JOHN LENNON photo by Bob Gruen

NY TIMES Article on Bob Gruen 14 October 2011

Friday, September 9, 2011
Art review: Sketches of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann stir emotions about Holocaust
by Meg Furey of The Assignment Desk, DFW

Profile of Eichmann

DALLAS — Temple Emanu-El hosted artist Edward Eichel and writer Deborah Lipstadt Thursday night to commemorate the 50th anniversary of The Eichmann Trial. The night’s exhibition and lecture served as a reminder to all in attendance of the post-war effect of the Holocaust, the importance of our continued recognition, and a recollection of the trial.
In 1961, Edward Eichel was a young expressionist artist living in Paris. Commissioned by French magazine L’Arche, he was sent to Israel to cover the trial of former Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, a man once in charge of the deportation millions of Jews to extermination camps. As the lone courtroom artist, Eichel was compelled by the gravity of the verdict at hand; Eichmann was being charged with crimes against humanity among 15 other war-related and human rights offenses. The artist felt the intrinsic need to expose Eichmann for the world to see, just as the voices of 100 Holocaust survivors who offered their first-hand accounts of the unspeakable crimes against humanity that took place behind the concentration camp fences. The accounts were staid reflections of the horrific rise of evil and abuse of power against an entire race. Taking place after the Nuremberg Trial, this was significant in that the world was hearing the victims’ own stories. And as the world listened, Eichel sat and drew.

“You have to see Eichmann to see what he really is … The way that I draw captured the character of this man,” Eichel said. “I felt I could do something different, something powerful.” And he did. Over the course of the two weeks he spent inside the courtroom, he produced 10 small ink-on-paper gesture blot sketches in order to capture the reaction of the gallery of onlookers, the judges, and Eichmann himself. His quick-handed technique breaks the tension of the courtroom while revealing an almost scattered intensity. The images move as thoughts do, like rapid-fire vibrations, emotions, and judgments together in each mark, moving from blame to forgiveness and every feeling in between.
Eichel’s profile sketches of Eichmann reveal a man who has no other defense than carrying out orders and doing as he was told. A viewer of these sketches should perhaps like to believe that the officer was under the spell of evil, that his freedom of choice had been encumbered by an especially sinister force, and he, as all men are capable though not all do, succumbed to the darker potential. Especially stirring is Eichel’s sketch named “The Cage.” Eichmann, seated behind glass accompanied by guards on either side, reveals the intensity of the trial, as many worried the former Nazi might be assassinated before a verdict was reached.

Eichmann was later found guilty and hanged in 1962.
Lipstadt, author of The Eichmann Trial, offered a lecture about the 1961 trial. It was a time for Israel itself to take up the responsibility to speak and act out on its own behalf. Lipstadt worries that as the years go by and the survivors pass on, the legacy of their will to endure and overcome will begin to fade. Fortunately, Eichel’s sketches provide us with a living document and the undeniable proof of the events, thus preserving a resounding voice against injustice and a continued call for hope.
The Eichel drawings have been on long-term loan to the Dallas Holocaust Museum by the artist since 1994. They will be on view again at the Dallas Holocaust Museum in early October.

The piece is called Superior Ink Loading Dock at the size is 48″ x 22″x 2″. The juror was Holly Hotchner, Director of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Several hundred works were submitted about 80 were accepted. This included a wide range of crafts not just fiber. For further info:
Silvermine Arts Center website

Superior Ink Loading Dock - Two Views plus Road

John Barnes Dobbs, American painter (1931-2011)
By: Mona Molarski

John Barnes Dobbs, a determinedly figurative painter who launched his career in the 1950s against the prevailing winds of Abstract Expressionism, lived to see a time when Realism would co-exist with Abstraction, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and a variety of other artistic movements. On August 9 Dobbs died at his home in New York’s Greenwich Village at the age of 80.

