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[Published in the Los Angeles Reader on September 2, 1983]

By Tom Christie

Between 1943 and 1945, Brian Moore, a young Irishman from Belfast, worked in the combat areas of North Africa and Italy as a port officer for the British Ministry of War Transport. When the war ended, he moved on to Poland where he worked two years for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. While behind the Iron Curtain he fell in love with a Canadian girl and followed her home where, he says, she hastily rejected him. Stuck in Canada with no money, he found work in a lumber camp. And then, because he'd always been good at writing in school, he tried to find work as a newspaperman. The Montreal Gazette hired him as a proofreader and he eventually became a reporter. He began to write detective novels, mostly under the pseudonyms Bernard Mara and Michael Bryan, among them Wreath for a Redhead, A Bullet for My Lady, and This Gun for Gloria. Moore's first serious novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, was published in 1955 to great critical notices. He received a Guggenheim fellowship to go to America in 1959 and settled in New York. His thirteen novels include An Answer From Limbo (1963), The Emperor of Ice Cream (1965), The Doctor's Wife (1976), The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960) and Catholics (1972). He also wrote The Revolution Script (1971), a documentary novel about the kidnapping of a British official by the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) in Montreal in 1970. His new novel, Cold Heaven, will be available in September. Moore has also scripted four films, including the CBS Playhouse 90 production of Catholics starring Trevor Howard and Martin Sheen, and The Blood of Others, currently being filmed in Paris by Claude Chabrol. Moore lives with his wife Jean on the bluffs above the beach near Point Dume, where we met recently.

            Q: You came to Los Angeles in 1964 to write Torn Curtain for Alfred Hitchcock and ended up staying. How did that happen?

            A: Hitchcock had read some of my early books and he was a Catholic. He wanted originally to do a film about a defector to Russia seen from the point of view of the defector's wife. As I was supposed to be able to write about women, I was hired to do this script. I always intended to go back to New York and then some things happened that changed my mind. My wife loved it here, I discovered that I was getting a lot more work done here, that I was becoming more solitary as I got older, and that I could live the monastic life I wanted to. Also, my father was a doctor and we used to rent a house on the Irish sea every summer, so the idea of being able to look out on the sea has always appealed to me. Then I was offered a Regents' Professorship at UCLA. That's all – I'm like top seed: It grew and I stayed.

            I assumed you had come here purposely, that California was the ultimate place for the "writer in exile," as you're often called. You didn't have any thoughts of coming here before this happened?

            No, not at all. I came here originally when they made a film of one of my books, The Luck of Ginger Coffey. I had the usual experience: I stayed in the Valley, it was hot, I went to Universal a couple of times, I went downtown, I saw Forest Lawn and I was quite happy to go home, because I hadn't seen the city. I think one of the problems with people who come to Los Angeles is that it's not a possible place to see; it's like the elephant and you're like the blind man and there's no way that you can get a fix on it.

            Yes, it takes a while to discover its virtues, I think.

            Well, it hasn't too many virtues but its one big virtue that counts a lot for me is that it's the least parochial city in America. New York is parochial. If you tell New Yorkers that their city is not one of the greatest cities in the world, they become infuriated. If you tell Parisians their city isn't great, they become infuriated. You could tell an Angeleno – native or otherwise – anything about the city and he's uninterested. That's a lot of shit to him. He doesn't care. And I think that's refreshing. That makes it an unusual city, in that way. It doesn't want to defend itself, therefore why should I defend it?

            New worlds have always been important to your fiction. Do you have any thoughts of moving on?

            Well, I'm so nomadic, I don't know. I've lived here longer than I've lived anywhere, strangely enough. I can't believe I've lived seventeen years here; it's amazing to me. But I've been able to do that because my style of living in America and Canada has always been to spend a major portion of the year here and a part of the year in Europe. If I didn't have a foot in both doors I would become a different person, and it's important to me to contrast my past life with my present life.

The awful thing about Los Angeles as a literary place is that, if you write about it, the Eastern literary establishment immediately categorizes it as a 'Hollywood novel,' whether it's about Hollywood or not.

            Belfast, Montreal, and New York have been near-characters in your fiction, but you haven't written much about Los Angeles specifically, even though you've lived here so long. Why?

            I've never lived in Los Angeles. I've lived in Malibu. I never met a payroll or had a proper job in Los Angeles. My theory of writing is that you cannot write about a place unless you've really lived in it, been part of it, and gone to work in the morning, to know what it's about. I tend to think that Los Angeles is a difficult city to write about. The really good books written about L.A. will be written by people of your generation who've really been brought up or lived here.

            Why do you think Los Angeles is a such a difficult city to write about?

            Because it is many cities. And the other awful thing about Los Angeles as a literary place is that, if you write about it, the Eastern literary establishment immediately categorizes it as a "Hollywood novel," whether it's about Hollywood or not. Another reason it's tricky to write about is that Los Angeles does not have a literary persona. New York has one, Moscow has one, Paris has one, even Boston has one, but Los Angeles does not have one. Therefore, you have to describe it to people because they're sitting in Ireland or someplace – they don't know what the Valley is. So, you have to load the novel with journalism explaining the city and these sociological facts put into a realistic novel are boring.

            By "literary persona," do you mean, for instance, that because people have read about New York so much, they feel they already know it?

            Exactly. People don't know about New York but they think they do; it presents a sort of literary image of itself. The Los Angeles image is a filmic image. The beach on which I live is a beach you've seen in a hundred films, but played as a European beach, not as the beach it actually is. Los Angeles is like an imitator, an impersonator of other places. Films have made it impersonate other places.

            It seems to me that, although you flirted with fantasy in earlier books, it was only in the California novels that fantasy began to play a major role.

            That's quite right. I think you're the first person to mention that to me; no one has mentioned that. I think it's true. It's funny that when I came to California, it was here that I began to deal with the questions of fantasy and mystical experience. I think the reason for it was because California seemed so secular and prosaic and because these great national forests like Los Padres are always in the background, you feel anything could happen in a way you don't – or I don't – feel it anywhere else.

            A perfect example of California to me was...I was in Carmel once, driving through, and I decided to spend the night there. I went to bed in a motel and I had a dream that when I woke up in the morning the parking lot was filled with objects of antiquity. Driving along the Big Sur coast on the way back the next morning, I started telling my wife about this dream I'd had, and it became almost like a reality. I really believe that if I had been driving along a New York turnpike it wouldn't have happened. I thought, What if something miraculous or extraordinary happened in California? California is the place that would change it and assimilate it and make it different. The whole idea of The Great Victorian Collection came out of that, and the idea of my new novel, Cold Heaven, which is about a miraculous experience, came because when I'd done The Great Victorian Collection I was dissatisfied – I didn't deal with a truly miraculous experience or how it would be treated here.

            For someone whose books were once banned in Ireland, you show a great deal of respect for some of your religious characters. The saintly old nun in Cold Heaven, for instance, is one of your strongest minor characters.

