“Edvard Munch at the Courtauld”

“In a dramatic self-portrait, Edvard Munch (1863-1944) stares out at us, looking both grand and cautious. Self-Portrait in the Clinic (1909) was painted while the painter was in a clinic, as he was treated for a nervous breakdown. After years of working strain, public derision, disastrous affairs and heavy drinking, Munch had hallucinations and collapsed. He committed himself to a Danish clinic, where he was one of the first patients to receive electro-convulsive therapy.

The current exhibition Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen at the Courtauld Institute, London (27^th May–5^th September) shows aspects of the Norwegian artist’s turbulent life. The exhibition includes all Munch’s major genres. These paintings are loaned from a museum in Norway, all collected by Rasmus Meyer.

Meyer knew the artist personally and bought pictures directly from his studio. He selected the best paintings, ones that showcased Munch’s core themes and stages of his development. That provides an ideal selection for this small exhibition (only 20 paintings), which distils the essence of the Norwegian genius…”

To read the full review free visit whynow? website here: https://whynow.co.uk/read/edvard-munch-at-the-courtauld-review

The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body

In The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body Alys George, a specialist in German culture at New York University, applies an interdisciplinary approach to the thesis that conceptions of the body were central to the up swelling of avant-garde culture during the period of Viennese Modernism.

George defines the Viennese fin de siècle as 1870-1938, contrasting with the usual definition as 1870/80 to 1914. Nominating the Anschluss as the cut-off of the beaux-arts period implies a level of continuity between pre-war and post-war periods in Vienna that diverges from the way other countries are assessed. The classification suggests Viennese society had not adjusted to its loss of empire and was still strongly attached to its pre-war culture, something reflecting Austria’s naturally conservative culture. It is paradoxical, of course, that the Vienna that was so critical of Modernism, clung to pre-war Jugendstil, Symbolism and Expressionism when much of Europe sought new styles and new political paradigms. Defeat shattered German society, yet that same defeat seemed to entrench and isolate Vienna in its pre-war culture, almost a rejection of defeat. However, Vienna’s reputation as the cockpit of Modernism (especially in Jugendstil and Expressionism) decreased dramatically, with attention increasingly focused on Paris during the inter-war period.  

The central concern of Viennese modernism is, according to Werner Hofmann and Hilde Spiel, “to recognize the flesh, to apprehend the human being in its creatureliness”. George claims the materialism of contemporary Viennese science centres culture of that location on the body. Vienna was a centre of medicine and the nascent science of psychology/psychotherapy, as well as anthropological criminology. One of the leading criminolgists was Italian Cesare Lombroso. Criminology was intimately associated with physiological and psychological research that ranged from the soundly evidence led to the crank pseudo-science such as physiognomy and racial classification. Sexology developed in Vienna in this period specifically so that normative sexual behaviour could be classed as legal and deviant behaviour classed as illegal. Study of disease, hygiene, exercise and naturism were interlinked, mixing science with fad, frequently crossed into areas of law-making, public policy and discussion of sex (both sexual activity and the innate characteristics of the two sexes).

Anthropometry and phsysiognomy flourished. Reproduced in the book is a page of head types drawn by Egon Schiele for a scientific textbook in 1917. Ethnography and anthropology were used to advance knowledge and to categorise races. George discusses the 1896 public presentation of an Ashanti village – transported from the Gold Coast, complete with wood-and-thatch huts and natives in traditional garb – set up in the Prater, the zoological park, in Vienna. It did booming business, with 15,000 visitors on the opening afternoon. Berlin took up the model by setting up an Abyssinian village in 1905. While George presents the range of responses to the event – more public spectacle than scientific demonstration – and inferences that can be drawn, she is rather too forward with her contemporary moral position than some readers will wish.

