Fred Pollack 'Creativity from lack' (Exhibition from February 25 to March 26 2022)

Bert Kuipers, Owner Bert Kuiper Kunsthandel Gallerease
Bert Kuipers
Owner Bert Kuiper Kunsthandel
5 Articles

One of his 2005 exhibition catalogs features a photograph of Fred Pollack on the back. His Rembrandtesque face emerges from the darkness, the rest of his body remains hidden. He looks at us insistently, unnoticed again to merge with the darkness, as if he were not there. He has said what he had to say with a determined look, on linen indeed, in a secret language of signs linked to a layer of meaning to which only he has the key.

His paintings have a hermetic feel, because it is never immediately clear how the abstraction on the canvas relates to the object in the reality or the thoughts of the maker. They are sensory-made feelings, metaphors and symbols painted on a dirty white background that has been applied to previously used material. Small holes have been drilled in it, which try to reach a reservoir in fits and starts in the depths; a 'tainted past', as he puts it.

Fred Pollack was born in 1943 in Enschede at a time when his father had already been gassed in Auschwitz. A little later, when his mother is arrested during a raid, little Fred is lying in a pram in the garden. The boldness of the neighbors ensures that the child is not taken. They put Fred in the bed next to their son who is six months older. The resistance fighter, Reverend Leendert Overduin, places Fred with a foster family in Enschede, which in turn has to go into hiding. His mother dies in Bergen Belsen from exhaustion.

Whether the story of the raid in Enschede is true is not entirely certain, because in 2014 Pollack heard that his mother had been arrested in Amsterdam. The lead up to the fate of his parents is a big black hole. In Het Joodsche Weekblad of January 1, 1942 there is an advertisement: 'Engaged: Lotte Gadiel and Lutz Pollack, Amsterdam: Meerhuizenpl. 134 ', Enschedé: Schouwinkstr. 25.' Both names can later be found in the registers of death in Westerbork; personal details belonging to a lost existence.

  

It is January in Corona time. We sit at the dining table in his house in Garnwerd and look out over the vast Groningen landscape, which is shrouded in diffuse light. On a branch in one of the trees in the yard, a sparrowhawk tries to ward off an aggressive magpie. Pollack looks fragile. He walks with a walker; the consequences of a complicated ankle fracture that he suffered several years ago. His rehabilitation was a lengthy process full of introspection that brought him closer to himself and his traumatic past. Because painting is not possible, he turns to poetry, which also appears to reside in him.

Not coincidentally, because the word comes from the Greek poiein, which means 'making shape' . Pollack is a retired psychiatrist. He was his own patient during that recovery time. During our conversation he formulates thoughtfully in measured sentences, taking a short break every now and then. Gradually, fatigue sets in. Parkinson's is inexorable in wrecking a body.

“I remember very well, I must have been about five years old, when my foster mother called me and my twin sister, Marion, into bed with her. She told me that she and my father were not our parents. Then the light went out for me. First, it was too early, but beyond that. She said, "Go to the bathroom and give Daddy a kiss." He was just shaving. My foster parents were twenty years apart and my foster father was always an old man to me. From that moment I grew up differently"

"I come from a family of tailors and my mother was a seamstress. All I have from my biological parents is a wedding photo and a photo of my mother with a child in her arm. Whether I am that child... well, I don't know. Marion, my sister, was very quickly taken away from her mother and I was allowed to stay. Marion was taken to a monastery. I only recently learned about my origins. My mother comes from Beuthen, from a area shifted between Germany and Poland.

She had a sister who lived in England, Aunt Helen. In Amsterdam, aunt Frieda and a brother, Curt Gadiel, owned the Wiener Werkstätte, a shop on Keizersgracht where he sold fur coats and tailored suits. The Gadiels appear to have been a very large family in Beuthen with many social contacts, many of whom have fled to Canada, Australia and New York before the war. I think because of pogroms. My father opened a tailor's shop in Enschede in 1942 with another Pollack, no relative. I think that shows courage in wartime. My father died at the end of February 1943, according to the notes of the Red Cross. I was born April 11, 1943. After arriving in Auschwitz, he was gassed the next day together with his brother Hans.”

 

"I ended up in hiding by Reverend Overduin. That name is a household name in Enschede. They first took me to the nuns of the Catholic hospital in Enschede. They belonged to a German order. Later I came to the Frankenhuis family, who who lived opposite Overduin, who were also Jewish people who had to leave their home at a certain point and were placed with a Catholic lady, Aunt Annie.

One day a father comes and says to my mother: 'This little boy must be raised as a Catholic'. Aunt Annie thought so too, because then another soul would be added. Then my foster mother said: 'Listen if I raise a child from a Catholic background as Jewish, what do you think about that?' 'No', said that father, 'that is not possible!'. 'So then it is clear' said my foster mother: 'this boy is raised Jewish'. So I did my bar mitzvah and everything that came with it. Gossip arose in the Jewish community of Enschede that I had not been circumcised. That was not done during the war and so it was determined that it had to be done after the war. But I did not agree with that: "you don't ever touch my cock."

