Barbara Loftus (b. England - Lives Brighton, England)
Confiscation, 2022
Oil on canvas
165 x 140 cm
The Artist’s Collection
(photographed on the easel)
© Barbara Loftus
Second generation German-Jewish émigrée
Confiscation – photographed on the easel to show its size and scale – emphasises the monumentality of this suite of paintings: capturing and pinning down the domestic details of homes and lives similarly ostensibly solid yet fatally disrupted, dispossessed, scattered, and lost. It also refers back specifically to the first incident of her history that the artist’s mother shared with her - what Barbara Loftus has called a ‘late-life unburdening to me of her formative years in pre-war Berlin’: when, a few days after Kristallnacht, two stormtroopers arrived at her grandmother’s house carrying a tea chest and demanded that she open the china cabinet, which they then emptied with care, removing each porcelain figure, wrapping it in tissue paper and laying it in the chest, before moving on to do the same with the family silver.
We view this scene as though we are standing behind the table with the two women on either side, looking into the room beyond as the systematic looting and unravelling of the family’s life begins.
