Farideh Lashai. Photo: Michael Nagle/New York Times.

NEARLY FIVE DECADES of artmaking confirms Farideh Lashai’s reputation as one of Iran’s most prolific artists, a deft and capable painter of gestural abstractions. She was also a moving and perceptive writer, as revealed late in her career with the publication of the autobiographical Shal Bamu (The Jackal Came, 2003). Her prose shares the fluidity and restlessness of her paintings: One story gives way to another, chronology is nonexistent, and vivid fragments of personal memory open onto collective history—“like reading a diary in high wind,” as one Iranian critic described it. Where her canvases had seemed—as with the work of most of her peers—fastidiously removed from ideological realities, her writing sketched precise and critical vignettes of its social context.

Shal Bamu is a story about matrilineal memory within patriarchal society. Lashai was born into a prominent family from northern Iran, and her book traces their entanglement in nearly every political uprising of the past century: the 1919 public hanging of a dissident reformer that her mother had witnessed as child, her brother’s politicization under the Shah in the 1950s, her own imprisonment for leftist student activism in the early ’70s, and the tumult of the Islamic Revolution of 1978 and the street demonstrations she joined while pregnant with her daughter. “I didn’t want this [bloody line of history] to pass from me to my daughter,” Lashai wrote. “I wanted it to end with my generation; I wanted the next to give their hearts away freely—to not have their sleep disturbed, like mine, with the memory of a body dancing on the gallows, fragments of an image once reflected in my mother’s eyes.”

In the past few years, until her death from the cancer she had battled for nearly two decades, Lashai created her most explicitly political artworks. Her landscapes became the background for stop-motion animations inspired by the iconography of familiar paintings, films, or books (Goya’s The Disasters of War, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland). The projections turn her abstract landscapes into stage sets where human actors are present only as ghostly props. They are brave and surprisingly specific political metaphors, a completely new visual experiment begun in the fifth decade of her career.

“All this violence, how do we stand it?” she asks on the last pages of her book. Lashai’s writings and late animations are the key to understanding the resolutely quiet abstractions of an entire generation of Iranian artists who painted lyrical landscapes through revolutions, wars, and uprisings of every political stripe. Far from being mute, her work bears testimony to incalculable losses, to senseless historic events that for many years could only be communicated abstractly. Her endurance and courage will be missed.

Media Farzin is a New York–based art historian and critic.

Left: Aleksei German. Right: Aleksei Guerman, Khrustalyov, My Car!, 1998, still from a black-and-white film in 35 mm, 150 minutes.

ALEKSEI GERMAN died on February 21 in his home city of Saint Petersburg at the age of seventy-four. Son of a famous Soviet writer whose work provided material for German’s films, and regarded by many as the greatest of contemporary Russian filmmakers, he completed only four solo features during his lifetime, all about Soviet history: Trial of the Road, a 1971 war drama (shelved until 1985) about a deserter to the Nazis who mysteriously surrenders to the Soviets; Twenty Days Without War (1976), about wartime life and love far from the front in Tashkent; My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1982; released 1984), his masterpiece depicting everyday life and unglamorous crime fighting in a provincial town right before the Great Terror; and Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998), a hallucinatory rendering of the anti-Semitic persecutions of the early 1950s built around the event of Stalin’s death in 1953.

German has a reputation as an unlucky director because of his run-ins with Soviet censorship, his fierce perfectionism and personal vision (the post-Soviet Khrustalyov was panned at Cannes), and the inaccessibility of his films: Despite a recent traveling retrospective in the US, none of his films are available with English subtitles in any adequate home-viewing format. This is a pity, because German’s cinema rewards—indeed requires—repeated and careful viewing.

One of the most striking features of German’s films is their astonishing visual and sonic density, born of a hyperrealist drive to capture the micro-textures of Soviet life. Some of the inspiration for this “dirty” style surely came from the rich tapestries of grime offered by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966), into whose roiling pre-modern lifeworld German himself would plunge in his final work, History of the Arkanar Massacre (whose release has been promised, with a soundtrack finished by German’s director son Aleksei, before year’s end).