            Well, I've always been interested in truly saintly people. There are a few of them around and they aren't necessarily Catholics [laughing], but true sainthood is something that is absolutely fascinating. An interesting thing makes Cold Heaven very topical now: The Catholic church can't get priests, it can't get nuns; there are no vocations. The only vocations coming up strong are for contemplative nuns. Nuns who are in ordinary callings want to leave them, to no longer be nurses or teachers, and to go be contemplative nuns, which is a terribly hard life. But they want to do it. So I think what I'm trying to say in Cold Heaven is that there is a great hunger for mystical experience, for sainthood, in all of us today, although we don't recognize it as that.

            It seems to me that the most emotional of non-believers are perhaps those closest to believing, or at least wanting to, but there's some...

            Barrier that keeps them from doing it. I'm really amazed at myself because when I was sixteen or seventeen I was very left-wing. I never joined the Communist Party but I was a left-wing Marxist sort of person and totally uninterested in religion, the opiate of the people, I thought. But I discovered that I was very interested in religion. While living in a communist country [Poland], I became disillusioned with what was happening. I discovered that whatever it was that made me go toward the revolution solution, it was the same idealistic impulse that would have made me religious if I'd gone the other way, and I was quick enough to recognize that in myself as a writer.

            One of your great strengths as a novelist, as noted by the English critic Christopher Ricks, is that your books make themselves "accessible to everyone...but concentrating simply, directly and bravely on the primary sufferings and passions that everybody feels."

            What Ricks said then is the thing that has both worked for and against me, which is that my books are easy to read. They're a good read, which I'm grateful for. I work hard for that but in this day and age they're often academically slighted because they are a good read. The interesting thing about Cold Heaven was that I wanted to write a book in which for the first seventy or eighty pages – until he was hooked and couldn't leave it – the reader thought he was reading a thriller.

            What can you tell us about Michael Bryan and Bernard Mara?

            Nothing. Who are they [laughing]? No, no, I'll tell you quite simply. When I was trying to get started, I had no money and I also hated detective stories – my father read them all the time. But I decided that there was money to be made writing under a pseudonym. I got Dashiell Hammett and Chandler, and I made them my models. I simply sat down and wrote one of those things in two and a half months and made a year's money out of it. I wrote Judith Hearne with the proceeds from those books. They were just clones, imitations. But all writing, even hack writing, teaches you something. They taught me the genesis of the thriller, which I've used years later in Cold Heaven. I couldn't have done it skillfully if I hadn't been an old practitioner.

            How have things changed in the last thirty years for the writer?

            When I first started writing, people like Flannery O'Connor were writing and if we made $5,000 a year and got a Guggenheim we were made because we went off and we simply wrote whatever we wanted to and if we gave them a book and it sold 10,000 copies, the publisher was delighted because we were good names to have on his list. In those days there was such a thing as a literary writer; now there's a thing called a "name" writer. There's a big difference.

            This is the change: When I started writing, if your book was sold to the Book-of-the-Month Club, your friends said, "Shit, what's wrong with it?" because the Book-of-the-Month Club was junk; everybody knew it. Now even the "best" writers want Book-of-the-Month Club selections more than anything; they hunger for it. They hunger for big sales. The distinction between being good and being rich has narrowed down.

            I was somewhat amazed recently to see in the window of a bookstore on Charing Cross Road in London a display of "California imports" – Black Sparrow and some of the other small presses.

            Small publishing, actually, is going to be a part of the future, because writers are still honest and still want to do good work. And young writers' only chance of getting published will probably be to go with a small publisher and forget all this fame and fortune crap, which is terribly insidious and bad anyway. I don't think writing is going to die; I just think the distinction should be made more often between financial success and artistic success. Artistic success, as Cyril Connolly said, is when your book stays in print for ten years, and that's still a pretty good wavelength. For instance – not to tout myself – but Judith Hearne has always been in print, for twenty-five years.

[Note: As of this republishing, Judith Hearne remains in print.]

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Raymond Pettibon and Marcel Dzama (at David Zwirner Gallery, London)

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#theoriginoftheworld #courbet #gustavecourbet #loriginedumonde #johnbaldessari #baldessari #museedorsay #loriginedebaldessari #conceptualart #congenitalart #mariangoodman #spruethmagers #spruthmagers (hier: Musée d'Orsay)

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Deforming the Round

When creating publicity materials supporting its extensive architectural survey, “Radically Modern: Urban Planning and Building in 1960s Berlin,” the Berlinische Gallerie had dozens of visual options. Curiously, the museum chose to prominently feature a photomontage of a building neither planned nor built but only imagined. And when the show opened in late May, its creator, the Berlin architect and artist Engelbert Kremser, was not in attendance, preferring to continue his Italian holiday.

This is entirely fitting given Kremser’s professional history. Much like his featured work, one in a series he made in 1970 critiquing the box mentality of Berlin architecture, he is nothing if not a kind of Berlin ghost. Over a photo of West Berlin’s Europa Center, which he hated, Kremser collaged a painted image of the mall as he would have built it. His Europa Center is an amorphous organic fantasy, historically wedged between the theoretical drawings of Hermann Finsterlin and the actual buildings of Frank Gehry, via Hans Scharoun.

  Finsterlin and Scharoun had been members of the influential Glass Chain group in the 20s, which also counted the brothers Bruno and Max Taut as members, along with Wasilli Luckhardt, Walter Gropius and others. “They made this fantastic architecture,” Kremser told me, “all theoretical, experimental.”

 It was, more or less, the expressionist yin to the Bauhaus’s industrial yang. But it was Scharoun who got things going after the war, actually got things built, including Berlin’s renowned Philharmonic Hall.

 “Scharoun had a lot of people working under him and they were called Scharounisten. I worked under him but was no Scharounist. I worked only on the Philharmonic Hall for two months as a student. I drew windows -- and toilets!”

 Cafe am See, Britzer Garten, Berlin

Kremser, 76, laughed heartily. It’s the sort of self-deprecating appreciation that would come in handy in a world that could otherwise make one bitter. He’s a striking man in appearance, with a bounty of silver hair, and deliberate, sometimes defiant eyes. (Full disclosure: I came to know Kremser when I rented a flat from him, and still do.) As a student, he challenged even what might have seemed radical at the time: “Scharoun always had corners,” he said. Kremser wanted to remove them, to go further, imperfectly.

 Kremser’s earth cafe

When Kremser sees a perfect circle, he sees a fiction: “Round is exactly round,” he told me, “ellipse is not exact. In nature, it is never exact. I wanted to deform the round. We humans are also nature. One side of the face is not exactly like the other, there is always a little difference, and these differences are important. Without them, when everything is the same, there is no choice involved, but when one has a choice, one must take in everything, really look at it.”

 This was of course how it was in the Gothic period, he noted, when each window was different. Roman columns were unique as well, and so it was with Baroque architecture, too, with all of its varied shapes and forms.

 “And this is why I never built any boxes. My principle is that you can drive by one of these modern boxes and see it all very quickly, with one glance. But with these forms you don’t forget them, because you have worked with them. They stay longer in your head.”

When Kremser sees a perfect circle, he sees a fiction.

