Michael Rogatchi has been invited to take part in the jury of the next, XIII Edition of Il Volo di Pegaso Italian National Arts, Literature and Music Award, to continue his participation in the jury of this special and prestigious art award. The theme of the XIII Edition of Il Volo di Pegaso is Colours of Life. Michael has accepted the invitation of his colleagues and friends with a pleasure.
In 2013, Michael Rogatchi was invited to take a part in the IV World Litvak Congress that took a place in Vilnius, Lithuania. He was the only artist whose personal exhibition was the part of the official program of that important event.
Although the Congress did commemorate the 70th anniversary of the destruction of the Vilna ghetto and its Jewry, Michael whose grandmother was Sofia Litowska , and who family have had its tragic toll of Holocaust, decided to commemorate their memory in the way of gentleness and beauty, the way of creating the atmosphere where their smiles were as if present.
That’s how the artist’s famous Jewish Melody series was born, and that what was its main purpose for the artist – to create the images which would bring enlightened memories about the people and way of life that has been annihilated brutally and without any reason at all.
Many of the images from Jewish Melody series has become a modern classic by now. The series has been widely exhibited and reproduced. Many exhibition, lectures, interviews, panels were conducted based on this series in the project on Art as an Act of Memory, in many countries: Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, the UK, the USA, and the others.
The point and subject of this project, the one of the Outreach to Humanity series of projects, is to evaluate the art not just as a tool, but as as an act of memory, in all its rich diversity and wide possibilities. It is not only educates much better and deeper, on a level of compassion and with emotional engagement of the viewers, but it also communicates humanity directly which is a special mission of the real, soulful art.
Art Essay Silver Thread and Heart Cord: Family Theme in Michael Rogatchi’s Art by Inna Rogatchi has been published in The Times of Israel. The full text of the essay can be read here.
The Story of Devotion in Pictures: Family Theme in Michael Rogatchi’s Art
By Inna Rogatchi (C).
First published: The Times of Israel, 27.07.2020. On the TOI site, the article can be read here.
Devotion on Canvas: Long Way for Real Feelings
The topic of a family theme in art is more intricate than it seems. Before photography, the immediate and primary function of it was clear: to leave those who could afford a family portrait for posterity. People posing were at unease, artists behind their easel most of the time were just earning their living. However masterly in detail Italian and especially Spanish portraits before the XVIII century are, they are largely impassioned, not to say indifferent.
Before Rembrandt, portrait as a genre had produced a beautiful, memorable, in many cases stunning in their harmony images of people as it was the case with all great masters of the Renaissance, but the inner light and depth of ordinary people’s lived- through faces had been brought to us by that great master who did revolutionised art in general and who meant everything to practically all and every serious artist thereafter. To see the beauty in not beautiful, to be such a philosopher while being a great master of art craft, to bring such depth into the artistic perception and set it up as an artistic criteria, to be that human one had to be a giant. As Rembrandt certainly was and still will be forever.
The XVIII century and the first half of the XIX centuries brought in engaging French portrait that did show a vivid interaction between a model and an artist , – and we are talking about family portrait here – with artists being an ultimate master in those relationships most of the time. After the appearance of photography, artists have become engaged more in self-analysis even while painting other people, as was the case with many German and French artists for almost another century, 80 years at least, until the end of 1930s.
Perhaps, it was something inevitable, some special way in psychology of art that helped an artist to open up about him – or herself while painting the other people, in this case, their family members. Tens of portraits by Monet, Manet, Renoir and many other their colleagues and friends made of their wives, girlfriends and children is proof of it.
Until the end of the XIX century, classic family portraits were not that much about a family as such , but rather it manifested about its separate members.
From Impressionists onward, family portrait has become more about art approach, experiment, style, light, coloristic, all the nuances of applied art that was bursting into an living experiment at the period.
Myriads of portraits of their family members mastered by the French Impressionists are more about themselves, with rare exceptions of Modigliani who did paint his wife with love and palpable human inter-connectivity, the portraits of his family members by Giacometti who did not belong to Impressionists, and who did bring that family connection into his works. He did these portraits of his father, mother, brother precisely for keeping that family connection alive. It was like writing a poem about his home, for Giacometti. And it seems to be a surprisingly rare thing in the history of art.
Probably, the most powerful from those rare works of devotion on canvas is Mother and Son, great work from the early Blue period of Picasso, the outstanding work of art of all times, indeed.
Speaking on Jewish art, Chagall did immortalise his wife and the love of his life Bella and their daughter Ida in his great works, of course, but his artistic impulse in the case of Bella was to paint the essence of romantic love which is another theme. In the case of Ida, his approach was similar to the French Impressionists who were painting their family members as models quite so very often.
But there is also art that creates, maintains and develops the theme of a family, even today, in contemporary art and in its figurative domain. Because of a number of reasons – fashion, priorities, changes of mainstreams and trends – it turned out to not be an easy thing to do. Seemingly, it always was the case. But when succeeded, this kind of art serves in many ways.
