My discovery of Kollwitz

Last weekend I made a visit to the National Gallery of Art, where I particularly enjoyed an exhibit entitled The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850-1900. It's running until the end of January and is described on the Gallery's website (http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/darkerinfo.shtm):

Organized around the city centers of Paris, London, and Berlin, the exhibition will include more than 100 works—mainly prints, but also drawings, illustrated books, and small sculpture—from the Gallery's extensive collections that reveal the romantic sensibilities of the arts of privacy. Here the experience of art was a private affair, like taking a book down from the shelf for quiet enjoyment. The arts of privacy encouraged the expression of darker thoughts and moody reflections—a milieu that recruited the talents of academics, realists, impressionists, and symbolists.

Some of the artists I recognized, such as Redon. But the work of Kathe Kollwitz, who had been unfamiliar with previously, was what really grabbed ahold of my interest. There was a small series of prints taken from Zola's Germinal which were quite aresting. I've not read the book and know only that it has to do an uprising in a French mining town...so it is difficult to know exactly is meant to be going on in the pictures.

But they have a certain tautness to them; one feels that something horrible is happening or about to, even if it’s not entirely clear what. I think the elongated, horizontal dimensions of the work add to the falling into madness kind of feeling I got in viewing them. I was reminded of the early works of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (I’ve only read his first two novels—Gargoyles and The Lime Works). And now I find myself wanted to enter back into those strange lands of frightening reality, descending circles of bedlam.

Waugh...a first visiting.

After having seen the recent movie remake of Brideshead Revisted, with the incomparable Emma Thompson and delightfully urbane Sir Michael Gambon (the second incarnation of Dumbledore) playing Lady and Lord Marchmain respectively, I decided to acquaint myself with the material's originator. I've now read a hearty handful of Waugh's novels and short stories, and I'm just to get to some of his letters (I'm hoping, as I seem to remember having heard, that they're simply loaded with scabrous and cruel little witticims).

My first read was, of course, Brideshead, which I picked up at what I have dubbed "The Warehouse." This rather impressive showing of shelf upon shelf of moldering books is something of an overflow facility of a local Washington used book seller. I read the book through on the out and back bus journey to New York (from D.C.) one weekend. I liked. Clearly, for I followed it up with a return to The Warehouse and further draughts of Waugh.

Put out More Flags was the latest I've downed. And I must say, I think it the best of the lot thus far, having read Brideshead, A Handful of Dust, Men at Arms, and Decline and Fall. The great joy for me in this 1942 novel is its frank, immediately after-the-fact viewing of the first, rather campy days of the Secod World War, full of the British establishment's and people's miscromprehension of the stark, inglorious and hellish experience to come.

Even with my only limited readings of Waugh, I feel confident in labeling Flags a work of an author at the very height of his powers. It has everything I've loved of the others. Its cast of characters includes charming Wildean aesthtes, clinging to the effete, oxonian idols of the past; cuckolded husbands running feverishly toward self-destruction; dipsomaniacal scions of faded, once noble families; and more.

And it's funny. It's very funny.