A comparative display was the 1906 General Hygienic Exhibition, also held in Vienna, one of many held in European cities. “Such large-scale exhibits aimed to reach the broadest possible audience by combining medical science about the body and hygiene, targeted at laypeople, with concrete directives about how to best improve one’s physical constitution.” This was a widespread drive for self-improvement through science and pseudo-science. “The notion of reforming the body included several branches: personal hygiene; naturopathy, nutrition reform, abstinence, and drug prevention; physical education and sports movements, including gymnastics, alpinism, and dance; clothing reform; spa and bathhouse culture; and nudism (the latter often subsumed under the rubric of Freikörperkultur, literally, “free body culture”).” It included not only advice, information and models, its exhibits acted as a trade fair for commercial wares in the expanding health-improvement-device market. Scientism and fads mingle easily – and sometimes indistinguishably – with science and technological advances.

There is a chapter on bodies in Viennese literature, centring on Arthur Schnitzler, Marie Pappenheim, Joseph Roth, Carry Hauser and Ödön von Horváth. (The first two were medical doctors as well as authors.) Robert Musil saw himself as a vivisector. Sigmund Freud, the most influential of Viennese Modernist writer, analysed the overlap between culture and body and the constant struggle between restraint and expression and the resultant dysfunction. Schnitzler’s depictions of dissecting rooms were from personal experience and his attempt to lay bare the malaises at the heart of modern life was akin to a medical diagnosis. Pappenheim also wrote a poem about a dissecting room. Journalist Joseph Roth wrote of the plight of the underclass – including the Kriegsbeschädigte (“the war damaged”) – in his articles in the years of deprivation. Horváth’s 1932 play is set in the Anatomical Institute, Vienna. George neatly summarises the bodily-focus of the texts but does not draw an overarching conclusion.

George discusses the position of working-class women as the subjects of medical institutions and research in Viennese medicine. She mentions Klimt’s murals for the university, including one for the discipline of medicine, which featured a pregnant woman nude. She also discusses controversies over abortion in the inter-war period.

George writes well of Schiele’s drawings made at the Women’s Clinic. “His drawings of mothers-to-be exude a candid, radical corporeality, an unaesetheticized physicality that sets them apart from even Klimt’s paintings of the same theme […] Schiele’s drawings call attention to questions regarding women’s sexuality, social marginality, and the more general problem of scopic power in fin-de-siècle Vienna.” George notes that these privileges for artists tells us about the thinking of physicians and senior hospital administrators. “[…] the access of artists to patients in Viennese clinical settings must be read together with concurrent efforts to put the clinics themselves and their modernity on display to the public. A modern type of medical architecture that emerged around the fin de siècle blurred the boundaries between private and public, while facilitating the production of images that could later be deployed in nonclinical settings.”

However, this seems too clear cut. For instance, the people who granted access for Schiele and Mime van Osen probably did not expect that art to become public – after all, there was no appetite at the time for public display of such images. How official was their access? Was it not a case of senior staff sympathetic to artists (who would be undertaking private research not expected to be shown directly to the public) offering access in return for a drawing or a portrait? To what degree was the institution itself sanctioning artist access? George assumes that the access was known and approved by authorities but this may not be the case. For example, John Richardson states that Picasso probably gained access to confined prostitutes in Paris during his Blue Period due to the ministrations of a doctor who had treated one of Picasso’s mistresses. Favours or payment in kind may have played more of a part than official policy, especially if it were tacitly understood that the artists would not display their art or mention where they met the subjects.

A chapter discusses the role of gesture in theatre, mime, dance and silent film. This is framed through the theories of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Long, flowing clothing was used to emphasise movement; some dancers were photographed nude, taking the expressiveness to new heights by abandoning the conventions of modesty. This relates to naturism and the advent of art photography. The New School for Movement Art operated in Vienna, covering “rhythmic gymnastics and calisthenics, dance, ballet technique, and acrobatics, [also] anatomy and physiology, pedagogy and psychology, instruction in form and harmony, the history of art, music, dance, and gymnastics, costume art, and figural and ornamental drawing.” Expressionism in Austria and Germany involved cinema, theatre and dance, which involved a lot attention to communication through form, gesture and movement.

