Monday 30 June 2014

Jael and Sisera by Artemisia Gentileschi




 
Jael and Sisera, by Artemisia Gentileschi, (1620), at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.
 
A biblical theme of a woman slaying an aggressor. Sisera was a cruel Canaanite leader who ruled the Israelites for twenty years. He was defeated by Barak but managed to escape and sought refuge in the tent of Jael. She gave Sisera sanctuary but when he fell asleep she drove a tent peg into his brain. The act fulfilled the prediction of a prophetess who foresaw that a woman would slay Sisera.
 
Sisera's face in the painting has a resemblance to Caravaggio. Is Gentileschi signalling the end of her admiration for the painter she revered the most? Caravaggio was often in trouble with the law: he killed an officer in a duel in Rome, escaped justice, fled to Malta, and was later jailed for assaulting a Knight of Malta.
 
Is Gentileschi declaring that she is superior to the man who influenced her style? Or is this really Tassi in the painting, the man who raped her?
 
She has signed her name on the pilaster, centrally-placed and inscribed on stone. Jael is positioned in the painting like a sculptor working on marble.
 
There is so much we don't know about Gentileschi who for centuries had the fate of so many women artists, being ignored by art history and fading into obscurity. An Italian Baroque painter, in an era when women painters were not easily accepted by the artistic community, she was the first woman to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence. She was raped when she was 18 years old, and insisted on prosecuting the rapist. During the trial she was subjected to a gynaecological examination and was tortured with thumbscrews to verify her testimony. At the end of the trial the rapist was sentenced to imprisonment for one year but never served his sentence.
 
Her paintings are extremely expressive, they portray women as assertive and strong, capable of giving themselves over to both crime and pleasure. She thus broke away from traditional conventions of the 17th century. Finally, this 'forgotten' artist is being recognised as one of the most progressive, revolutionary and accomplished Italian artists of the Baroque period.
 
 

Sunday 29 June 2014

The Holocaust Memorial Centre in Budapest




The Holocaust Memorial Centre in the Ferencvaros district of Budapest.

Designed by Istvan Manyi, the memorial opened in 2004. Like Liebskind's Jewish Holocaust Museum in Berlin, the building is distorted and oppressive:




 

darkened ramps resounding to the crunch of jackboots and the shuffle of feet lead to artefacts, newsreels and audio-visual testimonies.
 

 



The exhibition space reflects its content: fragmentary contours, strangely balanced walls, distinctive facades - the ramps and narrow passages of the exhibition space refer to the distorted and out-of-joint world of the Holocaust.






The word 'Holocaust' originally meant a sacrificial offering to god that is entirely consumed by fire. Since the 1960s the word has come to mean the extermination of two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe between 1939 and 1945. During the years from 1939 to 1945, the Nazis and their followers persecuted and murdered millions of Poles, Russians and other nationalities in Europe besides Jews, in addition to large numbers of Gypsies, homosexuals, mental patients, Jehova's Witnesses, as well as the political and religious opponents of Nazism. The uniqueness of the Holocaust however, does not stem from the sheer number of victims; prior to 1941, never before in the history of humankind had the leaders of a state wanted to kill every single member of a people, a nationality or religious group.





This is the first room





and looking closer you can see abandoned and retrieved objects that are testimony of the Holocaust



 

 
a looted candlestick
 

 
 


pliers, presumably used in one of the camps




 
a pair of glasses, loot or maybe fallen off the face of someone who was being maltreated or worse
 
 
 

 

a child's doll
 
 

 


a book - all so poignant and a preparation of the horrors awaiting in the other rooms.





The exhibition is organised in a historical narrative structure showing how the Nazis and their accomplices first deprived Jews and the Roma of their rights by declaring them secondary citizens; they set an upper limit on their number in the economic sphere - in some professions for example, the upper limit was 20% of Jews; a later act banned them from acquiring Hungarian citizenship and urged them to leave the country.

They then were deprived of their property. This was a slow process to begin with, but within a few weeks in March 1944, the Hungarian government seized nearly all the assets of persons regarded as Jews, from wedding rings to apartment buildings and industrial plants. Torture was used to make them reveal where they had hidden their valuables.

The next assault was deprivation of their freedom. Arrests, deportations and ghettoization: close to 150 ghettos were established within two months in 1944. On May 15, 1944 the largest and fastest deporting operation began, where the country was divided into six deportation zones. The engine of the Hungarian Holocaust was the collaboration of the civil administration and law enforcement agencies. Eichman himself had some twenty officers under him, his Kommando numbered fewer than 150 persons. Without the active, initiative-rich assistance of the Hungarian police, gendarmerie and public administration it would have been impossible to ghettoise and then deport hundreds of thousands of people within a few weeks. During the spring and summer of 1944, the entire state apparatus of wartime Hungary save the army, was actively engaged in organising the expulsion of Jews.

