 | Europe of Krause's Bali?
Whatever its accuracy or otherwise, this Bali is an image of Eden— man and animal living in a fertile paradise in harmony beneath the benevolent care of loving gods. It is contrasted directly with the clumsy stupidity of Western man who has lost touch with nature and the divine. The island is interpreted in the terms Chicago Bears Jerseys of the tradi-tional Western imagery of paradise. Krause's photography was also rooted firmly in the Western classical tradition as is seen, for ex-ample in his Balinese 'thorn-picker'.
Little wonder that the 1920 publication in Europe of Krause's Bali?* accompanied by a tenth of his collection of photographs, sparked an obsession in the West with Bali which was one of the causes of the wave of artists, writers, and bohemians that descended upon Bali in the two decades before the Second World War.Walter Spies was a Russian-born German and a painter who was friendly with Otto Dix and made films with Fricdrich Murnau, the expressionist film-maker. Saints Jerseys Spies may even have NFL jerseys been involved in pro-ducing Murnau's silent classic, Nosferatu.'9 Although deeply involved in the artistic life of expressionist Weimar Germany (he exhibited, for example, with the Novembergruppe\n the early 1920s) Spies was not happy in Germany. During the First World War, Spies, a German enemy alien in Russia, was interned in the Urals. Sent to Sterlitamak, a remote village inhabited by the semi-nomadic Tatars, Bashkirs, and Kirghiz, Spies was billeted with a local family and was free to spend his time more or less as Pittsburgh Steelers Jerseys he chose. The combination of an internee community including artists and musicians and the nat-ural beauty of the area meant that Spies's time in Sterlitamak was, in his own account, one of the happiest of his life. In addition to his visual talent, Spies was a musician of considerable ability and he soon became immersed in the colourful folk music, art, and culture of the region.
Back in Germany, after a Dr Zhivago-like trek across Russia to Germany at the close of the war, Spies plunged into the heady artistic life of the Weimar Republic. An intimate of Dix and Oskar Kokoschka and associate of George Grosz, Emil Nolde, and Max Pechstein, Spies joined others who, as he wrote in 1939, 'were still riding as "Blue Horsemen"'.20 Embroiled in a draining homosexual affair with Murnau, Spies longed for the simplicity and beauty of his time in the Urals. He wrote to his father in 1919:
Just imagine if all artists were from now Denver Broncos Jerseys on to write only or paint only silly, childish dadaistic stuff. How wonderful it would be.... The freest form of absolute creativity would have arrived!...I believe I am going through a crisis. Either it will come to nothing or it will turn out to be something really wonderful! I hope everything goes well, if not I will chuck an and go away somewhere into the country and become a labourer. That's lovely too, everything in this world is altogether heavenly! But then I will go, preferably on foot, to a country more interest-ing than this revolting Germany, somewhere where there are people with a soul!To his mother, in the same year, he said: 'I can see myself chucking everything and going off to some pon as a "dock worker" and then, quite by chance boarding a ship to carry me as far away from here New York Giants Jerseys as possible. I don't care what will happen then!'22 In 1923, he finally did as he had threatened, departing on a freighter for Java.
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