One man died in a World War I trench, leaving museums and private collectors dozens of stunning abstract paintings. The other expired in a Berkeley bedroom, and is best known for sculptures evoking the death of 6 million of his fellow Jews.
One man was the father of the German expressionist movement. The other never existed.
In his second novel, “Burnt Umber,” Sheldon Greene makes the unlikely connection between German artist Franz Marc and Harold Paris — through Harry Baer, a fictionalized version of the Berkeley sculptor.
An avid art collector (as well as novelist and lawyer) Greene grew enchanted with the work of Marc — an expressionist colleague of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, and Paris, whom he calls “the leading Jewish artist in Northern California in the 20th century.”
“I decided I could expose a lot of different ideas and at the same time write something that went right through the creative history of the 20th century from the standpoint of two artists,” said Greene, a Berkeley resident and co-founder of the New Israel Fund. “That brought the format of this book together.”
The novel begins with a fictionalized account of the life of Marc, a brilliant but unfulfilled artist who only finds contentment in the notion of a utopian society brought about by German victory in World War I.
Volunteering for the Kaiser’s army, an arena of frontal assaults, poison gas and wholesale death quickly sour Marc on his ideas of a cultural renaissance brought about by armed combat — but not before he, and millions of others, became Hitler’s first shock troops, according to Greene.
“When I got into studying Franz Marc and saw the matrix of German intellectual, social and political thought before World War I, then saw him go off to World War I, it came to me that he was really part of the Holocaust,” he said. “The movement he was participating in was laying the foundation for the Holocaust in the 20th century, just as Wagner provided the artistic vocabulary, which was ultimately transformed by goofy Nazi ideology into their racist doctrines. Marc was a soldier of the first wave of what ultimately led to the Shoah.”
While galleries worldwide sparkle with Marc’s unmistakable, vividly colored abstract renderings of animals, in Greene’s fictionalized world, the artist leaves behind something even more valuable in the French countryside — his long-lost World War I sketchbook.
The sketchbook is liberated by an 18-year-old GI named Harry Baer, who takes refuge from German artillery in a ramshackle French farmhouse. Baer carries the sketchbook for the rest of his life — through the concentration camp, back stateside to his working-class Cleveland Jewish family, to 1950s Paris and, a setting local readers will be more than familiar with, 1960s and ’70s Berkeley.
The real-life Harold Paris’ enduring inspirations were the Holocaust, Vietnam and genocide in Cambodia, and the fictionalized Baer follows a similar path. He constructs abstractly Shoah-themed, cavernous sculptures art patrons can actually walk into. Sprinkling bits of dirt and bone he collected at Auschwitz, Baer crafts a huge sculpture of a wall.
Similar works by Paris graced Berkeley’s Judah L. Magnes Museum several years ago in a career retrospective. And, like Baer, he was a packrat.
“Paris had a heart attack, and while he was in the hospital, he crafted exquisite ambiguous works using things like bandages,” said Greene, who will hold his first reading of ‘Burnt Umber’ Tuesday at Book Passage in Corte Madera. “Found objects had their own spirit. I thought ‘Why not have the artist actually pick up stuff at the camp?'”
Bound by the sketchbook, Marc — who unwittingly helped inaugurate the Holocaust — and Baer — who fought to end it — form a lifelong bond. Marc’s influence alters Baer’s work and even his personal life. For instance, he meets his future wife while gazing at a Marc masterpiece in a gallery in Paris. Greene also gazes, observing some of the greatest, and most terrible, events of the past century through the eyes of a pair of artists.
“I saw parallels in their lives. Franz Marc and Harold Paris both experienced a war. Marc and Paris both ended up dying young,” said Greene. “I saw a way of connecting these two artists, even though one was German and the other was Jewish.”