HANNELORE BARON COLLAGES
HANNELORE BARON COLLAGES JANUARY 16 – FEBRUARY 20, 2021
BaronMarkPhotographer Hannelore Baron in her studio, c.1985
“Everything I’ve done is a statement on the, as they say, human condition, and so on. The way other people marched to Washington, or set themselves on fire, or write protest letters, or go to assassinate someone, well I’ve had all the same feelings that these people have had about various things and my way out, because of my inability to do anything else for various reasons, has been to make the protest through my artwork hoping that it will reach the same ends.”
—Hannelore Baron, 1981
Untitled (C82197), 1982, mixed media collage with fabric, paper, ink and monoprint on two sheets of joined paper, 7 1/4 x 11 inches / 18.4 x 27.9 cm, signed
Published for the first time, it is our hope that this invaluable and rare primary source will contribute to a further understanding on the artist, who condensed and translated a wide range of influences and an expansive concern for the human condition into intimately-scaled expressions of thought and feeling. Reflecting on this interview experience with his mother, Mark Baron recently stated: “I recorded these interviews with my mother in 1981. Though casual as could be (with one recorded in my very noisy Volkswagen, on the way to a flea-market), I believed recording her thoughts, about her art and her life, was important. Honesty and openness were her norm. I’m happy that, after forty years, this interview is being published for the first time.”
On the occasion of Hannelore Baron: Collages – a Michael Rosenfeld Gallery online exhibition that presents twenty collage works created throughout the 1980s – we are pleased to publish a 1981 interview conducted between Hannelore Baron and her son, Mark Baron. This interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, is one of several discussions the two had together that illuminate key components of Baron’s practice in collage and assemblage.
HANNELORE BARON AND MARK BARON INTERVIEW, 1981
When did you first make monoprints?
...I saw in a book of primitive art that they had dug up these very, very thin copper shapes of persons and they were eroded and broken into parts and I just got the idea to buy very thin copper sheets and to cut them into the shapes I want and print it that way. The results were rather unpredictable which is what I always like. I like a lot of accidents, unpredictable results. Why did you wrap cloth around some of them, and string around some?
Mostly for texture, there are limited things I could do with the cut out figure and wrapping it up was one of them, besides that I was always interested in Egyptian mummies and sometimes certain things I see before I do them and certain things after that relate to the work I’m doing. In other words, I very often like to see something afterwards that relates to the work and gives it more meaning. A meaning that I really didn’t have in mind when I started but that applies to it in Soretrospect.Istarted out thinking of the mummies and certain American Indian burial costumes, other things that were found in remote areas, archeological finds, but later on, during the Vietnam War, when I saw all these bodies in plastic bags...like Vietnamese women sitting there crying with their husband lying next to them in the bag...then I thought of that whole thing too. Like burial at sea, where they throw the body off the boat in a bag and so on, but as I was doing them, I somehow related what I was doing to all of that.
As far as the boxes are concerned, they have really different separate meanings. First of all, in the beginning, I made them out of found wood and those had sort of a sentimental meaning because I just liked the idea that the pieces of driftwood had been washed over and had gotten their shape by weathering, and so what I was using them for was just a glorification of the wood itself. After that, I started to make some boxes that were put together as if something was nailed shut (and) built up. It had that sort of meaning. I kind of like, let’s say, a treasure or secret room where it is in the middle of a conglomeration of all kinds of pieces that sort of hide it further. In other works, let’s say, there is a room, then there are four walls around it and a door and a roof on top then we’ll put another four walls and another roof and put crisscross bars over the door, then more nails and more wood, until the secret is all the way in the center surrounded by all this stuff.
The string does have to do with imprisonment. You see a lot of the work is done on a totally subconscious level and then I try to think up later why I might have done that, and I can’t really tell how much of it is subconscious and how much of it is conscious. I don’t try to analyze it and I don’t think about it that much. It has partially to do with the visual effect and partially with the subconscious and partially with the conscious, and it’s all sort of together. I am very concerned about the political prisoners all over the world and of course it had to do with my own past experiences where I was not tied up, but it does not mean literally, physically tied up. As I’ve experienced for myself, you can be in prison without being in a locked room. You are imprisoned by your own fears, inhibitions, phobias. It’s the same effect as if you’re tied up with ropes, so it isn’t always a literal meaning. How come some of your boxes have glass?
