled in with the history of that emerald island, that history of hundreds of years of abuse. That this abuse caused Irish literature to blossom, in that foreign tongue, English, is one of those creative offshoots of abuse, one of those ‘miracles’, as his mother used to say, describing anything good or beneficial, a silver-lining around those multi-generational deadening clouds.

 

He was angry, sad, and excited when he discovered that he had to leave to survive, that he had to give up everything, and everyone he had ever known, and set out alone for that pagan land, on the other side of the Irish Sea. Looking back, he liked that this cuckoo also described a sort of madness, other than the survival instinct it became somewhat renowned for, it also described that ‘stark raving’ idea, that there had always been this connection we humans make about this misunderstood creature, and its development of certain Darwinian characteristics generated by its struggle to survive.

 

Stealing somewhat from the title of the book by Mr. Foster Wallace (of the multiple footnotes on footnotes), he suspected that he had come to that point where he might, at last, ‘Consider the Cuckoo’.

 

John: This riffing on a thought, expanding out to discover surprises and similarities is a thing of wonder.

 

Ruin: It's a bit strange to be working it out in 'real time' here. I am literally working it through in my head as I write it. It becomes a self-justification, of sorts, I guess. I will tie it in, somehow, to the main theme. I am coming out of that chapter which has to do with childhood, and heading towards London, via a year in Liverpool, that age-old Irish route, through Aristophanes 'The Birds', from which the expression 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' comes, through Mr. Darwin, on the way towards New York, and 'Rack and Ruin'.

 

But yes, he was heading for ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’, only in as much as it was to be totally unfamiliar, there was the madness there of difference, a way of thinking that was foreign to everything he knew. The old rules just didn’t apply, but there were also new rules to learn.

 

On Universal Order

Or blessed lack thereof.

 

Dear Rack,

 

I suspect we have both had our moments with each other, compassionate and understanding, and the opposite. I have never felt particularly worthy, but that’s a universal, some dreadful leftover from a hideously insecure childhood, neglectful parents, absent alcoholic father and abusive uncle, all that palaver, that stuff of amateur melodrama, probably endemic, commonplace even, on that little emerald jewel called ‘home’. The thing is, or the pedestrian tragedy is, that you don’t really realise what you are carrying with you when you set off into the world alone, when you put on your walking shoes, you have no idea what your coping mechanisms are, how skew-whiff they might be relative to a world out there, a place that has most likely generated another type of abuse, a foreign variant, one which you have no experience of at all. It’s not unlike our beloved Omicron, another spiked battering ram, something that you might survive or not.

  

Yes, it’s the same old same old, those ‘Wild Geese’ setting off, full of youthful energy and dreams of conquest, already weighed down by their own undoing. Compassion was easy for me when we met. You had, apparently, fallen at the first hurdle, or so it seemed. I was very wrong about that. Wrecked Rack was phoenix-like. I didn’t know that then, though that constant re-igniting can work a certain ruin on the old cadaver. I notice a chemical smell in my urine, and I was wondering if you do too. We are now part chemical; a bit liked our beloved de Selby’s part bicycle, part human. We have been absorbing chemicals now for decades, and you even two decades more than I have. One cannot help but wonder how they have an effect on our very DNA, our day-to-day thoughts, our moods and our hopes, or despairs. But, butt, chicken butt, as I like to say, I have decided to make their influence positive. We are hybrid, a new man, and woman, a chemically enhanced super-breed of survivors.

  

How’s that for famous last words?

  

We are like no one else, though this is true of everyone. Now we have the added in-put of our screens, our hard-drives and external devices, all brain-enhancers and exploitable. These are our external memories, as that innate ability to remember slopes off, and it’s nothing less than a frigging ‘Universal Superhighway’. Nobody has had that before, though I would question as to whether this is a recurring phenomenon, forgotten but recurring, on an infinite ever-expanding loop (call me loopy). Heloise and Abelard could have done with a bit of that, but they managed anyway, so how can we not rape and pillage the universe with this magnificent, unimaginable, tool at our disposal? The only thing that holds us back is our massive insecurity, and our excuses. But the proffering of these to each other, the unashamed exposing of them, is the beginning of this Knausgaardian ‘struggle’, and we have been doing this for almost 30 years. We have the capacity to cross germinate, to percolate Sontag’s ‘Camp’ through Knausgaard’s, and the other tyrant’s, ‘Kampf’, that tragedy and camp comedy combined. I would like a little more of that ‘fun’ back, the laughing at the absurdity of it all combined with the realization of what we wrought, and how blindly reactive it was, and we were.

