Bauhaus travels

April 27, 2009 - 8:37 AM by · 4 Comments
Filed under: Art, design, General, History and Culture 

If you can’t make it to Tel Aviv this year to celebrate its centennial birthday, there’s a great traveling exhibit by a favorite photographer of mine, Yigal Gawze, showing his collection of Bauhaus photos, Fragments of a Style. The exhibit opened in Chicago, recently moved to San Francisco, and will then be moved to Europe, including the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, Germany, as part of the 90th Anniversary of the Bauhaus school.

What’s really lovely about Yigal’s photos in this exhibit is that he hones in on the details and sunlit curves that we all see in Tel Aviv, but in a much gentler light on the normally harshly sunlit buildings.

In his explanation of the photos, Yigal writes:

“It was during the winter season, when the normally harsh outdoor light was softer and more easily tamed, and the white facades stood out against the backdrop of the deep blue sky. I was a tourist in my hometown, and my eyes developed a new sensitivity to my surroundings.
I chose to work in color (in contrast to the historical documents and the modern photographic work done on the subject), in order to better convey the character and the atmosphere created by the local light. The shadow of the palm tree falling on the white facade represents the special encounter that takes place in Tel Aviv between a building style originating in Europe and the Mediterranean glare.

From the start, I chose to focus on the fragments. I felt that I could capture the spirit of this architecture by focusing on an essential part of the structure, which carries within it the genetic code of the whole. It was also an attempt to convey something of the utopia of the years which saw the building of the ‘White City’. Only in the last part of the work, did I step back to deal with the whole building and its relationship to the street as part of the city.”

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Kafka’s Tel Aviv booty

July 27, 2008 - 12:00 PM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: General 

Kafka!During the same month in which the world’s literary eyes were focused on Jerusalem following Mark Twain-themed real estate landmark reports, the Tel Aviv-Kafka connection is buzzing hard as well, as a White City-based heiress is transformed into some kind of curmudgeonly cockroach by book lovers the world over.

One of 20th-century fiction’s most influential figures, Prague’s Franz Kafka first met Max Brod, a fellow Jew, in 1902, when the two were students at Charles University. Close friends from then until Kafka’s passing in 1924 at age 40 (he had suffered from tuberculosis, insomnia, depression, migraines, anxieties, boils and other complications), Brod enabled and encouraged Kafka’s creative output throughout the anguish.

Kafka ordered that all of his manuscripts be destroyed, and when he died, his girlfriend, Dora Diamant, heeded these wishes for the most part (the Gestapo ended up seizing some writings from her in 1933). Brod, serving as the writer’s literary executor, began publishing many as-of-yet unknown works, writing in 1925 that “Franz should have appointed another executor if he had been absolutely and finally determined that his instructions should stand.”

When the Nazis took over Prague in 1939, Brod packed up what was left of the Kafka archives and moved to Tel Aviv, where he worked as a researcher for the Habimah Theatre Company. He returned many works to Europe in various stages, including a large donation to Oxford University’s libraries in 1961, before he died in 1968, at which point his possessions were turned over to a friend named Esther Hoffe.

That’s when things started getting really Kafkaesque. Despite refusing to play ball with the State of Israel, Hoffe sold a Kafka text for £1m at Sotheby’s in the 80s and was even once busted at Ben Gurion airport trying to smuggle manuscripts in her luggage. Writings that are likely to have meditated on personae who felt like pawns amid bleak societies of red tape were being wrestled over by an extremely private woman and the Israeli government.

Esther Hoffe passed away last year, her damp, furry apartment potentially containing unknown written treasures.

But authorities in Tel Aviv have warned that the papers, with their high sulfuric acid content, may have stood up poorly to conditions in Hoffe’s damp flat in the centre of Tel Aviv and to the hordes of cats and dogs which she kept until… health inspectors intervened after neighbors complained about the stench.

Now Hoffe’s daughters are looking to finally unload the archive, but the local bureaucrats aren’t giving up just yet:

“I’ll persistently demand that no material connected to Franz Kafka leaves the State of Israel,” the state archivist, Dr. Yehoshua Freundlich, told Haaretz…. German parties have over the past few days expressed great interest in receiving the material, and estimated that it contains an original manuscript of one of Kafka’s stories along with his illustrations, as well as letters from his close friend, the writer Max Brod.

Exactly what types of works are being kept from public eyes remains an unknown variable, however. Even though many of us like to imagine lost novellas telling heady tales of introspective intrigue, the reality remains anyone’s guess:

“It’s very difficult to know what might be in her flat,” said Ritchie Robertson, the professor of German at Oxford University, which holds the bulk of Kafka’s known manuscripts. “But my own suspicion would be that there would be nothing of any significance by Kafka,” he said.

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