In the end art is freedom. Bruno Loewenberg 0 Artist and Survivor By Iphano Blair golden star and the company insignia ... I observed him always. No one can say for sure what is the very source of his artistry. Courage of super-human dimension is necessary to present your own concept, free of all conventions. In the end art is freedom. It makes you free to think, to feel, to do your own thing. I did one of my best paintings in half an hour. Sometimes I did a beautiful painting and destroyed it. Art is the preservation of our childhood: the world of fantasy, of fairy tales, of myths and ceremonies. Art is the growth to manhood, to grow up into the computerized world of adults. The symbiosis of both parts harmoniously is art. Everybody manages that more or less ... the executive playing with miniature railroads. The fantastic world of dreams is the nucleus of our artistic creations. To walk into nature, to feel nature, to be nature provides you with the ne afternoon in October, an elderly gentleman came into Ancient Currents Gallery (in San Francisco) and plopped a stack of color photos down on my desk. Why this venerable man would select this gallery, known for our primitive, international and modern artists influenced by the tropics, baffled me. Soon I made an appointment to see the work in person. There, sitting in a living room whose walls were crowded with work by Mr. Loewenberg as well as lithographs by Chagall, Dali, Miro and Picasso, we sat comfortably downing rounds of schnapps while the artist, aided by quips from his wife, Lisbeth, conversed his way around nearly a century of creative living. Suddenly, I realized the connection. I had been so busy looking into and gathering works that inter-relate modern and “primitive” art, I hadn’t realized that here was a patriarch in the very same field, a fellow quite modern but also of a tribe ... a tribe I share through my mother, who like Mr. Loewenberg, is one of the few members to carry our heritage, as it should be, from ancient to current. The Jews were the first tribe to decide to enter Western Civilization and still maintain their codes. It wasn’t until the 1900s that the “middle ages” were lifted from the shoulders of European Jewry. There were still pogroms as late as 1920, but in Germany, the “Rights of Man” had finally filtered across the border and for a generation life seemed to open up. Jews could vote, hold office, and create their own world and art, which they did wholeheartedly, both in ethnic forms such as the Yiddish Theater, and as major components of the Expressionists, Dadaists, Surrealists and Fantastic Realists. It is my conviction that this change in the arts, and its obvious symbolic effect on society, was instrumental in fueling the paranoid classicist backlash arch-typified by Adolph Hitler. More schizophrenic than the average politician, who generally condones all backroom debauchery, Hitler sported some of the most small-minded aesthetics in all of Europe. The cure he instituted for his ailing fatherland was severe cultural amputation, but imagine how enraged he must have been when his “Decadent Art Show,” designed to indicate the degeneration of post-1900 art, was popular among his fellow Aryans. What undoubtedly disturbed him the most in modern art was the tendency of the artists to express the two sides of things, equally and simultaneously (like Picasso’s noses), a concept abhorrent to a schizophrenic for whom division is the basic nature of life. As the noose of cultural control tightened around Middle Europe, the creative minds had to work faster and better. Some saw the “endgame” of such rigid cultural competition and fled; others, not so fortunate, survived through the strength of their inner vision. My personal need to understand how this could be done by sensitive souls and how they could maintain their awareness, led me to encourage Mr. Loewenberg to speak on such topics. It is a delicate subject that I wouldn’t broach with the toughest “survivor,” because to probe the subconscious of a man, where such things are absorbed, would be like opening a “Pandora’s box” ... unless that man is one who employs his subconscious daily and is accustomed to unearthing its contents for use in his art. Such a man, who has cultivated his awareness and dealt with the difficulties in his own mind might be able to give us a clue how such artistic energy became the power for many to weather the dark night of Western Civilization and perhaps prove the psychic nature of creativity. As a man who expresses himself with paint, he was sometimes uncomfortable with the precise nature of the written word. I assured him, though, as an artist, not an historian, he would be better able to paint a realistic picture of an epoch, though only forty years behind us, that had become an irreparable cipher to mankind due to the monstrous nature of history. A Conversation Bruno Loewenberg: I don’t even know when I began painting. I was always drawing, even as a boy .. . they were humorous drawings. I don’t know how great the influence of my father was. He was a ship chandler. I remember him having a big book into which he painted with water colors. He painted all the incoming and outgoing ships, but only their funnels . . . white funnel with a blue field, a ■ Photographs by Iphano Blair essential means to create. Go and do it! The universe creates the music but the human heart performs it. There must be a sense, a meaning in a painting, or it is all craziness. Sure the artist is crazy ... he must be crazy because he cannot accept everything he sees. He has to bend it into another creation. This is why Cezanne is so great, because he changed the picture of the world and of nature. There is an intriguing similarity between a painting and human life. In life you move from place to place, according to your adventurous impulse. At each station you grow larger, on the way to each you destroy so many 6 Clinton St. Quarterly
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