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| Perle Fine |
Perle Fine, a painter whose work is held in the permanent collection, was active in the avant-garde art scene in New York City from the 1920s through the 1960s. But despite her connection to well-known artists and her success in exhibiting her work, Fine is not well known among 20th-century American abstract painters.
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| Perle Fine |
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| Cool Series |
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| Cool Series |
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| The Scream by Edvard Munch |
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| Detail of Self-Portrait by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1984) |
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| Batman |
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| Egon Schiele, Mujer sentada con la pierna doblada, 1917 Národni Galarie, Praga. |
Royal Academy, London
Ferociously brilliant young Egon Schiele and established master Gustav Klimt share the spotlight in this compelling Viennese double bill
Laura Cumming
Sunday 4 November 2018
Egon Schiele drew Gustav Klimt many times in life, but also in death. Three drawings exist of Klimt in the morgue, his handsome face deformed by a massive stroke at the age of 55. Not many months later, Schiele himself was carried off by Spanish flu in the space of three devastating days. He was 28. Both men died in Vienna in the year 1918.
The Austrian figurative painter brings raw sexuality and a nervy human anxiety to the surface
Unlike the models posed as lofty goddesses and nymphs that dominate “the nude” in western art history, Schiele’s women work a nervy, very human sensuality. It speaks to our time, as much as it did the sex-conscious intellectual circles of the artist’s fin-de-siècle Vienna.
Schiele’s skill is in drawing, not painting. His women are all anxious lines, scratched out with an energy that suggests the artist’s feelings towards his subject. This is no softly lit daydream but a vigorous embrace of real flesh and bone.
The teasing stockings and high heels, along with the open legs, are frank about their purpose. The knowingness in the way Schiele depicts the naked body, including his own, makes his supercharged eroticism all the more unsettling.
Schiele often just depicted bodies, ignoring the heads. In this 1914 seated nude, however, the model seems to be enduring the objectification imposed by the revealing set-up. The eye contact and chin rested on a hand suggest a challenge, or boredom.
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| Striking moments but lacks light and shade ... Staging Schiele. Photograph: Foteini Christofilopoulou |
Staging Schiele review – art, obsession and orgasmic yelps
DanceEast, Ipswich
The expressionist aesthetics of Egon Schiele’s nudes should make for riveting dance, but Shobana Jeyasingh’s production is a bit too beige
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| Franz Kafka |
The artist, says Kafka, is the one who has nothing to say. By which he means that art, true art, carries no message, has no opinion, does not attempt to coerce or persuade, but simply – simply! – bears witness. Ironically, we find this dictum particularly hard to accept in the case of his own work, which comes to us with all the numinous weight and opacity of a secret testament, the codes of which we seem required to decrypt. The Trial, we feel, cannot be merely the simple story of a man, Josef K, who gets caught up in a judicial process – the book's German title is Der Prozeß – that will lead with nightmarish inevitability to his execution. Surely it is at least an allegory of fallen man's predicament, of his state of enduring and irredeemable guilt in a world from which all hope has been expunged. Yet the book has its direct sources in the mundane though extreme circumstances of Kafka's own life, and specifically in what Elias Canetti calls Kafka's "other trial".
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| Franz Kafka |
Tron, Glasgow
Kafka’s story is given a chilling update that chimes with our times, referencing the migrant crisis, the gig economy and fear of the unknown
Of all the shows to have been affected by the Covid-19 outbreak, it is ironic that Vanishing Point’s Kafka adaptation should have been one of the first. A co-production with Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione, it was due to have had its premiere at the 2020 VIE festival in Cesena at the end of February. The lockdown in Italy put paid to that; the entire festival was pulled.
Yet look at Matthew Lenton’s production, now making its debut on home turf, and it’s hard not to see a metaphor for the pandemic. Sam Stopford’s Gregor Samsa goes to bed as a takeaway cycle courier, having worked for three years without a day off for a zero-hours outfit wittily known as Grub’s Up. He is so burnt-out, he can scarcely bring himself to talk to the very family he is earning a living for, not even sister Grete whom he hopes to fund through music school.
