M HKA Ensembles

Drawing, 34,6 x 43,5 cm.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp.

CDFriedrich-esque 1945 Painting Depicting the Fire Bombing of Dresden, Painted about 8 Months after by a Doctor [H. Geller] Who Survived [title given by Allan Sekula], signed by the amateur painter, aquarelle on paper, 21 December 1945, 34,6 x 43,5 cm. Purchased by Allan Sekula through eBay on 9 June 2010. [Allan Sekula – The Dockers' Museum, 2010-2013, object nr. 58]

Aquarelle, circa 20 by 30 cm, of a family looking into the firestorm of the Dresden bombardment. It is painted in December 1945 by a doctor who lives in Dresden, so roughly ten months after the bombing and seven months after the end of the war in Europe. This painting is presumably based upon his own eyewitness experience. To Sekula it is oddly reminiscent of the spectator paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. He feels that linking the atomic bombings to these earlier systematic large scale conventional explosive bombings with bomber fleets is not unreasonable. Hamburg is another port city that suffered from that kind of bombings, Dresden is not a port city, it’s a river city, a river port in that sense but the image kind of leapt out to Sekula and seems to make sense.