Meet the Mother of French Modern Art (Paris, late 1800s to 1941): How could such a highly influential modern art dealer from the early 20th century, of mostly undiscovered French avant-garde artists called les Jeunes, be unknown to us? As in Berthe Weill was the first to enthusiastically discover, promote, fight for, and exhibit Picasso and Matisse, leaving her mark on art history.

As in advancing an extraordinary list of other French artists like Marc Chagall, Toulouse Lautrec, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, and artists from other countries such as Diego Riviera (Mexico) and Amedeo Modigliani (Italy).

As in a Who’s Who of something like 500 “novel” artists we’re told, listed in a stunning, twenty+ page Glossary of Names of emerging artists representing and furthering revolutionary art movements that bucked conventionalism: Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, Pointillism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Realism, Synchronism, and Futurism. (For characteristics of these new modernist styles, see: https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/glossary/https://www.theartstory.org/movement/synchromism/, and https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/futurism.) Fauvists, Cubists, and Surrealists are the most frequent, described in this informative video:

Could it be that Berthe Weill, fittingly called by the artists Mother Weill, was a woman in the male-dominated art world? She opened her first gallery in the “starving artists” Montmartre neighborhood of Paris in 1902 – the first one to do that in the Belle Époque era. Could it also be that Weill was Jewish, notably when half of France was conflicted about the innocence or guilt of Jewish French army officer Alfred Dreyfus? The Dreyfus Affair exposed the ugly consequences of anti-Semitism resounding today. French President Emmanuel Macron showed how damaging this period was in France’s history by opening the Maison Zola-Musée Dreyfus in October 2021, in Medan, a village near Paris.

Certainly there’s been plenty of time for us to have heard about this trailblazer – gutsy, persevering, colorful, witty, sarcastic, and fascinating – since she wrote her memoir Pow! Right in the Eye! in 1933!

Note the two exclamation points in the title. A tip-off that her writings in these journal-type notebooks are unusually excessively punctuated. A no, no in the creative writing teaching world (use sparingly, if at all). Then again, Weill marched to her own rare beat. Weill, nobody’s fool, asked Paul Redoux, a French artist and journalist to write the preface, in which he explains that what makes her prose so special is that it’s not weighed down by “literary verbiage.” Instead, it’s an “extraordinary” original source document from both an “artistic and psychological” perspective:

“Artistic, in what it told about so many artists’ beginnings and their initial struggles, everything that crowded the French painting scene over twenty-five years.”

“Psychological, in what those sentences – and it would be sacrilege to change a word of them – said about a courageous, tenacious, visionary, and enthusiastic soul” . . . wonderfully expressed in disjointed, punchy sentences that weren’t so much as written as spoken, they were so natural and alive.”

Punchy is spot on! This is a punchy memoir in every way.

Which makes it not an easy one to translate, refreshingly says translator William Rodarmor, winner of the 2021 Albertine Prize awarded by the French embassy for French literature translations, who:

“Found tackling Weill’s memoir to be a mix of pleasure and terror. The pleasure was in learning intimate details about an array of twentieth-century artists from a lively, sharp-eyed observer. The terror was in wrestling with Weill’s rapid-fire prose, idiosyncratic style, and cryptic references while being haunted by the fear of getting something wrong.”

If it weren’t for the collaboration between Manhattan gallerists Julie Saul, who led this effort along with Lynn Gumpert, director of NYU’s Grey Gallery, we probably would still not know what Berthe Weill meant to the modern art world. The complete vision for this project to be realized in 2024 when the Gallery is set to open the exhibition, Berthe Weill: Indomitable Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde. Saul sadly passed away in February 2022, even before this book was released. Poignant news that punches us too as you appreciate the task of pulling the book together. 

Saul and Gumpert made the smart decision to relocate Reboux’s “Preface: First a Few Words” after we’ve read the slim diary-like memoir. In doing so, he confirms what we’ve been feeling all along: that this “itty-bitty woman” (under five foot) with oversized eyeglasses had the “strength and faith” of a “husky giant.” A remarkable force of determination, risk-taking, and fervent devotion to the cause of nurturing what Weill astutely eyed as great art. Her quest was never about becoming rich. Which you might assume she became, but she didn’t. Continually, she mocks herself for her bad business sense, and chronically struggles financially to keep her gallery running, having to move five times due to expenses, problems with landlords, and so on.

