Kathe Kollwitz and her contemporary artists

 Jan is architect and my preferred partner to visit exhibitions. He doesn't only look at the objects shown but notices the relationships of the objects to their environment and comments on how they are placed. The statues on the black pedestals are by Kollwitz, those on the natural wood are by 19 contemporaries some working in different styles. Avant-garde as in the work of Jean Arp, piètas as the one by Ivan Mestovic' a sculptor whose work I have admired because of the large Prophet - preacher in Split in Croatia, Emiel Jespers, Zadkine....

 Kathe Kollwitz's son fell in Flanders fields on the first day of World War I. She then created the statue 'The grieving parents'. And spoke out against war and violence. Many of the pieces shown at the Bream Pavilion in the Middelheim museum in Antwerp are militant. The artists show us that war brings suffering, that it is filled with mass and personal  suffering. This composition of artists and work shown is a true pacifist statement.  I find the small statue with women and children wave at husbands and fathers who are going to war very moving. The women had to keep the family together, feed the children, work and make money... They also lost their jobs after the war because work was for returning soldiers in all war torn countries. I love the light in this pavilion. The war in sculptures is to me deeply moving and a fitting reminder to work for peace. Some sculptors created work in the trenches with the material the enemy fired at them applying all their craft to turn battle field objects into civilian objects. Another great exhibit at the Middelheim museum.

Louisville Saturday by Margaret Long

 My mother was a war bride and sailed to the US either in 1945 or 1946 after she got married in Belgium to my father, a GI, and settled for a while with his family in Ohio. Her library is a treasure-trove of old American books. Having visited Louisville briefly I picked up Louisville Saturday, by Margaret Long. The book was first published in 1950 as a Bantam book. I enjoyed Long's writing. Her descriptions of time and place just before I came into this world was enlightening. The strength of men, the keen observations about relationships, the meaning of doing one’s share in the war effort, the babies as a result of it all in colorful detail. Basically she describes in a serious way the effects of war on American women in that time. In it’s time it may have shocked some people that finally a women’s perspective was heard: lonely women and soldiers, all looking like heroes in their military outfits, the longing, the heartbreak, the drunken quarrels between a couple with harsh beatings, prejudice, the fierce longing for independence of these women, the longing to be all they could be. Louisville now known for the Kentucky Derby has an aura of ‘class’ nowadays. Yet in the second part of the 1940’s the proximity of an army camp influenced the whole town. Male longings for some one to love and be loved by, for some one to mold so that they would be exactly as they like their women. The strong if mostly futile effort by women to do what their soul demands and the dichotomy, the chasm between the two that is the real subject. By the way, don't you just love the old covers of pocket books?