Overall, The Naked Truth provides a thoughtful and intelligent overview of the role of the body in Viennese science and culture of the fin-de-siècle and modern periods.

Alys X. George, The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body, Chicago University Press, 2020, hardback, 322pp + xi, 43 mono illus., $45, ISBN 978 0 226 669984

© 2021 Alexander Adams

To view my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

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James Ensor: Chronicle of his Life

Xavier Tricot, Ensor scholar and author of his catalogue raisonné, has written James Ensor: Chronicle of His Life, a summary biography of James Ensor (1860-1949). Ensor is a significant artist in the development of Post-Impressionism and the foundation of Expressionism and has gone to be one of the most influential of Belgian artists. This book illustrates paintings and photographs, giving an account of major events and relationships, with lengthy quotations from letters and press articles.

Ensor was born in Ostend in 1860. His mother was Belgian and his father English. He met his future wife while on holiday in her native city. Ensor revered his father, whom he described as exceptionally intelligent, handsome and athletic. He had hoped to start a new life for the family in the USA but his foray across the Atlantic coincided with the Civil War and he had to return. It seems the set-back left him increasingly resentful of narrow materialism and limited intellectual scope of Ostend. More than a little of this attitude seems to have been adopted by his son. The family ran a gift, curio and seashell shop. The many masks in the shop and the apartment above provided Ensor with his most compelling subject, one that make him famous.

Ensor studied fine art in Brussels from 1877 to 1880. His art education in Ostend had been limited and traditional. At the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts he received more traditional training. He did not do well in examinations and tended to be placed in the middle or bottom of the class. One of his fellow students was Fernand Khnopff. Ensor worked alongside Willy Finch (1854-1930). They sometimes painted the same still-life side by side and they used similar styles; they painted each other’s portraits.

Ensor was disillusioned by the expectations of the academy and the opportunities for advanced art in Belgium in 1880. That year he left both the academy and the capital, to return to live with his parents in Ostend. Advanced art was synonymous with Impressionism and Realism. Ensor enthusiastically explored both avenues, relishing the use of paint that made clear its materiality. The Oyster-eater (1882) is a good example of Impressionist-inflected Realism.

His early paintings were marines, townscapes, still-lifes and interiors. They show careful observation and the adoption of a Realist palette, enlivened by attention to facture. Tricot has included seminal works by Ensor, stressing the paintings rather than the drawings or etchings. The book amounts to a biography of Ensor through his own words and art as Chronicle contains quotes from Ensor’s own writings, which were extensive. He wrote some articles and many letters, few of which are available in English translation. The reproductions are largely accurate and all the paintings are reproduced in colour.

Ensor’s paintings earned respect from critics and fellow artist when they were exhibited in numerous group exhibitions over the 1880s. He was building the reputation of being a leading painter, without there being anything unique about his paintings. His association with Les XX (the Belgian group of avant-gardists, operational 1883-1893) and La Libre Esthétique group (the successor group, 1893-1914) helped to spread knowledge of Ensor’s art. Despite this recognition, sales were slow and prices low.

In 1883 Ensor began painting his mask series in earnest. These paintings were of figures wearing carnival and theatrical masks – and the masks with figures – as well as skeletons, each interacting with each other and with figures who seem unaware of their presence. They were to prove Ensor’s greatest achievement. They destabilised the narrative of Realist art and took on aspects of caricature, satire and dream imagery. They extended gothic art and fantasy art. Ensor was playing with the boundaries between real and unreal, living and inanimate, high and low art, entering the territory that Symbolists were examining in the same period. What made Ensor different was his wit and the use of images and conventions found in satirical prints. The Symbolists were rather averse to humour, satire and social commentary, which can make their art rather self-important, grand and detached.