Self Portrait, c. 1920, Émilie Charmy
via wikiart.org [Public Domain]

Outspoken about the “comings-and-goings” of a dizzying collection of diverse artists – painters, illustrators, watercolorists, sculptors, printmakers, decorators, collagists, engravers – plus collectors, other art dealers, art critics, writers, poets, and playwrights she crossed paths with, but she doesn’t say much about her family or personal life.

What stands out is that her father was a “ragpicker,” and how much she treasured her frequent travels with friends, many artists themselves. She never married. One artist friend Weill was quite close with was Émilie Charmy. Interestingly, she too is being newly rediscovered. Charmy seems best known for her self-portraits. She’s associated with the Fauvists, especially its leading figure Henri Matisse. Known as “King of the Wild Beasts,” the name attached to this new dazzling color style of painting.

Weill intended to end her memoir at her twenty-fifth anniversary as a gallerist, but decided to add an “Appendix” that takes us to her thirtieth year in business. She closed her gallery in 1941, marking forty years. She died in 1951.

Translator Rodarmor wrote most of the detailed “Notes” that come afterwards. Chapter-by-chapter over twenty single-spaced pages, he takes great pains to fill in the blanks of this “heroic slayer of the dragon of banality.” Which is why you might not want to skip them as you’ll find you’ll want more enlightenment about someone who was “always interested in everything new.” Someone who gravitated to youth and “everything that makes life bearable.”

This is a charming, lovingly produced book that makes it clear that despite the “aesthetic revolution of eye-catching splendor” that defied the ordinary, the fickleness of art, “too subject to the whims of speculation,” took years to make a dent in. Even with the enormous up-hill challenges Weill went through to showcase women artists, it’s impossible not be floored by how many were still “stricken from the history of art.”

Weill writes about how “beauty and good sense triumphed together.” But you have to wonder if or when that would have happened if it weren’t for one striving woman who never stopped believing.

Lorraine

Leave a Comment

Still interpreting Hemingway (1923-1936 short stories set in Michigan, Spain, Italy, Austria, Africa; 1936-1944 historical novel spanning the Spanish Civil War, Winter War in Finland, WWII, Cuba): You’ve probably read at least one Ernest Hemingway novel sometime in your life, but have you read his short stories?

Legendary for writing prose as simple as can be, his sentences may seem straightforward but “important things were left unsaid,” explains acclaimed author Tobias Wolff, anthologist for this new collection of nineteen short stories that show why we’re still interpreting the meaning of Hemingway’s stories nearly a 100 years after he wrote them.

Wolff, who’s written his share of short stories, novels, and memoirs, including This Boy’s Life considered a classic, regards Hemingway “important” like “Winston Churchill, or John Wayne, or Mickey Mantle.” All historical figures “larger-than-life.” Poignantly, he remembers when and where he learned Hemingway had killed himself.

video
play-sharp-fill

Wolff’s Stanford University profile, where he’s an English professor emeritus, lists thirty-five honors and awards, excluding receiving the 2015 National Medal of Arts. So when he tells us Hemingway was a “very complicated man,” we listen up.

These stories demand putting on your thinking caps. Some so short you’ll breeze through them and miss the whole point. Longer tales are equally open for interpretation, to such a degree Wolff doesn’t just offer his interpretations prefacing a particular story but chose other notable contemporary writers to join him such as Edna O’Brien, Tim O’Brien, Abraham Verghese, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

It’s fascinating to see how you may not agree with their analyses, but certainly welcome their insight. That’s because Hemingway intentionally left things up to the reader to figure out. His famous quote about writing one true sentence, doesn’t quite ring true in these stories; the cliché read-between-the-lines couldn’t be truer. Owing to Hemingway’s Theory of Omission, or Iceberg Theory:

“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

This collection, then, is fresh and eye-opening; also surprising how profoundly sad many are. Until you pair it up with its companion documentary, a Ken Burns three-part PBS mini-series, Hemingway, that aired when the book came out. This double-review also morphed into reading what the best of historical fiction does: help us feel the emotional push-and-pull of a very complicated man.

