UTW 48

Italian-Jewish resistance hero Eugenio Curiel, Castel sant' angelo & my flying Chi, Obi Jew-Jew Kenobi (looked on by Alex from above and below as he tries to comprehend this artwork)

Curiel was born in Trieste, Italy, in 1912.  His parents were Jewish. He was a noted physicist, author and very active in the resistance; he was also active with the Communist Party.

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In the late 1930’s with met with other leftist anti-Fascists in Switzerland, Paris and back in Italy, in Milan. He wrote anti-Fascist articles for various publications. On June 24, 1939 he was arrested in Trieste, northern Italy.

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On January 13, 1940 a court in Milan sentence him to five years imprisonment in the island of Ventotene; on the southwestern Italiancoast.  Curiel arrived January 26.

Between 1939 and 1943, 700 political prisoners were housed there, among them 400 Communists. Following the first collapse, on July 25, 1943, of Mussolini’s regime, on August 21, 1943 Curiel left the island for Milano (Milan).

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In Milan he directed underground newspapers. On Feb. 24, 1945 a Fascist informer recognized Curiel on the street.  He was beaten to death by men, thugs, from the paramilitary Brigate Nere [in English: Black Brigades], run by the Republican Fascist Party. They operated under the Nazi military puppet government that installed Mussolini’s government in northern Italy called the Italian Social Republic, or The Republic of Saló.

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Other imagery: Alex Schwarz, seen at upper left, upper right and lower right, in a linocut, was a friend of the artist. Schwarz was raised in Vienna; his mother, among other relatives, was murdered at the Auschwitz death camp.

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Alex’s wife, Gertrude, who preceded him in leaving this world, was also a Viennese Jewish refugee survivor. She escaped via a kindertransport to England. [Also see UTW 44: Kamil Hahn of Telc, Czechoslovakia; Hahn was a first cousin of Schwarz]. Schwarz didn’t always understand all of my art but he was moved to tears when he walked through a Museum of History & Industry, Seattle exhibit of photos taken in the Warsaw ghetto by a Nazi sergeant, Heinz Jost, called a Birthday Trip to Hell. The 1994 MOHAI exhibit included 7 wings series drawings, offering viewers a local focus. The Jost photos were on tour from the Smithsonian’s Traveling Exhibit Services. They had been provided to the Smithsonian by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, which had received them from the German magazine Stern, which, if my memory serves, had received the film negatives sent by Jost before he died, long after the war.  

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The battery-operated cloppity-cloppin ‘ toy chicken: While working on the drawing I was reading "Things Fall Apart," by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. The part of the artwork title, My flying Chi, was inspired by the book, in which  learned of the Nigerian cultural concept of having a personal god, called a Chi. The battery-operated chicken toy, which I called "Obi 'Jew-Jew' Kenobi” in the artwork title, had been a birthday gift to me from a former girlfriend of Missouri, Linda Joyce Burns.

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 The drawing of Castel Sant'Angelo, known as Hadrian's Tomb in English, was inspired by a photo seen in Susan Zuccotti's book, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, Survival (Basic Books, NY, 1987). The photo is captioned Jewish forced laborers in 1942 working along the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, in the shadow of Castel sant'Angelo. (Publifoto, Rome).

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The 3 Orthodox Jewish men in prayer shawls were drawn from Warsaw ghetto photos.

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The mask, lower center: This might have been a compilation interpretation I drew, in part from a reproduction of a Judensau engraving, seen in the book The Art of Hatred – Images of Intolerance in Florida Culture, pub. by the Jewish Museum of Florida, 2001. The Judensau image is described as a woodcut, 1700, from Frankfurt au Main, Germany. The imagery of the Judensau includes a depiction of a Jewish man with horns, inferring the devil. This Christian iconographic imagery was most infamously portrayed in Michaelangelo’s sculpture of Moses, housed in the church of San Pietro of Vincoli, Rome, Italy.

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The dreidel toys were drawn from driedels I owned. A dreidel (pronounced dray-dull), is a spin toy for children at the Jewish holiday of Chanukah.

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The tree, lower right bottom and lower right, is from a linocut print I did called Tree with heart.

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The 6 bird head images on sticks, above the mask, were drawn from my imagination. They fit within a passage by Elie Wiesel in the book Harry James Cargas in Conversation with Elie Wiesel, pub. by Paulist Press, 1976, copyright Harry James Cargas. [Cargas, 1932 -198, was an American  Catholic teacher and writer].

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From chapter 3, page 37, E.W.: “How can you speak of taste?... How can one joke about these things? … I read that Günther Grass was asked whether he believed a museum should be built in Auschwitz and he said, “No, a circus,” because there was something farcical about it. The whole Holocaust had a farcical aspect. That is my haunting fear – maybe it was a farce, it wasn’t even a tragedy. Tragedy for us but not in other terms. It was a farce. Laughter. Laughter.

 Some years ago, in Frankfurt, they had a trial of the Auschwitz S.S. killers. I remember I read the proceedings. The indicted, the defendants, listened to witnesses and they couldn’t resist laughing. They went on laughing in the courtroom. These murderers went on laughing and I found it symbolic, instructive.”

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I had a very interesting response to this drawing during an exhibit tour I led once. I will tell the story of that response at any power-point presentations on my wings series art, if the site sponsor asks me to include this drawing in a guest class presentation.

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Exhibits include:

Pacific Lutheran University, Mortvedt Library, Tacoma, Washington, 2003

Seattle Central College, M. Rosetta Hunter Gallery, 2013

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A 19 min., 54 sec. video about the drawing; includes video footage Segan took in Rome, April 2010, on walks along the Tiber River by Castel Sant’Angelo.