He started to overpaint his older pictures, adding masks which mock the oblivious subjects. Ensor’s mask paintings were not his sole output during this time. He was as likely to exhibit a still-life, view of Ostend or a religious drawing. Ensor’s religious paintings are almost all centred on Christ, interpreting the life of Christ through a personal fusion of Ensor’s own surroundings and the art he loved. They are highly idiosyncratic pieces and vary in tone from the devotional to satirical and the autobiographical. His spurt of originality lasted from around 1883 to 1900, when Ensor’s verve diminished rapidly. His love of Turner blunted his earthy palette. He reprised old subjects but never recaptured his fire. Ironically, it was after 1900 that artistic taste caught up with Ensor and collector interest increased substantially.  

Ensor participated in the 1901 Venice Biennale. A series of publications and exhibitions raised his profile. He was knighted in 1903. In 1904 he met art dealer François Franck and in 1910 the well-connected gallerist Herbert von Garvens-Garvensburg, both of whom bought and exhibited his art. Ensor ended up painting replicas of his old paintings to meet the demand of collectors but his new compositions were generally unremarkable. In 1925 Ensor was admitted to the Académie Royale. In 1929 a huge retrospective was held in Brussels, including 337 paintings, 325 drawings and 135 etchings. The same year he was awarded a barony.   

Tricot has uncovered new data about Ensor’s life from memoirs and Ensor’s own letters. It seems his father was brutally attacked in 1885 and was hospitalised, apparently mentally unstable, and died in 1887. Tricot reveals links between Ensor and a number of artists well-known and obscure. He quotes letters written to (and from) Ensor’s publishers and collectors. He discusses matters of price and provenance that allow us to understand Ensor’s attitude towards the disposal of his art. In particular, Tricot provides information about how Ensor attempted to place key pictures with certain museums. Although this is not a full biography, the inclusion of the artist’s words gives a vivid sense of his character and views. His sardonic humour, wild wit, self-pity and capriciousness emanate from his comments. Memoirs and letters of others tell us how he was seen. Tricot has corrected the dating of At the Conservatoire from 1902 to 1893, altering his position the publication of his 2009 catalogue raisonné.

Overall, this is a very useful guide to Ensor’s life and art, especially when read in conjunction with larger catalogues. Perhaps the only shortcoming is the absence of graphic work, which may be less familiar to readers but was a key aspect of Ensor’s oeuvre.

Xavier Tricot, James Ensor: Chronicle of His Life, 1860-1949, Mercatorfonds/Yale University Press (distr. Yale), 2020, paperback, 224pp, 200 col. and mono illus., £30, ISBN 978 0 300 25397 9

© 2020 Alexander Adams

To see my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

The New Berlin, 1912-32

[Image: Dodo, Theatre Box Logic, for ULK magazine, (1929), watercolour and graphite, 40 x 30 cm, Krümmer Fine Art © Krümmer Fine Art]

The New Berlin, 1912-32 is a current exhibition which examines art that flourished in Berlin during the flowering of Modernism from 1912 to the end of the Weimar Republic in 1932 (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, 5 October 2018-27 January 2019). The exhibition (including more than 200 works of art in all media) focuses on advanced German art that made it to Belgium in those years and the art made by Belgians in response to that art. It features many names familiar to international visitors and figures from the Belgian art world who are lesser known internationally. This exhibition is reviewed from the catalogue.

The exhibition opens in 1912, which was when (in March 1912) the Der Sturm gallery opened in Berlin. The gallery would feature much of the era’s most ground-breaking art. In collaboration (and competition) with Galerie Georges Giroux in Brussels and dealer Alfred Flechtheim, Der Sturm allowed art to reach Berliners and – through loans and publications – international audiences, including those in Belgium. Futurism, Cubist, Blaue Reiter, Expressionism and abstract art began to be diffused via publications such as Die Aktion. The influence of Expressionist woodcuts – being the most accessible and accurately reproducible art of the time – became apparent in the art of Frans Masereel and Gustave De Smet. Their woodcuts are stylistically identical to those produced by the German Expressionists.