The collages are always under glass obviously. When the boxes were all wood, I didn’t feel that they needed any protective covering, but as soon as I started to put in paper or cloth I felt they needed some type of protective covering. Also,
This is symbolic.
Some look religious also.
After that came the black boxes and they were in the nature of funerary boxes, they were memorials, evidence of a disaster, remnants of some kind of a disaster.
Well, it is symbolic of hiding something away, somehow an inquisitive feeling.
Any memorial would have something religious in it too. It’s all part of being a memorial, not necessarily, but in my mind. I had, also, these few long boxes, the early ones, that were still of the natural wood, that were meant to be shrines with remnants of sainted figures. Then, after (the) black boxes, there were a series of games, mysterious games that had no rules, no specific way of playing, but they had game pieces. Then the boxes started to merge much more with the collages. That’s more or less what I’m doing now.
Well, the thing is, after the black boxes, the boxes ran alongside the collages. In other words, whatever I was doing in the collages I also used in the boxes. If I was doing prints of bound figures in the collages, I also used them in the boxes. If I was doing cloth collages, I put cloth in the boxes. If I was doing paper collages, I put mostly paper in the boxes. They started to merge. At the present day, it’s at a stage where if the contents of some of the boxes were put in a frame, they would be a collage, and there’s almost no difference except that I feel that what looks like a collage in the boxes is bolder than it would be in a frame, and it’s more immediate. Although, in some of the boxes I’ve put entire collages as part of it but then the other part is wood.
Some of the boxes have string around them, how come?
It’s not deliberately so. I don’t want any of my work, neither the boxes nor the collages, to be deliberate. In other words, I want it to be a very sincere thing and if it looks at all as if it was made for some kind of special effect, I take it apart. It has to have an immediacy or urgency in it and a total sincerity...when I take apart a box, I put in less than I take out. In other words, let’s say I have three or four different things in there, when I re-do the box there might be only one and the other two I might use in two separate new boxes. I usually simplify it, I never really ...unless I take apart two small boxes and make one big box...the material I take out remains as it is, it’s just the surrounding that’s changed.
I think there are, even today, three very different kinds of boxes. I still do boxes that are mostly wood where I still, to some extent, as I said before, glorify the wood, but it’s no longer found wood, it’s wood that has traces of ware or paint
I have re-done the boxes more than I ever re-did the collages. I put them away and then, after a while, I take them out. I want to strip away all extraneous matter, if I feel they’re too romantic or too cutesy...also I really enjoy taking them apart. Your work is romantic.
all along, I liked work under glass, in general, because since my work deals with memorials, to a great extent I feel it is sort of like it’s exhibited under glass like memorabilia usually is.
Also, that it’s too fragile but it’s very natural to be left open. And so originally, I put plastic which is just a protective thing and seemed not a part of the box, then I put glass but there were some technical things there where I didn’t like the sharp edges and I had to find ways to put the glass within the frame and this is one of the reasons why I put the leading on it. Then I had boxes where I put glass only over the paper part and left the wood uncovered. You sometimes re-work the boxes.
on it. Then I still do the black boxes and white boxes. The black boxes are showing the grief. In other words, they are in mourning. And the white boxes have the same grief but it’s been purified. It’s the difference between a burial and a cremation. The burial has all the fanfare and the flowers and the music and with the cremation you just push it through and that’s it. That’s the difference.
The string or wire tied around the boxes is sort of a finishing off (of) a memory that can now be put away. It’s as if a feeling or a sentiment has been put in the box and it’s tied up and that’s it, and now we go on to the next one.
