“The Magic Mountain is just one among thousands of books the bibliophile artist has read, but it changed him permanently in a very obvious way. He went up the mountain as young boy, Pavel Pivovarov. He came down a new man, Pavel Pepperstein. He was inspired to reinvent himself by the emotionally over-charged character in the book: Pieter Peeperkorn. Pavel distinctly remembers an old woman calling him a Jew boy around this time, and yet antisemitism if anything must have hardened his resolve to use his Jewish inheritance in his act of making himself afresh, and renaming himself in the process.
Just before Pavel read Mann’s second major novel, he made the series of drawings with which we begin this exhibition: The Adventures of Joseph Katsenelson. He explains that ‘Joseph Katsenelson is a product of my imagination. Later, books on Jewish mysticism began to fall into my hands, but at the time I created Joseph Katsenelson I did not know much about Jewish religious and mystical tradition. Nevertheless, this tradition attracted me in some way — on a dreamy, imaginative level. The first literary work from which I learned something about this tradition was Heine’s “Hebrew Melodies.” I adored Heine, and devoured his poems and verse.”

Alistair Hicks, curator