17139 („Es hat mein Leben mich gelehrt …“) 1932

Curator: So, we're looking at John Elsas' piece from 1932, titled "17139 ('Es hat mein Leben mich gelehrt …')". It's a mixed media work using drawing, collage, gouache, watercolor, and ink on paper. What jumps out at you? Editor: A kind of quiet despair, I think. A melancholic, fragmented figure. Like someone cobbled together from scraps of feeling. It has a poignant rawness. Curator: It's expressionistic for sure, isn’t it? You can see the raw emotion you speak of in the figure's elongated form, the tilted head, that almost cartoonish sorrowful face. And notice how he uses collage. There’s a disruption in the figure itself. Editor: Yes, it feels…constructed. The visible seams amplify the sense of fragility. The paper itself looks distressed, thin. And what about the political climate back then? You know, with the rise of fascism casting such a long shadow... Curator: Absolutely, John Elsas, a Jewish artist, was creating this work against the backdrop of rising antisemitism and political instability in Germany. It’s almost as if he's expressing the precarity of human existence at the time, in visual terms. His life experience becomes inextricably bound to the imagery we are seeing. The inscription at the bottom in German is his thought on what life has taught him. Editor: I read it translates roughly to, "My life has taught me what was right for me was foolish.” Powerful, knowing, yet so terribly sad. Curator: It feels like a gut punch, doesn't it? It really humanizes the experience of pre-war anxiety in Europe. Editor: Thinking about the paper again and how its very support system will eventually wither away under the acidity of the inks used here. It parallels with Elsas fleeing Nazi Germany to relocate to South Africa, to live a solitary and impoverished existence. Curator: Incredibly poignant when we look at it from that point of view. It invites us to think about our own vulnerability. Editor: Definitely gives you pause to reflect, doesn’t it? Makes you appreciate, perhaps, how lucky we are to share a dialogue like this with the artist’s work.