And the beloved Bauhaus? “Walter Gropius ruined everything!” he said. “It was such an interesting movement until he took over.” Kremser saw himself in one camp, and when other architects abandoned organics he saw it as a kind of betrayal.

 “I once looked up Wassilli Luckhardt because I so admired him. He was old and he said, ‘Oh, those were just youthful fantasies! It doesn’t interest me anymore, and it doesn’t matter for today.’ Then he made only Bauhaus and boxes. I was shocked and disappointed.”

 Berlin or New Mexico?

It would not be the last time Kremser was disappointed. You might think otherwise if you saw the bookshelf in his Potsdam home, where he and his wife Sieglinde live among Kremser-designed and –built wooden furniture. (One chair is cut from a sheet of wood so that not one splinter remains as waste.) On that shelf in his office are dozens of international publications in which he is featured, so it is not as if he and his ideas have gone entirely unnoticed. Yet he has built only three projects, and none of those were completed as planned.

 “I wanted to build skyscrapers,” he said, “but I could never find the owners or developers. People didn’t have the courage to do it.”

 A not insignificant problem was the Berlin Senate and its political NIMBYs, who actively opposed Kremser and his earth architecture, despite favorable attention in the press. The more he was written about, the more he was attacked. But Kremser dug in; he believed he was onto a significant innovation. He had read about the way the Albuquerque Civic Auditorium was built in 1957 by adding dirt to an existing mound, pouring concrete over it, then digging out the mound to leave only the form – a technique the Italian architect Paolo Soleri later used at Arcosanti in Arizona.

 “When you make something out of concrete, you have to build the forms out of wood. And these wooden forms are more expensive than the concrete. And you can’t bend wood. So I came upon this idea to build with sand. 

“As a kid, I used to build sand castles. And I thought, one could also build several forms out of sand. And pour the concrete over it, then dig out the sand. That is much cheaper and you have absolute freedom with the form – you don’t need wood. So that’s where the inspiration comes from, that you have the freedom to do anything. So many possibilities.”

 Ceiling patterns were ‘drawn’ with the end of a wooden plank.

The Senate meanwhile saw only hurdles, or simply weirdness, but in 1980 he would get his chance, with an international competition for the design of Britzer Garten, a large new park in the southern part of the city created to house the 1985 national horticulture show. Kremser’s proposal included a grand hall with a Buckminster Fuller-style cupola, as well as a lakeside cafe, and some offices. Against considerable odds, he was awarded the architectural aspects of the park’s design, but the Senate forced a compromise, insisting that only the cafe and the office balconies would be earth architecture, the rest conventional. (The grand hall was deemed too expensive to include.) Still, he had finally received a valued commission.

 Though modestly realized, in terms of scale, the completed Cafe am See is a grand gesture. Appearing from certain angles like the head of a giant scaly dragon, eyes wide open, it does not, one must admit, suggest Berlin in any way, shape or form. But this is also its beauty, and coming upon it in this city is like moving through a museum among all the familiar names and paintings, then suddenly seeing this one astounding piece. Full stop.  

 Unlike so many buildings that match highly designed exteriors with banal interiors, the Cafe am See really must be experienced inside and out to fully appreciate. The methods employed building it were as remarkable as is its appearance: Concrete forms were poured over construction rubbish and earth dug from the future lake, then topped with molded sand; the interior walls and ceiling are thus as much a part of the design as the exterior surfaces. Several large triangular wood-framed windows, beautifully expressive, help to make the overall interior vibe warmer than one might expect.

 To one side of the cafe stands a covered grotto with Gaudi-esque broken-tile work and Roman-style concrete columns, each one individually designed and built with negative forms so that it was difficult to judge how they would turn out. But Kremser’s system embraces the differences, including not just design and methodology but builders as well, many of whom were not professionals; Sieglinde built two of the columns, and other friends helped out. “We were young,” she says, “it was hot, everyone was in a bikini and swimming in the lake.”

Showing how the columns were formed by hand

Sadly, given its relatively remote location in Britz, a park entrance fee and only moderately acceptable gastronomic fare, few beyond the typical weekend crowds of retirees experience the Cafe am See, and fewer still know who designed and built it, let alone how it was done. Far fewer know the background of the small children’s playground in Berlin-Wittenau, a low-budget affair featuring designs created by kids and built in 1969 with the help of a French army construction unit. And although many more visitors to Berlin’s renowned Botanical Gardens experience and no doubt appreciate the greenhouses designed and built under Kremser’s direction in the 80s, it’s unlikely that any of them can name their architect.

 Three projects built with minimal return, then, only two of them earth architecture. So Kremser may well be best remembered by a building only imagined, one thrown out into the world with thumb pressed firmly against nose, fingers flayed, and which, in a grand irony, has come to represent a place and a time and its architecture – planning and building and dreaming in 1960s Berlin. The Berlinische Galerie had little choice but to use Kremser’s Europa Center; it was clearly the most radical.

“Radically Modern: Urban Planning and Building in 1960s Berlin” continues at Berlinische Galerie through 26 October. More of Kremser’s imagined Berlin here.

Cafe am See from Britzer Garten’s model-boat pond

(photos by Tom Christie)

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HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE LORETTA LYNN CONFIRMATION HEARING [mash-up]*

SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D – New York): Ms. Lynn has excelled at every stage of her career....If there's an American dream story, she is it. Still, despite her achievements, Ms. Lynn has always been a nose-to-the-grindstone type, rarely seeking acclaim, only a job well done. 

LORETTA LYNN: Well I was born a coal miner's daughter, Senator, in a cabin on a hill in Butcher Holler. We were poor but we had love, that's the one thing that daddy made sure of: He shoveled coal to make a poor man's dollar.

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D -- California): Ms. Lynn, I sat through six opening [numbers] by potential attorneys general and I just want to tell you yours was the best. I see the combination of steel and velvet....And I see the determination, which is in your heart and I think your being.

LORETTA LYNN: Thank you, Senator. Daddy loved and raised eight kids on a miner's pay, Mommy scrubbed our clothes on a washboard every day. Well I seen her fingers bleed, to complain there was no need, she'd smile in mommy's understanding way.

SEN. JOHN CORNYN (R – Texas): Ms. Lynn, you’re not Eric Holder, are you?

LORETTA LYNN: No, Senator, I'm red, white and blue, and proud of it too. Red comes from my grandpa, he's an all-American brave. White come from my Grandma, she's a red-headed Irish maid. The blue come from the man I love, 'cause this boy said “I do.” That leaves me a mixed-up, with the red, white and blue.

SEN. CORNYN: How do we know you are not going to perform your duties of office as attorney general the way Eric Holder has performed his duties? How are you going to be different?

LORETTA LYNN: Well I'm about as old fashioned as I can be, Senator, and I hope you're likin' what you see, 'cause if you're lookin' at me you're lookin' at country. You don't see no city when you look at me, 'cause country's all I am. I love runnin' barefooted through the old cornfields, and I love that country ham.

