Morath, Inge
(Graz 1923-2002 New York, N.Y.) : Photographin, Gattin von Arthur Miller
Subjects
Art : Photography
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Index of Names : Occident
Chronology Entries (2)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1978 |
Inge Morath & Arthur Miller in China – Inge Morath Foundation http://www.ingemorath.org/index.php/2009/01/inge-morath-arthur-miller-china-introduction/. Introduction by John P. Jacob, Inge Morath Foundation, for the exhibition Inge Morath and Arthur Miller: China, University of Michigan Art Museum, Ann Arbor, 2008. Morath preferred to work in "countries whose influence extends beyond their borders; mother cultures," and she dreamed of traveling the Silk Road, from Europe through Persia to China. Morath enrolled in the Berlitz School of Languages to learn Mandarin Chinese. She would continue her studies of Chinese language and culture for the remainder of her life, noting more than once the pleasantly soporific effect that Chinese grammar had on her. In the late 1970s, Morath and Miller were invited by the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries to travel within China, and they made the first of several journeys in 1978 (Morath returned alone in 1979, and again with Miller, for the staging of Death of a Salesman in Beijing, in 1983). Morath's journals reflect the depth of her experience of Chinese culture. They also reveal her recurrent frustration with the camera’s limited ability to capture the nuances of light and life in China. The frequent surprised, staring faces that distinguish her photographs of China confirm the difficulty that her journals describe for a foreign photographer to go unnoticed by her subjects in a nation where, only a short time before, the presence of foreigners was limited and communication with them restricted. China was one of the few countries to which she traveled where, in spite of her fluency in Mandarin, Morath remained an outsider. Morath's journals complain bitterly of her inability to blend in, and thus empathically to comprehend. In China, however, Morath's and Miller's movements were limited to what policy and the interests of their individual guides would permit. China is experienced as something outside the window of a large black car which refuses to stop for her; a series of briefing rooms and banquets. For Miller, contact with China is achieved through probing; for Morath, through dining. Encounters with one superbly cooked dish after another, meal after meal, is as close to a sustained, satisfying dance with China as Morath's handlers would allow her. "I am especially interested in photographing in countries where a new tradition emerges from an ancient one," Morath wrote. Certainly, China in 1978 was a country where civilization and development were subject to critical scrutiny, and both ancient and modern traditions were being publicly re-examined for their validity within a culture of change. What distinguishes Inge Morath's photographs of China from other, similar bodies of work, is her urgent desire to comprehend, and to convey in pictures, what Miller describes as "China's contradiction;" the ongoing struggle of new traditions in conflict with ancient ones. Although Morath is drawn to the beautiful and mysterious, the intensity of her experience and the intractability of her subject defy simplification. Morath encountered China as an irresolvable question, a dialogue between tradition and modernity within which beauty and tyranny collide again and again. The awareness of China's greatness, and of the concurrent greatness of her tragedy, is pervasive. |
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| 2 | 1978 |
Morath, Inge ; Miller, Arthur. Chinese encounters [ID D3839]. Arthur Miller and his wife Inge Morath travel as guest of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries with guide-interpreter Su Guang. Beijing, Yan'an (Shaanxi), Nanniwan (Shaanxi), Xi'an, Nanjing, Shanghai, Hangzhou (Zhejiang), Guilin (Guangxi), Guangzhou (Guangdong). They met Frank Coe, Sol Adler, William Hinton, Rewi Alley, Talitha Gerlach, Cao Yu, Su Shuyang, Huang Zuolin., Ai Xuan (painter). "Our interests in China are not quite of the same order. For Inge Morath there was initially the challenge of learning the language and addint ti to the half dozen others in which she is fluent, of which she has a working knowledge. The calligraphy led her to Chinese art, and the art to history. For me, China had been primarily a political and social revolution I had followed since the thirties, when the names of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai and Zhu De were like flares shot into the sky of a human sea, a hitherto silent mass of people