And that is why we need Passion For Freedom

Passion For Freedom is not an organization many people know about it, which is a pity. This is what they say their aim is:

What we do:

Create space for artists and writers who discuss subjects omitted in politically correct circles.

Invite people to open and uninhibited discussion. Nothing is more important than critically informed debate. It’s how society has advanced through the ages. Gather like-minded people creating a network of actively engaged citizens who hold high the value of individual’s freedom.

On the whole, I rather dislike the phrase "politically correct". It is meaningless and is used all too often on the right (roughly speaking) in the same way as the word "fascist" is used on the left: to silence arguments that cannot be answered.

In any case, a good many of the causes Passion For Freedom espouses: support for bloggers and journalists like Raif Badawi or opposition to the invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine by Russia are widely described and reported. Other causes, such as the fate of women in Islamic societies tends to be mumbled over by many people, particularly though not exclusively on the left but are still discussed. Nevertheless, we all need to support people who are fighting for freedom in conditions that are considerably less favourable than those in this country.

As this blog maintains: За Вашу и Нашу Свободу - For Your Freedom and Ours.

Passion For Freedom is holding its annual (we hope that is still true) London Art Festival at the Art Galleries and I went to the special VIP evening yesterday. (No, I don't know either why I was considered to be a VIP but I had a good time met several friends and chatted to some interesting people. So, I am not complaining.)

I am sorry to say that I do not agree with Douglas Murray's ecstatic review of the exhibition. Most of the art was anything but stunning, though I am delighted that people can produce the art that means so much to them about issues that mean so much to them. But if you want to see a wonderful painting that tells us all we really want to know about lack of freedom and having to create in code, look at this late work by Kaziemir Malevich. Back in the Soviet Union he was arrested twice for espionage and "encouraged" to paint in the more acceptable figurative way. (As a matter of fact, he might have gone back to figurative painting, in any case, as abstraction and suprematism could go only so far.) This is his 1932 work, Harvesting.

That truly is stunning and courageous beyond what most of us, certainly in this country, ever have to display.

Anyway, back to Passion For Freedom, who cannot help that Malevich died a good many decades ago, of cancer and rather prematurely, but at least not in the Gulag or an execution chamber.

On the other hand, the situation is not quite as rosy as we would like it to be. Apparently, one work of art was not there because Mall Galleries and Westminster Police because it was deemed to be "too inflammatory". Well, yes, I guess, works about freedom can be somewhat inflammatory. Oddly enough, there could have been nothing controversial about the point being made in Mimsy's tableaux that were removed as they showed - goodness me - that peaceful citizens are at risk from that murderous organization called ISIL or ISIS, whichever you prefer.

This is what the Guardian wrote:

Isis Threaten Sylvania is a series of seven satirical light box tableaux featuring the children’s toys Sylvanian Families. It was removed from the Passion for Freedom exhibition at the Mall galleries after police raised concerns about the “potentially inflammatory content” of the work, informing the organisers that, if they went ahead with their plans to display it, they would have to pay £36,000 for security for the six-day show.

In Isis Threaten Sylvania, rabbits, mice and hedgehogs go about their daily life, sunning themselves on a beach, drinking at a beer festival or simply watching television, while the menacing figures of armed jihadis lurk in the background. “Far away, in the land of Sylvania, rabbits, foxes, hedgehogs, mice and all woodland animals have overcome their differences to live in harmonious peace and tranquility. Until Now,” reads the catalogue note. “MICE-IS, a fundamentalist Islamic terror group, are threatening to dominate Sylvania, and annihilate every species that does not submit to their hardline version of sharia law.”

The decision to remove the work from Passion for Freedom came after the Mall Galleries consulted the police, who raised “a number of serious concerns regarding the potentially inflammatory content of Mimsy’s work”. The gallery cited a clause in the exhibition contract which allowed it the right to request removal of an artwork.

Ironic, is it not, that the Mall Galleries put this up on its website in connection with the exhibition:

The annual PASSION FOR FREEDOM Art Festival is a rare collection of international works of "courageous artists" who have answered three pivotal questions:

What is freedom?