Even in his first co-directed feature, The Seventh Satellite (1967; with Grigori Aronov), German insisted on personally shaving the faces of his actors to give them the desperate appearance of men taken hostage during the Red Terror episode (1918) of the Russian Civil War. He refused to use the cleaned-up images of mainstream Soviet newsreel as visual sources, turning instead to snapshots taken by nonprofessionals, to so-called “economic newsreel” (low-budget films mainly about local municipal construction and devoid of reenactments) or even, in the case of Trial of the Road, to captured Nazi newsreel, which made no effort to prettify Soviet realia.

This scenic realism is matched by an equally concerted obliquity of narration. Often casting against type—clown Yuri Nikulin as the melancholy Major Lopatin in Twenty Days; comic actor Andrei Mironov as the suicidal journalist Khanin in Lapshin—German also confused by refusing to guide our gaze to any privileged agents or images; by obscuring his actors, sets and dialogue with smoke, vapor, coughing and intricate volleys of noise; and on occasion (and especially in Lapshin) by thematizing our own perplexity through direct looks at or even addresses to the camera. In Khrustalyov, if the story is fairly linear and the images disconcertingly clear, the absence of explanation, the erosion of the onscreen world’s autonomy by sounds bursting in from outside, and the labyrinthine interiors combine to produce a paranoid space, akin (as an angst-generator) to the interminable palace occupied by Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.

It is between these poles of scenic realism and narrative decenteredness that German’s historiographical thinking and the bases of his achievement as the greatest cinematic chronicler of Soviet history are to be found. Watching a German film, we find ourselves suspended between history as already-periodized knowledge (“the Soviet 1930s”; “The Great Fatherland War”), and history as unfolding within an as-yet-unclosed present, freighted by the viscosity of everyday life and the burdens of unresolved trauma: German said of his protagonists in Lapshin that “they think they’re going to live.” German leaves behind a complex legacy, and one that should be central, despite his reputation as the creator of cinéma maudit, to our sense of Russian and world cinema. May his passing finally provoke a distributor to release subtitled versions of his films on Blu-ray, with the extensive critical commentary their formal and historical density needs.

John MacKay is chair of film studies and professor of Slavic languages and literatures and film studies at Yale University.

Left and right: Jean-Léon Destiné.

FAMED HAITIAN DANCER AND CHOREOGRAPHER Jean-Léon Destiné was also a phenomenal teacher; he was first invited to teach a one-week course in a special summer dance series at San Francisco State University in the mid 1980s. “African Haitian Dance” surpassed its target enrollment of thirty-five students. It was the beginning of what became a twenty-year relationship with the Bay area dance community. As a result of his teaching success, Destiné was invited for two additional summers. His classes reached hundreds of students—a number of them public high school and public university dance teachers. Without question, Destiné’s classes were the most popular of a ten-year series and marked a vibrant period for dance at this university.

Destiné’s teaching method was based on a series of movements related to specific drum rhythms. Elements of various traditional dance forms were the basis from which he developed his classes: mahi, damballa, perigol, petro, and others. Rene Calvin, master Haitian drummer, accompanied all of his classes. On at least two occasions Destiné presented lectures that brought into focus Haiti’s historical and cultural heritage. These lectures helped clarify much of the source material for his teaching, choreography, and performance.

Destiné returned to San Francisco after receiving a National Endowment for the Arts grant. This grant supported a work created for the former Wajumbe Cultural Ensemble (“Messengers of Good Omen”), for which I served as artistic director. The work, The Chosen One, followed a thematic line and design of a religious ritual; it included chants, songs, drumming, and other percussion. The choreographed ritual was based on Vodun-African religious tradition as it evolved in Haiti. It was followed by Combite, which depicted scenes of planting, harvest, and celebration. Destiné’s choreography and performance—reflected in his company’s concerts over the years—indicate why he received the Honneur et Merite, the highest honor Haiti has given to any artist.

It was sometime in the early ’90s that Destiné realized what he said was his dream of a lifetime, traveling to the country of Benin with the Haitian Society of New York to visit the general area to which many Haitians trace their origin.

Destiné returned to the San Francisco Bay area in 2004, 2008, and 2009, at the invitation of the Zeke Nealy Haitian Dance Camps. He was accompanied by dancers Nadia Dieudonne and Pineau Guerier and drummers Fanfan and Augustine Frisner, and several other Haitian artists.

