Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In 1943 Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka exhibited an immense, violent painting of a crucifixion called What We Are Fighting For in the bombed ruins of John Lewis Oxford Street. He was thrilled that no one took any notice: \u201cThat was only possible in England; there I would hope to carry on my life, not as a talented refugee, but as a free human being.\u201dHis fellow refugee Arthur Koestler similarly \u201cfound the human climate of England particularly congenial and soothing \u2014 a kind of Davos for internally bruised veterans of the totalitarian age\u201d: far from the horrors of Darkness at Noon.The Alienation Effect, Owen Hatherley\u2019s exhaustive, meticulously researched though uneven account of central European \u00e9migr\u00e9s\u2019 contribution to four aspects of British visual culture \u2014 photography, painting, architecture, book design and publishing \u2014 turns on this benign clash of sensibilities. The \u00e9migr\u00e9s were masters of stark abstraction and grotesque expressionism: full-throttle modernism forged in the tumultuous political battlegrounds of 1920s-30s Berlin, Weimar, Vienna, Moscow. That was entirely foreign to Britain, a \u201cbackwater\u201d which, Hatherley writes, \u201chad somehow sat out\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009the twentieth century\u201d. Here homegrown modern art was always a compromise, resisting extremes: we got Graham Sutherland not Picasso, Henry Moore not Giacometti.The \u00e9migr\u00e9s injected a revolutionary spirit, still visible all around us, from Hungarian Ern\u0151 Goldfinger\u2019s brutalist Trellick Tower in Kensal Town to Tbilisi-born Berthold Lubetkin\u2019s beloved Penguin Pool, modernist icon for London Zoo. Czech sculptor Franta Belsky\u2019s twisting bronze mother and precariously tilting baby Joyride rises proud in Stevenage Town Square. On the Embankment, Naum Gabo\u2019s purist abstract fountain Revolving Torsion faces Big Ben\u2019s ornate gothic turrets as if enquiring \u201cwhat exactly it is they think they\u2019re doing, what the point is of all this silly gesticulation\u201d.\u00a0Hatherley, a historian of 20th-century urban Britain, is an exhilarating guide to the \u00e9migr\u00e9 buildings and public sculptures which changed or challenged the fabric of our cities. Other sections are weaker. He adds little to understanding the foreign camera\u2019s estranged, enchanted eye. The chapters on fine art omit the major figures Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, who achieved greatness bringing acute German realist sensibility to British painting.If the overall \u00e9migr\u00e9 story is familiar, what is refreshing throughout are anecdotes and first-person testimonies giving voice to some of the 100,000 refugees of fascism who entered Britain between 1933-40. That figure seems small today, though enough then for the Daily Mail to gripe that \u201cthe way stateless Jews are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage\u201d.\u00a0Individually, the arrivals met generally sympathetic if bemused acceptance. \u201cBe kind to the foreigner, the poor chap can\u2019t help it,\u201d summed up native responses, according to a beguiled Koestler. Britain\u2019s reward, Hatherley argues, was that \u201c[t]he aliens made us all a little bit alien too.\u201dIn Scotland, Jankel Adler, embraced within a coastal artists\u2019 colony, painted the bold constructivist interloper \u201cVenus of Kirkcudbright\u201d. In Wales, Josef Herman depicted monumental miners as \u201cEgyptian carvings walking between sky and earth\u201d; on his first day in Ystradgynlais he was assured \u201c[y]ou\u2019re no stranger here\u201d and called Joe. At the Isle of Man detention centre, a staging post for male \u00e9migr\u00e9s, a guard accompanied Martin Bloch outside so he could paint en plein air. Bloch\u2019s \u201cMiracle in the Internment Camp\u201d typifies the fluid distortions of German expressionism, baffling to British audiences, though making some impact after the war when Bloch taught at Camberwell.Nearly all the \u00e9migr\u00e9s owed this country their lives, and many like Koestler saw the paradox that Britain, \u201csuspicious of all causes, contemptuous of systems\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009sceptical about Utopias\u201d, was not natural territory for modernism\u2019s formal austerity or exaggerated declarations. The more radical artists, Hatherley suggests, left for America when they could: Bauhaus pioneer Walter Gropius, mourning that \u201cin this neutralized air all imagination withers away\u201d; unrelenting abstractionist Mondrian, who complained that Hampstead had too many trees.The remainers tended to conceal leftist or just highbrow backgrounds, fusing them with English democratic moderation. Thames & Hudson\u2019s founders Walter and Eva Neurath adapted \u201cRed Vienna\u201d socialism to the ideal of offering art to a mass readership. Ernst Gombrich smashed the milieux of elitist English connoisseurship with his accessible bestseller The Story of Art \u2014 but its lucidity emerged from theories of painting\u2019s relationship with science and psychology flourishing in his native Austria, unknown in Britain.Others, conservatives anyway, embraced English traditionalism. Nikolaus Pevsner, who initially supported Hitler, was appalled to find himself on the Dover boat train with crowds of \u201cnon-Aryans. Dreadful, dreadful \u2014 to think that\u2019s where I belong.\u201d His epic series Buildings of England introduced English readers to their own architectural history.Hatherley\u2019s warm-hearted, rambling narrative welcomes them all. His book is bathed in nostalgia for tolerance and assimilation \u2014 bus conductors announcing \u201cFinchleystrasse\u201d, Jewish Hans Feibusch\u2019s murals for more than 30 Anglican churches \u2014 at the cost of a more subtle understanding of an art often rooted in trauma. We learn of painter Halina Korn that her \u201centire family were killed in Auschwitz and she suffered from poor mental health\u201d, that designer Germano Facetti \u201chad done time in the Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen\u201d: jarring everyday language for terrors that were exceptionally shocking.\u00a0In this sense Hatherley\u2019s writing evokes the English phlegmatic ordinariness that the \u00e9migr\u00e9s encountered. Kind and well-intentioned, The Alienation Effect lacks the rigour or comprehensive authority of a Gombrich or Pevsner, embodying rather the \u201cleisurely muddle\u201d that Koestler thought characterised \u2014 and perhaps redeemed \u2014 British intellectual life.The Alienation Effect: How Central European \u00c9migr\u00e9s Transformed the British Twentieth Century by Owen Hatherley Allen Lane \u00a335, 608 pages\u00a0Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Caf\u00e9 and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and\u00a0X<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In 1943 Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka exhibited an immense, violent painting of a crucifixion called What We Are Fighting For in the bombed ruins of John Lewis Oxford Street. He was thrilled that no one took any notice: \u201cThat was only possible in England;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":246427,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-246426","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246426"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":246428,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246426\/revisions\/246428"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}