In Which I Enjoy the Works of Ohne Title, and Get Trapped in a Quentin Blake Exhibit (Part 1)

On my second day of Genoa I was feeling ambitious, and ended up doing another triple-whammy of museums. First was the Otto Hofmann exhibit at the Palazzo Ducale. Otto Hofmann was part of the Bauhaus school, and I'll tell ya. Well, actually, I won't, because I'm trying to think of a metaphor for the experience of walking through 8-10 rooms of Bauhaus paintings, and words are really failing me. All I can say is that on the eighth room I envisioned a scene where two characters are walking through a junkyard, and one almost gets impaled by a tv antennae or something sticking out, and their reaction as they shove the antennae away is: "Jesus, I feel like I'm in a Bauhaus exhibit!" So that's how I feel about that. 

Far and away my favorite part was a room full of saved and salvaged letters by Hofmann, sent to friends and loved ones while he was fighting in World War 2 in Russia (he was actually taken prisoner for a long time). But the letters. were. GORGEOUS. It was the only time in the whole exhibit I felt moved to take pictures, and luckily the Italian security guard understood the emotion and waved her permission. "No visto niente," she said afterwards, with a wink. I went from letter to letter in a state of awe and inspiration, such as usually falls upon me when I see beautiful images combined with words. Hofmann had brought his pens and watercolors to the front, and in the margins and headings of the letters were vivid illustrations of the Russian countryside, the houses and towns, and later, those same towns going up in purple, red, orange flames. 

"The colors are like a Grunewald; the horrible is so close to the beautiful," he said in one of his writings. I have been google imaging him, trying to find one of his later paintings based on the Russian villages in flames, but to no avail. At least it's somewhat refreshing to have seen works obscure enough so that they are not all over google image... 

Another point worth mentioning from the exhibit is that it may or may not have taken me eight rooms to realize that Ohne Title was not, in fact, another artist very similar to Otto Hofmann ("I like some of his work," I thought to myself, "but my God, there's a lot of it considering it's someone else's exhibition!") but the German word for Untitled. Ahem. 

I blame spatial issues on the wall placards for this misconception, and for the fact that I'm still trying to reconcile in my mind that there is not an artist named Ohne Title, whose works and biography I was for a short time very interested in learning more about.