Awakenings

It disappoints me to see how our society has become. With our increasingly busy lives and the advancement of modern technology, families are growing further and further apart. Many of the people that we spend most of our time with know little about our everyday lives. We might know even less about theirs. As I sat at the dinner table, I looked around only to realize that the people who are supposed to be closest to me are actually the farthest apart. Vladimir Berenzon, my father, was practically unknown to me. His life before marriage is all but a blur. I began to wonder who this man actually was when he was around my age. It struck my curiosity to wonder how he lived his younger years back in Ukraine, before he married my mother. The beginning of his teenage years was an appropriate time to start. (more…)

The International Center of Photography displayed the works of “Gerda Taro and Robert Capa” in its War Photography exhibit. The war photography by both Taro and Capa added a new perspective to the reality of war which are often overlooked or ignored by people who are simply living at home and don’t fully realize the severity and tragedy linked to war.

Gerda Taro displays women in war add a new perspective to the idea of women in war. They are shown as medical assistance nursing wounded soldiers to better health but are rather seen as the military force in war. The “Republican Militiawoman training on the beach, outside Barcelona,” August 1936, displays a row of confident, fearless women all dressed in solid black clothes. The strong contrast that Taro put in the photograph adds to the authoritarian mood. The angle adds to the ascending power of women in war. It is important to note that there is no male figure in a series of photographs that in this category. Thus, the women seem to be independent and focused only on the aspects of war. Another image displays a woman leaning forwards as she holds a gun in her hand, alert and ready to fire at her target. The strong contrast of the dark clothes and the light background add to the confidence the woman processes while she firmly holds the gun in her hand. The angle captures more of a profile of the woman thus it may be trying to indicate the focus of the subject.

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An opera singer doesn’t sound like the most interesting person to meet. But when an opera singer walks in with a lively and an outrageous personality, one is safe to say that she is not the typical Viking lady holding a spear. Angela Brown, a lady with a rare voice and an even rarer sense of humor, came to speak to Baruch’s Arts in New York City classes. Professor Bernstein somehow lured Ms. Brown into our domain. She flew in to New York just to meet our class and certainly made it worthwhile. Ms. Brown spoke about her life, her work, and, most importantly, her vision. But no matter how serious it became, she always found a way to make her audience burst in laughter. (more…)

Born at the end of the seventeenth century before photography emerged as a recognized art form, James Van Der Zee was a superb photographer credited with the most extensive photographic documentation of African American life in Harlem, where he lived and worked in his photo studio GGG.

His photographs reveal meticulously staged, theatrical settings, which served as the background to portraits of middle-class blacks. With pipes, furs and coats for props, James Van Der Zee captured the dignity and the perfection of his people.

Before the invention of photo technology, Van Der Zee used the technique of double exposure to create layered photographs. He used this technique most notably in funeral photos where a faded image of the deceased was superimposed on a regular print of the funeral ceremony.

Destitute and unrecognized until the Metropolitan Museum of Art unearthed his extraordinary preservation of Harlem’s past, Van Der Zee catapulted to fame only in 1967. In 1983, the extraordinary artist with a natural deftness for photography died at the age of 97.

The Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and adjoining exhibits currently on display at the International Center of Photography are a forceful testament to the tragedy of war and the power of the photograph.

A collection of over 400 prints and negatives by pioneering photojournalist Andre Friedmann, who took the name Robert Capa, and his partner in love and work, Gerda Taro document the political and human history of the Spanish Civil War, events which consumed European and American intellectuals.

Among the silver gelatin prints mounted on the blood-red walls of the exhibit are images of Republican soldiers laden with heavy backpacks and artillery, men searching for wounded soldiers in clouds of dust and nearby explosions against serene country landscapes. As a tribute to the life that endures when nations go to war are photographs of a barber shop and agricultural workers in fields.

Recognizing the untapped power of photography, Capa and Taro had pushed beyond the limits of safety to expose the atrocities of war in a way that would sting more painfully than words printed in a newspaper. Raw and personal, the faces of widows, refugees and orphans humanize the statistics that civilians of war inevitably grow immune to. Photographs of the International Congress of Writers in Valencia and the intellectuals’ excursions to the war torn city capture the political dynamics that accompany every war.