The year 1912 was when Belgian art’s influence began to dramatically wane. Art Nouveau, Aestheticism, Symbolism, Luminism and Neo-Divisionism all had leading practitioners in Belgium, not least in the fields of illustration and poster design, and were popular Europe-wide from roughly 1890 to 1910. Belgium (particularly Brussels) was one of the artistic hubs of the period. The outbreak of the Great War decisively extinguished these movements as vital strands.

[Image: Raoul Hausmann, The Art Critic (1919-20), lithograph and printed paper, 31.8 x 25.4 cm, Tate: Purchased 1974, Inv. T01918 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017]

Belgium was occupied by German forces from 1914 to 1918. At this point German art, through exhibition and publication, became dominant sources of new ideas in a Belgium isolated from the rest of Europe. Belgian artists exiled in the Netherlands found kinship with German Expressionists in artistic terms. Some of the Expressionists were anti-war, Socialist and internationalists, which struck a chord with foreign artists. During the war and into the 1920s and 1930s Expressionism became a distinct school in Belgium, influencing artists of École Laethem-Saint-Martin, Nervia and independent painters such as the young Paul Delvaux. Expressionism of Belgium (principally in Flanders) is characterised by its domestic subjects, muted coloration, emotional moderation and links to traditional subjects. The Belgian palette contrasts with the lurid aggression of the Germans. Belgians saw Expressionism as a way of connecting to an actual remembered past while the Germans wanted to connect to an imagined past of exotic savages. The exhibition includes paintings and prints by Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Pechstein, Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz. During the occupation many German artist-soldiers made the pilgrimage to the studio of James Ensor in Ostend. The elderly Ensor was considered a pioneer of Expressionism for his celebrated mask paintings, made decades earlier. While stationed in Belgium, Heckel made art and the exhibition includes one of his paintings of Bruges.

In aftermath of the war, the assertively Modern seemed the only adequate response to the horror of invasion, destruction and mass slaughter. In 1918 Art Nouveau seemed incomprehensibly archaic and Symbolism a feeble fantasy world. Art for a shattered world would have to break with tradition. Exposure to art of Germany led to many young Belgians looking East following liberation. They divided roughly into two camps: the angry Expressionists, Dadaists and satirists and the idealistic abstractionists. The former reacted to the social and emotional upheaval of the war; the latter decided to prevent suffering and disunity through the establishment of technical perfection, scientific social policy and aesthetic revolution. In Belgium over 1918-20 there was a burst of short-lived utopian artistic groups inspired by liberation and the Russian Revolution. With the ideals of pacificism, Modernism, Socialism and internationalism (advocating European unity), these groups espoused rejecting tradition rather than adapting or hybridising it. Much of the art that inspired Germans and Belgians was Russian: Naum Gabo, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko and Kazimir Malevich.

[Image: Naum Gabo, Model for constructed Torso (1917), cardboard. 1917, reassembled 1981, 39,5 x 29 x 16 cm, Tate: Accepted by HM Government in lieu of tax and allocated to the Tate Gallery 1995, T06972, © Tate, London 2018]

Some of the leading Belgian abstract artists were Pierre-Louis Flouquet, Victor Servranckx and Marthe Donas. The radical ideas of Soviet architects found fertile ground with German architects and Bauhaus teachers. A number of uncompromisingly modern projections for redevelopment of Alexanderplatz, Berlin are shown here.

In the 1920s Berlin became a world metropolis, the third largest in the world (behind London and New York). Berlin was a city that was uniquely divided between the advanced and the regressive. It was home of the world-class pioneering technology, architecture and arts and was beset by widespread unemployment, hunger, prostitution, poverty, political violence and the persistent effects of wartime upon former soldiers, many severely crippled. This proved a stimulating environment for new art.

