Heartsick with Woe

What is the relationship between love and death, between passion and anger, between relationship and abandonment? These are the questions addressed by Rutie Borthwick in her 2012 work which sets the book of Lamentations in dialogue with the Song of Songs.

The design and content of the painting grew out of study sessions that Borthwick and I engaged in together. She was particularly interested in learning the biblical texts that I teach and that hold specific meaning for me. My passing comment about the ways in which I understood Song of Songs, the blossoming love of the covenant, as the flip side of the coin from Lamentations, the full-scale breakdown of the Divine-human relationship, suggested the theme and structure of this painting to Borthwick.

The painting comprises two distinct tiers. The upper tier, representing the Song of Songs, contains depictions of eighteen couples in love, who span a range of ages and ethnicities. The lower tier, representing Lamentations, depicts slightly fewer figures, who again span a range of ages and ethnicities though most appear to be Majority World figures—but the structure is different. While some of the figures do cling to each other, many of them sit isolated in their grief, while the figures in the foreground are already deceased. In between the two tiers is a large expanse of white space, which appears impassable.

The final appeal of Lamentations 5:22 seems to sit in that impassable white space. What happens if God is so angry with us that we are utterly rejected for all time? How can we return to the passionate, loving relationship described in Song of Songs, if we are forever grieving or, worse, dead? How can the white space between the two be traversed?

Käthe Kollwitz’s bronze depicts the head of a woman, possibly modelled after the artist herself, with eyes closed. One hand covers the lower part of her face, including most of the mouth. The other hand covers the left side of her face, including the eye and part of the nose.

Lamentation expresses Kollwitz’s grief and trauma at the loss of her fellow artist Ernst Barlach with whom she had exhibited as recently as 1936, the same year that Kollwitz was interrogated by the Gestapo. Barlach’s work was denounced and confiscated by the Nazis as a ‘degenerate art’, as was Kollwitz’s own work in this period. Although neither artist died at the hands of the Nazis (Kollwitz herself died just over a fortnight before VE Day), the Nazi period was extremely difficult for them both. As early as 1933, only a month after the Nazis came to power, Kollwitz had been forced to give up her teaching position at the Prussian Academy of Arts owing to her politics.

The hands covering the face in Lamentation may well represent more than just the inward focus of a figure in mourning, also reflecting the ways in which both Barlach and Kollwitz were silenced, both artistically and politically, by the Nazis. The close-up focus on the lone figure reveals both a more general sense of the loneliness of bereavement, as well as the specific isolation of both artists during the Nazi regime.

Like the end of the book of Lamentations, the figure in Lamentation is frozen in the moment; eternally grieving; no relief in sight. Can Kollwitz see a future where the Nazis are defeated? Barlach is already dead and will never see his redemption. Kollwitz’s bronze, like Lamentations, cries out to the viewer asking whether lament need be eternal.

References

‘Barlach’s Life, The Biography’, Ernst Barlach Haus, available at https://www.barlach-haus.de/en/ernst-barlach/biography/ [accessed 21 March 2024]

‘Biography of Käthe Kollwitz’, Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln, available at https://www.kollwitz.de/en/biography [accessed 21 March 2024]

‘History’, Akademie der Künste, available at https://www.adk.de/en/academy/history.htm [accessed 21 March 2024]

Boldly scrawled, almost graffiti-like, in thick, textured red paint is the Hebrew of Lamentations 5:22, followed in the same style, though in yellow, by the Hebrew of Lamentations 5:21. In this ordering of the verses, David Asher Brook is following the ancient, Jewish tradition which states that when the text of Lamentations is read aloud (most commonly on the fast day of the 9th of Av), the penultimate verse is always repeated after verse 22. This tradition is recorded by Rashi, the eleventh-century Hebrew Bible commentator, who explains that we should never end in words of reproof.

Each of the letters is adorned with industrial-sized staples painted in a strongly contrasting colour, reminiscent of the ways in which scribes often beautify the letters of the Hebrew Bible. But here the sheer force of pounding the staples into the wooden board makes them more expressive of anger, more forceful, and more emphatic than the beautification process they reference. Brook seems to be hammering out his own anger, the process of the painting perhaps representing his own frustration at God’s potentially infinite abandonment.

Brook takes the title of this mixed media work directly from Lamentations 5:21:  Restore us to yourself (the Hebrew translated by NRSV as ‘restore us’ can equally be rendered ‘return us’). In this way, alongside the visually brighter yellow in which he renders this verse, Brook foregrounds the hope of renewal. Perhaps this work reflects his own journey as someone who is baal teshuvah, a person who has returned to more traditional Jewish practice following a period of a more secular or less observant lifestyle. Lamentations 5:22–23 (i.e. the repetition of Lamentations 5:21) has become a cipher for his own, personal relationship to God, opening up the option to his viewers to grapple with these same issues.