About this Item
103 p. ; Ill. In very good condition. Flyer included. - PREFACE -- Piotr Nathan's grand project reminds me of an artist he does not know-the late American painter,Jess. The resemblance is founded first on the similarity of their sources in scientific illustration circa 1900. It is deepened when one considers the mutual method of the bricoleur; the common interest in cosmology, origins, encounters with wonderment, the psychology of children's literature and romantic literature, and a similar frankness about homosexual desire. Jess' apostasy from the main currents of American art was polemical. In his book, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, Thomas Crow attempts to place Jess in the context of Pop Art, and several years ago the Whitney Museum of American Art included him in the exhibition Beat Culture and the New America: 1956-1965. -- These startling contexts brought more awareness to Jess' work and succeeded in questioning what one might mean by Pop Art or "the Beats," but did little to shed much light on the implications of his art. I bring up the resemblance only to confound the notion of artistic singularity, and also to suggest that one ought to explore an argument for it. -- Today there is a much diminished, gravitational pull toward categories and "isms" in the serious discussion of contemporary art. In painting, certain tropes come and go, evolve, transform. Cellular and fractal imagery has been with us since the late seventies and flourishes in the digital age. Psycho-sexual confession has maintained a steady pace since Viennese Actionism. The markers of mass culture remembered from childhood change as each generation presents the origin of the world to reflect the decade of their own childhood. Nathan's paintings and drawings refer to the childhood of modernity, the workings of the scientistpoet of the Romantic period, especially the Prussian Enlightenment. They refer to the great leaps in observational power achieved in the nineteenth century with telescopes and microscopes. If there is nostalgia in Nathan's work, it is not for the sixties and his own childhood. It is for eras in which certain world views were possible. The idea of the past contains the bright star of romantic knowledge. -- Part of the optimistic sense of astonishment that pervades Nathan's work is surely rooted in his mother's near, miraculous escape from the ruthless scourge that decimated almost all of Poland's Jews. Nathan grew up in Communist Poland or Gdansk to be more precise-a part of Prussia before the war. It was a bleak, authoritarian place unable to "wake-up" from the warthat brought its modern contours into being. Nathan was schooled in Hamburg and then settled in Berlin. In the eighties, before reunification or more accurately the absorption of East Germany into the West and the collapse of the D.D.R. (German Democratic Republic), Berlin lived in a seismic twilight zone registering every chill during the Cold War, while dragging out the denouement of the Second World War. Thus, this was a city where one saw time distend for history. This Berlin-the island that emerged from the war, also somewhat miraculously as it was Stalin who resisted the suggestions of Churchill and Roosevelt to raise Berlin's ruinsis now being built over and figures largely in Nathan's work. -- Nathan's work is also work of the era of AIDS: a scourge that has been with us for over twenty years and which has claimed many of Nathan's close friends. Decay and disintegration are not stayed but part of the process. The good humour of the work only underlines its foundation in tragedy. -- Thankfully Ulmann-Matthias Cemali, Dr. Kassandra Nakas, and Frank Wagner have been able to argue more specifically, and in detail, for the importance of Piotr Nathan's work. As befits our mandate, we are once again mounting the first North American exhibition of an artist who is well-known elsewhere. No consideration of contemporary German art woul.
Seller Inventory # 1197883
Contact seller
Report this item