"I would never have become a doctor if I had been brought up in the family of my biological father and mother. Then I would have become a tailor and I would have had a chic little shop with leather in Germany. I sometimes fantasize about that. But I  foster parents gave me the opportunity to become a doctor. Before I got there I had to overcome a lot of obstacles. I couldn't count or read. I was dyslexic and had dyscalculia. Those words didn't exist then. For the class it was hilarious because I read the most idiotic things.

I was afraid to get a turn when we had to read, I was stressed. Elementary school was a disaster. I was a fearful child. In high school, I tried to hitch a ride with the boys who were good at learning. I overworked. During that period, my foster father had all kinds of health problems and I felt: he is going to die. I was afraid of being orphaned a second time. So I started to think magically. Fold the tablecloth a hundred times and he wouldn't die. But at number 81 I lost count. So I started again."

 

"I failed my final exam. I could draw well and I had a great sense of color. People didn't notice this at school but my mother noticed. But when I wanted to go to art academy, she thought I should have a real profession. At that time I resisted but afterwards I am very happy that I took my final exams again and that I started studying medicine in Amsterdam. I felt at home in that study. I had the feeling for a long time that wanted to do something with psychiatry. I quickly realized that it is the most creative specialism. Because of my compulsiveness in my youth, I had the idea that I knew what a patient was dealing with. I was able to feel what patients went through. I was of course also interested in who I myself was."

"During my life I suffered greatly from anti-Semitism. As a child I was often called 'dirty dirty Jew' after the war. And when I wanted to play with a friend it was called 'You can't come here because you are a Jew." I also had to deal with it during my initiation in Amsterdam. Three hundred men on the floor and thirteen men behind the table. One of those guys says: 'I can smell Jews ten meters away'. I stand and say "Then you can smell me now!" The other Jewish boys remained seated. I thought if I sit still now, then I am worth nothing. In my practice as a psychiatrist I also had to deal with it. From a psychotic patient I was told once that they were forgotten to gas me.

Pollack's house stands in a wide open landscape. Anyone can see inside, but the blinds on the windows of his studio are permanently lowered. It seems as if he has blinded his soul and no one is allowed to see how he transposes his feelings in his paintings. "When I still had a practice, I only started painting in the evening after work. I have always painted in neon light. The studio is south-facing and then a lot of light comes in. I couldn't use that. Maybe I wanted to don't flaunt a creativity that arises from lack. In my more recent work I show more of my soul. But I still paint with artificial light. The world of my studio is not the real world and that is why there is no Parkinson's there It's a bit like that little boy who discovers early on that the world is not his world."

"Of course we as humans have an innate tendency to keep our distance from traumatic things, that's your survival strategy and you can see that in my work as what shouldn't be seen, what shouldn't be heard, what shouldn't be felt, etc. Of course you only partly know what that is. Defense is not like, oh, that's a bad history, I have to stay away from that. The fear can be genetically determined, it can be passed on to the next generation, so become hereditary.

This has happened to many Jewish people. Apparently I have that fear in me too. We are a bit pre-programmed despite the fact that we are conditioned beings. And yet we are beings who need acceptance from the outside world. We are seen through the eyes of another. My paintings are seen through the eyes of another. I have once said that in my art I liberate myself from neurosis. That gives your identity a push in the right direction. There is freedom. No more eyes on your neck.”

"Hiding the past is also no longer tenable. This is reflected in my more recent work. There is much more light in it. It has become much more colourful, looser in tone and I let in the humor every now and then. I am less afraid of my feelings and If I am really well motivated to make a painting then my automatic skills and ratio take over and he painting is somehow creating itself. So I have somehow developed an alternative drawing system due to my dyslexia".

This is clearly visible in the earlier paintings. The analogy with his Parkinson's suddenly arises. Pollack's analysis is clinical: "When I was diagnosed, I fell into a deep pit and despite everything, this has been the most shitty period I've experienced. In the beginning you see Parkinson's as a friend, then as an enemy. But the disease is a system and I am a system and you have to see if you can balance those systems a bit. Art helps with that."

 

 

According to Pollack, what his work expresses cannot be adequately expressed in a language of understanding. What can be seen in his early paintings is beyond the limits of his (image) language. A work gradually arises, while painting, turning the canvas, now and then stepping back, then painting over again, until the work is declared 'finished' when he has recognized his intention in it.

His works are not given a title so not influencing the viewer for his own interpretation. Even in the figuration that appears more and more often, a work does not flinch at first. But if you open up and look closely, you will see that in recent work Pollack's world increasingly presents itself as a condensed anecdote, sometimes as a farce, then as a tragedy and sometimes as both at the same time. Life is lived on it in the present and understood in the past.

 

Fred Pollack's paintings are on display and for sale from from February 25 to March 26, 2022 at Bert Kuipers Kunsthandel in Enschede. If you would like to come by, pleas make an appointment for a viewing via the contact form Bert Kuipers Kunsthandel. If you would like see some paintings of  Fred Pollack online, you can do so here via Gallerease.

 


Written by Bert Kuipers on 07 Sep 2020, 13:24 Category Artist ProfilesTagged Modernism, Interview, Abstract Art , Modern Art (1860s-1970s)
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