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The Rose of No One: Colette Brunschwig’s Collages for Paul Celan

April 28 – June 16, 2007

In conjunction with this symposium, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art will feature an exhibit of seventeen untitled works by the French artist Colette Brunschwig. Each of Brunschwig’s collages is a meditation on a poem by Paul Celan, one of the most celebrated modern European poets. The work of Brunschwig and Celan--both of whom survived the Holocaust--bears witness to that catastrophe.

The Museum hours are Wednesday 11 a.m.-8 p.m. and Thursday through Sunday 11 a.m.-5 p.m. The museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays and major holidays. For information, call (541) 346-3027.

Colette Brunschwig Exhibit at the White Lotus Gallery

April 27 - June 9, 2007

The White Lotus Gallery at 767 Willamette Street will feature a companion exhibit by Brunschwig of ink drawings inspired by Chinese masters. There will be a gallery talk by Steven Shankman on Saturday, April 28 at 2:00 p.m. entitled “China and Colette Brunschwig’s Art of Witnessing.” Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. For information, call (541)345-3276.

Colette Brunschwig (b. 1927) is a renowned painter currently living in Paris who was deeply influenced by the traditional art of China. Brunschwig is a Jew who was hidden, during the Nazi occupation, by a Catholic friend who introduced her to the art of China. Brunschwig conceived of her art as bearing witness to the Holocaust, including the loss of her own family members in the catastrophe.  After the war, Brunschwig became close to the great Lithuanian-French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (d. 1995), who argues that a witness "does not thematize what it bears witness of, and whose truth is not the truth of representation"  (Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998], p. 146; originally published in French in 1974). In order to bear witness, through her art, to the trauma of the Holocaust, Brunschwig turns away from representation, from the notion of mimesis that dominates Western art from its beginnings through early modernism. Part of the appeal of Chinese art, for Brunschwig, is that it never was under the sway of the theory of imitation. In the Book of Documents, for example, we read: shi yan zhi ("poetry articulates what is on the mind intently"). We hear nothing, in this definition, that resembles the Western/Aristotelian idea that poetry is a representation of reality. What poetry does, rather, is to put into words a welling up of sincere, preverbalized emotion. What the words articulate is similar to what Levinas calls the "droiture" or straightforwardness of the "saying" (le dire) which is a response to the other that precedes language in the mode of representation and thematization. In order to bear witness in her work, Colette Brunschwig turns to the art of traditional China, and particularly to Mi Fu (1052-1107), the Northern Song dynasty calligrapher and painter who was brought up in Kaifeng, then the capital city and a town later known for its magnificent synagogue, as Matteo Ricci later noted, where several hundred descendents of Kaifeng's "Israelites" still live. Mi Fu's radically impressionistic "Mi-dot" technique has much in common with the radical impressionism of Brunschwig's European master, Claude Monet (1840-1926).

--Steven Shankman