Barometer c. 1936

Curator: I’m immediately charmed. It's wistful, like a forgotten toy, this watercolor titled "Barometer," painted around 1936 by Max Fernekes. What are your initial thoughts? Editor: A "Barometer," you say? That immediately strikes me as ironic. Barometers measure atmospheric pressure to forecast weather. And what do we see here? Two static figures frozen in their respective conditions of either "good" or "bad," seemingly untouched by the fluctuations of time, weather, or politics. Curator: You read it politically. Interesting. To me, those little figures peeking out from their arched doorways, feel so naive. It's decorative art at its finest. Editor: Precisely, decorative. A domestic object. What would it mean for such an object, which renders gender so explicitly – the woman demurely placed on the left, the man confidently to the right – to take on a more politically-charged meaning during the interwar period, as is the case with this piece? What kind of ideologies is this decorative piece perpetuating, intentionally or unintentionally? Curator: You are looking at this from a global, contextual lens, as expected, while I am thinking more on how these sorts of charming everyday images once made a person feel safe. The slightly distressed aqua surface with simple garlands of flowers above each figure adds to this reading, this feeling of safety being perhaps tarnished. What kind of world were we in at the time? Were we going into a storm? Editor: Always, right? So the work hints to some ideas of an innocence lost or some sense of imminent collapse. But who gets to maintain that innocence? How is it gendered, raced, classed? Even in these innocuous domestic objects, power dynamics are subtly, yet certainly, at play. The good and bad weather this barometer signals might not be evenly distributed at all. Curator: So much reading and so little rain! You bring a perspective that always makes one consider more than first meets the eye. Maybe, if the glass is half full, Max Fernekes, knowingly or not, urges us to pause on binaries that we take as absolute. Editor: Or to perhaps read how this domestic object works precisely to construct and reify such binaries, making them appear timeless, neutral, or simply “charming.” Thanks for this glimpse!