Renders, Hans

English

University of Groningen

   University of Groningen‘The art of living’Renders, HansPublished in:You can go everywhereIMPORTANT NOTE: You are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's PDF) if you wish to cite fromit. Please check the document version below.Document VersionPublisher's PDF, also known as Version of recordPublication date:2022Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research databaseCitation for published version (APA):Renders, H. (2022). ‘The art of living’. In E. Detaille, & W. Van Roij (Eds.), You can go everywhere: Josef &Anni Albersfoundation at 50 (pp. 137-139). Josef & Anni Albersfoundation.CopyrightOther than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of theauthor(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons).The publication may also be distributed here under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the “Taverne” license.More information can be found on the University of Groningen website: https://www.rug.nl/library/open-access/self-archiving-pure/taverne-amendment.Take-down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediatelyand investigate your claim.Downloaded from the University of Groningen/UMCG research database (Pure): http://www.rug.nl/research/portal. For technical reasons thenumber of authors shown on this cover page is limited to 10 maximum.Download date: 30-04-2023Edited by Édouard De taille & Willem van Roi_j You can go anywhere Josef&Anni ·-You can go anywhere Josef & Anni Albers Foundation at 50 Contents 0 Staring at zero IV Abstraction is real VIII You can go anywhere XI Art is not an object XIV Wei but experience no o. 11 Introduction, Édouard Detaille 87 ElenaArzak MagueyeBa 207 & Willem van Roij 90 Pierre-Alexis Dumas 212 ManuelHerz 269 Matthew Bourne 335 Robe 93 Christopher Farr 216 Louis Valentin 272 Emma K. Lewis 336 Jame 97 Paul Smith 218 NickMurphy 274 Christine J. Vincent 339 Mela I Toopenryes 98 Wayne McGregor 221 Toshiko Mori 275 Danièle Reiber 341 Seyd, 101 Eve Tribouillet-Rozencweig 222 Gilles Degois 278 Daphne Warburg Astor 343 Brigi 21 Katharine Weber & Charlotte 280 Kelly Feeney 347 Géra. Fox Weber 284 Mickey Cartin 348 Mou: 27 Lucy Swift Weber V Art is there where art seizes us IX Learn to see and fee! lift 287 MartaArzak 35° Shan 30 Tim Prentice 32 Charlie Kingsley 105 Elisa N ocentini 225 Louis Racine 34 Nancy Weber 107 Maria Toledo & 226 John Gordon XII Education prepares XV Art 36 Ruth Agoos Villalovos Manuel Fontán delJunco 230 Allegra Itsoga us /or the future keep 40 John Eastman 111 Fiona Kearney 234 Robbie Smith 115 Michael Semff 240 Laurent Van Reepinghen AlanRiding Moll-118 Philip Rylands JoshSlocum 291 353 242 Massamba Ca.mara 356 Paolc II To distribute 122 Sarah Hermanson Meister 244 Charles Lemonides 293 Victoria Ebin 358 And1 Fabrice Hergott 246 Saliou Seck 195 spiritual possessions 127 BambaSagna 361 Pierr 300 301 Lassana Keita 364 Jacki-43 Alberto Amoretti 3o3 Maimouna Ka Sow 366 Mart 47 Erika Goldman VI Search versus Re-Search X To follow me, follow yourself 3o5 Patrick Dewavrin 369 Anrn 48 Fritz Horstman 306 Mamadou Cissé Kanté 37° Mich 51 Ruth Lande Shuman 131 Emilia Terragni 251 George Gibson 51 Mando Watson 133 Belle Place 252 Vincent Broqua 137 Hans Renders 255 Adhiraj S. Shekhawat XIII Creating is the most 00 Art 140 Victoria Wilson 258 Shane 0'Neill Art is constant 260 Jaime Yaya Barry intense excitement Epilc 111 262 AbibDieye 375 VII To distribute material goods 264 Augustin Diouf 3o9 Giovanni Hänninen 57 Chiara Graffer 165 François Gibault 313 Saliou Diop 59 Dario Jucker 266 Moustapha Diouf 316 Clarisse Baleja Saïdi Acq 61 David Zwirner 145 Gifts & donations 320 Matthias Persson 64 Lucas Zwirner & David Leiber 322 Rebecca Salter 381 Acql 66 Bruno Racine 324 Raffi Kaiser 69 Jeannette Redensek 328 François 0lislaeger 74 Brenda Danilowitz 332 Louise Eastman Ad 78 Heinz Liesbrock 443 5oye 446 Picu 448 Ackr 6 VIII You can go anywhere XI Art is not an object XIV We have to go where MagueyeBa but experience no one was before us 207 212 ManuelHerz 269 Matthew Bourne 335 Robert Devereux 216 Louis Valentin 272 Emma K. Lewis 336 James Green 218 NickMurphy 274 Christine J. Vincent 339 Melanie Mason Niemiec 221 Toshiko Mori 275 Danièle Reiber 341 Seydou Badiane 222 Gilles Degois 278 Daphne Warburg Astor 343 Brigitte Degois 280 Kelly Feeney 347 Gérard Sénac 284 Mickey Cartin 348 MoussaSene IX Learn to see and fee! lift 287 MartaArzak 35° Shannon Hart 225 Louis Racine 226 JohnGordon XII Education prepares XV Art is the one thing that 230 Allegra Itsoga us /or the future keeps you in balance 234 Robbie Smith 240 Laurent Van Reepinghen AlanRiding Molly Wheeler 242 JoshSlocum 291 353 Charles Lemonides 293 Massamba Camara 356 Paolo Papone 244 246 Saliou Seck 295 Victoria Ebin 358 Andrew Seguin 300 BambaSagna 361 Pierre Thiam 301 Lassana Keita 