"JEWS ARE WELCOME HERE"

A motorcyclist on a village outskirts takes in a sign
proclaiming “Jews are not welcomed here,” circa 1935.

Jews Are Welcome Here

(Detail) Bottom Pane of Window

Top pane: The Artist, (Rivian), eyes representing 6.000,000 Jews who died in the Holocaust

Second pane: faces & hands representing the 6,000,000. 

Third pane, My Maternal Grandparents, Samuel & Rebecca Fishman who escaped the pogroms in Russia with my Mother, Fanny as an infant. Note: My Father, Dr.Benj. Swatez was also born in Russia & escaped the pogroms. (In most of Europe the Jews had to wear the gold Star of David.) 

Bottom pane: Sixty images representing the Jews who died in the Holocaust & the Jews who lived & prospered. IE: Albert Einstein, Sarah Bernhardt, Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir, the Marx Bros. Israeli Citizens, members of my Family etc. contradicting Hitler's plan to have a museum dedicated to an "extinct people"!  "This was extermination on an industrial scale and it involved huge numbers of people. Neighbours and employers reported Jews to the Gestapo. Bureaucrats processed notices of deportation. Postmen served them. Railway staff marshalled their departure. Others drove the trains and manned the signals. It was all logically and legally planned in an inversion of all the values on which human civilisation had been built.

So perverse was it that Hitler ordered the collection of 200,000 Jewish artefacts, which were photographed and catalogued to be displayed at the end of the war as a trophy case of archaeological remains. It was to be called The Museum of an Extinct Race."  

My ART WINDOW is a testament that Hitler's plan failed...thank G-d!

 Rivian 

WOMEN IN THE ARTS ...JOAN MITCHELL, ONE OF THE GIANTS!

Mitchell

Mitchell

Mitchell

This is the first posting on the subject of WOMEN IN THE ARTS.  I will be blogging intermittently about this subject which is, of course, dear to my heart! 
I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR FROM MY READERS, (2,000 in less than two months! yay!) FROM ABOUT TWENTY DIFFERENT COUNTRIES ON THIS SUBJECT. PLEASE COMMENT!

In 1989, a group of women plastered posters across New York. "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met?", the slogan asked. The Guerrilla Girls, as the activists were known, were outraged that while only 5% of the artists in the Museum of Modern Art were women, 85% of the nudes were female. Twenty years later, these posters are not just being exhibited inside a national museum - they are part of the largest all-female showcase in contemporary art to date, one that might finally show the art world what it has been missing.It is the first time the Pompidou Centre in Paris has displayed its new permanent collection of female painters, photographers, designers, architects, sculptors, performance artists and film-makers. After decades of excluding women from its major shows, elles@pompidou was an enormous visual manifesto for the institution, proving its commitment to putting female artists at the core of modern and contemporary art. (I hope more galleries & museums follow suite)!


I am focusing on JOAN MITCHELL, AMERICAN ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST, one of the most powerful painters I can think of...of any gender!  Joan Mitchell (1925‐1992) is one of the main female American painters of the 20th century. She was born in Chicago and spent most of her career at Vetheuil, a few miles only from Giverny, two key villages in Claude Monet's art. She passed on way too young at age 67!

The abstract painting she perfected as early as the fifties, oversized, luminous, dynamic, deeply refers to nature (Great Valley, Sunflowers, Linden, Fields). Actually, nature surrounded her studio at Vetheuil with its large views on the Seine river.