  

It would be wonderful to laugh, and scream, together again.

  

"But I wonder if you share my feeling that to write anything sufficiently accurate and engaging, and actually get it over all the hurdles of publication, and risk the ultimate disappointment of remaindering ... Oh, I could not do it now."

  

No, I have no intention of 'publishing', or even presenting what I am writing and thinking about, other than on Flickr. I find that I do things in 4-year traunches. The idea is just to sort out some of the mess I made, that cacophony of images I generated whilst trying to understand.

 

I am looking for where I didn't manage to communicate, although some of it ended up in museums (with appropriate puffing out of chest). A 4-year traunch/tranche is a challenge, a challenge because of age and the dragging of another 'fatal' disease along, with one, through a pandemic. Blissfully, science has intervened, yet again, somewhat offering respite, temporarily, from the Horsemen. I got that second Astra Zeneca yesterday, but am still jealous of those enjoying the intervention of the MRNA vaccines into the livestream of their DNA. If we are going to be so interfered with in that way, I want to be one of the first, on that cutting edge of the glorious new Science religion (that I love)! I would have loved to have been the Musk of death, that space pioneer and not the smell. Although, one appears to have missed that boat, along with many others, for now. But there is an acute awareness of their fetlocks and broomsticks, of those aforementioned Horsemen, that is, and their Woo and Woe.

 

Publishers, Bookshops, Museums and Galleries are over. Didn't you get the memo?

 

At the same time that remainder bin is essential. It is, more or less, where we all end up, the good and the bad, those who write with clarity and those who lick and salve their purple wounds in public.

 

You know that I love Purple, in a hate purple sort of way. Don't start me on Orange.

This 1856 painting by American artist Lilly Martin Spencer is displayed at the Brooklyn Museum. From the museum's description: "As the title implies, this bold young woman promises a dose of molasses to the person advancing to kiss her while she makes fruit preserves....Lilly Martin Spencer was a wife and mother as well as a professional painter and family breadwinner. Her great accomplishment was in representing homemakers who combined ideal domesticity and a more liberated, playful self-assertion."

 

... castello di gorizia

“WE MUST have an unconditional readiness to change in order to be transformed in Christ,”

 

For it is in contrition that the new fundamental attitude of a humble and reverent charity becomes dominant and manifest, that man abandons the fortress of pride and self-sovereignty, and leaves the dreamland of levity and complacency, repairing to the place where he faces God in reality...

 

...Contrition causes us to withdraw from our peripheral interests and to concentrate on the depths....

 

...By the just are meant neither the saints on the one hand nor the Pharisees on the other, but persons who, while leading a correct life and avoiding all transgressions in the strict sense of the term, never come to achieve that full surrender to God which (in a humanity tainted with original sin) is possible in contrition alone. Such persons are anxious to keep God’s commandments but they never discover the immense, unbridgeable abyss that separates the holiness of God from our sinfulness. Full self-surrender and the renunciation of all self-assertion (however hidden); the spiritual position of standing naked before God and throwing oneself altogether upon His mercy—these are things beyond their range of experience.

-Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ

War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars.

Arthur Koestler

War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars.

Arthur Koestler

The International Auschwitz Committee’s sculpture “To B Remembered” in front of the European Parliament in Brussels. The inscription above the main gate to Auschwitz that reads “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” (work sets you free) was a cynical lie, as all the prisoners knew and physically experienced day in day out. When the SS ordered them to weld the sign together, they had deliberately placed the ‘B’ in the word ‘ARBEIT’ upside down. It was a sign of self-esteem and self-assertion in an environment where all vestiges of human rights had been eradicated. They created a mark of their courage, their will to overcome the fear, to survive and later to tell the world about what happened in Auschwitz. #neverforget #HMD2014

Through Language in Vienna

 

A collaboration between Parrhesia, Zochrot and Ursula Hofbauer

 

Within the framework of the exhibition: OVERLAPPING VOICES

Israeli and Palestinian Artists

Essl Museum, Vienna

16/05 – 26/10/08

Opening: 15/05/08, 7.30 p.m.

Curators: Karin Schneider and Friedemann Derschmidt (Rites-institute), Vienna

Co-Curators: Tal Adler, Amal Murkus, Israel

 

Through Language is a public art project, a visual dictionary and site-specific glossary alternating between Arabic, German and Hebrew.

Giving the Arabic and the Hebrew languages presence in the public sphere in Europe evoke issues relating to the presence of our cultures within Europe, in the past as well as in the present .

