The Thief of Auschwitz by Clinch Jon

Author:Clinch, Jon [Clinch, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction & Literature
Publisher: unmediated ink
Published: 2012-12-01T07:00:00+00:00

Max

“Max Rosen’s human figures, rare as they are, have turned their backs upon you by the time you take notice of them.”

That was Edgar Mudd, writing in the Times of London in the spring of 1958, and it was probably the only defensible line of criticism that he ever delivered.

Mudd, you’ll remember, was a great booster of Calder and those big toys of his that the museums were all fighting over at the time. The most respected museums in the world, bidding against shopping malls and office parks and what have you. Airports. Frankly, I think every airport in the world should have a Calder. They’re too big to miss, even if you’re running past with a suitcase in tow, which means everybody gets the impression that he’s been exposed to something important—and yet they don’t require or even reward any actual thought. That makes them just about perfect for a culture on the move.

Besides, putting the damned things in airports would keep them out of the museums.

Back to Mudd, though, God rest his soul. In a rare moment of illumination, poor blind Edgar noticed that if there are any people at all in my paintings, they seem to have rejected the viewer and whatever interest he might have in them. They might even be hiding, concealing themselves among the planes and angles of the closed-in spaces that have always fascinated me so. For once he was right.

As I believe I’ve already said, spacious skies give me the willies. The critics have never known exactly what to make of that. It would be politically incorrect to blame it on my being an East Coast Jew, a New Yorker, a city boy. It would be philosophically taboo to blame it on my history in the camp. Heaven forbid. People act as if you make everything up out of whole cloth, as if you could possibly help the way you’re built and the things you’ve gone through and the way your work comes out. As if you could choose to overrule your own nature and experience.

They’re wrong. I’ve tried.

You can’t paint someone else’s paintings. You can only paint your own, with greater or lesser degrees of success.

Does this mean I’ve been too hard on Andy, after all? Andy and his fields and his farmhouses? Andy and his beloved teutonic Helga? I don’t suppose he could help himself any more than I can.

Calder, though. There’s no excusing Calder. Never mind what I said about airports. His kind of nonsense belongs underneath a circus tent.

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