Barbara Loftus
Artist Exhibit
General view.
A Confiscation of Porcelain, shown as an artist's film with music, based on Loftus' paintings and memory of her family's loss of rights in Nazi Germany after November 11, 1938. Paintings are arranged in order. All painted during 1994-1996.
Artist's Statement
My mother came to England in 1939 as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. She tried to obtain visas for her family to escape. However, she was too late: the war started, her family was trapped in Germany and eventually transported to Auschwitz where they perished-my mother was her family's sole survivor. I was born in England after the war, and grew up with little knowledge of my mother's past and German identity; there were no relatives, only a sense of a void that was too painful to be discussed. But in old age, my mother has begun to talk more easily about her past. She has described events, both happy and sad, with a vividness that has made me want to reconstruct them in my image-making.
I have been working on a sequence of paintings and drawings which tell the story of a day in 1938, shortly after Kristallnacht, when members of the SA came to my mother's Berlin home to confiscate the family collection of Dresden and Meisen porcelain. Collectively entitled, A Confiscation of Porcelain, my sequence of images takes the form of a series of paintings, a short film and limited edition handmade book.
For the past ten years one of the chief preoccupations of my work as a figurative painter has been the interaction between images in narrative sequence. My images are involved with the texture of reality: they seek to define or entrap a finite piece of space. Once enclosed, the space becomes a setting for incident. By entrapping space so deliberately I feel that I am also entrapping time. The enclosed time has paradoxical qualities: it is frozen and flowing-actual yet Platonic. It belongs to the existential moment, never-to-be-repeated; yet, by being trapped and therefore still, it has affinities with both past and future. I use my enclosed spaces as a kind of theater of incident. These incidents are often autobiographical fragments.
My work progresses through confronting the realness of things. By setting down the essential lineaments of concrete things, knowing their edges, voids and volumes, I hope I can come to know some of the invisible aspects of reality and experience. In my work as a painter I have employed traditional methods-drawing, preparatory studies, oil paint on canvas. Although I am deeply involved with and committed to the practice of painting, I have always felt a strong affinity with the narrative language of film. This has led me to experiment with paintings about sequence, in an attempt to introduce the element of time into my work; and I have recently begun to explore the possibilities of juxtaposition between film and painted images. I base much of my figurative imagery on performed reenactments of events with live models. I have also tape-recorded my mother's recollections of her youth.
- Barbara Loftus
Artist's Book
"A Confiscation of Porcelain " limited edition of 50 copies by Barbara Loftus, Brighton, England. The Artist's book accompanies the paintings illustrated in this section or an 8 minute video of the same title.
Copyright 1998 by Barbara Loftus.
The WESTERN QUARTER is the favourite abode of the well to do on account of its proximity to the Tiergarten. In place of the large parks and small villas which once surrounded the woods, the aristocratic Tiergarten Quarter has Arisen since 1850, stretching on the S. to the Landwehr Canal and on the W. to the Zoological Garden. The gardens, however, are gradually disappearing before the encroachments of bricks and mortar, the ground to the S. of the canal being almost entirely built over. In Potsdamer Strasse the business life of Leipziger Strasse extends as far as Schöneberg. The KurfürstenDamm (p.182), beginning on the S. side of the Zoological Garden, runs S.W. to Halensee and the villa colony of Grunewald (p. 191). To the N. the W. end of Berlin borders on Charlottenburg, to the S. of Schöneberg and Wilmersdorf, the space once intervening between the city and these suburbs being now entirely built over. The outlying suburbs on Potsdam Railway, Friedernau, Steglitz, and Lichterfielde were, before the Great War, rapidly rising in extent and importance, and the Botanic Garden and a number of scientific institutions have been transferred to Dahlem.
There are few dark lanes or alleys even in the old part of the city. Nearly all the newer houses have balconies, gay in summer with flowers and foliage. The public squares are embellished with gardens, monuments, and fountains, and the newer churches also are generally surrounded by small ornamental grounds. The centres of traffic, such as JannowitzBrücke, Trebbiner Strasse, Lehrte Station, etc.,with their network of railwaylines and the navigation on the river offer scenes of remarkable animation.
The loss of the Great War has effected vast changes in the social composition of Berlin. The brilliance of the imperial court has disappeared. New classes of society with new aspirations have risen to commercial power. while the former calm based on assured prosperity has 'given way to a restless selfindulgence. The large influx of foreigners, mainly from Eastern Europe, is readily noticed, whereas the activities of the intellectual and professional classes, who now live in comparative retirement. are not immediately apparent to the passing visitor.