Europe: A History (254 page)

Photo: Musée de Montaubon.

57. THE CHILDREN’S FRIEND. This picture of Stalin embracing a young admirer at the Communist Party Congress of 1938 at the height of the purges was widely repro duced by Soviet propaganda agencies. It even inspired a public statue erected in Moscow. The girl, Gelya Sergeyevna, learned much later that her father had been shot on Stalin’s orders, and that her mother had been cast into the Gulag for enquiring about his fate.

Photo: David King.

58. KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOUR. H. Lanzinger,
Adolf Hitler als Ritter
(c.1939). The Nazis’ search for
Lebensraum
in the East was often seen as a continuation of the medieval
Drang nach Osten
and the campaigns of the Teutonic Knights.

Photo: AKG, London.

59. ETERNAL WANDERER. C. D. Friedrich,
Wanderer above the clouds
(1818). The supreme image of the Romantic spirit.

Photo: © Elke Walford, Hamburger Kunsthalle.

60. DYNAMO. J. M. W. Turner,
Rain, Steam and Speed
(1844). A pioneering example of Impressionism, and the supreme image of the nineteenth century’s obsessions both with Nature and with Mechanical Power.

Photo: National Gallery, London.

61. NO SURRENDER, 1831. W. Kossak (1856–1942),
Sowiñski on the Ramparts of Wok
(1922). Facing the Russian assault on Warsaw, the Napoleonic veteran, General Jozef Sowiñski, ordered his men to fix his wooden leg in the ground, resolving never to bow down to tyrants.

Photo: Museum Wojska Polskiego, Warsaw.

62. FREE HELLAS. Ch. Perlberg,
Popular festivities at the Olympeion in Athens, 1838
. This scene from the newly independent Kingdom underlines both Greece’s Classical heritage and her legacy of four centuries of Ottoman rule.

Photo: National Historical Museum, Athens.

63. MUSICAL EVENING. J. Danhauser,
Liszt am Flugel
(1840). From the left: Alfred de Musset (or Alexandre Dumas), Victor Hugo, Georges Sand, N. Paganini, Gioacchino Rossini, Marie d’Agoult. Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz.

64. CONCERT OF EUROPE. A. von Werner,
The Congress of Berlin
(1881). From the left: Count Karolyi (Austria), Prince Gorchakov (Russia), Benjamin Disraeli (Britain), Count Andrassy (Hungary), Chancellor von Bismarck (Germany), Count Shuvalov (Russia), Mehmet Ali (Ottoman Empire). Staatlichen Museum, Berlin.

Photo: AKG, London/Berlin.

65. RURAL POVERTY. J.-F. Millet,
Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners)
(1857). The summer countryside of Normandy seen by a master of French realism.

Photo: Bridgeman Art Library.

66. INDUSTRIAL GRIME. L. S. Lowry (1887–1976). Though painting in the mid-20th-century, the Lancashire artist evoked a quaint and anachronistic vision of the early industrial landscape, which had all but disappeared.

Photo: Bridgeman Art Library.

67. IMPRESSIONIST. Claude Monet (1840–1926),
The Seine at Bougival
(1869). An experimental study of suburban Paris painted by a young Monet taking his first cau tious steps into Impressionism. See
[IMPRESSION]
.

Photo: The Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire.

68. PRIMITIVE. Henri Rousseau (1844–1910),
War
(1894). One of the vivid, dream-like images of‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau, instinctively produced by a naive artist in the era of Freud’s discovery of the subconscious and in the middle of the great European peace. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Photo: Bridgeman Art Library.

69. SURREAL. P. Blume,
The Eternal City
(1937). A dislocated vision of Rome from the years when Mussolini sought to build a new Roman Empire and when Eliot’s
Waste Land
suggested that European civilization had been shattered. See
[WASTE LAND]
.

Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Fund, New York.

© Estate of Peter Blume/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 1997

70. EUROPE DECEIVED. A. Vasilev,
They are Writing About Us in Pravda
(1951). A practitioner of Stalinist ‘Socialist Realism’ presents an idyllic imaginary scene from a collective farm in Moldavia. In reality, Moldavia’s population had been purged and repressed after the Soviet invasion of 1940, and the peasantry collectivized by force. Private Collection. See
[MOLDOVA]
.

Photo: Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.

71. EUROPE DIVIDED. Sigmar Polke,
Watch Tower with Geese
(1987–8). An image of the Iron Curtain painted two years before its collapse by a German who had himself escaped across ‘the Wall’ in 1953. On the left, in the East, a concentration camp: in the West, floating consumer
kitsch
.

Photo: © 1994 The Art Institute of Chicago. All Rights Reserved.

72. EUROPE IN TORMENT. Marc Chagall (1889–1985),
White Crucifixion
(1938). The central symbol of Christian Europe is overlain with Jewish imagery: painted by a Russian Jewish exile to Western Europe on the eve of the Second World War.

© 1993 The Art Institute of Chicago. All Rights Reserved; © 1994 DACS, London.

APPENDIX III

HISTORICAL COMPENDIUM

Geological and Histotrical Time

Ancient Mediterranean Civilization:Periodization

Minoan Scripts