More poignantly, bloody images, corpses piled two per gurney and the limp bodies of unclothed children are a truthful, unflinching account of a dangerous time. Complementing the photos of the Spanish Civil War, the Sino-Japanese War and World War II, is a smaller exhibit called, “Other Weapons” referring to the burgeoning power of photography in magazine montages and the profound political and social effects of a new print culture in the 1930s. Magazine covers with missiles aimed at children and a booted foot symbolically crushing a swastika had the power to ignite and mobilize nations. Old posters and newspapers from the Spanish Civil War awaken the viewer to the historical impact of images made possible by new technological changes in printing and distribution.

Photographer Gerda Taro’s death during the 1937 battle of Brunete serves as a final testament to her unwavering belief in the power of photography, and the importance of documenting what would otherwise be the unseen tragedies of war. The International Center of Photography exhibition is not only a visual history of war but an explicit reminder of the impact images bear on the human soul.

In the 1950s, downtown Manhattan was home to a flourishing community of artists of the New York school of abstract expressionism. Among them were painters Franz Kline, Jack Pollock, Robert Motherwell, his wife Helen Frankenthaler, William de Kooning, and his studio partner and teacher to Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky. Their rebellious artistry is aptly preserved side-by-side in the Muriel Newman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The gift of 93 year-old discerning collector, Mrs. Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman, the collection also features works by European masters: sculptor Alberto Giacometti and avant-garde painter Joan Miro. In a striking juxtaposition, Jack Pollock’s imposing piece “Number 28”, a classic drip work spanning 65 x 105 inches, is complemented by the Met’s earlier acquisition of “Autumn Rhythm”, a lighter palette stretching wider and longer than its denser counterpart. The texture of the twisting enamel and the rasp edges forged with knife and trowel relay Pollock’s creative abandon, and relay a tiny piece of that freedom to the viewer.

Another massive, radical work in the collection is “Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 35” by Robert Motherwell, a dichotomy of black and white on oil and magna that screams a political message of the Spanish Civil War, events that captivated Motherwell and his contemporaries. The clean exhibit in the style of the Museum of Modern Art also features Alfred Leslie’s suggestive painting “The Lady’s Flowers”, Gorky’s whimsical “Virginia Landscape” and de Kooning’s “Attic”, an enigma of figures, geometry and newspaper frays. Among the extraordinary pieces is Clyfford Still’s “1947-H No. 1” in the color-peeling effect of the artist with heavy, dark curvatures on a lighter canvas swallowing the viewer into its strange depths.

The exquisite collection includes drawings and sculptures including Giacometti’s “The Forest” with its seven attenuated human forms, which reflect the thinness and fragility seen in Miro’s “Circus House.” Like the modern art of his era interested in the subconscious and the emptiness of human existence, Giacometti’s bronze figures in their over-extended form are impossible to walk by unaffected. Max Ernst’s surreal depiction of the woman that would later marry Salvador Dali and Mark Rothko’s layered color palettes also stop the viewer cold. A finc collection of abstract art, the Muriel Newman gallery is a thoughtful experience of moods and emotions, through two and three-dimensional colors and forms.

“Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper. The photographer begins with the finished product”  

– Edward Steichen

Edward Steichen was an American photographer, painter, art gallery and museum curator, and even a film director. It would be safe to assert that he was a very well rounded man.

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When I was a young child, I did not fully appreciate everything my mother did for me, and all the sacrifices she went through to raise my seven siblings and me. I was never close with her, nor interested to hear all the lessons I needed to know as a growing girl in America. That perspective changed when I left to live in Israel for a year after graduating high school. While there, I learned that living by myself, and providing my own meals strongly made me yearn for my mother back in America. From the time I came home from Israel, I told myself that the relationship between my mother and me must change. And now, after having worked on my goal for a few months, I am happy to spread that my mother and I get along very well, and share secrets together. But our new relationship didn’t mean that I knew about her life back when she was young, and therefore, after doing my research, I present, my mother. (more…)

I decided for my photography project to take pictures of reflections that I see in the city. Many people take normal reflection pictures of buildings, and therefore, I made sure my pictures would have a different twist. But this wasn’t as easy as I expected it to be. At first, I thought that the instant I went outside, the theme would come to me. However, on my way home from school, when I walked to Port Authority, a theme just wasn’t coming. So I sat for a long time, and then the theme of reflections came to me. Even though many people do this same theme for various art projects I didn’t care– the city was a place for real art opportunity. So I set out to find my pictures.

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Robert Capa has enabled the entire country to live through the American wars. Although all at home, Americans, at times of war, sat glued to the radio to hear any new strategies or news about the fighting. But the news was not able to form a clear picture in people’s minds of the actual fighting that was going on. Capa’s pictures brought the battles to life (more…)