We hope to question the tendencies of the Western world to perceive Arabic and Hebrew languages and cultures as threats and thus refer to the constant uprising of xenophobia and Anti-Semitism in Europe.

he project also proposes language and culture as an arena for listening and engaging in dialogue with the others.

 

AugartenStadt was not chosen by chance; as "verlorene Insel (lost island)" was the main scene of Jewish displacement in 1938 – and as a site of new migration, it is the space of current conflicts between populism, xenophobia and Muslim self-assertion.

 

The project was carried out before in two places in Israel – in Jerusalem and in Jaffa – employing Arabic and Hebrew transcriptions and translations. The project was a response to the widespread practice of Israeli extremists erasing the Arabic language from street signs, by using stickers or spray paint and to the state practices of Palestinian cultural oppression by marginalizing and under-privileging Arabic - an official language in Israel.

The Arabic words constitute keys to stories, memories, hopes and fears that are for the most part heard only inside private homes, without a presence in the public sphere and its discourse. The idea was to allow Arabic a presence in our public life.

We would like to manifest the presence of the Palestinian citizens of Israel - the native people upon whose destruction our state is built - through the visualization of their language and to express our wish to become culturally integrated in the Middle East.

 

Through Language was first presented in August 2006 in the exhibition "Neighborhood Works" (Curated by the Sala-Manca group) in the German Colony neighborhood of Jerusalem. The project's second presentation was in Jaffa where it was curated by the "Ayam" artist group, with the support of the Tel Aviv–Jaffa Municipality's Culture & Arts Division, Department of Arts; The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon; and The New Israel Fund.

 

Parrhesia is a group of educators, social activists and artists from the fields of graphic and industrial design, cinema, photography, video and fine art, who are engaged in Israel's civil society.

The group collaborates with organizations for social change and community activists – in addition to their independent activities in the public sphere.

 

Zochrot ["Remembering"] is a group of Israeli citizens working to raise awareness of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948. Zochrot endeavors to make the history of the Nakba accessible to the Israeli public, so as to engage Jews and Palestinians in an open recounting of their painful common history.

Zochrot hopes that by bringing the Nakba into Hebrew, the language spoken by the Jewish majority in Israel, they can make a qualitative change in the political discourse of this region. Acknowledging the past is the first step in taking responsibility for its consequences.

This must include equal rights for all the peoples of this land, including the right of Palestinians to return to their homes.

 

Parrhesia and Zochrot are engaged in an ongoing process of collaboration – the publication of Sedek, a magazine about the ongoing Nakba. Its first two issues can be viewed in the following links:

www.parrhesia.org/sedek.pdf

parrhesia.org/sedek2.pdf

  

DI Ursula Hofbauer is a Vienna-based artist and architect who has been working in and with public space in several exhibitions and art projects, including: “Strange Views” (1999), an exhibition project in the Viennese Prater with lettering on sidewalks; “Permanent Breakfast” (1999-2005), the everlasting breakfast in public space; wine-tasting with homeless people under a Viennese Bridge (2002); and art projects with refugees (2004-2006). Lectures, publications and guided tours about the Permanent Breakfast project, gender and public space and Viennese landmarks. Hofbauer is decidedly dedicated to all questions of democratic use and appropriation of public space and resulting designs.

We thank Aktionsradius Wien at Gaussplatz www.aktionsradius.at/

for a lot of valuable information, their hospitality and straightforward support.

 

Gargoyle is a mouth for ejected words of sweeping Lucifer this took other angels that had the seed of desire planted within them, for it is selfish desires that fuel the ego. He was expelled from the higher regions because he no longer had the Christic virtues but had the ego crystallized instead. Since we assert that selfish desires and interests strengthen the egos hold on us, it is also true that altruistic, compassionate service vivify the Christic force within us that stirs us to self-sacrifice for humanity (The hanged man). Can 'Lucifer' be the Hanged Man #12 card ? Here are a few depictions of the card for reference first: The Hanged Man...also known as Perspective....now also known as "Lucifer"....here's why I think this is an awesome pictorial for the meaning. What is the central meaning for the Hanged Man?

Letting go...as in accepting God's Will (give me a chance to explain...just a little more)

Giving up control

Accepting what is

Putting others first

NOW WAIT A MINUTE, ERIC !! You said this would all make sense....Lucifer isn't this way!

...TRUE.....and that's my point. He is the card's "shadow side" (or Reversed). The shadow side of every card is the not-so-well known or publicized meanings that are just as much true as the upright meanings...just from a different 'perspective' (like how i tied that all in...LOL)

Lucifer...Satan....the Devil....whoever you may call him....he IS the Hanged Man's other half to complete the whole story.

