The Freud Museum, London
5th October – 13th November 2011
An exhibition of paintings and images on paper by Barbara Loftus. Curated by Monica Bohm-Duchen
Review: The Guardian, Laura Barnett, Sat 1 Oct, 2011
Behind a locked door: my mother’s story
Artist Barbara Loftus has used her Jewish mother’s life in Nazi Germany as the basis for much of her work. But as she tells Laura Barnett it was years before she discovered the full story
It was triggered by my mother Hildegard Basch’s late-life unburdening to me of memories of her formative years in pre-war Berlin. My study has become a 25 year excavation, it re-enacts a piecing together of maternal testimony, traces and archival evidence to enter a lost world and reclaim something of the lives of the family who perished before I was born.
‘He explained to me that neither a tourist visa nor emigration visa would be given to non-Aryans in Germany, unless they had special protection and had confirmation from the foreign office. And even then, nowadays there would hardly be a reasonable chance. I said – and how come that yet still a number of people manage to go over there? He said either through protection or via foreign countries. I said he should at least give me a hint how I could get there via a foreign country.’
from a letter to Hildegard‘s Grandfather Felix Berlowitz 18th October 1938