364 Jackie Ivy To follow me� follow yourself 3°3 Maimouna Ka Sow 366 Martina Yamin X 3o5 Patrick Dewavrin 369 Anne Sisco 306 Mamadou Cissé Kanté 37° Michael Beggs 251 George Gibson 252 Vincent Broqua 155 Adhiraj S. Shekhawat XIII Creating is the most 00 Art embraces all facets of lift 158 Shane 0'Neill 260 Jaime Yaya Barry intense excitement 262 AbibDieye 375 Epilogue, Nicholas Fox Weber 264 Augustin Diouf 3o9 Giovanni Hänninen 165 François Gibault 313 Saliou Diop 266 Moustapha Diouf 316 Clarisse Baleja Saïdi Acquisitions 320 Matthias Persson 322 Rebecca Salter 381 Acquisitions 324 Raffi Kaiser 328 François 0lislaeger 332 Louise Eastman A different kind of happiness 443 50 years of the Foundation 446 Picture credits 448 Acknowledgements 7 The art of living Hans Renders . or It was back in 2013 when Nicholas Fox Weber and I had our first serious conversation about his PhD dissertation on his biographical research of the early years of Piet Mondrian. We had been introduced in April of that year, and ever since that first lunch in a Paris restaurant, it was clear that we had a rapport. Nick, energetic as ever, began showering me with all sorts of questions, exploring possibilities, and, in the meantime, ordering a second bottle of wine. Were we on an equal footing? Was it a good idea for me to act as supervisor for someone I had known for years on paper? Reading his books on the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, and Balthus had filled me with admiration mingled with envy-wasn't it the case that I could learn much more from him than he from me? Some clarification is in order here, about the relation between supervisor and PhD student. The most obvious situation would be that the aspiring doctor, being a PhD student, would learn a lot from the supervisor. Allow me to disabuse you: in this instance, there was some cheating. I gained a lot more knowledge from the PhD student than he gained from me-and that is putting it mildly. Not only about Mondrian, but also about art in a wider context. And about humanity. Big words, admittedly, but there were at least two occasions on which matters oflife and death entered the equation. We had agreed to meet in Paris at eight in the evening, and on the previous day I had treated myself to a stopover on the road from Amsterdam to Paris-in Ghent, where I had the opportunity to gaze through a glass screen at the restoration of the fifteenth-century Adoration of the Lamb by the Van Eyck brothers, in a crypt of the Saint Bavo's Cathedral. Resuming my journey to Paris the following day, I had an experience that I can still feel in my body. My car was hit from behind: total loss. After an escape from an ambulance on the way to Arras, a train trip to Paris followed. I arrived on his doorstep in Paris at exactly eight p.m. The evening that ensued is etched on my memory. "The art of living" -that, to my mind, aptly sums up the reception I was given. The same art ofliving that Nick displayed two years later when he underwent serious surgery in New York. In his first emails from the hospital, he referred only in passing to his medical travails, his full attention again being focused on Mondrian. Reading the opening chapters of his Mondrian dissertation I was at once capti­vated by his enthusiasm and the originality of his approach to looking at art. With eloquence, he takes the reader on a voyage of discovery. His way of seeing and writing, as evinced in the first volume of this biogra­phy, took my breath away. How often hadn't I set eyes on Mondrian's composition-and yet a whole new world unfolded itself before me. In his description of his visit to the house Mondrian was bom in, I must admit that I was astounded, initially, by the emphasis Nick puts on the fact that the windows of the premises are made up of horizontal and vertical panels. But those windows mean that, for the first years of the artist's life, he saw the outside world through this configuration of delineated planes. The effect thereof is manifest in almost all the artist's later work. No other art historian had ever viewed Mondrian's art from this particu -lar perspective. The same originality can be seen in Nick's study titled Freuds Trip to Orvieto: The Great Doctors Unresolved Confrontation with Antisemitism, Death, and Homoeroticism; His Passion for Paintings; and the Writer in His Footsteps. Nick studies a work of art at such length that he unashamedly takes possession of the constituent forms, internalizing them, after which his interpretation reverts, 137 as it were, to the artist. In Freud's Trip to Orvieto he insinuates himself into The Last Judgement, a cycle of paintings by Luca Signorelli, and defends the art vis-à-vis the observer-in this case, Freud. He explains Freud's markedly problematic relation to these paintings. Time and again it is art that confronts Nick with