Jean-Léon Destiné was one of the most popular and respected artists to come to the San Francisco Bay area.

Nontsizi Dolores Cayou is a professor emirata of San Francisco State University.

Jørn Utzon, Sydney Opera House, 1973, Sydney. Photo: Balthazar Korab, 1988.

WITH THE PASSING of Balthazar Korab earlier this year, we have lost one of our most sensitive and acute chroniclers of our designed environments. I had the honor of conducting almost thirty-six hours of interviews with Balthazar over the past fifteen years, as I worked on my monograph about his work. Our conversations often wandered through the extraordinary experiences underlying each of the images we discussed. “The story” he would often say, “prevails in my approach to photography; the feelings, responses to a place, the message… Photography is a very important way of creating a record of the transformations experienced throughout the cultural life of a place.”

Having experienced powerful transformation firsthand during his formative years, in the form of the devastating effects of war on his home city of Budapest, Korab understood both the power and fragility of architecture. These early experiences, along with his later travels through war-torn Europe in the mid- and late-1940s, heightened his sensitivity to the complex lives of buildings and compelled him to include (where others might omit) the fullest range of expressive, atmospheric, and even melancholic qualities in his imaging of architecture.

His work is thus full of intriguing contradictions—perhaps appropriate for a photographer with no formal training, who in fact studied architecture, and who, when once asked to characterize his work in a single sentence, simply responded “soft-spoken with a bite.” His professional images of architecture are recognized for displaying a precision befitting their Modernist subjects, but they are often layered with the idiosyncrasies of atmosphere, weathering, and activity that confound an otherwise “disciplined” picture. And while he has been widely celebrated for a career producing images of iconic Modern architecture, he often preferred to photograph vernacular buildings and anonymous industrial sites. This preference seems to have stemmed at least in part from the exuberance that he experienced when emigrating to what he called the “unique cultural timezone” of the postwar United States in 1955. Landing a job in the office of Eero Saarinen, Korab joined an exceptional team of designers from around the world and began working as the in-house photographer for the firm, a role that ultimately helped him launch his own studio as a professional photographer of architecture in 1958. There, his work quickly expanded beyond the outstanding modern architecture that he was charged to document. As Monica Korab, his wife and studio partner, noted: “Balthazar, a perpetual foreigner in a strange land, was often more enthusiastic exploring vernacular subjects than many of his other projects, because they offered a much broader expression of a particular culture. Everything was new and worth examining to him, and I think he saw something in America—an explosive push to build differently from his European roots—that was fascinating and yet unsettling in some respects.”

We are fortunate that Balthazar’s entire photographic archive was acquired by the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division in 2011. His adopted nation (Korab became a US citizen in 1964) has thus secured his contributions to the disciplines of both architecture and photography. I will miss him and our meandering conversations dearly, but I find solace in the fact that the treasure trove of images housed within his archive—beautiful, heroic, complicated, and often contradictory—will continue to offer a compassionate portrait of our cultural heritage while also provoking us to reflect on ourselves, a fitting legacy for work that is indeed “soft-spoken with a bite.”

John Comazzi is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Minnesota and author of Balthazar Korab: Architect of Photography (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012).

From left to right: Gavin Russom, Daniel Reich, Karen Heagle, Paul P., Shelby Hughes, and Nick Mauss at a photo shoot for New York magazine in 2003. Photo: Christian Holstad.

THE ACT OF ART-MAKING IS MESSY AND DIFFICULT. People are much more complicated than materials.

Most artists can close their studio doors and hide their struggles. But Daniel worked every day in an atmosphere filled with personalities to whom he chose to expose his own complexities.

Daniel was an artist with a vision driven firstly by Love. This was most evident in his expansive writings and prescient, crystalline curating. When I look at this still-working list of artists he exhibited over the years, his vision, at times seemingly fragmented, becomes instantly, plainly clear.

Christian Holstad is an artist living in New York.

Left: Daniel Reich at his gallery on West Twenty-Third Street in New York. Photo: Paul P. Right: Daniel Reich at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2009. Photo: Ryan McNamara.

