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Totalitarian Europe

 


 

   
Knoedlers Catalog  

In May of 1944 Mrs. J. Borden Harriman and the American Free World Association presented a series of his small watercolors and drawings entitled "Totalitarian Europe" at the Knoedler Galleries on East 57th Street, New York. These portrayed the fruits of Fascism in the lives of ordinary people with scenes of starvation, horror, concentration camps, the dead, bombed out buildings, and other ravages.




I still have six of the water colors.

They are approximatelyl 14 x 18"

(The black and whites are photos of watercolors I don't have.)

 

*

There were 27 works on the walls and together they depicted "totalitarianism in its following aspects:

1, 2, 3

Unrestrained Totalitarianism begins by destroying its own
house and then destroys that of its neighbor.

 

Ruins

 

4

Destruction, systematic and sudden.

 

Destruction

 

5, 6, 7, 8

Hunger, that comes with destruction....

 

Starvation

 

 

Hunger and mysery

 

10

and misery that comes with hunger.

 

Horror

 

11

Abandoned children lose human feelings

12

Children's blood serves to revive the executioners

13

The mothers and sisters are raped.

 

Despair

 

14

And the cataclysm reaches to the defenseless below the ground

15

Jails augment with the triumph of Totalitarianism....

16

as do concentration camps

17

and barbed wire.

 

Barbed Wire

 

18

The desire for freedom is discouraged by the wooden block and
the axe....

19

by bodies swinging in the air

 

Destruction

 

20

or hanging on lamp posts

 

Hanging Men

 

21

Those who do not belong to the race of Totalitarians are
condemned to death....
[referring to the Jews]

22

forced to dig their own graves....

 

Graves

 

23

killed in gas chambers en masse.

24

Hate

 

Tyranny's Faces

 

25

Insanity

26

Terror

27

and blood

 

Even with the numbers of the drawings included the flow of titles makes a powerful statement, perhaps even more so because of the inclusion of the numbers and what they represent, for the imagination is set to work. The show was received favorably by the New York art critics who had the common theme of the war now to work on: Fascism had become America's enemy too. And all the critics commented upon their impact and the grimness of their theme, especially Emily Genauer of the World Telegram, who always championed my father's work.

"The pictures he has painted," she said, "for all their unvarnished grimness, for all the violence of their themes of rape and destruction, are still incredibly tragic rather than frightening, heartbreaking rather than violent. Their colors are gentle, even melting. Their organization is always magnificently controlled, formal in the extreme. So beautiful are they aesthetically that could one think of this war they depict as a fight honorably done with centuries ago, one might derive genuine pleasure from the paintings. But they're of the here and now and their aesthetic form serves most brilliantly as a vehicle for the expression of powerful and important ideas, not one bit pleasurable."

 

Excerpted from Waiting at the Shore

 

 


 

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