Selbsthaj!, anti-Semitism, and latent homosexuality. These major themes are anchored in all his publications. They afford him the sensibilities to see the way ,he sees, for which he has developed antennae giving direction to his life and work. His art-historical studies are indeed extraordinarily frank. In Freud's Trip to Orvieto he does not shrink from drawing a compari­son between Freud's family and his, thereby demonstrating that the bond with his own father was as strong as it was complex. "Dad and I had virtually identical features, and I speak with his voice and accent. But I have that farmer's nose and full lips in a totally different tonality and on a leaner frame, and I use that voice and tone in a life that is a radical jump from my father's. As I write dus, how I love him and miss him, while feeling that I am him but, contradictorily, belong to a different species." Ultimately, it is such personal experiences that inspire Nick to travel the world over and write on so many disparate subjects or, as in the case of his marvelous work in Senegal, to make a start and take action. A book on tennis or on Babar the elephant springs from the same engagement as a catalog devoted to Josef Albers's impas­sioned tango drawings. And then there's his zBauhaus: The zPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus !deals and Design, published in 2020. Compare that to his 2009 article in the New York, Times, in which he tells "a different story" about the Bauhaus, angled toward "a Bauhaus-trained paimer and architect who applied the school's aesthetic advances to concentration camp design." Nick is no less an art historian, author of children's books, and propagandist of Anni and J osef Albers than he is a journalist with a mission to expose, even provoke. Disclosures in the French press of Le Corbusier's dealings with the Nazis keep on coming, while the subject is covered in detail by Nick's biography of the famous architect. "There is a single line from my three hours with Henri Cartier-Bresson in the winter of 2003 that I hear in my head just about every single day." Thus begins a twenty-six-page article on the French photographer, who, not coincidentally, photographed Anni andJosef Albers. An illuminating essay, because the author uses his own experience to broaden our view of Cartier-Bresson. The same natural confi­dence underlies his ability to write a note­worthy, winy article on tennis and American fiction for the tennis magazine Courts. It was thanks to this refreshing unin -hibitedness, this eclectic stance that I felt a connection with him from the first minute at that restaurant on rne Chomel. The accompanying photo, taken in Nick's Paris apartment about a month before receiving his PhD, is dear to me. What exactly does it show? To my shame, I appear to have abruptly sat myself down on his lap, leaving poor Nick somewhat at a loss. He is aware of the camera, so he puts on a smile. At the same time, he is in his element. But there is also another side to the story of this can -did moment. M"chofas Fox Weber receives his Ph.D. after a successful public defend of his thesis Piet Mondrian's Early Years. Gromizgen, September 20, 2018. Photo: GiovanniHà"mzinen Prior to receiving his PhD at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, Nick was interviewed for the Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool The interviewer was 138 Hans Renders and Nick Weber, Pans 2018 Eric Palmen, who also took the photograph. Nick answered all the questions dutifully: how, as a young boy, he had been intro­duced to Mondrian's work by his parents, how there is a natural progression from figuration to abstraction to be seen in the artist's compositions. All his responses were equally straightforward and lucid. In the meantime, I was idly wandering about the apartment on rue Chomel, from the balcony to the sitting room, from the kitchen back to the dining room. Nick's brain was holding forth on autopilot, and moreover, we were both a little impatient at the prospect of the meal we were to have on the terrace of a fine restaurant nearby. The mood was happy, even jolly. The dissertation was written, the book was at the printers, and Paris beckoned. Nick was in genial form, casting me a look now and then as he responded to the interviewer. I looked back at him, and it carne to me that this slight, muscular figure with a touch of Popeye the Sailorman after gulping down a can of spinach longed for an act of liberation after all those months of going over the manuscript sentence by sentence. He and I had even spent an entire week together, working from morning till night, along with Willem van Roij, the ever loyal, discerning master manager of projects. During the course of that interview, Nick's mind was filled with new dreams. Not just about the enjoyable evening ahead, but also about how