Who better than Paula McLain, an early pioneer of the literary sub-genre of women behind the famous men? Her first historical foray into one of Hemingway’s wives (he had four) was The Paris Wife, when married to his first wife Hadley Richardson and they had his first son (he had three) nicknamed Bumby. Love and Ruin – what a perfect title!

The novel takes us into Hemingway’s third marriage to Martha Gellhorn, a journalist whose literary ambitions were smothered by a man who thrived on grabbing all the attention. Later, she became a famous war correspondent – why the novel is such an ambitious undertaking – and a novelist, memoirist, and short story writer in her own right. Love and Ruin emotionally complements the stories, especially when the couple were both reporting on the Spanish Civil War, where they fell madly in love.

Hemingway fictionalized his stories from his life. So the more insight you have into Ernest Hemingway the writer and the man behind the public persona – the grandiosity and intensity of his needs, desires, and demons – the greater your appreciation for what’s said and unsaid.

His fondest memories were as a boy summering with his family in northern Michigan, kindling his love for the outdoors and sports. (On second thought, perhaps you’ve read his Nick Adams Stories? A few included here.) Other stories relate to Hemingway’s fighting in and covering wars, and his ardor for bullfighting and big game hunting.

McLain, like the Burns documentary, wants to show us his many sides. Why Hemingway was so complex: his cravings for constant love a hole that’s never filled; his manic-depressive mental state, with bouts of excruciating loneliness. He’s both loving and raging. His addictions are significant factors in his self-destructiveness. Martha is sensitive and sacrificial, yet he’s out-of-control revengeful when she finally decides come hell-or-high-water to leave him for weeks at a stretch, even months, on assignments for Collier’s magazine, so affected and committed to telling America about the suffering of refugees during WWII. So expect plenty of suffering in Hemingway’s stories too.

The Hemingway Stories challenged me. Love and Ruin captivated.

Loneliness runs through so many stories, sometimes accompanying excessive alcoholism. In Out of Season, the Italian hotel gardener is “quite drunk” in a story that seems to be about fishing, but actually has little to do with it. The old, handsome drunk who finds solace and compassion in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place is not without suicidal thoughts. (Hemingway’s father committed suicide too.)

Two stories are awfully bloody and they’re not about war. The Undefeated, “a great bullfighting story,” says Tobias Wolff, is also “touching” whereas Indian Camp is a horrific medical tale. It helps to know Hemingway’s father was harsh and a physician. Wolff believes Hemingway “handles very sensational material in an absolutely unsensational way,” but Verghese, a physician himself, is appalled at how “insensitive or hardened to the suffering” the character in the story is. Beware, it may turn your stomach.

Up in Michigan, the first story, may be the briefest but it gets under your skin. Written in 1923, it depicts how constricted women’s lives were and how relevant today. Perhaps set in Michigan because this place marks Hemingway’s innocence? Like the “neatest girl” in the story, Liz, with a crush on a man who barely notices her until one day he returns from hunting, starts drinking whiskey, and out-of-the-blue kisses her, strangely. Disturbingly. She’s sitting on a chair and his kiss isn’t gentle, nor the way he grabs her body. Their dialogue is spare so you must read into the narrative to decide whether she even knew what she was getting into. Hemingway captures her innocence with, “Something clicked inside of her and the feeling was warmer.” Then her ambivalence? Fears? Wishes? saying, “Don’t, Jim.” The story shows how difficult it is to prove rape – my interpretation. Not what Edna O’Brien, “Ireland’s greatest living writer,” says:

“Many women feel that Hemingway hated women and wrote adversely about them. I would ask his detractors, female or male, to read this story. Could you in all honor say that this was a writer who didn’t understand women’s emotions and hated women?”