During a career that spanned more than half a century, Dobbs painted his own dusky vision of humanity: figures embedded—more often than not—in an alienating, modern landscape of city and suburb. The people on his canvases are often seen in the distance or from behind, as if departing. They ride up escalators, wait on subway platforms or pass through turnstiles. We glimpse their silhouettes through plate glass windows or in the glare of sun on concrete. In his final works, Dobbs’ figures appear against flat backgrounds, iconic as the images on tarot cards: acrobats, boxers and contortionists, struggling against the physics of their own bodies and that of the universe.

Dobbs had many solo shows at galleries, universities and museums. His work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio, and the Salon Populiste in Paris. Dobbs’ paintings are part of the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; the Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY; the Canton Museum of Art, Canton, OH and the Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, MA. From 1972 to 1996, he was a Professor of Art at John Jay College, City University of New York. He was a member of the National Academy, to which he was elected in 1976.

Born in 1931 in a small house by the Lackawanna Railroad in Nutley, New Jersey, where his grandfather had once worked as a railway express clerk, Dobbs grew up in a politically engaged family of artists, musicians and poets. Yet he credited the shining rails that ran past their little house with giving him his first lesson in one-point perspective. Although he studied with several painters during his twenties, he always referred to himself as a “self-taught” artist.

At 18, after graduating from high school, Dobbs hoisted a duffle bag onto his shoulder and hitchhiked cross-country. He worked at a variety of odd jobs before returning to the East Coast to study painting with Ben Shahn, Gregorio Prestopino and Jack Levine, who became his mentor and life-long friend. In 1952 Dobbs was drafted into the Army and stationed in Germany. He brought along a sketchbook, which he filled with drawings of soldiers and post-war German life, later published in a chapbook, “Drawings of a Draftee” (1955).

After returning to the United States, Dobbs married French-Algerian literary scholar Anne Baudement and had his first one-man show at the Grippi Gallery in New York in 1959. Four years later, painter Raphael Soyer included Dobbs—along with Edward Hopper, Leonard Baskin, Jack Levine and eight other figurative artists—in his large group portrait, “Homage to Thomas Eakins.” Soyer’s canvas was a cri de coeur for 20th century American Realist painting. But, although he and Dobbs became close friends and artistic compatriots, their work developed along different directions. While Soyer devoted himself to painting from life, Dobbs worked from memory and imagination, employing both literal and symbolic imagery to invoke America’s collective preoccupations and dreams.

Those dreams, as Dobbs conceived them, can sometimes be terrifying. In “Deodand #2,” (1969), painted by Dobbs during the height of the protests against the war in Vietnam, a large revolver points straight at the viewer. Staring down the barrel of the gun is the shadowy face of a helmeted policeman. With its oversized revolver, gripped in huge hands, the work confronts us more directly and aggressively than news footage ever could. The artist is willing to let us squirm before this hyper-realistic nightmare of the American history from which we are still trying to awake.

“I’m not afraid to say I’ve made paintings that can be hard to live with,” Dobbs wrote near the end of his life, responding to often-heard comments that his work is both beautiful and disturbing.

Certainly we can trace Dobbs’ artistic lineage from Goya through George Grosz, those break-and-enter artists who brought fury into the drawing room and have never been entirely forgiven. As with those earlier, socially conscious painters, one senses that the demons that pursued Dobbs were as much personal as political. That’s one reason the sloppy labels “Realist” and “Social Realist” that have dogged him and his circle for decades don’t shed much light on the paintings.

In the unforgettable self-portrait “White Mask” (1999), Dobbs’ haunting gray eyes stare out of his long, bearded face. They are cool, appraising and unflinching. But instead of a cap on top of his balding head, the artist wears an African totem. It’s a large wooden mask, painted white, the color of death. And its coal-black eyes stare off into an otherworldly, steel-blue distance. “I am your doppelgänger,” the ghostly second head seems to say, “and I come from a world that’s truer, deeper and more real.”

Dobbs is survived by his wife Anne, sons Michel and Nicolas, and his sister Louise DeCormier and her family. His work is represented by ACA Galleries in New York and George Krevsky Gallery in San Francisco, where a memorial exhibition will run from November 12 to December 19, 2012.

Contact: Michel Dobbs
Sag Harbor, NY
Phone: 631-725-0957 or 631-834-4272