SEN. JEFF SESSIONS (R – Alabama): Ms. Lynn, are you able and willing to tell the president of the United States no if he asks for a legal opinion that supports an action you believe is wrong?

LORETTA LYNN: Well, Senator, I don't wanna wear the pants, but I'm a-gonna have my say. From now on, Mr. President, it's fifty-fifty, all the way. Up to now I've been an object made for pleasin' you. Times have changed and I'm demanding satisfaction too.

“Senator, you'll bite off more than you can chew if you get too cute or witty. You better move your feet if you don't wanna eat a meal that's called fist city.”

SEN. SESSIONS: Just so you understand that your role is such that on occasion you have to say no to the person who actually appointed you to the job and who you support.

LORETTA LYNN: Look here, Senator, I work my fingers to the bone and the President and I, we don't hardly speak. All I ever get is just a little kiss about once a week. So you can feed the chickens and you can milk the cow, this a-woman's liberation honey is a gonna start right now.

SEN. TED CRUZ (R -- Texas): Ms. Lynn, with regard to the O.L.C.’s analysis of the President’s executive amnesty, I would note that I twice asked you if you agree with the analysis. You are very talented and I suspect it's not an accident that twice you have not answered that question.

LORETTA LYNN: Senator, you'll bite off more than you can chew if you get too cute or witty. You better move your feet if you don't wanna eat a meal that's called fist city.

SEN. CRUZ: You have described what O.L.C. did but not given a simple answer. Do you agree with that analysis or not?

LORETTA LYNN: Like I said, Senator, if you don’t wanna go to fist city, you better detour around my town. ‘Cause I’ll grab you by the hair a-the head, and I’ll lift a-you off a-the ground.

SEN. DAVID PERDUE (R -- Georgia): Ms. Lynn, thank you so much for, again, your perseverance. I am very impressed with your career. I congratulate you on this nomination.

LORETTA LYNN: Well, Senator, I have to say that I've been blessed. Not bad for this ol' Kentucky girl, I guess. Yeah hey, yeah hey, yeah hey. Yeah hey, yeah hey, yeah hey.

                                                              -- Tom Christie

*[The above questions are taken from the hearing on Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch in the U.S. Senate, as recorded by C-SPAN; only the nominee’s last name has been changed. The answers are made up of Loretta Lynn lyrics, from the following songs, in order: Coal Miner’s Daughter; Ibid; You’re Looking At Country; Red, White and Blue; We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby; Hey, Loretta; Fist City; Ibid; and Story of My Life.  Dialog addressing senators and references to the president have been added.]

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Berlin-based Icelandic artist Egill Sæbjörnsson built his Steinkugel at the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s center for disease control. Selected by The Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning in a contest in 2013, the piece is a 6.5 meter-tall concrete wall with orb, upon which a computer program projects a self-generating video mash-up of more than 100 still images chosen by Sæbjörnsson, in league with a programmer. Random and never repeating, Steinkugel’s silent, virus-like morphing mesmerizes, but the Koch Institute, in Berlin's Wedding district, is not much of a destination. One can imagine a work like this in Kassel's Karlsaue Park, or behind the Arsenale in Venice, or for that matter inside many an institution, relentlessly churning out its weird remix.

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"Fragile Sense of Hope" - Art Collection Telekom

Paulina Olowska, The Foyer, Rabcio Puppet Theater, Rabka-Zdroj, Poland (2013)

Would that Deutsche Telekom’s new Kunstsammlung, introduced in Berlin recently, set a new standard for corporate collecting. Called Art Collection Telekom (which probably sounds more interesting to German ears than to English), it’s an energetic sampling of emerging artists from Eastern Europe curated by Rainald Schumacher and Nathalie Hoyos. Intended to emphasize and represent the social and political changes in the region since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the collection was begun four years ago and currently comprises some 150 works from 33 artists and 13 countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Turkey and Ukraine.

In the past, like most corporations, Deutsche Telekom “collected” art in order to decorate its buildings – with city views, nice flowers and a few blue-chip pieces, says Schumacher. But when the company approached them in 2010, he and Hoyos realized that what passed for a collection actually wasn’t one at all. They suggested a radical shift: to sell off existing pieces -- quietly and usually to private parties -- and to then use the proceeds to start afresh.

Mladen Stilinovic, Material Value of Laziness (2006)

Schumacher, who has worked for Gerhard Richter in Cologne, Barbara Gladstone in New York, and Esther Schipper in Berlin, and directed the Goetz Collection in Munich, didn’t want to simply “play up and down the hit list” of the usual art markets. Why not start from the beginning and in a place not so familiar, he and Hoyos told Telekom, "where we don’t know so much and it would be a little more exciting. Astonishingly," he says, "they agreed."

Their focus of choice was the shadow lands of Eastern Europe, a region under-represented in the art world at large but one in which they are well-connected. “When young artists are doing something interesting, we hear about it,” says Schumacher. "Being busy in this field for a very long time, you get a feeling for the stories contemporary art is telling, and you make a choice out of this feeling.”

  Igor Grubic, Angels with Dirty Faces (2006)

Art Collection Telekom's ambition transcends typical definitions of value. Having operated on a relatively small budget of “a few hundred thousand euros” up till now, Schumacher notes that even low amounts are important for the young artists they’re buying. Another goal is to support galleries and institutions, to bolster the burgeoning yet fragile art infrastructure in the region, where, of course, Deutsche Telekom also has a business presence. As for the art itself, the team doesn’t aspire to a large museum-level collection, but could well function as part of a larger collection, says Schumacher.

  Šejla Kamerić, Fragile Sense of Hope, (Xglass III) (2013)

The opening exhibition, hosted by Me Collectors Room Berlin, is called “Fragile Sense of Hope,” after the title of a work by the Bosnian artist Šejla Kamerić. It’s meant to represent both the aforementioned socio-political change as well as, perhaps, the current mood among emerging Eastern European artists. The work featured -- 70 pieces by 25 artists -- is lively, playful, political, humane. There’s a collective sweetness to it, a kind of roughness and naivete, not in the worldly sense but in the art-worldly sense. This is not art made to earn a million bucks, in other words, nor is it enabled by those millions in the form of foundries or high-end printers. It’s old school in that way, entirely contemporary in others, and a welcome, organic addition to this mad market-driven world.

Credit Schumacher and Hoyos, but also Deutsche Telekom's Raimund Schmolze and two other board members who review the curators’ choices and, according to Schumacher, say yes to 90 percent of them. (He notes that the 10 percent are always about practical matters, such as storage and exhibition, and never about artistic issues.) But Telekom also has a potential business incentive: Available for the exhibition are iPad-based guides the company has developed featuring recordings and texts, in German and English, that give more information than the usual audio guides -- artist interviews, for instance. They operate simply and come with hot-pink headphones that also make for unintentionally good people watching.

“Fragile Sense of Hope” continues at Me Collectors Room/Stiftung Olbricht, Auguststraße 68, Berlin Mitte, through November 23. Much of the collection can be seen here: http://art-collection-telekom.com.

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Director Travis Mathews Talking Gay/Straight 'Interior. Leather Bar.'