Some authors comment on their favorite story. Mine, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, is the last in the collection. War veteran O’Brien says it’s probably his favorite too, along with Verghese because of how “in one short story a man can so effectively have his own life flash before him.” Here you’ll find Hemingway’s lyricism: “The snow as smooth to see as cake frosting and as light as powder.” Here too is: “I loved Africa,” says Harry, the character who “loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.” Like Ernest Hemingway.

Lorraine

Leave a Comment

Ocean Decade – Why we love the sea, and why the urgency to protect it (Cornish Coast and the Isles of Scilly, England, 2019-2021 present-day): What does the sea mean to so many? asks British author Wyl Menmuir who lives a mile from the Atlantic Ocean along the Southwest tip of England in Cornwall, the “longest shoreline of any county in the British Isles,” 326 miles.

Like The Many in Menmuir’s 2016 longlisted Booker-prize novel set on the Cornish coast, his nonfiction The Draw of the Sea describes many ways the ocean means to so many. In so doing, he shows us why the UN declared 2021 to 2030 the Ocean Decade. Why the multitudes who love the sea, live by it, depend on it, can no longer do so without understanding the urgency of what’s happening to it. “If you ask ten different people what they see when they look at the coastline you will get eleven different answers.” 

The “otherness” of “a sacred space” that’s “everything the land is not” explains why there’s no single answer to why the sea captures us profoundly. Perhaps all the reasons can’t be contained in this one book, but it feels as though they are. At least for Britain’s North Coast region of the Atlantic Ocean, with its stunning beaches, towering cliffs, hidden coves, and long history, folklore, culture.

Cornwall beach by Weldon Kennedy on Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

Aesthetically, we’re drawn to this handsomely produced book, with its golden, glittering dust jacket. Watercolor images of the sea at low tides wrap the inside cardboard cover front and back creating a sense of wholeness. Sixty black-and-white photographs taken from the camera Menmuir carries around with him illustrate otherworldly ocean tales he digs up. A striking one is of a walrus tucked into a cranny on an “ambulance boat,” having gone way off course. A “symbol of climate change.” Marine mammologists and marine scientists are examples of the diversity of people Menmuir sought out to gather a broad perspective as to what this unique ocean world means to many.

As a creative writing teacher at Falmouth University located in Cornwall, Menmuir is many things too: literary poet, historian, photojournalist, and a lover of the sea – a Thalassophile.

An eight-page A Glossary of Sea Words found at the back of the book demonstrates a genuineness of wanting to communicate a world unknown to so many of us who’ve not spent time on the Cornish coast. A world deserving of its own vocabulary. British English revolving around the sea feels like a foreign language!

For instance, beachcomber along the shoreline translates into “wrecker” along the “strandline.” Hence insight into the meaning of the title of the opening chapter “Strandline Gleaner.” There’s a long-history of shipwrecks on these rough northern seas, so there’s a Cornish word for “someone who collects from the beach items washed up from the shores – a “wrecker” whose action is “wrecking.” Menmuir has a word for the know-how: “flotsamancy, a prediction of where the most interesting wreck will wash in, based on a combination of hunch, tip-offs and weather tracking.”

Cornwell is likened to “an outstretched arm” that’s “open to the wild weather and putting it in the path of the Atlantic gyres,” so even the author’s house is built from wood salvaged from a shipwreck (hardwood from a Nigerian tree, Iroko.) Today these beaches are a collector’s paradise, but long ago livelihoods depended on it. A “secret business” made into a documentary, The Wrecking Season. The book opens with an epigraph, paying tribute to the playwright Nick Darke who made the film, passing away soon after he spoke these words:

“It’s the beginning of the day, you’re alone, first on the beach. No footprints, there’s a gale blowing, gigantic sea running, and there’s wreck as far as you can see. You’re alive. Your eyes are everywhere, your heart’s thumping, you’ve got such a sense of anticipation – some people jump out of aeroplanes for that kind of thrill. I just walk onto the beach.”