suddenly defying the Japanese fascists and, surely, prophesying the dawn of reason and liberty in Asia." "The paintings on exhibition at the Nanjing artists' center make it easy to imagine what the artist's problem is in China at the present moment. Pictures of happy workers and peasants in heavy black outline, costumes and flesh tones bright and optimistic, alternate with traditional landscapes, somber and rather dark, emphasizing a stylizes verticality, the elemental failing water, the mountain and forest. A long white sheet of rice paper is produced, and each painter sets out this clumb of brushes as well as an elaborate old inkstone. This is a kind of absorbs ink very slowly and hold enough of its seepage in a cavity so that a brush can be dipped and wetted. The painting is started by one artist, who begins at the bottom, pushing his inked brush against the grain of the soft bristles, making a clump of long half-inch-thick lines running vertically up about a thir of the paper. Then with a sharper brush he slashes in what are now obviously pine branches and we have a dense thicket. Number-two man takes over and with much lighter strokes traces a long curve, which turns out to be a waterfall beginning a little above the midway point of the picture and descending almost to the bottom, the lines splattering off in all directions. Number three artist adds a mountain, which is blocked into the upper right side. Now number two returns and adds a wash of faint pinkish gray to the falling water, and a deeper pink to the pine thicket. Number one moves in again to make the thicket a bit more dense, and three counters with another shot at the waterfall." "A performance of The White Snake, a Kun-style opera intrigued me with its immensely suggestive symbolism and stymied any attempt to deduce a consisten subtextual story. But it is one of those very old and beloved works that will doubltess provide an endless source of contention for anthropoligists and the psychoanalytically inclined onece it becomes available to Western stages." "Loyal Hearts by Su Shuyang [Baoding, Hebei 1938-] is the most celebrated post-Gang of Four play, and the first to reveal some of the details of that periods. Performance at the Peking People's Art Theatre." "After the performance of Guo Moruo's play Cai Wen Ji, the seventy-six-year-old director of the Theater instisted that I must sit down with the cast for a serious discussion of the play. Cao Yu, the black-haired director, a restless bantam in his late sixties who cannot sit still or suppress a wisecrack, commanded ailence of his actors so that I could hild forth about the play itself. The play, however exotic, had bored me with its relentless repetitiousness. And from what I could detect in the audience's feeling, repetition is repation in Chinese also. Having praised, and honestly, the acting and production, which could compare with the best anywhere in the world, I hated to have to tell the truth about the play itself. " "Of another sort entirely was the anti-Soviet melodrama Bi An by Gao Xingjian. Permormance in the Shanghai People's Art Theater under the director Huang Zuolin." "China surprised us in a hundred ways, perhaps most of all by her pervasive beauty. There is an instinct for aesthetic harmony among the Chinese, even in the thoughtless way a woman will arrange a handful of leeks she is washing by a brook, setting them down in a fan shape. The Chinese child is a triumph of humanity, and in the aged there is a sort of dignity that can come only from social respect and a decent tradition. There is also a certain rightness of proportion, a native taste in objects held in the hand. And a poetic tradition inconceivable in the West – where else in the world is a leader's calligraphy of importance, and where could it evoke pride that it is elegant? Indeed, the use of imagery in political discours threatens to turn China into a fairyland for the unwary foreigner. And what people so profoundly understands food? But none of these charms can any longer distract the Chinese from their dilemma. It is repeated and it seems to come from the heart – their feudal heritage still holds them. So much so that the very people who say so are at the next moment caught in it again." |
Bibliography (2)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1979 | Morath, Inge ; Miller, Arthur. Chinese encounters. (London : Secker & Warburg ; New York, N.Y. : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979). [Zugl. Photobuch]. | Publication / MillA2 |
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| 2 | 1979 | Miller, Arthur ; Maratha, Inge. Raising the curtain : scenes from a changing China. In : New China ; vol. 5, no 3 (1979). | Publication / MillA21 |