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Ivan Kirigin
Ivan Kirigin
hexodus: Geometrical Abstraction: On the first day of this year I learned about my long-lost grandfather, Zanis Waldheims, via a site made by his friend of 35 years. We had been separated when I was young, due to large-scale circumstances. Although my grandfather passed away in 1993, the curator of that site kept all of my grandfather’s... - http://giantrobotlasers.com/post...
hexodus: Geometrical Abstraction: On the first day of this year I learned about my long-lost grandfather, Zanis Waldheims, via a site made by his friend of 35 years. We had been separated when I was young, due to large-scale circumstances. Although my grandfather passed away in 1993, the curator of that site kept all of my grandfather’s sketchbooks, documents, personal effects, drawings, art pieces, annotated books, manuscripts, photographs, letters, films, audio tapes. Everything. From 1945 to 1993. Over his life, my grandfather developed a theory of geometrical abstraction that he expressed in a series of over 600 art pieces. To say that this work is immense would be a gross understatement. His life was spent in a quest for understanding after experiencing the horrors of two world wars in which his small nation of forest-people was devastated. Despite that, his ideas have remained largely unknown. The fact that this corpus was not relegated to a dump in Montreal can be completely credited to his friend, Yves Jeanson, who provided an intellectual counterpart to my grandfather, listening where others chose to ignore. I spent the last week in Montreal, hosted by Yves and his wife, two of the kindest and most sincere people that I have met in my life. During this time, we spoke for hours about the work and life of my grandfather, poring over documents, discussing his art and philosophy. I have much to report, and it will take a while for this tale to be told. It is truly exciting and unique, and frankly it is hard to know where to start…
June 28 from Tumblr - Comment - Share
Grandfather's life-story reads at times like a stand-up comedy routine, no editing necessary ("1935: […] He begins to frequent a woman, that was presented to him by his cousin Zenta who happens to be a friend of hers. He will later marry her." http://waldheims.net/En_Life... ) - ianf ⌘
Other parts of it read more ominously. Grandchild Hexodus should try to research grandfather's wartime doings. Because anyone who has lived a normal life in WWII Nazi-occupied Latvia and, at war's end, considers himself (as relayed to his longtime Canadian hagiographer friend) "completely destroyed when he learns […] that the Allies admitted [the Russians] to the panel of judges to judge the Nazis at Nuremberg," in effect has considered the Nazis to be the lesser of two evils, can not have had entirely clean hands [his "small nation of forest-people" has a lot to answer in other contexts, http://vip.latnet.lv/LPRA...] This is not an apology for Stalin's Russia, but everybody would do well to read what historian Timothy Snyder recently summed up on the subject (despite the title, it is not about the Holocaust as such): "[…] In the entire Stalinist period, between 1928 and 1953, Soviet policies killed, in a conservative estimate, well over five million Europeans. Thus when one considers the total number of European civilians killed by totalitarian powers in the middle of the twentieth century, one should have in mind three groups of roughly equal size: Jews killed by Germans, non-Jews killed by Germans, and Soviet citizens killed by the Soviet state. As a general rule, the German regime killed civilians who were not German citizens, whereas the Soviet regime chiefly killed civilians who were Soviet citizens." ["Holocaust: The Ignored Reality" http://www.nybooks.com/article... ] - ianf ⌘
woah, i didn't realize this reblog would cause this link to post. Not that it is hexodus's grandfather, not mine (he's my brother in law) - Ivan Kirigin