  James Franco and Travis Mathews’ Interior. Leather Bar. is a short feature re-imagining the 40 lost minutes from William Friedkin’s 1980 Cruising (starring Al Pacino as a straight cop tracking a serial killer of gay men). But it is as much about the making of the new film, and the various levels of discomfort among both the gay and straight actors involved, primarily that of the straight lead Val Lauren. After its screening at last year’s Berlinale, Mathews, who is known for his gay-porn series In Their Room and the feature I Want Your Love, discussed the making of Interior. Leather Bar. and the mixed reactions it’s getting from gay and straight men, and from those who like it best -- women.

    BLATC: Let’s start with the obvious: How did you and James Franco come to work together on this project and why?

  Travis Mathews: When James first approached me, it was a larger sort of situation where there was a series of different films from the 70s that he wanted to revisit in some capacity. Cruising was the first of these. It was never about doing a remake, it was always about doing a nod, and doing some sort of [take on] how far have we come as a culture, or with gay culture, or with sexual freedom, creative freedom. And he knew that he wanted explicit gay sex in the film. 

  We didn’t know each other. But the through line in my work has been about masculinity, gay male intimacy. In the last couple of years, I had been using un-simulated gay sex to weave into narratives in a way that wasn’t meant for titillation or pornography but was used for other reasons -- funny moments, awkward moments, character development moments. There’s so much substance there that’s underutilized in terms of story.

  Last summer, I had a feature film, I Want Your Love, that is a narrative with sex woven into it. James had seen it and reached out to me about collaborating. I got an email and then within twelve hours we were on the phone discussing this.  He said he wanted to revisit Cruising and he didn’t have any real ideas of how to enter into it or what we might do but he was interested in me being involved and hearing my thoughts. And the first time we talked I had a whole series of questions and concerns, knowing his history behind and in front of the camera in films with gay content. I was, like, Okay, you’ve done all this stuff. And most of it’s been very positive, whether people have appreciated it or not, it’s been very positive, like the different characters and the different gay icons he’s brought attention to.

  But Cruising’s going to be a very different situation; it’s still very much a problematic film for people, for its representation, and it has this very well-documented history of why. And he understood that and agreed with that and I thought it was important for us to include all of what we knew was going to be chatter into the film without making that the film. So it was this dance where I felt we needed to acknowledge certain things about who he was and what he’s done and why he’s doing this without letting that overtake the whole movie we were making and having it be completely about that.

  We were looking for parallels with the original Cruising that would, for people who knew the film, make it richer but also wouldn’t be vital for an experience with the film. And Val’s character is the arc that’s supposed to model Al Pacino’s character.

  Before I even wrote a treatment for it, the first thing that we both sort of connected to (and that I hadn’t heard about) were the lost 40 minutes. And this whole mythology of them being destroyed or them being buried, or Friedkin has them in a dungeon somewhere. Actually I hope with the amount of attention that the film has gotten that somehow they’ll surface and just be their own thing. I think that would be kind of amazing. I know that they’ve never publicly been screened. I’ve heard Friedkin say some controversial things about them, but I’ve not had a chance to talk to him about them personally.

  So we used that as a launching point for what we were going to do. We had four weeks, from the moment we talked on the phone till the moment we went into production, which was a two-day shoot. And with the confined limitations that we had, and also the number of things that seemed important to cover in the exploration, it seemed, and I still think so, the wisest thing to do was not try to recreate these 40 minutes on a two-day shoot but instead do pieces of that but to make it more about the process of making this film. And find arcs within that process that could make it a cohesive whole.

  So that’s how it started to come together. And when you see in the first scene in the film, in the hotel, where we’re talking, and then Val comes and we’re introduced, none of that’s scripted. And that’s actually the first time that I met James. When I walked into that hotel there were three cameras on me. Once we decided that we were going to make this as much about the process, and our exploration, there was never a moment when something wasn’t recorded. So there are scenes that are scripted and crafted, and then there are scenes that happened in a much more organic sense.

  And there were always cameras, so we could just quickly be, like, “Okay let’s do this! Hang on, hang on, don’t start yet.” And then there would be people in the moment really negotiating or figuring out what was happening. You know, all of this happened so quickly, there was no time to worry or ruminate or over plan anything. It was like making quick choices and then just sticking with them and then seeing what quick choices that meant you had to make because of the ones you had just made five minutes earlier.

    What was your casting process?

  When I got there, there’s like 50 guys – about half of them gay and half of them straight -- and there’s absolutely no direction whatsoever. I wish this had been filmed, actually, because this was a very rich and interesting scenario that unfolded.  You know, these guys didn’t know what they were coming for, right? But they wanted to be there because of Franco blah blah blah. But James wasn’t there, one of his producers was there, and I was there. And she was like, “Okay, go.” And I didn’t know how this was supposed to go. So I just stood up and I was, like, “Okay, thank you for coming. I want to let you know that there’s going to be actual gay sex in this, and I’m not asking or expecting any or you to go there. If you are interested, then we can talk, but if you’re not interested that doesn’t mean that you’re not involved in the film. I want that to be clear.”

  But then it became this really interesting thing where people had so many levels of excitement and levels of discomfort that I actually had to ask the guys to go into different sections of the room based on how far they were willing to go sexually with another man.

So on one hand there was a group of guys who were, like, “I’m okay taking my shirt off and being in the milieu but I don’t want to touch another guy, I don’t want to kiss another guy.” And then there was another group that was like, “I’m fine touching and kissing a guy but I’m not going to get naked, I’m not going to do anything sexual.” And then there was somewhere in between, like, “I’m okay being sexual to a point.” And then, like, “I’m ready to full on fuck anybody you want to put in front of me.”

  "Action!"

So we had clusters of guys in different parts of the room, and I had to go over to them and be, like, “So remind me, you guys are the ones that will just be okay with kissing?” And you can see them having this internal process. “I should say yes because it’s this James Franco thing, but where are my boundaries, what will my friends say, what will this do for my career?”

  My initial instinct was to bring in only the extras who were not only gay but who had a comfort level.  But overnight, I thought about it, and I connected with one of James’s producers, and then it just seemed obvious that we should invite all of them. And we should let those different layers of comfort and discomfort be part of the rich texture of the film, because this is part of what we’re doing.

  So the arc of it is Val’s experience kind of piggybacking on these various other peoples’ experience. And their discomfort with it may have had nothing to do with the gayness but just about what it might do to their careers, being involved with something like this – both in a positive and negative way. So there were all of these ways in which it seemed exciting to capture people negotiating boundaries -- ways that were somewhat scripted as well as ways that were very much live and present. As a filmmaker it was super exciting because I like to work with basically a map that I’m ready to throw away at a certain point and then revisit, and that was a lot of what this movie ended up becoming.

    And did you wind up cutting it yourself?

