Sick of your compatriots after months of gazing anxiously into their inscrutable faces? Thinking of Paris as a place where you might get away from all that? It’s not all a bad idea. Remember, though, that, here-below, in the hell nobody’s yet out of, a body’s only defense against reality is absorption in something interesting.
Thus disabused, a body may, for a while, calmly say goodbye to the home front with a visit to an interesting exhibit called Josephsohn vu par Albert Oehlen, a life-time retrospective of the sculpture of Hans Josephsohn at the Musée de l’art modern de Paris.
It’s hard to find an adjective to describe Josephson’s work. He kept himself to himself pretty much; he has been little shown outside Switzerland. Albert Oehlen, a contemporary multi-materials artist who first came to attention as an art scene bad boy in Germany in the 1980s, and is curator of the exhibit, discovered Josephsohn’s work when he visited Kesselhaus Josephsohn, a dedicated storage and display space. Kesselhaus Josephsohn was founded in 2003 as part of the Sitterwerk arts and culture complex in St Gallen, Switzerland, where Oehlen lives. Oehlen’s adjective is to organize the show around the sculptor’s life-process of creation: chronological, closing with a totem by contemporary sculptor Rebecca Warren (b. 1964) - taken from Oehlen’s personal collection. Josephsohn’s all there, Oehlen’s adjective says, words just get in the way.
Oehlen’s right.
I was a little breathless when I got to the top of the stair where the exhibit begins. When I looked up, I stopped wheezing to goggle breathless: morsels of whole sense, visual haikus. Haikus, haikus everywhere and nothing to do but look. This Hans Josephsohn guy is about how eyes make feelings, processes of creation.
In plaster or bronze, bits of wall, classic-shape kores, faces and figures capture visual expectation and form. A little section of stone wall full enough image to make signs enough to make portents… But then, it’s a stone wall, natural, made, size, rock pieces, rock types, cracks, fissures, surfaces, fractures, filler, place. It’s a stone wall. I see not so much “essence” as the fleeting sense of the whole thing.
From beginning to end, I had the feeling that I was noticing each thing for the first time. Shape, texture, relief, light, associate into visual clues into perception, into posture (movement) into character, into personality. Toward the end I was looking at heads were mysterious, maybe ancient, because their personality had been lost to time.
If it’s hard to find a single adjective to define the work, it’s even more difficult describe the feeling that Hans Josephsohn and the experience of his work inspire in me.
Born in Konigsberg in 1920, Josephsohn died in Zurich in 2012. As a Jew in post-1933 Germany, the boy was refused entry to his local art school. In 1938, he got a scholarship to study in Florence. He arrived just in time to be expelled under Mussolini’s Leggi Razziali. Fleeing to Switzerland, he found a friend in sculptor Otto Müller (1905-1993) before he was interned at the start of the world war in 1939. Josephsohn began working again in 1943. In a film about him and his work, he remarks that he has never visited Auschwitz, where his family was presumably murdered as he began his career; he was afraid a memorial might distract attention from them.
Although this is the first Josephsohn exhibition in France (and perhaps in Europe outside of Switzerland), the contemporary artist and culture activist Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964) featured certain of Josephsohn’s sculptures in Third Mind, a 2007 group show of contemporary artists at Palais de Tokyo. Rondinone wanted to build a heritage frame for the younger generation he was featuring.
From all this, my feeling creates Josephsohn as a created artist’s elder artist, genius honored by posthumous recognition rather than cold cash and a coffee. Josephsohn was sandwiched into the helpless tragedy of human existence both by natural routine,
Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
Poor Solomon Grundy
… and a need to work and work and work, some work to keep thought at bay, some work to get the expression of vision just right. Like Emily Dickinson,
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –
None may teach it – Any –
'Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –
________
Properly called “Josephsohn vu par Albert Oehlen”, the life-time retrospective is part of a triptych exhibition called “Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire - l’Age atomique/Josephsohn - Reanimation Paintings: A Thousand Voices”: a museum-wide sweep of history, high art and contemporary inclusion culture. It runs through 16 February 2025 at Musée de l’art modern de Paris.
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