I am lucky to know such a contemporary artist who still values the theme of a family very highly and who keeps and develops the theme as dear for himself throughout his career. It is Michael Rogatchi –www. michaelrogatchi.com
Being privileged to observe the work of my husband artist from a close distance, I can see how the family theme has developed during his career. It turned out to be a case-study of the family theme development in the work of a contemporary master.
Among the oeuvre of Michael, there is a substantial amount of works, mostly oil paintings, dedicated to his own and our extended family.
It started from Lullaby, the portrait of his mother Maija-Mara Rogatchi-Reiss, created in 1994. Two Little Goats is an eternal Yiddish lullaby, and Michael did bring the goats on the canvas decades after his mother who was an aspiring and able singer used to sing it to him.
Her face of a strong-willed Jewish woman who was caring and protective for her son and who was extremely helpful for tens of people around them who knew that they can always come for help to this special woman and always get it. This woman’s ivory-like face also shows the never left reflections in her bottomless eyes. And there had been so many things that she kept reflecting upon during many years of her not that long life, keeping it all to herself, without bothering anyone around, never frightening or saddening her only son, but always protecting him from harsh realities and cold winds around them while teaching him to be strong and courageous.
How to protect a baby born inside Gulag, the son of Stalin’s political prisoner and his devoted wife who went after him, lived nearby and was allowed to see him once a month? How to protect a baby born in the absolutely harsh place of Soviet Gulag known as Valley of Death? How to protect this boy in the unspeakably hard exile in Kazakhstan, with that extreme climate of plus 45C in summer and minus 45C in winter, in the reality when a human life cost almost nothing but human dignity was highest possible? How to present to his boy a regular meal of a rye bread with a bit of vegetable oil and an onion as a normal and even good dinner? This woman did manage all this in a marvellous way. She did it by the way of her great lullabies which were still heard in the head of her son decades later, but also by the way of warm family evenings of non-stop music from gramophone, classical and operas, reading the best literature aloud extensively, immersing her boy in etiquette and best manners, not forgetting about teaching him to help to the others, everyone who does need help, elderly, young, sick, poor. To be human. To be brave. To fight for things fair.
Michael’s father was arrested by the NKVD in 1949 being very young, for his alleged belonging to the bourgeois ‘organisation’ ( there was none, arrested were several co-students from the first year in university) and initially sentenced to death which was later commuted into 10 years of Gulag. Thanks to Stalin’s death in 1953, he was eventually released from the camp, but instead of being free, he and his family , as millions of others Gulag’s prisoners in Soviet Union, were sent to exile to Kazakhstan where they lived surrounded by thousands of people with the same destiny. Henry Rogatchi, talented, good looking, joyful and very kind man, who contracted tuberculosis in the camp, died relatively soon, being just 39. His only son was brought by women mostly, his mother, grandmother and aunt.
Not surprisingly, Michael’s other important works on the family are dedicated to his grandmother, Sofia Litowsky-Reiss. That brave woman who used to be a member of Jabotinsky’s organisation in Ukraine and who being a mother of four children of her own has adopted two more orphans in the years of devastated famine in Ukraine, also has lost her husband to the Stalin’s regime. Shimon Reiss, brave and smart military engineer from Budapest who was ‘a white’ officer in the Austrian Imperial Army, fell in love with Michael’s grandmother and settled with his family in Ukraine after WWI. One morning in 1937, accomplished and widely respected engineer Reiss went to his work, never to return. He was eliminated by the NKVD on the spot, in the first wave of their purges that started from ‘cleansing’ of foreign nationals and ‘bourgeois enemies’ of their bloody Bolsheviks coup. There is just one very small photo of him left in the large family.
His wife Sofia who raised so many children of their own and adopted ones, was a person whose motivation in life was to help the others. Thus she voluntarily went to Kazakhstan to help her daughter to raise Michael. And his grandma was his fortress and his heaven. “When grandma took us under her wings, literally, my cousin Galja and myself, and sang us all Yiddish songs in her melodic and warm voice, the outside world ceased to exist. It could be a terrible freeze and snowstorm outside, but we knew nothing about it. We lived in the world of Yiddishkeit, and it was the most wondrous one in the universe” – Michael recalls.
Michael’s first tribute to his brave grandmother is My Grandmother’s Songs work from his celebrated Jewish Melody series ( 2013).
He has elaborated it further on as an oil painting for his Zion Waltz series ( 2016). In this work, the lines of Michael grandmother’s caring face appears from the sky in gentle appearance on canvas.
Sofia’s biggest dream in life was to bring her family to Israel. Her entire family, she always emphasised it. Michael was quick to go, naturally. He packed his little suitcase very quickly, put it under his bed, and reported to his grandmother that he is ready to go. He was 12 at the time. It was the first time when in the 1960th the USSR did open the window for its Jews for Israel for a short time.
