Mom and pop modernism - exhibit of books published by the Gaberbocchus Press, La Boetie Gallery, New York, New York

Charm is a quality not highly valued in the vanguard milieu nowadays. on the other hand "The Themersons and the Gaberbocchus Press--An Experiment in Publishing, 1948-1979" a new show of over 100 works and works on paper at La Boetie Gallery, reminded us that civility and wit were one time major components of the modernist sensibility--weapons of deceptive sweetness in the bohemian assault upon social propriety and stultifying artistic convention. Les intentionally, the exhibition also serv as a caution regarding the limitations of any coterie, especially single that adopts intellectual coziness as its prime oppositional strategy.

"Gaberbocchus," the word for Jabberwocky in a Latin translation of Lewis Carroll's famous piece of poetry is the unlikely name of a small London publishing jeopardy rounded in 1948 by the Polish expatriates Stefan and Franciszka Themerson. Working on the outside of two successive residences, the husband-and-wife team (she acting as art director and illustrator, he as editor and sometime author) produc above 60 titles in 31 years. The volumes and pamphlets, usually issued in editions of no more than several hundr copies, were thus imaginatively designed as to be virtual artist's works--and to attract authors (or their representatives) as diverse as James Laughlin, Bertrand Russell, Stevie Smith, Kenneth Tynan, Raymond Queneau and Kurt Schwitters. (1)

The Gaberbocchus convolutions range widely--from poetry to philosophical novels to plays to uncategorizable hybrids of image and body Yet they are marked from one extremity to the other of by the grave whimsy captured in Franciszka's renderings of the firm's dragonlike logo creature. Stefan articulated the couple's basic cre in "The Chair of Decency" a 1981 Johan Huizinga Memorial prelection delivered in Leyden: "Gentleness is biological and aggression is cultural." The articulate utterance (which also holds that "people don't like to be cut-throats unless it is for the sake of an idea") advocates "decency of means" as the principal ethical value. This mild sentiment have the appearances to have been wedded to an equally quixotic publishing rationale. one time when asked via questionnaire to identify the press's primary force and primary weakness, Stefan answered "refusal to conform" in one as well as the other instances.

Dedicated to this homey version of avant-garde integrity, the Themersons started their enterprise by dint of issuing 1,000 shares priced at single pound apiece, ran it (aided through codirectors Barbara Wright and Gwen Barnard) with a quiet, three-decade-long disregard for mainstream taste and publicity, and, in 1979 sold their interest to Uitgeverij De Harmonie, a Dutch publishing company move swiftly by their friend Jaco Groot

Gaberbocchus Pres was the culmination of an artistic collaboration that began virtually from the twinkling that the couple first met in prewar Poland. Franciszka was born in Warsaw in 1907 the daughter of Jacob Weinles, a painter then well known for his large, conventionally compos depictions of Jewish life. Stefan, Franciszka's junior by means of two and a half years, was from the family of physician Mieczyslaw Themerson in the provincial town of Plock which he departed to undertake studies in architecture and physics in Warsaw. The pair had begun their creative dialogue by means of 1929, and they were married--at the ages of 24 and 21--as before long as Franciszka completed her Academy of Art stage (with a first prize for painting) in 1931

Stefan had already shown a vivid interest in photomontage and collage, flat creating a flip-book of animated circle and matchbox photogram images in 1927 when he was still in high institute A year later, at 18 he had begun to write a film rounded pillar for the newspaper Polska Zbrojna. The couple's first joint effort consisted of five experimental films made between 1930 and '37(2) All these works were more or les "abstract" in their emphasis on purely visual aspects of presentation. The impulse toward a depersonalized cinema stemm from Stefan's boyhood experience of seeing a standard film narrative interrupted by dint of three feet of scratched, carelessly spliced scrap stock. The unlooked for flurry of light induced in him, he later recalled, a desire "to diocese the Screen's own life."

The individual Themerson film that survives from this period, The Adventure of a profitable Citizen (1937), could be seen in its entirety upon videotape at the exhibition. although critically lauded, this little parable of nonconformity was in the way that ill-received by the public and the popular pres when it came without in 1938 that its theatrical move swiftly had to be cut short. The innocuous tale, intertwined with music by the agency of Stefan Kisielewsld, concerns a hard-working functionary who individual day leaves his desk to engage in a series of not divisible by 2 actions--walking backwards, carrying a mirrored wardrobe, soaring to a rooftop, playing a flute etc.--and thereby incurs the wrath of his comrade citizens, who at one point hunt him with angry placards. Today it is hard to run over whether the audience was more impatient with the film's satisfied its narrative disjunctiveness or the variety of technical devices it employs: realistic action interspersed with passages of abstract light patterns, fast-forwards, turn topsy-turvys interludes of hand-painted film, peculiar camera angles and occasional negative images.