Gemalde Gallerie, Berlin

Gemälde Gallerie, nr Postdamer Platz, Berlin

Amazing collection of Old Masters. The work by Franz Hals is really interesting, remarkable, some of the Caravaggios and the works by Gainsborough have real dignity, gravitas, wonderment. Strange how an artist manages to dig so much out of what appear to be conventional portraits. Franz Hals is beginning to investigate really elementary but hitherto uninvestigated things about portraiture, such as; what happens when the sitter moves? The paintings have a snapshot quality, the artist has attempted to portray heads twisting and turning. Rembrandt is also represented. A fantastic painter who had many financial and personal difficulties to overcome, he was claimed as a Nazi icon when Holland was over-run in WW2. Rembrandt had many quarrels with Jews who (apparantly) bought up his work cheaply and then sold it at profit. (isn´t that what commerce is about?) But Rembrandt also spent money wildly, never paid taxes or bills. Anyway, the case of Rembrandt tells us a lot about propaganda and the uses and mis-uses of ´truth´, in a historical or personal framework. It’s odd to reflect (is it?) that one of the greatest artists was grifter and con man. Caravaggio was also a reprobate, but in a different way. Living an outrageous life of violence, homosexuality and art, a waif depicting the life of the street and filtering it through a high art lense for his Church patrons who forgave him, ultimately, for his ´lapses´.

He murdered a man after a game of tennis (??), escaped to Sicily and then to Malta where he was made into a Brother Knight by the Knights of St John and then gaoled. I´ve been to the dungeon where Caravaggio was imprisoned (spent a night there too). Famed for his use of light and shade, a new art technique which he called chiaroscuro, he foreshadowing the experiments of the Flemish school of art who perfected usage of artificial light in painting and also foreshadowed its use in cinema. The extreme contrasts of light and darkness in Caravaggio begin to speak about the ambivalence of reality itself and its insubstantiality (merely a play of light and shadow). I also went to see the exhibition Durer´s Mother. Some sketches by Durer which I´ve seen before in the Chester Beatty Collection in Dublin.
best wishes,
Paul

read Ibsen and Strindberg a long time ago. Ibsen in college. Strindberg a bit later. I believe Strindberg had frequent hallucinations, and really was one of those rare people who can combine a serious psychiatric illness with creativity. I think my father's masters thesis, also, quoted Ibsen. It was mostly about the changes over history in formal and informal forms of address in French, German, and English. He made a glace at Norwegian too. My son found it in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Columbia when he was an undergraduate.
Christopher

Subject: Cafe, Frederichstraße
Hi, sitting at a cafe tonight, mulling over some chilli and a coke. A man came up to me, addressed me in German, then some women came over, talking at me while I couldn´t understand. Seemed they wanted me to move to a smaller table so that their group could be together. Anyway, I thought this man was familiar and it turned out to be Klaus Maria Brandauer, the Austrian actor, who is putting on a production of Die DreiGroßenOper somewhere nr Frederichstraße, the main theatre boulevard in Berlin. Here am I, an itinerant observer according to my pal Gerry. A real symbol/victim of our celebrity culture, being moved aside or trampled on to make way for a defunct celebrity who had his 15 minutes of fame. Talked to the director for some time about Macbeth and the play that absorbs me: Shakespeare´s Othello (because the subject jealousy, is such a modern emotion). Turned out that she liked Ibsen. A Viennese and schooled in a Viennese charm school. Ibsen was a writer, not a playwright. Most of his plays were latterly unstageable and he wrote long tomes which people now think of as plays. One reason that academies like them is because they are so ´literary´, therefore fill up a literature course with lots of reading and little practical theatre work. I mentioned Strindberg, a writer I like and whom Ibsen detested. (a guide to what is good. Strindberg also was a friend of Nietzsche´s, a very good bloke and some charming letters about the Kaiser and Stocker.)Ibsen had a portrait of ´the madman´ (Strindberg) on his desk. I think he regarded Strindberg as mad because he dared to intimate poetic drama which Ibsen had abandoned in favour of realism and then naturalism but which Strindberg was returning to after Froken Julie, a landmark in naturalist theatre.

Paul Murphy, Berlin, 2006