Lou Posner: The Interface Between Life and Art
Posner created this imaginary butcher shop from sources ranging from 19th-century European shops to contemporary Brazilian art, vanitas symbolism, and early Cubism.
With characteristic humor, he depicted the Polish-Jewish writer, Bruno Schulz holding a decidedly nonkosher ham, while the German-Jewish Expressionist painter, Ludwig Meidner, stands by a container of sausages
But the painting's deeper subject was a child's first encounter with such a place--"the beautiful, the spooky, the unexplained, the dirty, the clean, the bright, the dim."
The hanging meats, hooks, scales, tools, and solemn figures are familiar yet somehow strange, capturing what Posner called our childhood "sense of wonderment remembered, preserved, redeemed from adulthood."
For Posner, that way of seeing was fundamental to being an artist: retaining the curiosity, imagination, and wonder of childhood