Everything I’ve done is a statement on the, as they say, human condition, and so on. The way other people marched to Washington, or set themselves on fire, or write protest letters, or go to assassinate someone, well I’ve had all the same feelings that these people have had about various things and my way out, because of my inability to do anything else for various reasons, has been to make the protest through my artwork hoping that it will reach the same ends. And it probably will have the same effect which means nothing at all. But it clears my conscience. I feel that as long as I know all the things that have happened and are happening (which) I consider totally terrible, I feel that if I keep silent I am part of this terribleness and if I make a statement I’ve done my share. And that’s why I’m doing them. That’s not the only reason, the other reason is that I absolutely need another dimension to my daily existence and have for many years. Especially since I’m rather isolated, I just have to have this way of expressing myself. I’m the type of person who must express herself, either verbally or through my work or some way or other. I have a feeling always that when my experience is digested then it comes out in another form, that I’m just in the middle. That there’s an input and an output and I’m sort of making the change in the middle. Like a meat-grinder really. And it’s really like a meat-grinder also, the way it’s screwed to the table.
Fear, fear of letting go, I can’t let go. What do you think would happen?
I always think that if I let go and go into the large outer space, I won’t find my way back. Also, I’m afraid that it’s too big an experience for me. It’s just fear of the unknown. Because it’s unknown and I don’t know if I could come back and I don’t know what I’d find there. I have fear of the unknown in general, whereas other people want to go out and explore the unknown.
Well, I’m a total contradiction. My life is one way, and my inside urges are another way. I’m so timid and quiet and so small in my outlook...I’m so confined. I’d like to always expand but I can’t. I tend to blame the people around me, but it really has nothing to do with them because if I wanted to I could, but I can’t and I never could. Also, I want to be so big, but on the other hand big things scare me, so there’s a tremendous contradiction. I think that’s what some people like in the work, the work is very small in dimensions and big in feeling and that’s, I think, exactly how I am. When I say I’m small in dimension, naturally, I don’t mean physical dimensions, but I think this is one thing that will always keep me working. And what keeps you from being large and loose?
What kind of fears?
Why, what’s screwed to the table?
I am, because I always feel like I would have liked to live much more open, without being sort of stuck. I’ve always been stuck through my own fears, my own circumstances, but I think it’s my own fears.
Yes, there definitely are, because this is why, for a while, I couldn’t go downtown alone, because downtown, or anything away from home, was unknown. So, when the fear takes on larger dimensions, which is when I had the breakdowns, the division is very literal.
As far as a true preference, there are certain ones of any phase that I like better than others because they somehow seem to express exactly what I want them to say at the time. Otherwise, it’s just that I like to keep the early ones because I can’t really ever go backwards. I can never repeat, at a future time, what I did in the past. Everything I do is just done at that moment, even though I change the boxes around, they become of the new period.
Are there two real divisions?
Anything outside the home, even visiting someone, becomes fearful because to some extent it’s unknown and unfamiliar. And at those times, I could only stay with what was absolutely familiar and the only way I could face the outside world was to take something very familiar with me, which was either the children, my husband, my mother, or someone like that. So that I felt that the familiar was with me, and when I went out into the unknown, I was still surrounded by the familiar and there was something familiar between me and the unknown.
Without that, I wouldn’t leave the house, at those times. At other times, like now, when I don’t have a specific breakdown, the division is still very clear, like every time I go out and go downtown it is as if I’m launching myself into orbit, but my reason tells me that I’ll be all right, and I will get back, and I sort of don’t have the fear that’s so overpowering that I can’t face that.
Do you have a preference for the earlier or later work?
