Slight Exaggeration by Adam Zagajewski

Author:Adam Zagajewski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

* * *

Gloomy circumstances of a historical nature lend weight to Czapski’s notebooks (Czapski hints at this in the comment I just cited). The massacre of Arabs in Paris took place on October 17, 1961. The Algerian War was raging at the time; dozens of, perhaps a hundred or more, bodies ended up in the Seine. Historians say that police dumped the murdered Arab protesters into the river from the beautiful Pont Saint-Michel in the heart of old Paris. The massacre is one of the most shameful episodes in postwar French history. The prefect of police at the time was the infamous Maurice Papon, who had so energetically collaborated with the Nazis during Vichy—he was the secretary general of the prefecture in Bordeaux and helped to deport more than sixteen hundred Jews. Czapski had this massacre fresh in his memory (though the French papers reported it only later and never gave the full dimensions of the crime) as he discussed Tobey’s elegant art. He most certainly didn’t expect a literal, faithful depiction of such a tragedy. But he didn’t want “contemplation fed by religious syncretism” to divorce itself entirely from the world’s pain, its ugliness. The knots binding pain to beauty should never be undone completely …

* * *

In Berlin, in my beloved Gemäldegalerie, the heir of a quiet museum in Dahlem, which few tourists visited in the old days, when the city was divided into two civilizations. Zbigniew Herbert was one of these rare tourists, he visited the museum repeatedly; he brought a notebook and sketched the paintings he particularly liked. Today that collection occupies a huge building in the heart of Berlin, right by Potsdamer Platz, but it still doesn’t draw many visitors for some strange reason, unlike the Louvre, where you can’t find a spot to stand among the throngs of tourists from every continent. The museum building was perfectly designed. An enormous rectangular hall, completely empty—if you don’t count the discreet water feature in the center—creates a meditative space where you may order your thoughts, on a polished wooden bench, if you prefer sitting. From the hall you enter galleries brimming with masterpieces. A different picture catches my attention every time. For example, Poussin’s dark, matter-of-fact portrait of himself as a serious man, a professional artist. Or Brueghel’s little painting depicting two monkeys chained to a wall while a great port bustles in the background, boats sailing, birds flying. (Wislawa Szymborska wrote a wonderful poem about it.) This little work demonstrates not only great craft, but great wisdom. “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters,” Auden writes in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” a poem inspired by the Brueghel painting depicting the fall of Icarus. The two monkeys aren’t looking anywhere, their gaze is fixed in the niche that has become their cage—they pay no attention to the port, the boats, the birds. The old masters understood the meaning of captivity: indifference to the world, the boats, the birds, enclosure in diminished space. Or an even smaller painting, a late Rubens work, a landscape with a gallows.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.