Darke’s prose lyrically sets the tone for Menmuir’s intimate and humane compilation of spirited testaments to the meaning of the sea to the many. Often variations of, “We go down to the sea for a taste of freedom, a taste of the borderless and expansive.”

The sea is so powerful it’s ingrained in our language, Menmuir points out:

“When we grieve, we are adrift or unmoored . . . and when we are struggling – mentally, financially, spiritually – we try to keep our heads above water. We look to dry land, try to remain grounded, and we hope for plain sailing in the days to come.

In the second chapter “Island Fisher,” we meet an endangered lobsterman, Jof Hicks. Menmuir interviewed him on the essentially uninhabited island of St. Agnes, one of the fifty islands that make up the Isles of Scilly off the Cornish coast. An ancient world, Jof used an ancient craft to weave “withy pots” from the barks of willow trees, instead of plastic lobster traps that have taken over the industry. Presented as a time-consuming, ethical approach that could help save the seas from its “greatest threat”: the mind-boggling amount of plastic debris washing up along the shores endangering the fish we eat and the health of the oceans. The effort Menmuir made to seek Jof’s unique and sea-loving story sticks with us when we learn that he wanted to speak with Jof again only to find out he’d passed away. Jof’s words live on: “In the past, we paired science with economics and that has failed . . . So let’s pair science with art and see what happens.”

People collect the plastic debris obsessively, often for nostalgic reasons. Memories of childhood toys like plastic cowboys are treasured. “Fisherman’s kisses,” which are tiny pieces frayed off of fishing nets, are reminders, though, of the extreme need for ocean conservation. One group combing a beach area found 10,000 of these so-called kisses in no time. Consider too this shocking factoid: there’s an “estimated eight million pieces of plastic that enter the sea every day, amounting to almost 270,000 tons”!

In the breathtaking “Depth Plumber” chapter, we’re introduced to a relatively new “sport” of underwater diving in which the diver uses minimal equipment – freediving. Less is more for this supposedly “relaxing,” almost “spiritual” experience. There’s no oxygen tank, only the diver’s ability to hold his/her breath under water as long as humanely/superhumanly possible. The record-holder – 7 minutes! While we think it’s the loss of oxygen that causes us to exhale, or in this case, swim to the top of the water gasping for air, we’re told it’s actually the pain of too much carbon dioxide.

The freedivers Menmuir follows are women. Some call themselves mermaids; they actually perform as mermaids at parties. The author, an avid surfer (surfing is a big part of life here including a group called Surfers Against Sewage) is in awe of the “serenity” of the freedivers. Terrified of what he’s observing, he still tries it. One woman especially catches our attention too: diagnosed with ADHD saying freediving makes her feel calmer, freer, thus giving us a glimpse into what it might feel like when your brain is on sensory overload. Still, given all the sensations and things she must see under the waters, surprising. Apparently less discordant than land life. What does that say about what we’ve done to our landscapes?

Menmuir turns that question into everything the land is not. Plunging deeper into why we can no longer take the seas we love and rely on for granted.

Lorraine

Leave a Comment

How Ireland’s history shaped the lives of three generations of an Irish family (Cork and Down counties, Republic of Ireland & Northern Ireland; 1911, 1920, 1982): Irish writer Billy O’Callaghan’s Life Sentences is an awesome piece of literary craft.

Exquisitely poignant and immersive, the moving prose deepens the reading experience as if the novel were heftier than its slim size (200 pages). O’Callaghan, having won awards for his short stories, makes writing less look easier when in fact it’s harder as many have said.

There’s a strong sense of deep-rootedness and authenticity to the emotional pain and suffering of the characters. For a compelling reason, as the novel is drawn from O’Callaghan’s family history. As to what extent Life Sentences is autobiographical versus fictional he tells us: “What’s within these pages is a skin of fiction laid over a considerable amount of fact and truth drawn from the secrets I’ve been told or uncovered over the years.” Within those secrets lies another reason also shared: inspiration for the novel “was lit in me more than forty years ago” by the author’s grandmother Nellie Martin, for whom the book is dedicated to “with the greatest admiration.”