HANNELORE BARON COLLAGES
Untitled (C80057), 1980 mixed media collage with fabric, paper, ink, watercolor and monoprint 17 x 12 1/2 inches / 43.2 x 31.8 cm signed
Untitled (C80058), 1980 mixed media collage with fabric, paper, watercolor and ink 15 x 11 inches / 38.1 x 27.9 cm signed
Untitled (C81250), 1981 mixed media collage with fabric, paper, ink, pastel and monoprint 4 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches / 11.4 x 49.5 cm signed
Untitled (C81257), 1981 mixed media collage with paper, ink, watercolor and monoprint 5 1/8 x 18 1/2 inches / 13.0 x 47.0 cm signed
Untitled (C81245), 1981 mixed media collage with fabric, paper, ink and monoprint 9 1/2 x 12 1/2 inches / 24.1 x 31.8 cm signed
Untitled (C81186), 1981 mixed media collage with fabric, paper and ink 9 3/8 x 7 1/2 inches / 23.8 x 19.1 cm signed
Untitled (C81041), 1981 mixed media collage with fabric, paper, ink and acrylic 6 3/4 x 8 inches / 17.1 x 20.3 cm signed
Untitled (C82243), 1982 mixed media collage with fabric, paper, ink, crayon and monoprint 11 x 7 1/4 inches / 27.9 x 18.4 cm signed
Untitled (C82370), 1982 mixed media collage with paper, ink and watercolor 18 3/4 x 15 1/8 inches / 47.6 x 38.4 cm signed
Untitled (C82344), 1982 mixed media collage with paper, ink and watercolor 15 1/2 x 13 inches / 39.4 x 33.0 cm signed
Untitled (C83138), 1983 mixed media collage with paper, ink, pastel and monoprint 10 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches / 26.7 x 21.6 cm signed
Untitled (C23180), 1983 mixed media collage with fabric, paper and ink 9 1/8 x 6 1/4 inches / 23.2 x 15.9 cm signed
Untitled (C83285), 1983 mixed media collage with fabric, paper and ink 9 3/8 x 7 5/8 inches / 23.8 x 19.4 cm signed
Untitled (C83047 ), 1983 mixed media collage with fabric, paper and ink 9 3/4 x 9 3/4 inches / 24.8 x 24.8 cm signed
Untitled (C83261), 1983 mixed media collage with paper, ink, intaglio print and monoprint 12 5/16 x 9 1/2 inches / 31.3 x 24.1 cm signed
Untitled (C85107 ), 1985 mixed media collage with fabric, paper, ink and thread 9 3/8 x 6 1/4 inches / 23.8 x 15.9 cm signed
Untitled (C85088), c.1985 mixed media collage with fabric, paper, ink and graphite 9 x 9 1/8 inches / 22.9 x 23.2 cm signed
Untitled (C86106), 1986 mixed media collage with fabric, paper and ink 10 x 8 3/4 inches / 25.4 x 22.2 cm signed
Untitled (C86075), 1986 mixed media collage with fabric, paper, ink and monoprint 9 x 9 1/4 inches / 22.9 x 23.5 cm signed
Hannelore Baron, c.1985 BaronMarkPhotographer
Baron was born Hannelore Alexander in 1926, in the small German town of Dillingen, not far from the French border. She experienced a childhood fractured by violence and displacement. In 1941, the United States consulate granted the Alexander family an emigration quota number, and they were able to make their way to New York. Shortly upon her arrival, Baron enrolled in the Straubenmuller Textile High School in Manhattan. Although she did not study art formally after high school, her acquaintance with John Heliker, who taught painting at Columbia University, enabled Baron to bring her artwork to him for regular critiques. In 1947, she met bookseller Herman Baron; they married in 1950 and had two children, Julie and InMark.the late 1950s, Baron started to incorporate collage elements into her painting, and her work was exhibited at various venues in New York. A member of the National Association of Women Artists, she began making assemblages from found wood, driftwood, and wire in 1968, when a volunteer teaching position at the Yonkers Jewish Community Center gave her access to woodworking tools. The following year, she had a solo exhibition at Ulster County Community College in Stone Ridge, New York, and she became the director of the short-lived Tyndall Creek Gallery in Riverdale. She continued to explore new ways of combining media in the 1970s; Baron developed a sculptural technique for making monotypes by shaping copper into cut-out forms (i.e. heads, figures, birds) and then inking both sides to result in mirror image printing. She also employed a “transfer drawing” technique that was
Hannelore Baron (1926-1987) is celebrated for her intimate collages and assemblages that, as Michael Brenson wrote in a 1989 New York Times review, “suggest both the condition of entrapment and the possibility of release.” The compassion, anger, dissent, humor, and silence that animate her work hint at her traumatic experiences as a child in Nazi Germany. However, she was often reluctant to discuss this part of her life out of concern that it would limit interpretations of her artwork. Influenced by ancient religious texts, Egyptian art , Coptic textiles, Persian miniatures, botanical prints, and archeological finds, Baron was concerned about the human condition, including her own — and she stated, “I am a total contradiction.”