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| Franz Kafka |
Franz Kafka is the twentieth century’s valedictory ghost. In two incomplete yet incommensurable novels, “The Trial” and “The Castle,” he submits, as lingering spirits will, a ghastly accounting—the sum total of modern totalitarianism. His imaginings outstrip history and memoir, incident and record, film and reportage. He is on the side of realism—the poisoned realism of metaphor. Cumulatively, Kafka’s work is an archive of our era: its anomie, depersonalization, afflicted innocence, innovative cruelty, authoritarian demagoguery, technologically adept killing. But none of this is served raw. Kafka has no politics; he is not a political novelist in the way of Orwell or Dickens. He writes from insight, not, as people like to say, from premonition. He is often taken for a metaphysical, or even a religious, writer, but the supernatural elements in his fables are too entangled in concrete everydayness, and in caricature, to allow for any incandescent certainties. The typical Kafkan figure has the cognitive force of a chess master—which is why the term “Kafkaesque,” a synonym for the uncanny, misrepresents at the root. The Kafkan mind rests not on unintelligibility or the surreal but on adamantine logic—on the sane expectation of rationality. A singing mouse, an enigmatic ape, an impenetrable castle, a deadly contraption, the Great Wall of China, a creature in a burrow, fasting as an art form, and, most famously, a man metamorphosed into a bug: all these are steeped in reason; and also in reasoning. “Fairy tales for dialecticians,” the critic Walter Benjamin remarked. In the two great zones of literary susceptibility—the lyrical and the logical—the Kafkan “K” attaches not to Keats but to Kant.
An intelligent portrait of the author during a time in which he wrote some of the most hauntingly strange texts in modern literature
PD Smith
Friday 16 August 2013
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THE GUARDIANhe result of a decade of research, this first volume of a trilogy on Kafka, flawlessly translated from the German by Shelley Frisch, covers the period 1910 to 1915. During this time he wrote some of the most hauntingly strange texts in modern literature, including the stories "Metamorphosis" and "The Judgment" and the novel The Trial. It was also a period of intense personal anxiety as Kafka struggled to reconcile his writerly need for solitude with his family's expectation that he should marry. He wrote more than 500 letters and postcards to his fiancee Felice Bauer. But "the cascade of fears that plagued and eventually overwhelmed Kafka" meant marriage was impossible. "I am taciturn, unsociable, glum, self-serving, a hypochondriac," he admitted to her in 1913. But out of the ruins of their engagement emerged The Trial, an "overwhelmingly complex" novel that translated "the accumulated humiliations" of his disastrous personal life into literature. This is a wonderfully intelligent and perceptive portrait of a uniquely powerful writer.
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| Felice Bauer and Franz Kafka |
Dearest F.,
In your last letter (how long have I sat motionless over that word, wishing you were here!) there is a sentence that is fairly clear to me from every angle; this hasn’t happened for a long time. It concerns the apprehensions you feel about sharing life with me. You don’t think—or perhaps you merely wonder whether, or perhaps you merely want to hear my views about it—that in me you will find the vital support you undoubtedly need. There is nothing straightforward I can say to that. I may also be too tired just now (I had to wait for your telegram until 5 P.M. Why? What’s more, contrary to your promise, I had to wait as long as 24 hours for your letter. Why?) and far beneath my tiredness too happy about your letter.
It is late evening. I won’t be able to write of the most important matters today. The exact information you want about me, dearest F., I cannot give you; I can give it you, if at all, only when running along behind you in the Tiergarten, you always on the point of vanishing altogether, and I on the point of prostrating myself; only when thus humiliated, more deeply than any dog, am I able to do it. When you pose that question now I can only say: I love you, F., to the limits of my strength, in this respect you can trust me entirely. But for the rest, F., I do not know myself completely. Surprises and disappointments about myself follow each other in endless succession.What I hope is that these surprises and disappointments will be mine alone; I shall use all my strength to see that none but the pleasant, the pleasantest of surprises of my nature will touch you; I can vouch for this, but what I cannot vouch for is that I shall always succeed. How could I vouch for that in view of the bewildering confusion in my letters which you have been receiving from me all this time? We haven’t been together much, it’s true, but even if we had been together a great deal, I would have asked you (for that would then have been impossible to do) to judge me by my letters and not by your personal experience. The potentialities latent in my letters are equally latent in me, the bad as well as the good; personal experience robs one of perspective, and in my particular case to my disadvantage. […]
Moreover, I believe that this immaturity of mine, these possibly happy, possibly unhappy fluctuations of my nature, need not be in any way decisive for your future happiness with me; you needn’t be directly exposed to their effects. You are not dependent on others, F.; you may long to, or rather you certainly long to become dependent; but you would hardly give in to that kind of longing indefinitely. You couldn’t do it.
To your final question, however, whether it is possible for me to take you as though nothing had happened, I can only say that it is not possible. But what is possible, and in fact necessary, is for me to take you with all that has happened, and to hold on to you to the point of delirium.
Kindest regards, yours,
Franz K.