Let's look at the original card again...upside down or Shadow side: This way what does the card suggest? The man is now grounded again, able to walk on his OWN TWO FEET, under his OWN power. What about his head? It's still a-glow with enlightenment ! But wait....I thought the man got his enlightenment while hanging upside and submitting? He did....but he also CAN on his own...

...just like Lucifer did !

Remember the first card above said "New Vision"? The figure was 'standing tall' with wings spread, leaving the corpse on the ground that was a slave to the 'old ways'. Keeping these images in mind lets see the meanings of the Hanged Man again...as it's 'True' other "Shadow"

Reversing...turning the world around...overturning old priorities

Seeing things from a new angle or perspective

Up-Ending the old order...doing an about-face

Living in the moment...for the NOW !

Defiance

Self-assertion

Sound more like the Lucifer you know? Let's look again: What we are witnessing is the moment Lucifer made his choice to rebel...and just BE HIMSELF ! On the left...heaven...his appointment there, where he was told what to do and had limited choice. On the right, FREEDOM as not a PLACE, but an IDEA....where he stretches his hand out in acceptance (notice the other is more closed with a "shackle of light" restricting it's movement).

Notice, also, the color of his wings: white on left from that of God's control, dark on right to show expansive freedom like that of space. In-between there is a struggle for control, for power, and for self-enlightenment. Both God and now Lucifer know this....the time for a new perspective has come...and Lucifer chose FREE WILL.

Whether I believe in Lucifer or not is unimportant...only the symbolism here to help see the relationship of the meanings of both Light and Shadow...neither one more important than the other....both necessary to the True meaning of the Hanged Man card.

Which side are you? Do you submit to what others tell you is right...or do you find you listen to what your heart tells you? You may have more in common with this card than you previously thought ! Cheers !

Eric "MoonLightTrucker"

“Esoterically, the Hanged Man is the human spirit which is suspended from heaven by a single thread. Wisdom, not death, is reward for this voluntary sacrifice during which the human soul, suspended above the world of illusion, and meditating upon its unreality, is rewarded by the achievement of self-realization.” – Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages.

In the Tarot with the twelfth (12th) card called ‘The Hanged Man”or in French, “Le Pendu.” The Hanged Man (XII) is the twelfth trump or Major Arcana card in most traditional Tarot decks.

 

This card portrays a young man hanging upside down by his left leg from a horizontal beam, the latter supported by two tree trunks from each of which six branches have been removed. The right leg of the youth is crossed in back of the left and his arms are folded behind his back in such a way as to form a cross surmounting a downward pointing triangle. According to Elphias Levi, the Hanged Man thus forms an inverted symbol of sulphur. Elphias Levi had stated in his book, Transcendental Magic; ” It is also implied fantastically that the Roman alphabet is related to Tarot cards, but whereas the Hebrew Mem answers to the card of Death the Roman M is referred to the Hanged Man, Resh to the Judgement card but R to the Blazing Star.” Levi likens the hanged man to the legend of Prometheus, the titan who gave fire to mankind and in turn suffered the wrath of Zeus by becoming the eternal sufferer, not just by being bound to a rock, but to also have his liver fed upon by an eagle each day. the Egyptian Tarot the hanged man is hung upside down between two palm trees, which is said to signify the Sun God who dies perennially for his world. In some Tarot decks, the figure in the 12th card carries under each arm a money bag from which coins are escaping. Some people have said that this latter card is that of Judas Iscariot who is said to have gone forth and hanged himself, the money bags representing the payment he received for his crime. The Hanged Man is a form of Pittura infamante;

 

(Italian for “defaming portrait”; plural pitture infamanti) is a genre of defamatory painting and relief, common in Renaissance Italy. It came to be regarded as a form of art rather than effigy; the power of the genre derived from a feudal-based code of honor, where shame was one of the most significant social punishments. Common themes of pittura infamante—which were meant to be humiliating—include depicting the subject as wearing a mitre or hanging upside down, being in the presence of unclean animals such as pigs or donkeys or those deemed evil like snakes; pittura infamante would also contain captions listing the offenses of the subject.Pittura infamante could originate as more favorable depictions, only to be transformed after the subject had fallen out of favor.

PleaseView On Black

  

The attitude of the Indian toward death, the test and background of life, is entirely consistent with his character and philosophy.

Death has no terrors for him; he meets it with simplicity and perfect calm, seeking only an honorable end as his last gift to his family and descendants.