the work of Anni and Josef Albers could best be presented in Amsterdam, London, or Milan. "Mondrian was just like my father: stubborn and utterly one- track minded," I heard him say. While he was talking with Eric, I got the impression that he was eager to be clone with the pres­sure that I, in all amity, had been putting on him. During our talks in Amsterdam; Bilbao, Spain; Groningen; and Paris (very often Paris), I had kept drawing attention to foot­notes and references ("we have to be harsh"). It was in a mix of solidarity, friendship, and, I confess, also pressure that I landed on his knee in the middle of the interview and whispered in his ear, ''And you have yet to write volume two." That was what triggered the flash of amusement, surprise, and slight discomfort in his expression. A moment of alliance and boldness, tinged with highhandedness on my part, arising from the collaborative impetus we had recently shared-in effect, a physical boost for him to go ahead and complete the second volume of his Mondrian biography. Nick, like all of us, is not free of bias, but because he is a learning person, I could address him in the laudation following his defense of his dissertation with the words "Nicholas Fox Weber, the writer who has even overcome his last bias. Promo.tingJosef and Anni Albers worldwide is an excellent Hans Renders and Nick Weber, Parzs 2018 Eric Palmen, who also took the photograph. Nick answered all the questions dutifully: how, as a young boy, he had been intro­duced to Mondrian's work by his parents, how there is a natural progression from figuration to abstraction to be seen in the artist's compositions. All his responses were equally straightforward and lucid. In the meantime, I was idly wandering about the apartment on rue Chomel, from the balcony to the sitting room, from the kitchen back to the dining room. Nick's brain was holding forth on autopilot, and moreover, we were both a little impatient at the prospect of the meal we were to have on the terrace of a fine restaurant nearby. The mood was happy, even jolly. The dissertation was written, the book was at the printers, and Paris beckoned. Nick was in genial form, casting me a look now and then as he responded to the interviewer. I looked back at him, and it carne to me that this slight, muscular figure with a touch of Popeye the Sailorman after gul ping down a can of spinach longed for an act of liberation afi:er all those months of going over the manuscript sentence by sentence. He and I had even spent an entire week together, working from morning till night, along with Willem van Roij, the ever loyal, discerning master manager of projects. During the course of that interview, Nick's mind was filled with new dreams. Not just about the enjoyable evening ahead, but also about how the work of Anni and Josef Albers could best be presented in Amsterdam, London, or Milan. "Mondrian was just like my father: stubborn and utterly one-track minded," I heard him say. While he was talking with Eric, I got the impression that he was eager to be clone with the pres­sure that I, in all amity, had been putting on him. During our talks in Amsterdam; Bilbao, Spain; Groningen; and Paris (very ofi:en Paris), I had kept drawing attention to foot­notes and references ("we have to be harsh"). It was in a mix of solidarity, friendship, and, I confess, also pressure that I landed on his knee in the middle of the interview and whispered in his ear, ''And you have yet to write volume two." That was what triggered the flash of amusement, surprise, and slight discomfort in his expression. A moment of alliance and boldness, tinged with highhandedness on my part, arising from the collaborative impetus we had recently shared-in effect, a physical boost for him to go ahead and complete the second volume of his Mondrian biography. Nick, like all of us, is not free of bias, but because he is a learning person, I could address him in the laudation following his defense of his dissertation with the words "Nicholas Fox Weber, the writer who has even overcome his last bias. PromotingJosef and Anni Albers worldwide is an excellent cause, setting up projects in Senegal has been harder, but accepting that you could also make a valuable contribution to the academie world is perhaps your greatest achievement." That is the truth of the matter! Prof Hans Renders is a professor of Hist01y and Theory of Biography at the University of Groni1Zgen a1Zd director of the Ulliversity's Biography fl stitute. He is the author of many book.s, i1Zcludi1Zg a number of acclaimed biographies of important Dutch poets. He is currently cowritillg the biography of De Stijl helmsman Theo van Doesburg. Renders acted as supervisor for Nicholas Fox Webers PhD thesis Piet Mondrian's Early Years (2018). 139 

‘The art of living’

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