How easy is it to lose it?

How hard is it to get it back?

The gallery is now in an excellent position to answer question two and possibly even three.

The Telegraph, I am glad to say, also covered the story and has even given readers the chance to vote on the issue. I hope readers of this blog will do so and vote the "right" way. Remember: Your Freedom and Ours.

In the meantime, here are two of the tableaux that have been banned from the Passion For Freedom exhibition:

Truly controversial. I feel more than a little embarrassed by this story.

So you think the West is too materialistic? Well, let me tell you ...

Yesterday evening I went to the British Museum and saw its exhibition Germany Divided: Baselitz and his generation. One assumes that the BM sensibly decided to remember the 1914 anniversary of the beginning of what used to be known as the first German war by looking at what that event wrought in Europe and, especially, in the Continent's central part. More power to their elbow.

The six artists whose work is now either in the British Museum collection or been lent for this exhibition by the Duerckheim Collection were all born under the Nazis, have childhood memories of Germany's defeat and the large-scale destruction and are also people who, having found themselves in the eastern section, eventually made their way to West Germany where their career flourished. The art exhibited is, as one would expect variable though the Baselits's chiaroscuro achieved through two or three coloured woodcut blocks create an interesting link with a recently closed Royal Academy exhibition of works created by similar techniques in the Renaissance era.

The artists' personal experience of the Cold War and their knowledge of the two contrasting artistic and cultural worlds clearly contributed to a certain crisis in their identity, both personal and artistic. This is not a particularly clever idea of mine: it is, in fact, the theme of the exhibition, seen through the works of art and through various pronouncements by the artists in question. Having left East Germany behind (most by choice though one, A. R. Penck, through force majeure in the eighties when dissidents were routinely exiled by the DDR) the artists in question continued to feel discontented, though now with the West and, particularly, with Western materialism and consumerism.

It is, of course, the role of the artist in the modern (post-Enlightenment) world to be discontented so we cannot complain about that too much but the particular cause is of interest. as it has been for some time and still is a favourite defence of the indefensible, the Communist system. We all know how it goes: there were, of course, some nasty aspects to it and one would not want to deny that but at least you did not get the obsessive materialism and consumerism of the West. Whether the real horror of those grudgingly acknowledged "some nasty things" is quite balanced out by the often tiresome obsession with the latest gadgets and clothes, yet another holiday and the emptiness of reality TV is questionable. Would people who say that prefer to live in fear of that unexpected yet expected late night or dawn ring of the bell or knock on the door with all that entailed? I think not.

Let us look at the argument: at least they are not obsessed with materialism and consumerism. To start with, what is the basis of Communism and Marxist Socialism but materialism, dialectic or otherwise? The whole political ideology, the whole basis on which state and society are to be built, purport to be materialistic, discarding religion, spiritual entities and "empty" intellectualism. Not only were the ideas discarded and banned, their proponents and practitioners were arrested, exiled, murdered or forced to convert to the worship of Materialism. Socialist Realism from which the artists in this exhibition fled one way or another is the glorification of materialism in art and its apotheosis heralded (or was meant to herald) the trampling down of all non-realist, non-materialist expression.

So much for the underlying ideological basis of Communism. The problem was that it could not provide the material goods that materialism promised to all. While theoretical materialism remained a good thing, its practical assumption had to become a bad thing since it did not exist in the workers' paradise. In particular, it had to be pronounced as bad by Western supporters (at a distance) of that non-materialistic materialist workers' paradise as they could not hide indefinitely behind the lie that consumer goods in the West were available to very few people. In fact, there is an odd correlation between growing contempt for consumerism and materialism and the wider spread of the actual goods.

Were people in Communist countries really not interested in consumer goods? Were they heck. No-one who has ever lived in those countries especially the Soviet Union and managed to communicate with the indigenous population can forget not just the queues for goods that might appear or might not but also the obsessive discussions of what might be available and where, what might be acquired at home or - blissful idea - abroad.

