Fermin Rocker 1907-2004
By
Anthony Rudolf
A
version of this obituary was published in the London Independent
on October 20, 2004
Fermin Rocker Exodus
II 1987
oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches
all images courtesy
The Chambers Gallery, London
Fermin Rocker himself had
recognized that his current show at the Chambers Gallery in London would
be his last.
For some time he had been
tired. His eyes were not as good as they were, and walking the few yards
to the studio with its north light - at the back of his top-floor flat
in Tufnell Park - was becoming difficult. It was even possible that
the private view would be his last or penultimate excursion from the
flat, for even with the help of his devoted son and amanuensis, Philip,
going down all those mansion-block stairs presented formidable problems.
But, after a 48-hour flu, the 96-year-old Rocker died in his bed on
Monday. There had always been a good chance he would die brush in hand,
but it was not to be.
The possibility that the
private view - to which Mick Jagger has lent his classic Rocker painting
of a refugee scene - might have been the artist's penultimate sortie
refers to an event that will be taking place in December at Toynbee
Hall: the publication of a new edition by Five Leaves Press of his father
Rudolf Rocker's 1956 autobiography, The London Years. This event will
surely want to celebrate the son as well as the father he adored.
Fermin Rocker was born in
1907 in the old East End, the son of Milly Witkop, immigrant Yiddish-speaking
radical daughter of, for that generation, untypically tolerant orthodox
Jews, and of Rudolf Rocker, the legendary anarchist theoretician and
practitioner and a German Catholic. Rudolf taught himself Yiddish and
English and became the recognised leader of the Jewish sweated workers
in the East End, as well as editor of the Yiddish anarchist weekly,
the Arbeiter Fraint. Fermin's father was a disciple of Prince Peter
Kropotkin and it is possible that the boy, who sat on Kropotkin's lap,
was the last living person who had met the great man.
Fermin himself wrote an enchanting
account of his early childhood in Stepney at 33 Dunstan Houses, an anarchist
commune. Appropriately published by the anarchist house Freedom Press,
The East End Years (1998), which contains the author's characteristic
illustrations and some rare photographs, picks up on the title of his
dad's memoir and is far better written.
Rocker père wrote
many books, some of which are still read by anarchists and the larger
number of students of the movement, but he was a man of action, whose
memorial is his life as a radical political activist - described in
a famous and influential book, William J. Fishman's East End Jewish
Radicals (1975), a book that means much to East End anoraks of all persuasions
such as the late Nicolas Walter, Iain Sinclair, Rachel Lichtenstein,
Arnold Wesker, Clive Bettington (top walking tour guide of the East
End since Fishman's retirement) and myself.
Fermin Rocker Approaching
Storm 2002
oil on canvas,
40 x 32 inches
Fermin, the only child of Rudolf's second marriage, would not become
a man of action, in the father's sense at least. The shy and self-effacing
boy was a precociously gifted draughtsman, and was taught drawing and
watercolour by his half-brother. Rudolf took his young son to parks,
museums and historical places, but it was the busy Port of London -
the Heathrow of its day - that most enthralled the boy and it was there
that he did his first drawings on visits with his father:
"In an age which held
that children should be seen and not heard, he treated me with exemplary
kindness and tolerance . . . In later years my father would look back
at it with nostalgia and regret. It was a time, he insisted, that still
had aspirations and ideals, that still had visions of a better future,
of a world more just and humane."
After the First World War
- during which Rudolf was incarcerated in a detention camp at Alexandra
Palace - the family went to Berlin, where the young Fermin went to art
and print schools and associated with leading artists and politicians
of the Weimar Republic. But he always said that the only artist who
made a real impression on him was Kathe Kollwitz.
Fermin settled in New York
in 1929. He worked as a freelance commercial artist, illustrator and
printmaker, and worked on pre-Disney cartoons such as Betty Boop. From
1937 he began to concentrate on etchings and lithographs. As a painter
he was drawn to the American realist school and the "ashcan"
painters such as John Sloan, whose paintings (one or two are in the
Metropolitan Museum) surely influenced the younger artist. He had solo
exhibitions in New York in 1944 and 1961.
In 1972, retired from the
commercial fray, Fermin Rocker with his editor wife, Ruth, and young
son moved to London. He continued working as a book illustrator, but
was eventually able to devote himself to painting. In the last 20 years
of his life he had 13 solo exhibitions (mainly at the Stephen Bartley
Gallery in London), which is surely some kind of record for a man of
his age, but only of real significance if the work stands up.
Well, serious critics such
as William Packer, John Russell Taylor and Mel Gooding wrote in praise
of him. "The compositional deliberation gives these pictures something
of the rapt intensity of a Balthus, the dramatic presentiment of a Hopper,"
wrote Gooding in Arts Review.
Rocker was duly flattered,
as he should have been, by these comparisons, but he always resisted
my own references to Edward Hopper, in conversation and in print. Some
fellow painters, including Paula Rego - whom I recall listening enthralled
to his stories and who shares his particular admiration for Goya, Daumier
and Degas and who also resists when people link her own work to that
of Balthus - found aspects of his work, graphic and oil and later acrylic,
to their taste.
Fermin Rocker The
Barrow 2004
oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches
Why do I love his work? It
is because it is self-evidently rooted deep in his psyche, like a dream
or an obsession, and reiterated in a late flowering because his very
life depended on it. He continually reworked his themes because the
visual problems raised by thinking his feelings remained ongoing but
had to appear to be solved before he could progress, progress towards
a deeper interrogation of the past, a deeper interrogation of Matthew
Arnold's "land of dreams" which lies "north of the future",
in Paul Celan's phrase.
His sites of memory, occasionally
recognisable through their idealised visionary topography transfiguring
a prosy flatness, are in fact sites of remembrance, which can be defined
as memory laden with psychic significance, like a ghostly treasure ship.
Their space is a metaphor of time, of heroic days recalled without nostalgia,
when information technology was young, and politics, for us or against
us, was personal. His figures, his figurations, are objective correlatives
for images seen with the inner eye, their tonalities subtly muted, without
strong contrasts - the later re-workings of his hand mirroring the workings
of his mind.
One of the great pleasures
of life, for me at any rate, is to visit old-timers, usually at teatime,
men and women of my parents' generation with stories to tell and lessons
to teach. In the nature of things - and as my generation itself approaches
old-timer status - their number is diminishing. Only the other day,
I visited Fermin Rocker with Bill Fishman, the writer Peter Gilbert
and the medical anthropologist and doctor Cecil Helman, who observed
that Fermin was looking very well, often the sign of a last-minute rally
and push for life.
He had painted my portrait
and Helman's and he was intending to paint Gilbert's. His method was,
as Paula Rego pointed out, time-honoured but now very unusual: he would
make sketches from the model, and then watercolours from the sketches
and the model, finishing with oils.
Fermin Rocker saw and experienced
many things. He kept faith with a spiritual truth, which matured over
a lifetime. Now this mensch has joined his ancestors and I mourn his
passing. But I rejoice that, with the support of his son and some friends,
he survived so long, fit enough in mind and body to continue making
art almost to his dying day. May he rest in peace, and may some of his
paintings last as long as our troubled planet survives
Painter and graphic
artist: born London 22 December 1907; married 1954 Ruth Robins (died
1989; one son); died London 18 October 2004.
Anthony Rudolf has
published autobiography, fiction, poetry, literary criticism and poetry
translations from the French. In recent years he has been looking at
pictures. He wrote an essay on Kitaj for an exhibition catalogue published
by the National Gallery in London.
