For anyone interested in German and Austrian art before the Second
World War, there is only one place to go and that is to the Richard Nagy
gallery in London where the Silverman Collection of art is on display.
It
is not just that it is a quite breathtaking collection, with half a
dozen masterpieces and some of the finest paintings of Otto Dix, Egon
Schiele and Ludwig Meidner anywhere. It is also such a strongly personal
gathering of art by a collector who has bought the pictures that
appealed to him not for their name or their value but for what can only
be described as their anger. "I like paintings of torment,Selecting the
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GPS." he told an interviewer, "of tension, of the human condition"
Well,
there is plenty of that in his chosen field, which may explain the
singular lack of the art in UK public galleries. The British tend not to
like angst in their art, still less when it is painted by their former
enemies. Even among private collectors it is a limited speciality,
confined mostly to Jewish Americans from the East Coast, seeking the
culture of their roots but also, perhaps, an explanation of the
cataclysm that befell Europe at the time.
Benedict Silverman
fits that bill, although he lays no claim to middle-European ancestry.
But there is clearly something in the art that speaks to him directly.
One of his first purchases was of a black wash and charcoal sketch,
Standing Boy by Egon Schiele, from 1910. It was one of a series of
studies the artist made when only 20 of street urchins. It's an
exquisite work but a painful one, as the boy, his hands thrust into his
jacket pockets, looks with tightened eyes on the world about.
It
was a picture, Silverman implies in an interview published in the
catalogue, that reminded him of his own childhood,We mainly supply
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from china, or lack of it. When he was only six his mother had been
carted off to a mental asylum suffering from post-natal depression after
the birth of twin girls. She remained incarcerated until her death in
old age, unbeknownst to her son who was left bringing up his sisters.
The
theme of loss and disruption runs throughout his holdings. His own
favourite picture is a superb gouache and watercolour by Egon Schiele,
Woman with Homunculus, from his most creative period in 1910. He drew it
after he had taken his girlfriend for an abortion.Western Canadian
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The black-haired girl, naked except for black stockings, turns back to
look at you, the figure of a child clutching her side, her eyes both
accusing and resigned. Schiele died, tragically, of the Spanish flu in
1918, aged only 28, planning a life-size canvas of the Last Supper
representing himself and the young artists whose task it would be to
create a new world after all the destruction of the old. Silverman's
collection includes an oil and tempura study for the final work, which
was never completed. It's one of the most valuable paintings in the
collection and, in its way, the most optimistic as the figures set about
the meal with an air of determination and experience.
Few of
Schiele's contemporaries shared his belief in that future. Ludwig
Meidner,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele , whose work is too little known over here,Thank you for visiting! I have been crystal mosaic
since 1998. foresaw what was coming in 1913 with Apocalyptic Landscape
in a violent vision of tumbling buildings, huge explosions and raging
waters. His worst fears were realised once the war had started. The
Incident in the Suburbs from 1915 depicts two men struggling desperately
against each other as they flee the collapsing buildings. For Meidner,
it represented the ruptures of society caused by the war. For Silverman,
it appealed as a picture of the viciously competitive real estate
market in which he started out. Meidner's feelings are mirrored in a
powerful Cubist oil on board painting by his friend George Grosz,
completed towards the end of the year. It is a nightmare view of a world
balanced on the edge of chaos, the figures and emblems of the corporate
world bustling around the figure of a lone female tightrope walker.
"I
like paintings that hit me in the stomach," says Silverman. That is
certainly true of the works of Meidner and Schiele. It is also true in a
more cerebral sense of the works of Otto Dix. The collection contains
two truly stupendous works by Germany's answer to Goya. One is a small
nude done in the manner of Cranach. Venus with Gloves from 1932 is as
compulsive as it is disconcerting, the classical simplicity of the nude
subverted by the emaciation of the body, the wistful fragility in the
eyes and the black of the gloves and falling skirt against the whiteness
of the body. You could spend hours just looking at it without ever
fully understanding the picture or the sitter.
The same could be
said, but even more so, of the great masterpiece of the Silverman
Collection, Otto Dix's Self Portrait with Model. Painted in 1923, it is
one of the largest oils in the exhibition and quite the most
disconcerting. The artist stands, all formal and constricted, in shirt
and tie and well-groomed hair. He looks out of the picture with a set
face and empty eyes. Beside him is the nude model, full fleshed, her
arms above her head, looking down with wide-eyes, thinking of something
else. Power and control are there, but it is the model that seems
freest, and the artist most imprisoned by himself.
Benedict
Silverman is now disposing of the whole collection to fund a foundation
dedicated to teaching literacy around the world. Reading, he feels, is
the great liberator and the lack of it the great obstacle to an
individual's progress. It's a very American act of charity. But then
Silverman represents a very American style of collector in his
combination of private passion and public responsibility. One wishes
there were more like him. One fears that, in a world of trophy buying
and the super rich, they are a vanishing breed.
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