In Soviet cities directions were given by shops. Get off the bus at such and such a shop, turn right, walk to another shop, then right again and it's the second entrance. That sort of thing. Naturally, one had to ask the driver where such and such a shop was, which would cause great excitement on the bus: why were you going to that shop? Was there anything being sold there?

That is materialism and consumerism on the lowest possible level. It did not stop there. With no rights to real property, people competed in ownership of consumer goods: clothes, shoes, make-up, furniture once that became possible and cars when that became possible in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

One of the comedy sketches I recall from my childhood in Budapest was a discussion between two men, played by well known comedians, over breakfast in a cafe about a third one who is assumed to be the owner of a car that is outside. "Where does Kropacsek get his car from?" became one of the oft-repeated lines by people who watched the sketch and sympathized. For about ten minutes there was a discussion about the hapless Kropacsek who ought not to be able to afford a car but seems to have done. How did he do it? Where did he get the car from? Eventually, one of the men realizes that the car is not Kropacsek's but someone else's, whose name might be Moritz. Relief all round. Silence. Well, you can hear the punchline ahead: "where does Moritz get his car from?". Not materialistic at all. Not obsessed with consumer goods. Certainly not.

Even tickets for particularly well thought of plays and films, especially if they were a little daring, books that you could buy only if you had connections, all had become part of a febrile competitive consumerism. Yes, people smuggled in dissident literature but even more they smuggled or just took in all sorts of goodies, basics and luxuries, for themselves, for their families, their friends. Obsessive materialism and consumerism prevailed everywhere in the Communist world with it being considerably stronger and more obsessive in the Soviet Union than in Eastern Europe, particularly countries like Hungary where certain economic reforms made life a little easier, a little more like the West (though only a little).

Communism in its Soviet form has gone and what we see in the post-Soviet states is yet more obsessiveness as well as absolute selfishness in the accumulation of wealth and of consumer goods on a scale that is truly stunning to us in the West. That and the lack of any non-materialist ideas and controls are not the result of the collapse of the Soviet system but of its existence, of its materialist ideology, of the destruction of all other ideas and the contrasting material poverty.

Still under the influence

Earlier this evening I went to the launch of a book about a great but hardly known Russian art critic, Nikolay Punin at the Pushkin House (where I, too, shall be giving a talk next week but that's another story) and organized by the UK Friends of the Hermitage.

The author, Natalia Murray, who lectures on twentieth century Russian art at the Courtauld, called her book The Unsung Hero of the Avant-Garde, which gives a slightly one-sided view of Punin's life and work. He started off as a member of the Avant-Garde and a Futurist, an art Commissar, in fact, who, while fighting for the Hermitage during the Civil War, also proclaimed loudly the need for proletarian art, for the old to be swept away, for a new art in a new state.

Over the subsequent decades he moved over a little and got into serious trouble with the authorities for his insistence that Western art was of great value and modern Western art needed to be seen and studied, not hidden away and lambasted as something decadent. There was and is a superb collection of late nineteenth and early twentieth century art in Russia, put together by the collectors and businessmen Mamontov and Schchukin but expropriated by the Bolsheviks. There are also wonderful examples of early twentieth century Russian art, which was truly avant-garde, in the forefront of many developments but was suppressed (with artists exiled, silenced, imprisoned and murdered). Punin is also credited with saving much of the "decadent" art that was very nearly destroyed.

His reward: three arrests one in 1921 together with the poet Nikolay Gumilyov who was executed, one in 1935 when he was released after pleas by Anna Akhmatova (whose son had also been arrested) and Boris Pasternak and the final one in 1949 and a miserable and tormented death in the harsh labour camp in Vorkuta in August 1953. His name was written out of Russian art history, to be revived only partially and reluctantly very recently when his diaries were published in Russian and English by the University of Texas that has acquired some of them.

Dr Murray's biography is the first one in any language. (The picture is on the cover of the book and is a portrait of Punin by Kazimir Malevich.)