Commercial solo exhibitions have been presented consistently since 1969 with her first major museum survey in 1989 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 2002, Hannelore Baron: Works from 1969 to 1987 traveled to eight national venues; curated by Ingrid Schaffner for SITES (Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Services), the exhibition was accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue. That same year, the Art Museum at the University of Memphis presented Hannelore Baron: Fragments Shored Against Ruins.
Baron understood her art as a form of political expression, and this aspect became more explicit in the 1970s with several series that incorporated motifs of torn flags, war-time letters, children’s games, and anti-war protests. After several exhibitions at Kathryn Markel Gallery, Gallery Schlesinger-Boisanté (New York) organized its first solo exhibition for Baron in 1981 and, a year later, arranged an exhibition of her work in her childhood town of Dillingen. The gallery would go on to represent and consistently exhibit her work throughout the decade. In 1987, Baron, who had battled several types of cancer in her lifetime, died at the age of 60. Her early experiences of terror and persecution had continued to torment her as an adult in the form of depression and claustrophobia, but they also informed her concern for the disempowered, her mistrust of nationalism, and her fierce criticisms of war and environmental destruction. Translating her political beliefs into abstract forms, Baron created “an art of concealment and protection,” one that remains as poignant and necessary today as it was in the late twentieth century.
popularized in the 1920s by Paul Klee. In Baron’s hands, “mixed-media” meant more than the convergence of a variety of materials and approaches in a given work. She had a singular capacity for drawing out the visual, textural, and conceptual continuities among her elements. In her work, a family resemblance is visible among wood and paper, paper and textile, wood and cloth.
Over the decades, Baron’s work has been contextualized in groundbreaking museum exhibitions including The Poetic Object (San Antonio Museum of Art,
work is represented internationally in over thirty public collections that include the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY); Art Institute of Chicago (IL); Brooklyn Museum (NY); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY); Israel Museum (Jerusalem); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); The Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MA); National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC ); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA); Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC ); and Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY).
San Antonio, TX, 1988); Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving Art (Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, 1997); Six Centuries of Prints and Drawings (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2004); The Keeper (New Museum, New York, NY, 2016); The Warmth of Other Suns (The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, 2019; curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Natalie Bell and organized by the New Museum); and “Good Artists,” curated by Jenny Holzer for Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, 2019). In 2020, she was featured in Women to the Fore at the Hudson River Museum (Yonkers, NY) and Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection at the Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY). Baron’s work has also been included in a number of recent group exhibitions at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, including Collage: Made in America (2017), The Time Is Now (2017), Art of Defiance: Radical Materials (2019) and Paper Power (2020). Upcoming in February 2021, Baron’s work will be on view in Portable Sculpture at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, Baron’sUK.
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA
The Bass Museum of Art, Miami, FL
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
International Collage Center, Milton, PA
Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, CA
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers State University, New Brunswick, NJ
Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA
Luther W. Brady Art Gallery, Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, The George Washington University, Washington, DC
John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI
Moderne Galerie, Saarlandmuseum, Saarbrücken, Germany
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY
Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA
Selected Museum Collections
The Jewish Museum, New York, NY
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Dennos Museum Center, Northwestern Michigan College, Traverse City, MI
Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN
Muroff-Kotler Visual Arts Gallery, SUNY Ulster (Ulster County Community College), Stone Ridge, NY Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, MA
Skirball Museum, Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Richard F. Brush Art Gallery and Permanent Collection, St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY
Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University, New Haven, CT
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI
Pannell Gallery, Anne Gary Pannell Center, Sweet Briar College, Sweet Briar, VA
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR
Smith College Museum of Art, Smith College, Northampton, MA
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
New York Public Library, New York, NY
Weatherspoon Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC
Williams College Museum of Art, Williams College, Williamstown, MA
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