Dundee, October 7, 2015
Dear Reader,
I am Erasmus, born in Rotterdam, son of the Scottish artist Tracy Mackenna and the Dutch artist Edwin Janssen. I was born in 1999 and spent the first years of my life in a house approximately 300 metres away from the Chabot Museum.
In this letter I’m going to tell you about Erasmus the Clown, the work in the Chabot Museum in which I perform, and about the painting that inspired Tracy and Edwin to make that work. Mum and Dad asked me to play the role of the clown because of my love for theatre and acting. In this letter, just as in the video, I am the medium: the subject of the work is talking directly to you my friends, the audience.
My parents thought it was important that I should tell you about the work, as museum and gallery information is often very brief, and mostly written by the curator. This letter is directed at you, with the intention of revealing some of the ideas and personal connections that have informed this work, with help from my parents and Wikipedia.
The artwork that it all started with is called Clown in front of Ruins of Rotterdam, painted with oil onto canvas by the Dutch artist Charley Toorop. It now hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo in the Netherlands. The image of a pensive clown fills almost the whole canvas, painted in red and yellow and white. The background shows Rotterdam in ruins, in sombre grey tones.
Just like me, Charley was from an artistic family. Her father Johannes Theodoorus Toorop was a Dutch-Indonesian painter, better known as Jan Toorop. He worked in various styles including Symbolism, Pointilism and Art Nouveau, and his early work was influenced by the Amsterdam Impressionism movement.
Some curators and museum directors, like those in Museum Boijmans van Beuningen that faces the Chabot Museum in Rotterdam, say that Charley is the most prominent female Dutch artist of the 20th century. Anyway, Charley, who died in 1955 at the age of 64, created a body of work that to me looks strong-willed, self-aware and socially committed. She mainly painted portraits of people in her immediate circle and the face that she saw in the mirror every day.
In a catalogue that I found in my parents studio I read that Charley Toorop and Henk Chabot were close friends. They held each other in high regard and felt a strong artistic bond, which is revealed in the letters they sent to each another. Op 24 April 1940 Charley wrote:
“Dear Chabot, I’ve seen your work at van Lier! It’s going to be tremendously good. I am so glad about it – I admire your courage and perseverance and ability! – Glorious! – Especially those 3 figures with that chap with the newspaper, that fellow lying in the field. There is so much in it. I wish I could be so free – I’m a woman and that is a burden – I have to save my strength by slowing down. I am delighted that you’re doing so well! They’ll have to see it now. The duffers! Glad to hear you sold something, to Boymans too. Good luck! Are you two coming our way this summer? If so, you will come and see us, won’t you? Otherwise next autumn or winter in Rotterdam, if we’re not at war. Looking forward to seeing you both! Charley”
What I find remarkable is that Charley makes a negative remark in this letter about the fact that she is not a man. These days, a woman wouldn’t use her gender as an excuse for not achieving, as in Charley’s case, an artistic aim.
Two weeks after Charley wrote her letter to Chabot, on 10 May, Hitler’s army invaded the Netherlands and on 14 May, the Luftwaffe bombarded Rotterdam’s harbour and city centre. During the following five difficult years the artists’ friendship was particularly close. In contrast to many other Dutch artists, both Toorop and Chabot refused to join the infamous ‘Kulturkammer’ a repressive institution that subjected artists to censorship and control over the presentation of their work. Their refusal made it really hard for the like-minded friends to get materials and had a considerable impact on the production of their sombre canvases that were painted in a very limited colour palette.
In 2000 the Chabot Museum celebrated their close relationship by organising an exhibition that combined both artists work. The Friendship didn’t include Charley Toorop’s Clown in front of Ruins of Rotterdam, which inspired the work I am part of, but an image of it was printed in the catalogue and discussed by Bram Hammacher who was a huge fan of Toorop and Chabot.
You are probably wondering how Charley met the Clown. It was caused by the bombardment of Rotterdam that is mentioned earlier. Two months later, in July, a man sought refuge in the town of Bergen, where Charley lived and painted: this man was Bumbo the clown. He had worked for the circus in Rotterdam until he lost everything to the bombardment. By fleeing to Bergen he met Charley who immediately started to paint him, a man who for her, held the tragedy and absurdity of war in his eyes. The clown posed for Charley three days every second week and when she talked about the experience of making his portrait she said, “I‘m working hard every day on the old clown Bumbo, who is a very special character.” Tracy and Edwin hope to find out more about this enigmatic clown. Currently information is very scarce and we don’t even know his real name. As part of the presentation Erasmus the Clown in the Chabot Museum, my parents have set up a ‘live’ studio, that functions as a public base for their creative explorations.