Being deprived of human dignity was the next step: wearing the yellow star; the horrors of the ghettos and collecting camps; being stripped naked and tortured; routine torture; having to watch loved ones being tortured and killed; body cavity searches; rapes; having a number tattooed on the skin; race-obsessed doctors conducting experiments.

Finally, being deprived of life. Jews and Roma were murdered indiscriminately; people were robbed, then shot and dumped in the Danube. And then, the deaths in the camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Manthaussen, Ravensbruck.




 
In the summer of 1944, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were deported in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Their extermination was directed by Rudolf Hoss, and the operation was named after him. The SS doctors were selecting night and day, the gas chambers were always full, the furnaces were operating continuously. The area around Birkenau was filled with heavy, suffocating smoke and the smell of burning flesh. Long flames leaped out of the chimneys of the crematoria. Sometimes, as the corpses of the previous transport were being dragged out of the gas chambers, the next group of Hungarian Jews was already waiting in the front of the crematoria, and a new train from Hungary was at the ramp.
 
 
 


More than 5,000 Hungarian gypsies were murdered, many of them shot in mass graves by Arrow Cross thugs and gendarmes.





 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

Some Hungarian Jews tried to resist even at the doors of the crematoria. In the dawn of May 26, 1944, hundreds of condemned Hungarian Jews refused to enter the gas chambers and tried to break out from the closed sector of Crematorium V. Under the glare of floodlights, they were all shot.





On May 28, another Hungarian transport revolted at the same place. They wanted to run to the nearby woods, and they were all shot by the SS guards. On October 7, after months of preparations, the Jewish Sonderkommando in Birkenau rose in revolt. They blew up Crematorium IV, attacked the guards and broke out of the camp. While escaping, they cut through the barbed wire of the women's camp so that girls and women could also escape. By the end of a whole day of firing and pursuit, all the rebels had been killed.
 

 
 
 

 
 
 
 

The exhibition also pays tribute to the thousands of people who helped: during the nearly two-month-long siege of Budapest, thousands were saving their Jewish friends, acquaintances and even strangers by risking their own lives. During the reign of the Arrow Cross, rescue activity intensified despite the fact that anyone helping Jews or Gypsies was risking his/her own life. 
 
 
 
 

Emerging from the bowels of hell we moved on to the restored and sunlit Art Deco Synagogue, built by Leopold Baumhorn in the 1920s.










We then ended up where we had started from, the garden/courtyard
 
 
  

 
The Tower of Lost Communities, which is also the entrance to the permanent exhibition. The Tower displays the 1441 Hungarian towns and villages that have ceased to exist as a consequence of the deportations in 1944, as inhabitants lost their lives in concentration camps or forced labour service. Its special twelve glass panes were designed by Lazslo Zsoter.
 
 
 


looking closer





The Wall of Victims, with thousands of names





looking closer


 








 

Source:

From Deprivation of Rights to Genocide - the booklet that accompanies the exhibition.

Saturday 28 June 2014

Bedo House

 
 
 
Bedo House in the Lipotvaros district of Budapest is a superb example of Hungarian Art Nouveau architecture, built by Emil Vidor in 1903. Restored after decades of neglect it now holds the Museum of Hungarian art displaying a private collection of furniture, graphics and interior design. 
 
 
 
 
 
There is also a café and a shop that sells reproduction and original pieces.
 
 
 
 
 
The Museum is so full of furniture and objects that it's difficult to take it all in.
 

 
 


an Aladdin's cave of beautiful objects
 
 
 


but also a chance to see the house from the inside





a wonderful gate separating two of the rooms.




 
Going up the stairs to the first floor - note the wood on the stairs, and the wrought iron bannisters
 

 
 


looking down - wonderful front doors as imposing from the inside as from the outside




 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 






 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

 
Wonderful attention to detail, as in the etched glass on this window
 

 
 

 
and here
 

 
 

 
too many things to take everything in
 
 
 


the two windows at the back that overlook the courtyard




 
the same detail on the side of the balconies as at the bottom of the internal stairs
 
 
 

 

the inner courtyard - above the museum, the rest of the building is apartments




 
 
 
 


classic Art Nouveau bannisters




 
another wrought iron gate
 

 
 

 
stunning stained glass
 

 
 

 
different colours for each window

 
 
 


We really appreciated having the opportunity to be inside one of those magnificent buildings

 










Conventional toilets but a wonderful door
 

 


The café is very pleasant,




 
full of Art Nouveau furniture and objects - one of the customers was wearing period clothes which added to the atmosphere
 
 
 
 

 
lots of paintings and posters from the period
 

 
 

 
We stayed for a refreshing drink

 



 
and then went in search of Hold utca Market Hall and the Glass House Memorial Room - we did not manage to find either, despite having a map with us. So frustrating, but the beauty of Bedo House made up for it.