  This is an interesting story that I’ve shared but I haven’t shared with any of the press. Not for any reason, it just hasn’t come up.  The film was originally conceived as a 5-10 minute art video that was going to play during Fashion Week in New York. And there was a shorter version that did play there. But there was tons of footage, and I had done an episode of this series, In Their Room, in London in April. And I had reserved the whole month of August to go back and stay at my mom’s house in the middle of Ohio-nowhere to edit this In Their Room London episode. So I had four weeks already reserved, I was going to be focused on that.

  And of course this came into my life and superseded the other project temporarily. So I had two big hard drives and I went back to my boyhood bedroom in rural Ohio and it felt like I was in high school again. My door would always be shut. I mean, I had like three weeks to edit this and the thing that was hard -- in addition to constructing it – was knowing when to pull back and when to give more. There were so many cameras that at different points we were capturing the same moment and to layer that and to sync that was its own difficult process.

  But I was in my room, working like 14 or 16 hours, and my mom would always be knocking on the door. And I’d be, like, “Mommm, I’m working!” She’d be, like, “I’m sorry, but I went to the store and I got that turkey you like, and let me know if you’d like me to make something for dinner.”

  My mom was actually the first person to see a lot of the scenes that I was crafting – nothing that was super sexual – but scenes where there’s a certain level where I wanted the viewer to understand just enough but to still be slightly confused in figuring out. So she’d come in and she’d get her glasses and her soda and she’d say, “Okay, what do I need to know?” “You don’t need to know anything!” And she’d be, like, “Okay, so how confused am I supposed to be?”

  I love my mom, she’s great, but she has a pretty simple life 500 million miles away from this world.

    Tell me about your expectations for the film and the reactions you actually get.

  The Q&As are intense and a bit of a dance. I think this is very much seen as a gay film, but it’s not really a gay film, it’s more of a queer film, because there’s a straight protagonist, and we’re dealing with sexuality.  People come into it with very strong feelings about what the film is going to be. And for some people, they’re thankful that it’s not what they thought it was going to be. And there are others who are upset about that. I get a lot of questions from gay people who know and like the work that I’ve done and are challenging me with why I did this, what it means that I’m doing this, and what my purpose is in doing this. So there are little bombs here, little bombs there, and I can almost feel people wondering if I’m going to be truthful, if I’m going to be coy, or am I going to put my foot in my mouth.

  There’s a whole demographic that loves the film and there’s a whole demographic that hates it. Actually, women seem to like the film the most. I think women have connected with it because how often do women get this sort of voyeuristic look into men talking about sexuality, whether it’s gay sexuality or straight sexuality, and seeing men have to negotiate boundaries – and where those lie. And women are not involved in the discussion in the film, so they’re not being provoked to sort of check in with their own processes as much as both gay and straight men are.

  I’ve had straight men come to me -- liberally minded straight men mind you -- come up to me and say, “Your movie really made me check in about things, like, you know, I didn’t think I had any homophobia still in me, I thought it was totally cool and I just wanted to let you know that I had my own sort of process with it.” And for me that’s fucking amazing because I feel that, of any audience, a straight male audience is probably the hardest to actually reach with the kind of material that this film explores. 

  But with some gay men I think there’s some disappointment that the ark and the weight of this movie rests on a straight man’s experience, whether you think it’s James’ or whether you think it’s Val’s. And that bugs me because, not that I feel like I’m being ghettoized and trying to jump outside of doing film with gay content, but I feel like, Why can’t straight men be part of this conversation? I don’t feel like I’ve pandered to straight men, I don’t feel like I gave easy answers that are, like, now the straight man is taken care of, he’s okay now and he can go home to his wife. I don’t feel like that’s how we approached or made this film.

  Yet I’ve had men who are livid that, in 35 years since the original Cruising, we’re still concerned about a straight man and his discomfort or his negotiating around gay sexuality. And I’m, like, that’s part of the world we live in. If I made every film about exploring a straight man’s experience with gay content, well, sure.  But then there are gay men who just want 40 minutes of sex, or they want to see James Franco’s ass, or they want to see him do something sexual. 

  And then of course James brings everything that James brings to the movie already where people have strong feelings for and against him, so that becomes another thing to negotiate. I’m not his mouthpiece, I’m not going to speak for him, and I’m not going to go to a lot of places I think people want me to go, of solving the riddle that they think he is. That’s for him to do.

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From the Archives: Helmut Newton at the Chateau Marmont

In 1984, I interviewed Helmut Newton for the now defunct weekly newspaper, the Los Angeles Reader. Newton was staying at the Chateau Marmont, his home in L.A., and also working there.  When I first saw him he was down on Sunset Boulevard, shooting a couple of models. Later, inside a room at the Chateau, he did a Vogue shoot of the renowned Hollywood photographer George Hurrell shooting the actress Michelle Pfeiffer. I sat in on this session, and took two noisy Polaroids, to Newton’s annoyance. The story would share the Reader’s cover with Matt Groening’s far better interview with Malcolm Mclaren. Twenty years later, Newton would die when the car he was driving crashed coming out of the Chateau’s garage. In the top shot, Newton shoots Pfeiffer alone, with two assistants. When he died, he was with his wife June  AKA the photographer Alice Springs, who is in the foreground in the lower shot, which shows Newton to the left and the bed on which Pfeiffer lay for Hurrell's camera. Springs now runs the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin.

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From the Archives: Charles Bukowski Takes Li Po to Musso & Frank’s

In 1986, I was working as a young editor under Harold Hayes at California Magazine. In the 60s, Hayes had made magic at Esquire, sending William Burroughs and Jean Genet to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, assigning Gay Talese to profile Frank Sinatra (who had a cold), shipping Michael Herr off to Vietnam, and creating endless iconic covers with George Lois, including Andy Warhol drowning in a can of tomato soup and Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian. Hayes, in other words, had a knack for mixing the times with its leading voices. He knew how to get people to do things, at little or no cost if need be, mainly by flattering their ego but also in such a way as to open them up. For our annual travel issue that year, he had us ask well-known people to act as cicerones, or personal guides, to take someone of their choice on an imaginary tour of their favorite haunts. Who would they choose, where would they take them and why? One of those I asked was Charles Bukowski, who decided upon the Chinese poet Li Po (also known as Li Bai, 701-762). This is the result, recently recovered from my archives, i.e., a box in a closet. For those who don't know Los Angeles well, Musso & Frank Grill is an iconic restaurant in Hollywood, and a hangout for writers during the 30s and 40s. Bukowski's text, as written below on, yes, a typewriter:

3-27-86

California magazine:

      Well, with Li Po I'd take him to Musso and Frank's and we'd go to the bar while we waited for a table. I'd put in a request for a table in "the old room" with Gene as the waiter, if possible. I never mind waiting at the bar except on a Saturday or Friday night when the tourists bevy up to the wood. I prefer to partake of vodka-7's and Li Po, a good red wine. Upon getting our table we'd order a bottle of Gamay Beaujolais and look over the menu. I'd tell Li Po that Hemingway, Faulkner and F. Scott used to get stinko at Musso's and that I did too, mostly in the mid-afternoon, ordering bottle after bottle at the table while checking out the menu and then most of the time not eating at all.