Charley considered Clown in front of Ruins of Rotterdam to be one of her strongest paintings and urged her dealer to exhibit it. Preferring instead to keep it in a safe place, at the end of 1942 he eventually sold it to a private buyer. The artwork is now in the collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo.
The dark background scene in the painting is a mirrored reworking of a photograph that the Hungarian photographer Eva Besnyö made of the city’s ghostly, destroyed buildings. In July 1940, two months after the shelling of Rotterdam from which Bumbo fled, Eva Besnyö visited Rotterdam and documented as a silent witness the ruined heart of the city and the first steps towards its post-war reconstruction.
At the age of twenty, Eva, who was born in Budapest, decided to leave Hungary’s repressive, anti-progressive environment forever. (By the way, my mum also lived in Budapest, and she even speaks Hungarian). Eva left for Berlin, where the young aspiring artist joined other creative Hungarians such as the painter, photographer and Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy. In the German capital, she adopted the language of New Photography and New Objectivity, whose modern vocabulary gave her the freedom to develop her personal style. Endre Friedmann, a friend from her youth, also decided to escape from the Hungarian regime that was in alliance with Nazi Germany. He followed the photographer to Berlin and sometime later changed his name to Robert Capa. More about him to follow.
In 1932 Eva met John Fernhout who was the second son of Charley Toorop and the philosopher Hendrik Fernhout. Of Jewish origin, and experiencing the rise of naziism and anti-Semitism, Eva decided to leave Germany and to move to Amsterdam. Welcomed into the circle of international artists around Charley Toorop, she quickly became well-known.
A solo exhibition in 1933 at the Kunstzaal Van Lier, attracted the attention of the Dutch followers of the ‘Neues Bauen / New Building’, whose architecture she recorded in a highly personal manner. The Chabot Museum, which was originally designed as a house for C.H. Kraaijeveld and his wife by Gerrit Baas and Leonard Stokla is an example of this influential building philosophy. During the war the beautiful villa functioned as a headquarters for the Waffen SS.
The German invasion in 1940 marked a dramatic turning point in Eva Besnyö’s life, which she had to live clandestinely because of her Jewish descent and after becoming active in the Resistance. Eva survived the hardship she had to endure and died years later in Laren, in North Holland in 2002
As you all know, in Square 1940 in Rotterdam stands a colossal bronze sculpture sited in 15 May 1953, that is officially called The Destroyed City / De Verwoeste Stad but nicknamed Jan Gat. The artist who made it, Ossip Zadkine, was from Vitebsk in Belarus and was born in 1890.
Zadkine’s parents sent him to his mother’s northern English Sunderland. She was Sophie Lester, descended from Scots who emigrated at the time of Peter the Great to Belarus. Ossip called himself Joe until 1914. After attending the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, the young artist went to Paris, where died in 1967. Zadkine is primarily known as a sculptor, but also produced paintings and lithographs.
In the First World War between 1916 and 1917, Zadkine worked as a stretcher-bearer on the front and made drawings and watercolours of wounded soldiers. The artist was discharged in 1917 and later said that the war left him “bodily and spiritually ruined” and that his own work was “a cry of horror against the inhuman brutality of this act of tyranny”.
My mum wrote about Zadkine’s sculpture in her blog when she was out and about in the city performing the role of The Print Pedlar as part of my parents WAR AS EVER! project with the Atlas van Stolk and the Nederlands Fotomuseum. “Seeking respite from the continuous trail of walking and talking, I headed for Zadkine’s colossal bronze, ‘The Destroyed City / De Verwoeste Stad’, knowing it as a place where few stop, yet many use as a crossing from one point to the next. For weeks I have passed the lonely figure, staged and raised up on its own plane at the head of the Leuvehaven, the blank site stripped and wiped of its history, now ringed by museum, offices, college through a continuous process of regeneration. This is art as monument, even though it is doubtful whether Zadkine’s motivation was the particular circumstance of Rotterdam’s city centre aerial bombardment. This material marker, the figure whose heart has been wrenched from it, stands in rain, cloud, sun, snow as the memory of a specific event, binding it to the global history of violence … this representation of the past defines the city’s present and future. The work’s ‘publicness’ was rehearsed through an exhibition–driven public consultation process designed to ignite the imaginations of the broadest publics. Zadkine’s figure had all the ingredients of the spectacular and engaged citizens in the spectacle, in the same way as the statue of the Scottish bard Robert Burns did when unveiled in Dundee to a crowd of 25,000 in 1880.”
