Hunger

I have just read a post in a blog  that broke my heart. The writer visited a children's home in Kallithea in Athens that hosts children whose parents cannot afford to feed them anymore. One mother visited her children and having spent a substantial amount of time with them, tried to take her leave, but found it impossible to do so, as the children started crying, asking her to take them home with her. She tried to explain that there was no food in the house, and promised to visit the next day. The eldest then said: 'Please take us home mummy, and we promise never to feel hungry again'.

Scores of children have been put in orphanages and care homes for economic reasons: one charity has reported that 80 of the 100 children in its residential centres were there because their families are no longer able to provide for them. 10% of Greek children are said to be at risk of hunger. Teachers talk of seeing pupils pick through bins for food.

This is the reality of Greece today.

More than a quarter of the population - and 62% of those under 25 - are already unemployed. Private sector wages have fallen by 30% in four years and painful new taxes have been imposed as the country is crucified by its adherence to the euro.

Many of these people are so impoverished that they eat sporadically, and some of them go hungry. Increasingly the children of these destitute people eat little or not at all, fainting in schools.

The Guardian reported in March the testimony of Victoria Prekate, a secondary school teacher in Athens:

'It has been a common secret among PE teachers for some time now that they don't expect pupils to do PE any more, because many of them are underfed and get dizzy. They need to be discreet, as these underprivileged children don't wish to be exposed to their peers.

Many families, suddenly left without work, are in shock and there is nowhere to turn. Social services are collapsing. They are not professional beggars. They are ordinary people like you and me, suddenly left with nothing. I know one area where schools have specialised in what they gather: 1st primary school gather rice and pulses, 2nd, vegetables, 3rd meat and chicken, etc.'.

Hungry, Anna Kindyny


All of this is reminiscent of the last time Greece was starving, during the dark times of 1940-41 when Greece was under German occupation. This was one of the worst famines in the history of modern Europe as Nazi Germany included starvation as part of its attempts to crush the Greek resistance.  It is estimated that between 1941 and 1943, 300,000 died in Athens alone from starvation.  Oxfam in the U.K. was established to help the starving in Greece.

The return of hunger in Greece is due to the asphyxiating austerity imposed by the Troika: the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission are converting Greece into a colony that lives or dies at their whim. They demand repayment for Greece's debt, no matter the social costs. Instead of helping Greece to create jobs and wealth so as to repay the debt, they demand higher taxes, the elimination of social services, drastic cuts in jobs, pensions, salaries and government spending. They also require that the Greek government privatise all state enterprises, including drinking water.

 

 

 

Pictures such as this one shocked Greece last winter. Informal networks to help those in crisis have sprung up all over the country. Farmers come to Athens on a regular basis and bring food that is distributed for free - in this photograph the stampede to reach this food shocked the nation.






I have posted this photograph before, but it's too relevant not to do so again. The placard that the woman in the photograph is holding says: 'Dear God, hunger scares me'.




Sources:

Kathimerini
Eleutherotypia
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2012/mar/13/greece-breadline-hungry-children-pe

Flowers

 

First visit to Antonello this summer, and there is a surprise awaiting us: lots of flowers outside the shop this time, very tastefully arranged, as usual

it's unfortunately not a permanent feature, but rather, preparations for a wedding

looking closer

and again

the two candles in the picture are also for the wedding, but they are not finished yet I am told.

The main window

still the main window

as seen from inside

the smaller window on the right

as we enter the shop

looking closer

everything is carefully thought out and placed just so

the back of the shop

as with everything, it's all in the detail

isn't this little corner fantastic? So simple, and yet...

Greek basil

good quality blooms and the art of placing them strategically

looking out

I have to point out here, that the shop is tiny, tiny - you can barely move in there, and yet, they achieve so much.

Vilhelm Hammershoi

 

 

 

 I love Vilhelm Hammershoi's paintings, so I was very pleased to have the opportunity  to see more of his work in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen.

 

Hammershoi is known for his poetic, low-key portraits and interiors. His wife figures in many of his interiors, often depicted from behind. A lonely, isolated figure in an empty parlour, people without any contact with each other, a city with no trace of human life, landscapes stripped of any romantic leanings - these are the themes of his paintings. All his life Hammershoi devoted himself to this limited number of themes, mainly painting interiors from his home, monumental buildings in Copenhagen, landscapes outside the city, and portraits of his immediate family and his friends.

 

His work is infused with atmosphere, often oppressive. Behind the calm, static exterior lurks an indefinable and ominous element. The colour palette is limited, dominated entirely by greys, yet encompassing a wealth of nuances. Light and air play major roles in the images, taking on an almost physical tactility even as material objects are dissolved and everything takes on an ethereal aspect.

