Editor's Message
A Self-Evident Truth
“For milk to become yogurt, it needs culture.”
—Willem de Kooning
In Germany, under Hitler’s regime, artistic expression was banished as a form of Bolshevism. In Russia, under Stalin, it was denounced as “bourgeoius cosmopolitanism”. In mid-50s America, Abstract Expressionists met with aggressive censorship by members of the House Un-American Activities Committee. More recently, in October of 1999, Rudy Giuliani threatened to cut off city funding for the Brooklyn Museum because he deemed a painting in one of its shows to be “offensive.” And last month, Governor George Pataki issued highly publicized threats against the International Freedom Center and the Drawing Center for their display of “anti-American art.”
History has not been kind to those who attack the creative spirit. Nor should it be. Freedom of expression is our birthright as Americans. And so we dedicate this issue to all our comrades in this genuinely patriotic “war for freedom.” All of us here at the Rail wish you a great summer!
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Thoughts on Mies’s Lemke House: Architecture—Feminism—Philosophy
By Joseph MasheckOCT 2018 | 1 by 1
The Lemke House, built between 1932 – 33 for Karl and Martha Lemke, who had no children, on a pair of lots in the Berlin suburb of Hohenschönhausen (now Berlin-Lichtenberg), is modest. It’s the last house that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe built in Germany, before closing the Bauhaus, owing to Hitler, and moving to Chicago. Karl Lemke, who ran a graphic arts business that catered to the art world, was a friend of the architect. That this work entailed a great deal of thought on Mies’s part is attested to by a huge quantity of preliminary drawings, starting from much more ambitious ideas.3 The economy was taking its toll; yet something excellent was envisioned. Two significant features of the project do not seem acknowledged, however: the role of a woman designer, and the fact that the house, small as it is, is an extraordinary example of the influence on Mies of his most admired living philosopher, Romano Guardini.
The Regime is Female
By Alexis SpiegelNOV 2019 | Theater
Who said to kill all* the men? [*almost all] The answer to that question stays ominously unanswered in Sarah Elizabeth Grace's new play The Regime is Female, but we get a mounting sense that the eradication of nearly all the white men happened quickly, without “feminist” consensus and perhaps as non-intersectionally as other women's movements have been enacted historically in The United States.
Barbara Happe and Martin S. Fischer's The Auerbach House by Walter Gropius with Adolf Meyer
By Morgan RidlerDEC 19-JAN 20 | Art Books
Edited by the house’s current owners, the new edition advances the earlier publication’s argument that the rather little-known Auerbach House was crucial to the development of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus style. This edition of the book improves the quality of the wall painting images and utilizes recent scholarly work to update the analysis of the book.
Carmen Maria Machado: In the Dream House
By James W. FuerstOCT 2019 | Books
The subject matter of her memoir, however, is vastly different: it centers on the passionate same-sex relationship between the author in her mid-twenties and another young woman that quickly turned sour and became abusive. The eponymous Dream House, the author informs us, is neither a Hollywood set nor a narrative prop, but rather an actual place—the idyllic-seeming home that Machado and her lover shared in Bloomington, Indiana—as well as a “haunted house” where “metaphors abound.”