Nellie’s voice is here as one of three narrators who tell their stories in three, longer-than-typical chapters, titled with the name of the ancestor and a specific date, historically and personally significant. For instance, “Nellie, 1982” signifies the year of her death. Her chapter is the final one, though the other two narratives are not chronological. Opening with Nellie’s father recounting and reflecting on his life in “Jer, 1920,” while “Nancy, 1911,” his mother, Nellie’s grandmother, comes after him. After reading all three, you’ll feel the impact of this timeline approach to the storytelling. A helpful Family Tree guides our reading as the family’s ancestry goes back six generations. 

Life Sentences is a novel in which the reader asks how something can be so beautiful and yet so sad? The beauty of the sadness is carried down through the generations, remarkably consistent in the mood of each chapter, each narrative, each life. A sorrowful, roll-with-the-punches attitude. “Life had its struggles but we bore them in the way that our kind always do.”

What kind is that? The kind who lived through great traumas, unrelenting poverty, hunger. The kind of people profoundly influenced by Ireland’s history of GREAT hardships – the Great Famine, Great Migration, Great War. The kind who show a quiet grace and gratitude for the simple blessings in life. An old-fashioned sensibility elevated by an old-fashioned style of storytelling. The prose isn’t brisk or tightened; it flows in sweeping sentences sweeping us intimately into hard-lived lives in hard times. 

Is that why there’s so many great Irish writers? A complexity, a richness, to mine profound emotions of a people and a culture intensely affected by Ireland’s history of conflict and struggles?

O’Callaghan’s ancestors relay unfamiliar and known Irish history. Abominable workhouses are depicted as prison-like poorhouses. If someone managed to survive and flee from worse than slum-like conditions, they might labor in the rural countryside going farm-to-farm. Luckier ones might find employment as a housekeeper, thankful to have a suitable roof over their head and food, though meager and far from having a real home. You’ll see the weight of that in these stories.

The characters are grieving in some way. Does their strength come from seeing so many in the same boat? Some cope by drowning their sorrows in alcohol; others resort to selling their bodies seeing no other way out. Lives were shortened. Life went on. Of those who married and had children, some found fulfillment and belonging, sometimes true love. Still, anger, shame, sadness, letdown stored within. Overall, a melancholy tone. 

“Nancy, 1911,” is O’Callaghan’s great grandmother Nancy Martin’s story. She was obsessed with a man despite his being married and a father, Michael Egan. “The heart wants what it wants,” she says. He’s out of the picture more than in, but does take an interest in his children: Jer (short for Jeremiah) and Mamie.

It’s Jer who starts the novel off. With a gut-punch. On line one, he’s in a pub “drinking fast and heavy.” Choosing 1920 as the year to begin the novel is noteworthy. Jer has been coping with life for the past four years, ever since he returned injured from the Battle of the Somme, infamous as one of the deadliest WWI battles in history. The wounds Jer suffered are presented as far more psychologically traumatic than physical. His memories and nightmares in the trenches of France echo PTSD. “The flavors of that fighting haven’t left me,” he confides a few pages in. Later you’ll read others who thought he was born to be a soldier, a fighter. He is the character with the most rage he cannot control; he’s also an empathetic fellow. We see both in the opening and closing chapters.

Jer’s emotional story is heart wrenching as he was in that bar grieving the death of his attached-to-the-hip, older sister Mamie. The funeral will be held the day after we meet him in a badly enraged drunken state. He blames Mamie’s husband Ned for her death so wildly he wants to kill him. Despite Ned being one of the “rooted ones, millworkers, the ones who properly belonged,” he left Mamie with “scraps” to take care of herself and her children. Jer also blames himself for not doing something to stop the “wretched life he [Ned] gave her.”

Jer rages; Jer loves. The depth of his emotions jump off the page, owing to years he and Mamie were all they had in the world, separated from their mother Nellie when they were all imprisoned at one of those wretched poorhouses in Northern Ireland. When he loses Mamie, Jer loses himself. “Grief can do funny things to a man.” The year 1920 also signifies the date when workhouses in the Republic of Ireland closed. It took twenty more years to shut them down in Northern Ireland.