In 1947 Eva Besnyö’s friend Robert Capa travelled to Russia and visited the Ukraine and the Caucasus with the writer John Steinbeck. The resulting book A Russian Journal was published in 1948. This was the same moment in history in which George Orwell was revising the manuscript of 1984, on Jura, the island off the West Coast of Scotland where in 1998 my parents held their week-long wedding party.
Orwell must have been a bit upset that Steinbeck and Capa chose to focus on personal portraiture rather than group context in a snapshot of the Soviet Union where politics are mainly kept out of the frame and individuals dominate the picture. State-planned famine, Soviet show-trials, and Stalinist treachery in Spain made Orwell bitter towards the Soviets. Steinbeck’s American failure to denounce Stalin’s wrongs while praising Russian virtue must have seemed unforgivable, given what Orwell knew and the timing of when he knew it.
Like the Joads, the Ukrainian farmers who were hospitable to Steinbeck and Capa are fully realised fellow beings, not proletarian symbols displayed against the kind of landscape Orwell might have described.
One of Capa’s photographs in A Russian Journal shows two clowns in a Ukrainian circus. Some pictures of people living in the Russian country side remind me of some of Henk Chabot’s paintings that depict farmers and the fields around Chabot’s home and studio on the Rotte at Bergschenhoek, which now lies at the outskirts of the city where both I and my namesake were born.
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus lived between 1466 and 1536, and was known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, or simply Erasmus. He was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, a Catholic priest, a social critic, a teacher, and a theologian. Erasmus was his baptismal name, given after St. Erasmus who is also known as Saint Elmo of Formia, Italy (which is on the coast near Collemacchia where my mum’s family is from) who is venerated as the patron saint of sailors and abdominal pain. Desiderius is a self-adopted additional name. The Roterodamus in his scholarly name is Latin for the city of Rotterdam.
As a classical scholar Erasmus produced important new Latin and Greek editions of the New Testament and wrote extensively about manners and how to behave. The ‘Prince of the Humanists’ supported religious tolerance and his widely spread ideas would be influential in the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation.
In his most successful book Praise of Folly, published in 1511, Erasmus uses the character of a female jester to speak directly to his audience. The first version of the book is supposed to have been written in the space of a week while he was staying with Sir Thomas More in England. Praise of Folly starts off with a satirical and learned declamation, during which Folly praises herself, in the manner of the Greek satirist Lucian, whose work Erasmus and Sir Thomas More had recently translated into Latin; a piece of virtuoso foolery. It then takes a darker tone in a series of orations as Folly praises self-deception and madness and makes an ironic examination of pious but superstitious abuses of Catholic doctrine and corrupt practices in parts of the Roman Catholic Church—to which Erasmus was ever faithful—and the folly of pedants (“a person who is excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning”).
I like the bit where Folly talks about her birthplace. “I wasn’t born on wandering Delos or out of the waves of the sea or in ‘hollow caves’, but on the very Islands of the Blest, where everything grows ‘unsown, untilled’. Toil, old age, and sickness are unknown there. There’s no asphodel, mallow, onions, vetch, and beans or any other such worthless stuff to be seen in the fields, but everywhere there’s moly, panacea, nepenthe, marjoram, ambrosia, and lotus, roses, violets and hyacinths, and gardens of Adonis to refresh the eye and nose. Born as I was amidst these delights I didn’t start life crying, but smiled at my mother straight away.”
My parents share, hundreds of years after, Erasmus’ interest in many similar concerns, such as conflict, war, education and national identity. With the dream of independence still alive for many Scots, despite the 2014 Referendum defeat, this last issue is a real hot potato. Folly speaks about it when she says, “Now, just as Nature has implanted his personal self-love in each individual person, I can see she has put a sort of communal variety in every nation and city … The Scots pride themselves on their nobility and the distinction of their royal connexions as much as on their subtlety in dialect … The Italians usurp culture and eloquence, and hence they’re all happy congratulating themselves on being the only civilized race of men.”
Perhaps you have noticed that in the video I am wearing a lapel badge with the text “WAR AS EVER!”. This was produced by my parents for their 2012 exhibition, that focussed on the role of the media in representing war and violence. My parent’s WAR AS EVER! showed us incisively that war is of all times. By combining a series of altered images from the Van Kittensteyn Album of 1613 that documents the Dutch struggle for independence, with fragments of newspapers reporting on the Iraq war, bought on the day my younger sister Esméemilja was born, Tracy and Edwin show us in a straightforward manner that the world is still in a dire state.
