A monograph on the work of Barbara Loftus with contributions from Monica Bohm-Duchen Art Historian and Esther Leslie, Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck  University of London.

An exhibition of paintings and images on paper by Barbara Loftus

Curated by Monica Bohm-Duchen

5^th October – 13^th November 2011

The Freud Museum presents Barbara Loftus’s investigation into the recollections of her mother Hildegard, who fled Germany as a Jewish refugee in 1939. Her cycle of works examines the domestic impact of German hyperinflation on an assimilated Jewish family at a time when a climate of fear, suspicion and destabilization in the collective German psyche dealt a fatal blow to the fragile concept of the German-Jewish symbiosis. The historic equation of the Jew and money re-emerged as the scapegoat for the failing mark and the brutalising effect of hyperinflation which undermined the Weimar Republic and laid the foundations for the Third Reich and the rise of Hitler.

Sigismund’s watch narrates a ‘primal scene’ from the early 1920s, recollected by Hildegard when, as a small child, she witnessed, unseen by her parents, a bitter marital row. The cause was her father, Sigismund’s bankruptcy, which inflicted sudden impoverishment on their comfortable bourgeois way of life. She saw her mother tear her father’s gold pocket watch from his waistcoat pocket, stamp on it and smash it.

The ruined watch became a symbol for the chaos into which Hildegard’s family and many other Germans were plunged overnight. The story is told through a cycle of paintings and images on paper, contextualised by historical material and quotations from the Weimar period.

Venue details

20 Maresfield Gardens
London
NW3 5SX

020 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
info@freud.org.uk

opening hours:  Wednesday-Sunday, 12-5pm

Admission: Adults £6.00; Senior citizens £4.50; Concessions £3.00, Children under 12 free

Transport: Finchley Road tube and Frognal overground, Buses13,82 and 113

An exhibition of 131 biographical albums documenting the lives and sufferings of Jewish citizens of Berlin Schoneburg and Tempelhof. One album is devoted to the life of the artist’s mother Hildegard Basch

www.hausamkleistpark-berlin.de