During the discussion it came out that despite the inherent importance of the theme, despite Dr Murray's study of Punin's personal archive that is mostly in the keeping of his grand-daughter, there was a reluctance on the part of the publishers to take the project on. Eventually, it was published by a Dutch company, Brill, who also has an extensive English list.

The reason for interest being so low, it seems, is that after the Soviet authorities had written him out of the story, nobody in the West knew or cared about him either. When it comes to our knowledge of Russian history and culture we, in the West, are, to our shame, still under the influence of Soviet decisions.

After all, as I wrote about an exhibition of Russian and French art in Russia back in 2008, the curators at the Royal Academy, largely ignored Nikolay Punin's role in saving many of those paintings and his fate as one of Stalin's victims.

On a lighter note

Brian Sewell remains one of my heroes. Probably he would hate me saying it (so vulgar my dear) but he shoots from the hip. Yesterday's Evening Standard had an article by him, which enumerated various far-ranging reforms that really would save money and help the arts in this country. Number one reform, I am glad to say, would be the abolition of the Arts Council. He goes on with some other sensible ideas though I do not agree with the notion of charging just foreign visitors to go to museums and art galleries. The idea of that bureaucracy would be nightmarish and it is those same foreign visitors who are likely to leave generous amounts of money in the collection boxes. After all, those museums in other countries that Mr Sewell (and all of us) pay to visit also charge their own citizens. Otherwise, I can find no real fault. Like education, the whole arts business and its relationship with the state needs to be reconsidered root and branch.

Where does evil lie?

Occasionally I decide to try to have a thing called life. I am not always very successful at my attempts but this evening I triumphed and attended a lecture on art at the newest of London’s venues for art, literature and music (as well as a nice bar and restaurant and an iffy coffee bar), Kings Place. Rumour has it that it receives no subsidy from the Arts Council but runs on the money from various organizations, including the Guardian and the Observer, that have offices in the rest of the building. This will have to be investigated.

The lecture was given by Dr Gail-Nina Anderson and was part of the Talking Art series. Entitled Fearful Images, it was described:

The role of art goes far beyond simply delighting or informing the viewer, and this talk explores a particular strand of imagery designed to rouse a darker emotional response. From Medieval devils to Romantic nightmares, spectral visions to exteriorised neuroses, art has given shape and expression to the things that lurk in those hidden corners we might prefer not to explore. Painters such as Goya and Fuseli call up images intended to provoke a shudder – is this simply sensationalism or do we need to visit the dark side? Does the visualisation of our imagined horrors give them power or put them in their place, and why do we so often find ourselves laughing at what is meant to be scary?

The blurb does not do justice to the breadth of Dr Anderson’s knowledge or her infectious enthusiasm for various works of art, from Fuseli’s The Nightmare to various paintings with grinning skeletons.

I am not about to rehash all she said and would not do so even if I could recall everything. Two points struck me and, surprisingly, Dr Anderson did not seem to make the connection. (Or maybe she is saving it for another lecture.)

Having gone through nightmares, appearances of death (more common in German art of the 16th century than any other, apparently, but that might have something to do with German history of that period), grand apocalypses and the aforementioned skeletons, she came to the idea of evil in art.

Showing some examples of paintings of witches’ covens and other related material, she came to the conclusion that it was well-nigh impossible to paint or draw evil successfully without making it slightly amusing and not just because we all laugh to ward off evil spirits.

The one artist who managed to overcome this problem, she maintained, was William Blake, whose Ghost of a Flea is, indeed, a terrifying picture.

However, at an earlier point in the lecture Dr Anderson showed a couple of examples from Goya’s series, Los Caprichos. Then she added that there are some paintings she cannot quite deal with – she had never given a lecture on Goya’s series, Disasters of War and probably never will.

There was the answer to the conundrum: real evil is not imaginary monsters but what men do to each other (oh yes, and women). That is the real horror we have to face and one from which often escape through grim jokes and laughter. For, as a very knowledgeable person said to me once about the Soviet Union under Stalin, if you did not laugh, if you really thought seriously about what happened, you would go mad.