 

His tableaux of figures turned away from the viewer project an air of slight tension and mystery and these are his best, I think. In that respect this exhibition in Copenhagen was disappointing as the number of those particular themes was limited, unlike the exhibition of his work in the Royal Academy in London in 2008 which I enjoyed immensely. Still good to see more of his paintings though

 

 

 

Self-Portrait, The Cottage Spurveskjul, 1911

Interior, The Old Jamb Stove, 1888

Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor, 1901

Evening in the Drawing Room, the Artist's Mother and Wife, 1891

Interior. Artificial Light, 1909

Hammershoi's favourite motif was a sparsely furnished room where gentle, splendidly depicted daylight falls upon the walls, doors and floor, and where a single woman is occupied by her chores, isolated from the world. Here, however, he made an exception: the scene is a dark interior at night, lit only by two candles. There are no people in the room and no logical explanation for the arrangement of the furniture: he has suspended their usual function, i.e. to provide a setting for human interaction. This exacerbates the strong sense of absence that Hammershoi often conjures up in his paintings. He painted an oval shaped frame as if the scene is watched through a mirror. Perhaps it was intended as a reference to the traditional notion of art mirroring reality.

A Room in the Artist's Home in Strandgade with the Artist's Wife, 1902

St Peter's Church, 1906

The Old Christiansborg Palace, Late Autumn, 1890-92

From a Deerpark near Copenhagen, 1901

Tree Trunks, Arresodal, Frederiksvaerk, 1904

Seated Female Nude, 1898

Portrait of Ida Ilsted, Later the Artist's Wife, 1890

Ida Hammershoi, the Artist's Wife, with a Teacup, 1907

Female Model, 1909-10

Amalienborg Square, 1896

Artemis, 1893-94.

Impressionist art at the Statens Museum for Kunst

There is a considerable collection of French Impressionist paintings at the Statens Museum for Kunst, including a Matisse room.

Woman in a Chemise, Andre Derain, 1906

A key work from Derain's Fauvist period, this is a confident example of the power of expression that can be achieved through shape and colour. Despite a seemingly rapid and expressive mode of painting, the picture is achieved through a stringent system of triangles with colours restricted to the complementary contrasts of red/green, orange/blue. The picture plane is stretched out from top to bottom by a seated female figure whose gaze is directed at us.

Trees at L'Estaque, Georges Braque, 1908

Self-Portrait as Pierrot, Amedeo Modigliani, 1915

Alice, Amedeo Modigliani, 1918

The girl is portrayed from the front, and the planes  have a geometric order that creates a sense of calm and harmony. African masks and medieval art were important inspirations for Modigliani's painting and on that basis he developed an idiom made up of elongated shapes accentuated here by the tall format.

The Guitar Player, Juan Gris, 1928

The Metronome, Georges Braque, 1909

Woman with a Horse, Jean Metzinger, 1912

Metzinger's first Cubist works were inspired by Picasso but he soon took Cubism in a different direction. In his paintings, motifs and compositions took shape in a state of on-going dialogue with the art of the past. The objective was to create a work that connected the present with the past.

Summer, Jean Metzinger, 1916

The Two Sisters, Andre Derain, 1914

The two women have been chiselled into the picture like statues. The monumental canvas, the simplicity of the figures and the grey palette evoke thoughts of art from earlier eras. The painting is based on inspiration from medieval art. French classicist painting and African masks and sculptures all united here in a hitherto unseen synthesis.

Woman with a Vase, Fernand Leger, 1924

A woman carrying a vase is depicted from the front with a linear precision that imbues the image with a classical, monumental feel. The face is empty, the body stiff and divided into parts. The woman's dress has the shape of a sturdy Doric column. The simple palette consists exclusively of blue, red, white, black against a light grey background.

After WWI a Neo-Classicist trend permeated the Paris art scene. In the aftermath of the trauma of war many artists, among these Picasso and Laurens, harked back to classical stylistic features to provide visionary images of a new era of cohesion, order and social harmony.



The Matisse Room

A small section of the Matisse room

 

Jazz, Henri Matisse, 1947

With the book Jazz, Matisse introduced the cut out technique that would preoccupy him during the final years of his life. The twenty illustrations in the book were executed as pochoir prints after Matisse's original cut-paper compositions. He used inks of the same colours he used for his cutouts. The motifs hail from the realms of folklore, myths and the circus and are evenly distributed within the 150 pages of the book alternating with Matisse's own handwriting.

'I wish to present colour plates in the most favourable conditions possible. To do so, I need to separate them by intervals of a different character. I decided that a handwritten text was the most suitable for this purpose', the book states. Even though Matisse claimed that the text exclusively served a visual function, it includes metaphorical statements about the nature of art.

Seated Man, 1918

Reclining Woman II, 1929

seen from a different angle

Interior with a Violin, 1918

The motif of this painting is the hotel room and its window facing the beach and the sea. The contrast between outside and inside, light and darkness plays a major part in the painting but so does the contrast between two different idioms: the indoor interior is painted in an abstract, plane-oriented style that points back to Matisse's painting of the preceding years. The glimpse of nature is painted in the naturalistic style that would characterise his art in the following years.

Portrait of Madame Matisse. The Green Line. 1905

Much of the strength of this painting lies in its simple geometric structure and in the way the colours are combined. Spatial modulation is pared back to a minimum. Effects of light and shadow, which would have added depth to the image have been translated into planes of colour instead.

Landscape near Collioure. Study for the 'Joy of Life'. 1905

Le Luxe II, 1907-08

With its subject-matter, three naked women in a landscape, and its title, the work inscribes itself into a long-standing tradition of women bathing in a natural setting. The motif is a traditional image of untainted happiness. Matisse addressed the theme again employing it in a new fashion. He used distemper and large, uniformly coloured planes.

Nude with a White Scarf, 1909.