[Image: Otto Dix, Two Children (1920), oil on canvas, 95 x 76 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts Belgium, Brussels, inv. 7510, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn © SABAM Belgium]

Georg Simmel described the city dweller as free from traditional constraints of religion, morality and local political affiliations. The urban person had been liberated from the constraints of custom and – newly anonymous, mobile, freely associating – was able to develop his/her talents; these tastes might reach a state of extremity. Take a look at Hans Baluschek’s printed portraits of a drunk, carnival whore and cocaine addict – victims of urban degeneracy. Criminologists in Vienna and Berlin were engaged by the question of whether or not cities caused latent criminality and moral weakness to corrupt individuals. Two paradigms were at war: the utopian (cities allowed the fusion of individuals into superhuman forces of productivity, creativity and innovation) and the dystopian (cities allowed the moral and genetic dregs of society to spawn turpitude among the masses). As one looks through the art here, one cannot help but see the abstractionists, Bauhaus teachers and city planners as utopians and the political artists and Dadaists as dystopians.

The proclivity for people to seek out likeminded others led to the acceleration of tendencies and producing ever more extreme and specialised styles. In Modernism there has always been a craving for novelty. When the style of Weimar Berlin art was not Modernist, the subject matter was often contemporary. The Neue Sachlichkeit and Magic Realist artists painted modern places (such as cabaret clubs, cinemas, streets filled with automobiles) and modern people (drag artists, homosexuals, flappers, Communist and Nazi agitators). Dodo, Lotte Laserstein, Hannah Höch and others female artists were the so-called New Women, liberated from former constraints, and they portrayed New Women. Only Laserstein could be described as a Neue Sachlichkeit painter. (See my review of Laserstein’s current solo exhibition in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt in the next issue of The Jackdaw.)  Political satire often dictated the tone, especially in the work of George Grosz, Otto Dix, Raoul Hausmann and John Heartfield. This was the time when Heartfield made photomontage into a mass art and a political weapon. His attacks on Nazism featured on the covers of AIZ and other publications and are recognised as classics today. (Read my review of Heartfield’s photomontages here.)

Berlin was home to other leading creative figures, including filmmaker Fritz Lang, playwright Bertolt Brecht and novelist Alfred Döblin. The catalogue includes an informative essay on Expressionist cinema discussing the role of Nietzsche’s thought on the films by Robert Wiene and others. Other essays cover the changing character of Berlin, photomontage, the New Women of Berlin and political art. Groups of works are illustrated in sequences with brief written summaries. The texts (which are based on research rather than theory and are admirably free of jargon) ably map the importance of Berlin as a centre for the visual arts and explain links between Belgian artists and the capital of Germany during the period of High Modernism. The profuse illustrations of periodicals show what people were reading at the time and how they consumed art. This catalogue forms a good introduction to these subjects and will be of value to anyone wanting to understand the role of Berlin in European Modernism during its heyday.

 

Inga Rossi-Schrimpf et al, The New Berlin, 1912-32, Lannoo/Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, 2018, hardback, 256pp, fully col. illus., €34.99, ISBN 978 2390 250 739

 

© 2018 Alexander Adams

View my art and books here: http://www.alexanderadams.art

Peter Kuper: Kafkaesque

[Image: (c) 2018 Peter Kuper]

Kafkaesque is a new book by graphic artist Peter Kuper featuring stories by Franz Kafka. Kuper, whose previous graphic novel Ruins won an Eisner Award in 2016, has produced black-and-white woodcut-style illustrations for 14 stories by Kafka. Kafka wrote stories in different forms. There were lengthy allegories, stories in the form of dreams and short parables which were as honed as parables of Biblical character. Kafka was the sort of visual writer whose stories lend themselves to illustration – ones with lots of strong images but not overly descriptive or detailed. Interestingly enough, when Kafka discussed with his publisher the illustrations for his famous “Metamorphosis” (wherein Gregor Samsa woke one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect) Kafka was categorically insistent that the insect Gregor not be depicted. Kuper has elected not to illustrate “Metamorphosis” – but only because he has already made his version of it.