The final chapter, beloved grandmother Nellie’s story, is also deeply moving. She’s Jer’s youngest daughter, with two of her own children – Gina Murphy and Liam O’Callaghan. They are Billy O’Callaghan’s parents.

Nellie was one of the workhouse survivors who made her way alone from the North farm-to-farm, making it south to the village of Douglas near Cork, where the author also lives. She lived into her 60s, longer than some of her brothers and sisters. As the final story told, she ties the other two together, speaking for three generations of lives sentenced to “sad contentment” and “a sensation of floating in mist.”

Nellie, one of Jer’s six children, was also lucky in love; much luckier than her mother Nancy. Even towards the end of her life when she’s widowed, there’s no bitterness or anger. Rather, she’s comforted by the closeness she has with her older sister May who lives “just a stone’s throw from the house in which I was born.” That’s the author’s parent’s house, so we see and feel how the power of place means everything to her. “Happiness for me now is belonging.”

As Nellie looks back on her life and tells us how it turned out, she’s also telling us what Life Sentences is about: “It might not have been the life I’d wished for as a girl, but we hold on to what happiness we find.” A powerful message from a powerful writer.

Lorraine

Leave a Comment

Bursting with grandeur and humanity (“megascale” architectural projects spanning five continents over fifty-fifty years): This is one of the most inspirational books I’ve ever read.

It’s also one of the most soulful – “regardless of what one thinks of the word ‘soul’” – writes architectural genius and visionary Moshe Safdie, 84, in his monumental memoir If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture. One takeaway is his asking us: When did we stop dreaming “big”?

“Unable to design in a manner that considers the benefit of the few at the expense of many,” Safdie, in essence, is asking why we always talk about what’s wrong? Why not talk about ideas to make things right, to improve the “quality” of lives? In his case, around the world. The purpose of his life’s work.

A handsome book, suffused with black-and-white sketches and illustrations of structures envisioned and realized, as well as colorful photographs, treats us to an abundance of eye-popping, fantastically complex architectural visions, projects, and stories of how they came about. A “melting-pot” mindset aimed at advancing an “exemplary public realm” in different cities, cultures, and countries on most continents on the planet.

So why isn’t his name on the tip of all our tongues? A mystery in a book intended to demystify the “mysterious” profession of architecture. “There is mystery at the heart of architecture just as there is mystery in the meaning of life,” Safdie lyrically writes. Considering architecture is “a mission, and an architect has a responsibility (to clients, to society) that transcends the self,” there will always be a mystique about creativity and spirituality.

Safdie is an ideal messenger for infusing a sense of soulfulness, spirituality in every socially-minded project he takes on.

Grounded in Israeli values of society above self, he was born in Haifa, Israel when it was governed by the British Mandate for Palestine and when Israel became an independent nation in 1948, “an extraordinary experience.” Even as a boy he “loved domes. There is a spiritual element, I am sure – circularity symbolizes unity.” In chapters titled “Old City, New City,” “Faith and Peace,” “Does God Live There,” and throughout his life’s story, Safdie has sought to “create places of spiritual uplift.” None more profound than designing the Children’s and Transport Memorials on the Yad Vashem Memorial Site (and the Yad Vashem History Museum he redesigned) in Jerusalem to honor the estimated one-and-half to two million children who perished during the Holocaust. (His mother-in-law, a Hungarian Jew, survived the Bergen-Belsen Concentration camp.)

Eyeing a “natural rock archway” on the “ridge of the Mount of Remembrance,” his team dug into, under, and across those hills brilliantly “creating a large chamber as a place of reflection.” An underground room in which a candle flickered and twinkled like millions of stars in the heavens symbolizing each of the children who vanished. The Transport Memorial is chilling too, seeing “one of the freight cars that carted people to the death camps” high on a hill.

For drastically different “building art” with a spiritual quality take a look at his Infinity Pool at the Marina Bay Sands hotel resort complex in Singapore:

By green_kermit on Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

An example of a project yet to come to fruition is in Abu Dhabi expanding the sacred dimension, the Abrahamic Family House. “A complex that would incorporate a mosque, a church, and a synagogue.”