The drawing WAR AS EVER! which was used for the badge, is based on the slogan “WAR IS OVER!,” which was advertised by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the early seventies as part of their campaign for world peace. The text “WAR AS EVER!” also refers to Voltaire’s science fiction story Micromegas. In this literary work of 1752 two peaceful giants, who visit earth on a voyage of discovery, unmask the, in their eyes, stupid humans as vain fools. The quote from Micromegas that triggered this work WAR AS EVER! reads, “For instance do you realize that as I speak a hundred thousand lunatics of our species, wearing helmets, are busy killing or being killed by a hundred thousand other animals in turbans, and that everywhere on Earth this is how we have carried on since time immemorial?”
Voltaire’s story is a really great example of stage setting. The giants are actors, observers and correspondents, who as outsiders, in a way that is not confrontational reveal to us humans our foolishness and vanity commenting on aspects of western culture and society. My own passion for acting, text and performance means that I have taken on different roles in a range of situations. My first professional stage appearance was in 2013 with Dundee Rep Ensemble in Hecuba; Euripides’ Hecuba – A new version by Frank McGuiness. My silent role meant that I was on stage during the tragedy, set after the Trojan War, but before the Greeks have left Troy. The central figure is Hecuba, wife of King Priam, formerly Queen of the now-fallen city. I played the part of The Prince of Thrace, who is unfortunately murdered. While I was on stage and in the wings, I was able to think about how the audience would react to this, because even in today’s theatre, audiences are unused to, and often squeamish about scenes of child murder.
As this tragedy unfolded and the young Prince of Thrace became a bloodied victim of Hecuba’s retribution actors and audience were reminded of dramatic events in Syria and other conflict zones, making this Greek tragedy, originally written in 424 BC, uncomfortably relevant. The more recent image of the dead body of three-year old Alyan Kurdi lying face down on a Turkish beach and the unfolding refugee drama in Europe should remind us of all the people, including Bumbo the Clown, Eva Besnyö and the refugees depicted in Chabot’s paintings who became displaced as a result of war and terror.
The mute Bumbo that I am playing for mum and dad as part of their ode to Charley Toorop’s painting combines the role of war victim with that of tragic clown. The jester, the clown and fool has been a recurrent symbolic character in paintings, plays and literature across time.
Two other examples of characters that regularly appear in our cultural history are Democritus and Heraclitus, two Greek philosophers who with their particular lines of thought and ways of life, each had opposing human temperaments: Democritus, bon viveur and optimist and Heraclitus, dark in his writings, melancholic and intolerant. Rubens portrayed them looking at us, the spectator, leaning over a globe that lets us see northern Europe and the oceans around it. Democritus, with his cheerful face and symbolic red cloak points at Heraclitus, sombrely clasping his hands, and draped in black robes. The theatrical composition is typical of baroque painting and evoke the idea of the Theatrum Mundi, literally the world stage. I know it best through the line in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players …”. The world seems like that to me, with millions of different characters that are shunted about a stage, often by external forces, who make it difficult for them to control their own lives. Like in Shakespeare’s plays, lots of the events in the world today appear to share common patterns that sometimes makes it hard for us to understand the differences between one situation and another. People say that Shakespeare was very aware of the contemporary weltanschauung (“a particular philosophy or view of life; the world view of an individual or group”), and that maybe he was using his vast knowledge of the theatrical standards of the time to explore his view of human existence.
And so, my friends, I’m going to finish with a few words that link me to some of the things that are stirring in this work – loss and love and staging. A while ago, during a visit to friends of my parents, I heard a piece of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s famous opera Pagliacci. The tenor Mario Lanza, who played the main role of Canio the Clown and whose father, just like my great grandmother, had to leave the tiny Italian village of Collemacchia for economic reasons, sang these lines in the aria Vesti la Giubba or Put on the Costume, with which I will leave you:
Put on your costume and powder your face
The people pay to be here, and they want to laugh
And if Harlequin shall steal your Columbina
Laugh, clown, so the crowd will cheer!
Turn your distress and tears into jest
Your pain and sobbing into a funny face – Ah!
With my best wishes, a laugh and a wink,
Erasmus Theodorus Dorian Mackenna
Erasmus the Clown was presented at The Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2014.
Erasmus de Clown was presented at Chabot Museum, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2016.
The Visual Research Studio was funded by the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture, Sir William Gillies Bequest.