My Time in Space by Tim Robinson Read Free Book Online Page A

its recent past, in which it was not done to ask anyone where they had been or how they had lived at any period in the previous thirty years, it was no wonder the already dark mood of my paintings took a turn into nightmare: atomic bombers flew in at the window, skeletalized birds fell through a lethal sky, monstrous creatures crawled in the sewers of towering ‘cities in a vacuum’.
    These works were very acceptable to the painters of the Wiener Schüle des Phantastischen Realismus, a group of belated surrealists under the enchantment of Bosch’s nightmare- landscapes . I had my first exhibition in the gallery owned by the leading ‘fantastic realist’, Ernst Fuchs, a striking figure who might have been modelled on one of Durer’s self-regarding portraits and whom we had occasionally glimpsed at the Opera accompanied by a Cranach Eve with waist-length golden ringlets. According to current legend he was subject to visitations from angels who periodically commanded him to chastity, and his minutely executed paintings revelled in a sex-haunted religiosity. Two of his emissaries called to vet my work for the exhibition and after examining the contents of my studio left with expressions of regard and admiration; later we found that one of my little sketchbooks ofink drawings was missing – a series of ‘map-faces’, which in the light of their absence now appear to me as the best of my work from that period. I don’t remember that Galerie Fuchs succeeded in selling any of my paintings, but a review in the Wiener Zeitung praised my ‘sleepwalking surefootedness’, a phrase I have found comforting since.
    Much of the sleepwalking mood of the city derived from the presumed omnipresence of spies. Vienna’s artists were very given  to ‘ Sezessionen ,’ but if any two of them sat down at a café table to found a new group they were soon joined by two more, the spy from the East and the spy from the West; or so we were led to believe. One day we happened to notice a little plaque on the door of a grand building on the Ringstrasse: ‘International Künstlerklub ’. Enquiring within, we were warmly greeted, and soon found ourselves members, at a very modest fee, of a club that hosted evenings of wine and conversation in its pleasant old rooms; there was even talk of showing my work there. Later we were told by one of the members that the club was funded by the CIA through the Ford Foundation, with the object of seducing visiting Hungarian artists into defecting to the West; also that, having defected, with whatever good publicity for the cause of democracy this brought in its train, these artists soon discovered that there was no state support for them on offer, and quietly went home again. Similarly, the Galerie im Nansen-Haus, where I had my second exhibition, was said (by the same person) to have a connection with Radio Free Europe, proselytes of the Cold War. Were these things so? We would have had to turn spies ourselves to find out.
    My best-attended exhibition in Vienna was an impromptu one, and an episode worthy of the city of Freud. The Council haddecided that the attics of the city, stuffed with generations of junk, were a fire hazard, and decreed that on an allotted day each district should empty out all this repressed material onto the pavement for collection and disposal. When the day came for the first, the most fashionable and expensive, district to disburden itself, scavengers descended. Everything was analyzed meticulously; mounds of goods dwindled as metal spokes were snipped from old umbrellas and well-dressed ladies tottered away with antique standard lamps; in the end so much had found new homes that there was little for the authorities to remove. Then it was the turn of our district, and I took the opportunity of throwing out a stack of the worst of my paintings, most of them on hardboard. These attracted great interest. I spent the day leaning out of the window watching passers-by pulling them out