Therefore, he courts death in battle; on the other hand, he would regard it as disgraceful to be killed in a private quarrel.

If one be dying at home, it is customary to carry his bed out of doors as the end approaches, that his spirit may pass under the open sky.

Even the worst enemies of the Indian, those who accuse him of treachery, blood-thirstiness, cruelty, and lust, have not denied his courage but in their minds it is a courage is ignorant, brutal, and fantastic.

His own conception of bravery makes of it a high moral virtue, for to him it consists not so much in aggressive self- -assertion as in absolute self-control.

The truly brave man, we contend, yields neither to fear nor anger, desire nor agony; he is at all times master of himself; his courage rises to the heights of chivalry, patriotism, and real heroism.

 

Albrecht Dürer -

Bildnis Johannes Kleberger [1526] -

Vienna KHM GAP wm

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Albrecht Dürer - Portrait of Johannes Kleberger, 1526

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Inv. no. 850

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1. Description of the painting

The square limewood panel presents Johannes Kleberger in a near-frontal three-quarter view, his head emerging like an antique bust from a dark circular recess. This zone, conceived as a medallion or blind oculus, contrasts sharply with the stone-coloured outer frame. Through a subtle trompe-l’œil effect, the head casts a shadow onto the surrounding surface, creating the illusion that it projects into the viewer’s real space.

The sitter is depicted nude, without any attributes, jewellery or clothing. The focus rests entirely on the head: a striking, slightly eccentric face with brown, wide-open eyes, dark curly hair and deeply set sideburns. The flesh is delicately modelled; hints of beard growth, carefully graduated light and shadow, and the precise articulation of nose, brows and cheekbones lend the visage a strong physiognomic presence. In the pupils, window-cross reflections are visible, further enhancing the illusion of lifelikeness.

The inscription within the medallion, executed in carefully painted orange-yellow Roman capitals, reinforces the character of an antique medal:

EFFIGIES JOHANNI KLEBERGERS NORICI ANNO AETATIS SVAE XXXX.

Adjacent to the inscription appears a sign resembling a merchant’s mark. The outer frame bears coats of arms and astrological symbols in its corners, including a golden emblem with stars in the upper left, referring to the horoscope of Kleberger, born under the sign of Leo.

The entire conception oscillates deliberately between painting, sculpture and numismatics, presenting Kleberger simultaneously as a real individual and as an idealised, heroic figure.

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2. Art-historical analysis and interpretation

The Portrait of Johannes Kleberger of 1526 is among the last and most unconventional portraits in Albrecht Dürer’s œuvre. It is devoted to a personality who provoked both admiration and resentment in Nuremberg: a socially ambitious merchant, humanist and adventurer whose life was consciously aligned with antique models of self-fashioning.

Dürer responds to this extraordinary sitter with an equally extraordinary pictorial invention. Elements drawn from ancient portrait sculpture, the Renaissance medal, and illusionistic painting are combined to create a unique portrait type. Kleberger appears as a living antique sculpture, a conception that directly engages with the paragone, the Renaissance debate on the hierarchy of the arts. Here painting triumphs over sculpture, for it creates not only plastic presence but also animation, gaze and psychological depth — a painterly equivalent of the Pygmalion myth.

The sitter’s deliberate nudity is neither naturalistic nor erotic but heroic in connotation. It recalls antique ruler portraits and Roman imperial imagery, which Kleberger himself adopted on contemporary medals. Instead of external signs of status — sumptuous dress or ostentatious display — Dürer concentrates on the physiognomic expression of character. In accordance with contemporary theories, outward appearance is understood as a reflection of inner qualities: the strongly articulated facial features convey a leonine temperament, associated with determination, ambition and self-confidence.

The astrological signs and heraldic emblems on the frame not only document Kleberger’s self-assertion and social ascent, but also point to his humanist education and familiarity with astrological writings, possibly those of Agrippa. Much suggests that the sitter himself played an active role in shaping the iconographic programme of the painting.

That Dürer accepted the commission despite Kleberger’s conflict with his close friend Willibald Pirckheimer may be explained by the artist’s fascination with the sitter’s singular personality and by the opportunity to create something radically new. The portrait is therefore far more than a mere “cabinet piece”: it is a virtuoso artistic statement that transcends genre boundaries and defines the individual not through rank or wealth, but through character and personality.

Kleberger’s evident attachment to the painting — he took it with him when he left Nuremberg — underscores its function as a form of self-portrait mediated through portraiture, oscillating between self-aggrandisement, humanist ideals and artistic reflection.

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