While it would be easy to devote this entire review to Safdie’s mind-boggling, wide-ranging, and “far-reaching” projects described in chapters structured around them, this memoir is SO much more than even that. A few more images below to give you more of a sense of the magnitude, diversity, and uniqueness of the work of Safdie Architects (architecture is a highly collaborative process), to include museums; historical/cultural/religious/peace centers; public/island/Arctic housing complexes; libraries; academic/government properties; and airports.

From here, it’s imperative to reflect more on the man and his architectural philosophy and values.

In 1953, Safdie’s family left Israel for Montreal, Canada when conflicts between Arabs and Israelis intensified. He’s also a US citizen, living near Harvard where he teaches at their Graduate School of Design and Safdie Architects is based (offices in Israel and Canada too). Having lived in different cultures on different continents, and studied and traveled to a slew of other nations, his life is as rich and extraordinary as his groundbreaking work. He’s met, worked with, and befriended people from many walks of life – famous architects, presidents, prime ministers, royalty, diplomats, artists, writers, journalists, corporate leaders, developers, composers, and musicians. The story of Yo-Yo-Ma playing his cello in Safdie’s redesigned (within limits) 1753 historic home in Cambridge, Massachusetts is one of many joys he expresses. (He seems almost amazed himself at how opening higher-to-the-sky glass windows in his living room created even more “dynamism” than the space already had.) Another relationship, with Yitzhak and Leah Rabin, is movingly described.

Actually, everything in this book moves us in one way or another.

Safdie says architecture “thinks in three dimensions,” mixing math, engineering, and spatial skills with aesthetic, artistic ones. Yet, he also says, “Every aspect of knowledge and life – the sciences, the social sciences, the humanities – can come into play in the course of creating a building.” It’s these higher-purpose dimensions that touch us deeply about a man who comes across as feeling things deeply. These we might call socially conscious, environmental, philosophical, and spiritual dimensions.

When Safdie describes himself as a “modernist architect” as opposed to a postmodernist, a trend he bucked for a “permissiveness” that led to structures that lacked meaning, he embraces these added dimensions. How to explain how uplifting to be introduced to a man who sticks to his principles and values time and time again? You see this in the way he approaches opportunities for all his projects, even in countries like China, Iran, and the Philippines where he questions whether he should “work for any regime with whose governance” goes against his democratic values? If he sees “ordinary people” can gain something he proceeds.

For instance, a project in China on a site called Emperor’s Landing, “a quintessential megaproject” on the scale of lower Manhattan, allowed an opportunity to break ground in a country closed off to most. It’s also a striking example of what Safdie refers to as “multi-use” projects within an urban design.

Safdie’s fame kicked off with Habitat ’67 in Montreal timed to their Expo. A stark contrast to “soul crushing” public housing projects that “devastated” him, believing this is not “how people want to live.” (Other Habitat housing complexes have been built and are in the works.)

“Architecture is labor-intensive and time-intensive.” Passion-intensive, long-term planning intensive, and humbling-intensive too, because you can work on a project for years, believe in it wholeheartedly, invest significant funds in, and then for a variety of reasons it’s postponed or abandoned, such as a war, financial crisis, and “geopolitics.” 

Forty years ago Safdie wrote a beautiful poem that tells you a lot about his character, humility, and humanity. The lines relate to seeking truths: “He who seeks truth shall find beauty; and “through nature, the nature of the universe and the nature of the man, we shall seek truth.”

“Nature’s way” is also a defining element, connecting the “sheltered world indoors” with the “natural world outdoors.” There’s always a “garden or a courtyard,” water if possible – a fountain, waterfall, pool. The “sound of moving water” at the Ben Gurion International Airport, “performs a kind of magic for the soul” (see https://www.aiq.co.il/su_article.php?id=59&num=251&lang=eng).

In his most visionary chapter “What If?” we’re implored to “dream big.” With our imaginations stirred, we think If Only.

Lorraine

Leave a Comment