'Black Book' - Gideon Rubin

An Exhibition curated by James Putnam at The Freud Museum.

Rubin’s specially created project for Freud’s final residence related to the era of the late 1930s, when Freud left Vienna for London. It presented a series of paintings on canvas, linen and paper with subject matter drawn from original pre-WW2 German magazines that Rubin collected specifically for the project. These magazines contained idealised images of heath and efficiency to promote the myth of Aryan supremacy as Nazi propaganda. Rubin subverted these images in his characteristic style by masking out the faces, Nazi references and swastika motifs. This process relates to our human tendency to block out unpleasant memories from our psyche.

Working on the project was Rubin’s way to engage with the past on a personal level. He identified Freud’s narrow escape from Vienna in 1938 with his own maternal grandparents’ escape from Nazi persecution, fleeing Romania at the last moment in 1939. Rubin situated this imagery within the context of Freud’s home. But these seemingly ‘innocent’ images belie their sinister undertones that allude to the Nazis subsequent mission to exterminate the Jews with Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’.

• https://www.freud.org.uk/exhibitions/gid...
• https://outset.org.uk/supported-projects...