      After Musso's we'd simply go to my place and drink some more, probably more red wine and we'd smoke sher bidis from India. I'd talk and he'd listen and then I'd listen while he talked. There would be some good laughter and then that would be the night. Unless he wanted to write some poems, burn them and float them in the L.A. Harbor.

      In any town, good taste and good sense are not so much what you see and do but more what you don't see and don't do. What is outside of us is hardly as important as what is inside of us, though granted, we must also live with what is outside of us. Li Po would know this, and so slowly drinking away the night would be the finest thing for both of us.

                    oh yes, yes, yes,

                                  Charles Bukowski

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Agrarian Goth

Big. Bold. Luscious. Tractors. That would sound absurd and dangerous for most artists, but Karen Carson is as fearless as she is humor-full. Known for wildly shifting directions as much as she is for her painting chops, Carson changes projects like sex addicts change partners: “I just wake up one morning and I’m interested in something and then I look for ways to satisfy the need,” she said over the phone on a hot, arid day in Los Angeles.

It must have been a strange morning last year, then, when she got up and decided to go to her local John Deere dealership. That would have been in Montana, where Carson and her husband, a former rancher, live four months of the year. She said she used to watch him drive a swather, the hay cutters also known as windrowers, and had lately formed an interest in – or an attraction to -- big American farm equipment.

“I was avoiding landscapes, and realized that I was a lot more interested in machines. Of course, these machines just plow through the landscape. They are kind of monsters and they’re beautiful and very sexy the way they plow – they’re sexual but not until I painted them did I realize that.”

J.G. Ballard in the heartland? “There is something anthropomorphic about them,” she said. “You find when you’re doing them, they become body parts. You get to a point when you can’t separate life and art.”

In several large works on canvas (shown recently at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery), Carson’s vibrant colors match the peculiar intensity of the John Deere green. “I’m a woman, 70 years old, and I wanted to do something macho, if macho can also be feminine, as in the use of color. I wanted to make these things into celebrities; I painted them in a way that says, ‘Look at me, look at me!’

And they are very much alive, almost jumping -- or accelerating -- off the canvas, with palpable personality and traction. Through these souped-up, decked-out, expensive machines, ubiquitous on today's big modern farms, Carson has wittingly portrayed contemporary rural life. Yet she was caught off guard by the reaction she got from people whose connection to John Deere et al is also one to family and to the land. “I had no idea these tractors had so much resonance with people, it’s just amazing how happy people are with them. ‘God,’ I thought, ‘did I do something wrong?!’”

Could be something right. The artist, meanwhile, is feeling a little needy for something new, but this time not so far afield. “I was thinking I’d go into the Caterpillar realm,” she said. “I just see them as an agrarian symbol. It’s agrarian expressionism.”

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The Bright and Sunny Heart of Darkness

"Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging."

                       -- Walter Benjamin, Excavation and Memory

Quintan Ana Wikswo’s “Sonderbauten: The Special Block” is a photographic teasing out of repressed collective memory. At Dachau, Wikswo learned, there was a special building, the titular Sonderbau, which served as a functioning brothel. When prisoners from Ravensbrück women’s camp near Berlin were brought into Dachau, they were separated into two groups. Some were shipped off to a side camp in which they assembled Agfa cameras, while the others were assigned to the brothel. Their "clients" were male political prisoners, ostensibly, who apparently needed an excuse to stay away from each other (or so the Nazis thought). But there were surely others, says Wikswo -- it was not difficult for officers to quietly slip inside a back door to experience what was otherwise strictly verboten. Visiting Dachau, Wikswo asked to see the brothel, and was told, not surprisingly, that the structure no longer existed. It had not been deemed memorable, or, rather, the right kind of memorable. Which is to say that the Sonderbau was truly too much.

  (The murder of Jewish and other prisoners was one thing; the contiguous raping of them another. In fact, by the time the women reached Dachau, they had been almost fully debased. Upon arrival at Ravensbrück, they had been stripped naked in front of the camp’s male guards, their hair shaved off, and collectively showered. Prior to that, of course, their lives had merely been destroyed, their families separated, loved ones missing or worse. Forced sex must have seemed like the next logical deprivation.)

  Wikswo, an American artist, began collecting the Agfa cameras, which she found on eBay. Then she returned with them to Dachau and photographed the space where the brothel had been, so as to capture not just its absence and its missing workers but its missing history as well, and to shed light on the decisions that led to this erasure. She was not unaware of certain creepy parallels between the two camps; key word aperture. All of the effects in the images are done within the cameras, Wikswo says, these Agfas that were sometimes damaged in such a way that allowed in light and/or dirt. She took multiple exposures and, in some cases inserted Dachau flowers between film and lens. She used color to combat our preconceived notions of what such photos should look like. And she stayed out-of-focus because there is no way to bring her true subject, this missing history or its blurring, into focus. Her focus, one could say, is the lack of focus, the space between here and there.

The Sonderbauten photos have shown in New York and Munich and are now at the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin as part of a larger, dry and frankly schizophrenic exhibition of Jewish rites and customs, “A Time for Everything: Rituals Against Forgetting.” The best one can say is that this survey of objects provides a well-designed forum for Wikswo’s images, which manage to take us somewhere we don’t want to go, and to do it not with a hammer to the head or to the senses, or with accepted and expected visual histories, but with a glimpse of blue sky or a blooming dandelion juxtaposed with a dance of barbed wire or a priapic guard’s tower. That’s pretty much the way it really was, after all.

“Sonderbauten: The Special Block" and "A Time for Everything: Rituals Against Forgetting” continue at the Jewish Museum Berlin through February 9, 2014.

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portfolio: THE IMAGINED ARCHITECTURE OF ENGELBERT KREMSER

The Berlin architect Engelbert Kremser, now 75, is known for his Erdarchitektur, or earth architecture. Although he managed to get a few notable buildings built back in the day, and his name and designs appeared in architectural journals with some frequency, he was largely frustrated, playing the organic outlier to Berlin’s boxy Bauhaus establishment. More on this later: I recently sat down with the architect, who happens to be my landlord, for a more in-depth piece. In the meantime, check out these thumb-nosing photomontages he made in the 60s, replacing prominent structures he abhorred with his own fabulous vision. Some enterprising gallery or museum should show the original photomontages, which are hand cut and deserve exactly what Kremser detests – a white cube.

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Saul Leiter, 1923-2013

http://innogreathurry.com/InNoGreatHurry/Trailer.html

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A Malibu Oak in Berlin

An oak tree grows in Malibu, California, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. You know Malibu: Zuma Beach, fires in the Summer and Fall, then the Winter floods and mud slides that follow. Brown rolling hills, oak trees. One such tree is struck by lightning. An artist with the lovely, honorable and appropriate name of Taft Green harvests this fallen fruit and devises a sculptural series for and from it. There are five works in all, with titles relating their composition to movements, and vice versa: Fold, Loop, Repeat, Rotate and Expand. Each piece includes the sculpture of oak and mild steel as well as a logo, printed from a carved block of oak that retains traces of its lightning-scorched history. The works are grounded in notions of image making, transformation, and language reduction per the theories of Jean-Francois Lyotard, says the artist with the alarming ease of a physicist explaining string theory to a rope salesman. But happily, such explication is not necessary to appreciate Green's muscular, kinetic sculptures. When in their physical presence, these oak and steel printing combines exert an enigmatic magnetism -- maybe it's those traces of lightning. Four of the five pieces can be seen at Praterstrasse Berlin through January 14.

