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His World and Mine… Rerouting of Fate

 I was born into the effervescence that was America after World War II. These were halcyon days, full of discovery, energy and growth; prosperity for many more Americans; an easier life than any of their immigrant parents could have imagined. Gross inequities still persisted but our expectations were high and endless. What had come before had been catastrophe and loss in a magnitude the world imagined would not happen again. Millions died and so many families continued to swim against the ripples, created by those losses. One death, that of my father shortly after coming home from the war, (presumably a heart attack), has given me the longer view of the impact of such a loss in the scope of so many of that time. And now, as I think about that time from this distant vantage point, I am struck by how the flow of life can so easily be redirected. Just the loss of that one, preciously small pebble in the mountain of humanity. That rerouting of fate. 
Rather than documents of the time and place in which he lived, (a New Yorker on the cusp of 30 in the early 1940s,) the work I have of Max’s is instead a window into the people in India and in the South Pacific. But what came before?  He studied at Pratt Institute in Advertising Design for two and half years; studied commercial art at The New York Metropolitan Art School, and in 1942 had been at Brooklyn Polytechnic studying engineering drawing for five months when he was drafted. He’d been employed as a commercial artist for nine years by that time.

What were the colors that surrounded him? The moccasin brown, viridian greens, dull burgundy, pale yellow, Prussian blue that I know from the clothing of the 1940s, were they absorbed into his work?  I have been listening to big band music and the crooners of his time to help imagine being there. The jitterbug songs that played during wartime to keep spirits up and the mournful “missing-you” ballads. Did he share my mother’s love of classical music? Could he sing? 

I try to imagine him sitting in some special place, the sheets of watercolor paper laid before him and the watercolors; were they in tubes or cakes? What were his thoughts and conversations about the growing storm of war overseas that would ultimately consume his life? His work seems to have been constant and prolific. Were there doubts?  How tall was he? Was his voice soft, deep?  What were his politics? I have some of his notes that mention Christmas celebrations and yet he was Jewish. Was he religious?  Would the prejudices of people from his generation have persisted, leading to debates with my teenage self. Like so many men of his time would he have dismissed art made by women? I am hoping not. Would the art that I have made have been different if I had grown up with a model and mentor? Would the rebelliousness that has propelled me still have existed within a world with a parent so temperamentally like me? Would I have been swallowed up by his talent and chosen a different path had he lived?

This project has provoked me to consider a myriad of alternative outcomes to the life I have had and the one I lead now. It has given me an understanding of the enormity of the pain and shift in my mother’s world and mine. Most important, it has formed the lesson of my life and a living demonstration of the value and endurance of art beyond each of us.