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with Daniel Reich was also my first encounter with New York. In January 2003, I came to the city with a small folder of drawings in hand; a friend made a phone call, and suddenly I was in Daniel’s apartment/gallery amid Christian Holstad’s beautiful Life is a Gift installation. We knelt on the floor to lay out the works. I remember him wiry and fresh, pulling out a few hundred-dollar bills from his jeans pocket and buying all of the works I’d come with. Those crumpled bills meant more to me than any subsequent payment I’ve ever received, and on the Greyhound back to Toronto I knew my fortune had changed.

Then there was silence, and I didn’t hear from him for a month. I later learned that this was when Colin de Land had died. Daniel started at Pat Hearn’s gallery; he sought her out specifically because she showed Mark Morrisroe. It was from these two dealers, Pat and Colin, that Daniel found the value system that came to define his métier: a belief in Art above all things, and in its confluence with personality. This wisdom included giving to those special people who gravitated toward him as many big opportunities as possible. I didn’t live in New York and could only witness his small gang periodically, but I remember Nick Mauss and Ken Okiishi stuffing envelopes and hanging paintings not as artists or staff, but as believers in something extraordinary at work.

To me, Daniel always appeared a slightly mystical creature. Yet he possessed, perhaps to a stronger degree, a great number of human frailties: giddy indulgence, obstinate faith, consuming worry. He swanned and he sweated. There are lines we all skirt which Daniel—a symptom of his genius—continually trespassed. Nothing was average or passable in his world, nor was he a perfectionist; things were lost, destroyed—things languished. And yet it was the labor, the ebullience of his rich, deadly smart, radically free-associating mind that made something remarkable out of each and every show. Daniel was a born dealer, not just because he, like most good artists, was otherwise unemployable, but because his eccentricity was alchemy in the gallery. He took risks with his money and with the money of others, and I think he always sincerely believed it would all work out. Spending was like making a wish or saying a prayer; new shoes, or capriciously rebooking airfare was a type of strange magic to augur success.

I remember another conjuring, a performance almost, as we installed my show in fall 2008. Amid the unsettling quiet brought on by the worsening recession, Daniel devised a strategy for painting the gallery—one that was all but invisible to everyone but himself. An assistant went over the gallery walls, already painted in their typical white, with two other hues of white, a “yellow” and a “green.” Daniel conducted the painting with precision, so that narrow swaths were applied here and there, like highlights and shadows, taking up several days of our time in an imperceptible aesthetic labor which I could only understand as wizardry meant to invoke the old rush of collectors who weren’t coming through. On opening night the gallery had its aura, and it worked.

But despite all of his surreptitious magic, it ultimately wasn’t enough. There was a breach in the hull and the part of Daniel that understood the usefulness of life began to ebb when he had to close his gallery, forced out by his own amazing folly and by a world that demanded something more practical. Daniel enjoyed scrappily going up against the hegemony of Chelsea. An inscrutable David, what he proposed was soft, slight, and upset by masculinity. Daniel knew the legacy and aesthetics of the strengths and frailties of homosexuality. We would talk about Tennessee Williams, Denham Fouts, and King Ludwig. He knew the course of lives lived and lost.

Anyone who has had a telephone conversation with Daniel will remember that the sign-off was the hardest part for him. There were various long pauses and rapidly repeated “okays” before the final, hesitant, goodbye. I feel very much like this now, so I want to add two more little remembrances. I’m brought back to one of our earliest emails where he said, “Yes, of course I’m interested in handling the work long-term. In a way it is perfect for me.” Daniel tried to engender his artists with his own delicate gestures of rebellion, and a spirited, cerebral pleasure in beauty. It’s an imbued force, something that will continue to manifest in our best work, which will in turn always be perfect for him. Finally, the last time I saw Daniel was in August. He invited me to the Russian Tea Room and implored me to order the cheapest drink on the menu so he could treat me. I had a peppermint tea and he had several Ivan the Terribles. His conversation frothed with wicked intelligence, jokes, and glumness. I left him with an electric buzz in my gut; I felt happy and proud. I knew that Daniel was one of the last of a kind of rare bird, and I couldn’t believe my luck at having him for a friend. I know that I will miss him for the whole of my life.

Paul P. is an artist living in New York.