Fold

Fold (detail)

Loop

Expand

Repeat

Repeat (detail)

Galerie Praterstrasse Berlin, Bergfriedstrasse 20 (Ecke Wassertorstrasse), 10969 Berlin-Kreuzberg. Tuesday-Friday 10 - 15 Uhr and by appointment. mail@praterstrasseberlin.com

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The Suicide of Detlef G.

Note: If you find this in two columns, please click on the headline for the single-column version.

With the dark, wet days of winter upon us, Germany is awash in strange art-world stories linking past and present, namely the amazing, appalling, even sad tale of Cornelius Gurlitt and his 1400 entartete Kunst paintings. In a bit of welcome news, Berliners celebrated the return of one piece of entartete Kunst, Lotte Laserstein’s Im Gasthaus. But today brings news of another tragic affair: Detlef G., a 73-year-old Berliner, has taken his own life after confessing to police that he forged and sold some 100 works over the last ten years as those of the German-French painter Lou Albert-Lasard.

Real, oder? Lou Albert-Lasard, Ohne Titel (ca 1920s)

Albert-Lasard, sometimes spelled –Lazard, is perhaps best known for her two-year relationship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom she lived in Munich and Vienna from 1914-16, and which ended her marriage. When her affair with Rilke was over, she moved to Switzerland, then Berlin, where she was associated with the November Group of Expressionists, and finally to Paris in 1928. Settling in Montparnasse, she is said to have hung out with the likes of Matisse, Delaunay and Giacometti. In 1940, the Jewish Albert-Lasard was interned along with her daughter at Gurs, in southern France, where she continued to produce drawings and watercolors, mainly of prisoners, under the name Mabull. She and her daughter survived the war and travelled extensively together, Albert-Lasard drawing and painting all the while; she died in Paris in 1969, aged 84.

Lou Albert-Lasard, drawing from Gurs (1940)

  Detlef G. was a former gallerist known in Berlin for his love for and expertise on Albert-Lasard. One unconfirmed report suggests that he was administrator of her estate, and he often offered her works to church auctions benefiting refugees. On November 12, police searched his apartment, where they found evidence of his forgeries, including an “estate stamp” of Albert-Lasard’s signature used to “authenticate” the paintings. Detlef G. signed a confession two days later. His wife reported him missing the following day after he failed to come home or call. On Sunday a walker discovered him in his car, which was parked along a forested road near Trebbin, a town 36 kilometers southwest of Berlin.

Albert-Lasard

If you think you may have purchased a forged Albert-Lasard work, the Berlin police would like to hear from you, at +49 (0)30 46 64 94 54 00.

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Lotte Laserstein, Back in Berlin

Note: If you find this in two columns, please click on the headline for the single-column version.

While the art world was fully engaged in the discovery of 1400 lost entartete Kunst paintings in the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, a story still unfolding, another, far more modest yet potent victory was celebrated in Berlin. With the opening of the Berlinische Galerie's fine new exhibition, “Vienna/Berlin: The Art of Two Cities From Schiele to Grosz,” another rediscovered painting made its return to public view after almost 90 years in the dark: Lotte Laserstein’s Im Gasthaus/In the Restaurant (1927).

Laserstein was one of the first women to study art at the Berlin Academy and after Im Gasthaus appeared in the academy’s annual exhibition in 1928 it was purchased by the City of Berlin, a considerable honor for the young artist. The painting shows a “neue Frau” alone in a bar, her hair bobbed in the new, more masculine style, her deflected expression pensive, intense. There is, too, something about her just-ungloved hand, with those two, Schiele-esque fingers pressing down on the seams of her other leather glove. Another single woman reads a book behind her, and if you bring this woman to the foreground, into the neue Frau’s line of sight, well, who knows. In any case, if Laserstein’s painting skills were getting noticed in Berlin's art world, her subject matter was getting her noticed elsewhere, as was her ethnicity. 

  Two years later, Laserstein finished her masterwork, Abend Über Potsdam/Evening Over Potsdam (1930), which shows a group of friends dining on a terrace overlooking the sprawling city under roiling clouds, clearly a stand-in for Germany at large. Again they look away pensively; what should be a scene of pleasure and joy is instead one of ennui and melancholy. Most or all of them, based on real friends – the woman at left, Traute Rose, was a life-long friend and Laserstein’s favorite model -- were Jewish and they had plenty of reason to be troubled. Three years after the painting was finished, in 1933, Laserstein was officially classified as “three-quarters Jewish”; her life as a German artist, just begun, also appeared to be finished.

It’s unclear whether Laserstein knew that Im Gasthaus had been labeled degenerate – the painting still has its own entartete Kunst number (EK14607) written on the back, despite someone's attempt to erase it – but she knew in any case that it was time to get out if and when she could. In 1937, the same year the Nazis held the infamous Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich, Laserstein was given a show in Stockholm. She traveled to Sweden for the opening, stayed and would live out her life there, dying in Kalmar in 1993.

  In 1987, the London art dealers Thomas Agnew & Sons, along with Belgrave Gallery, put together a show of Laserstein paintings, all of which sold, according to the Berlinische Galerie’s Dr. Ralf Burmeister, co-curator of “Vienna/Berlin.” One of these works was Evening Over Potsdam, which Laserstein had held onto for nearly 60 years. The painting went into a private collection until last year, when it was purchased at Sotheby's for a reported 350,000 pounds by the Neue National Galerie in Berlin. Meanwhile, Im Gasthaus was on the last leg of its long journey.

Among Laserstein’s papers, which are owned by the Berlinische Galerie, is a photo of Im Gasthaus, on the back of which she wrote “vermütlich zerstört” -- presumed destroyed. That was a reasonable assumption, but as the strange tale of Cornelius Gurlitt and his 1400 “lost” paintings shows, there were plenty of reasons to hold on to works of art and keep them under wraps. In fact Im Gasthaus was in someone’s hands all along; it would pass to at least another and possibly a few different owners before it showed up in an auction in Munich last June. The auction house, Ruef, obviously didn’t know what it had and estimated its sale value at 900 Euros. Im Gasthaus sold to a private bidder, who outlasted a museum with a winning bid of €110,000. Burmeister’s not saying if the museum was the Berlinische Galerie, nor is he naming the new owner, who has lent the painting for the exhibition. He did suggest that he wouldn’t be surprised if the painting comes up for sale again in the near future.

Lotte Laserstein, seen below in a 1934 photo taken by her friend Traute Rose, emerging once again.

— Tom Christie

"Vienna/Berlin: The Art of Two Cities," co-produced by the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, continues at the Berlinische Galerie until January 27, 2014. Alte Jakobstraße 124-128, 10969 Berlin.