Kuper decided to work on scratchboard, which is an inked board or paper which is scratched away with a tool. This is working in negative, a reverse of the ink-on-paper positive approach. This gives the images a starker, rawer feeling. The slight irregularities of the scratching – combined with the unreliable fidelity of the scanning technology which records it – add to the slight wavering quality of the images. This softens what might otherwise be a rather harsh mono style without mid-tones. The style also works against cross-hatching, which tends to abrade scratchboard unpleasantly and erratically. The primacy of black gives the panels an omnipresent atmosphere of impending darkness, where daylight or electric light are only brief reprieves from the natural normality of a dark universe. In Kafka’s writing, one feels the standard is ignorance, unfairness, oblivion, coldness and isolation. There is much humour in Kafka – which Kuper brings out – but that does not invalidate his bleak outlook. Humour is the spark of humanity in the cosmic expanse of indifference and darkness. It is deliberate that blank pages between stories are black rather than white.

Extracts of Kafka’s text are used as narration and dialogue. The stories are changed from Kafka’s neutral or naturalistic settings to a heightened setting, often in modern America, though never explicitly contemporary. Kuper’s art blends uses imagery of mid-century America, populated by people, drawn in a consistent and stylised manner. The stylisation is in line with the Expressionist printmakers that Kuper admires.

[Image: (c) 2018 Peter Kuper]

The artist describes his drawn stories as translations and conversations with the original stories. Sometimes Kuper has adapted freely and imposed a distinct personal approach. For example, “The Trees” becomes a depiction of homeless rough sleepers on New York streets. “Before The Law” becomes an allegory of racial injustice, where a black man awaits admittance to the chambers of the law, guarded by a white man. To be fair to Kuper, he leaves this matter open to our interpretation but our knowledge of current political narratives suggests a political intention. “In The Penal Colony” needs no alteration to make it a criticism of the severity of judicial punishment. The story is rather complex. Kafka undercuts the obvious message extolling humanist compassion by portraying the prisoner, condemned to die on an elaborate machine, as a hardly better than an animal, a comic stooge and a fool who is both an impediment and willing participant in his execution. There are many other elements, not least of which is the story functioning as a parable critical of society. The story leaves us in some doubt about the apparent moral that capital punishment is cruel and unusual.

[Image: (c) 2018 Peter Kuper]

Overall, Kafkaesque balances the humour and seriousness of the original stories. One thing that Kuper has not been able to replicate is the eeriness of Kafka’s prose and scenes, which fluctuate between the ordinary and uncanny. However, these graphic stories are translations not exact parallels or recreations and one should not expect that full richness of the sources to be present in these partial re-presentations. Kuper’s understanding of the limited capacities of art is apparent in his choices of stories. He has naturally been attracted to the ones that are most absurd, slapstick and dramatic. For example, “Gracchus the Hunter” is a personal favourite of mine but it would clearly have been unsuitable for Kuperisation.

Most of the stories are six pages long. Some are longer, such as “The Burrow” at 22 pages and “In The Penal Colony” at 46 pages. “The Burrow” is an example of effective use of double-page spreads. The cross-sections of the timid and inventive burrow-dweller’s underground network of passages and chambers incorporate multiple scenes in two-page panels. The multi-directional passages allow text and action to be broken into sequential fragments. In one image we see the burrow-dweller inhabiting the labyrinthine recesses of his own brain, hiding from potential intruders real or imagined. Kuper’s creative freedom allows him to create a parallel pictorial system which mirrors the burrow-dweller’s tunnels made with such industriousness and ingenuity.

One can say that the spirit of the originals is partially captured and enjoyably transmitted in these new versions. Kafka (who had a habit to making ludic stylised drawings) would have found many panels in Kafkaesque to admire and amuse.

 

Peter Kuper, Kafkaesque: Fourteen Short Stories, W.W. Norton & Company, 19 October 2018, £13.99/$19.95, hardback, 160pp, mono illus., ISBN 237 0000 441 560

Peter Kuper’s website: www.peterkuper.com

 

© 2018 Alexander Adams

View my art and books here: www.alexanderadams.art