Sofia Litowsky-Reiss was not able to fulfil her dream, however, because many members of her family were not allowed to leave the USSR. And she was unable to leave some of her children behind. She was the matriarch of the family and felt all responsibility for all its members. Michael’s packed suitcase however was kept by the boy intact for many months there under his bed. For the long time, he was hoping to reach Israel with his family, despite any hurdles.
During the long dark cold evenings in Kazakhstan, his family got together quite often. Family dinners and gathering on the Shabbes, it was the time of the week that kept us together and filled us with joy. And our grandparents did keep our Jewish holidays, especially Pesach.
On these days, in Michael’s family, his uncle Reuven Kotljar would play piano with a great talent, and Michael’s mother would sing with her strong and beautiful voice, to the entire family’s rejoice. Reuven grew up in an orphanage. His and his twin brother’s parents were killed as ‘enemies of Soviet state’ by the NKVD when the boys were babies. By known tradition of Soviet humanists, children were separated and had no clue on each other’s existence. Reuven also never knew that he was Jewish until he became an adult and left the orphanage. Incredibly, meeting no single Jew in his early life, he spoke with the heaviest Yiddish accent possible. And he was a super-talented pianist, self-taught one. Reuven and his brother did find each other being married adults each. It was another Jewish miracle.
Michael’s portrait of his uncle Reuven was not conceived as a direct portrait. Michael created the general portrait of a warm, kind and thoughtful Jewish man who saw a lot in his life. Only afterwards did he realise that he gave his Jewish man the face of his brilliant uncle Reuven. This portrait has a special quality: the eyes of this man follows you wherever your movement would be. It is the one of most critically acclaimed Michael’s works on Jewish heritage.
The Way of Unity and Belonging
Music was much more than music in the life of the Soviet Jewry. It was probably the only universal way for millions of Soviet Jews to feel and express their belonging to each other and to our people.
My father Isaac Buyanover, talented engineer, inventor and chess-player, has had congenital heart disease, as he was born in the midst of severe famine in Ukraine. He had to be careful at all time in his movements and everything he did. But he completely abandoned any precaution when hearing the first sounds of Freilach, Hava Nagila and any other Yiddish dance music. My father danced his heart out at family’s and friends’ gatherings. His giant love of Cohen to his people bursted out in his dances. Everybody loved him dancing, because everybody saw that love outpoured, unmistakably.
Michael’s work Freilach ( 1995) is dedicated to my father and is about him. It is also about the essence of Jewish belonging. I wish my dad who died so prematurely, would see the work. He would be endlessly grateful for such heart-felt understanding.
The work dedicated to the memory of my maternal grandparents, Abram Elovich and Adel Chigrinsky is called Mirages ( 1995).
My grandfather, high-ranking engineer, paid his toll to Stalin’s regime, as well. He was arrested without any guilt at all, in the anti-Semitic purges in early 1950s, and was released a couple of years after Stalin’s death. As he returned home alive, the family regarded it as a great luck. My grandmother belonged to a well-known Jewish family that was closely related to Menachem Ussishkin, and was a daughter of a legendary man, Meer Chigrinsky who saved a huge Jewish community of Ekaterinoslav/Dnepropetrovsk from that devastating famine in the 1930s, and the niece of another legend, great doctor, Falk Chigrinsky who saved very many sick of tuberculosis children’s lives during the Siege of Leningrad, to die from heart attack on May 9th, 1945. More about it can be read here.
As practically all Jews in Soviet Ukraine, the family suffered many losses, many of them in the most tragic way and circumstances. My grandmother was unable to overcome it for the rest of her life, and the painting emphasises it.
As all Jewish European families, our both families, or our one extended family paid a terrible toll in the Shoah. Michael’s strong love to our grandparents and parents who both did suffer a lot being hunted, deprived, and mourning the lost members of the family every single day, materialised in his well-known My Train work ( 1993) from his In the Mirror of the Shoah collection. Being the work reflecting Holocaust in general, it is also profoundly auto-biographical account. Amazingly, every member of our extended family does recognise itself among the faces presented there.
I know that my Michael’s mother and aunt, and his grandmother who lost her daughter with her entire family in the Shoah, my grandfather and mother, who also lost her aunt with her entire family, and several other members of our family are there, additionally to that boy who will always look on the history of his extended family and the history of his entire people from that track which will not disappear in our hearts and minds ever.
Michael always maintains that despite harsh objective circumstances of his life, his childhood was blessed and great one. Analysing the lives and attitude of our parents, we understand that it is because of their talent of heart and their stern will to give their children the best possible care, not to mention love which was immeasurable, our childhood was the most loving, protective, rich and fruitful one. That childhood created by our parents and grandparents naturally and effortlessly towards us, but with great overcoming towards the impossible circumstances of their lives, in the aftermath of Holocaust and WWII, under the Stalin’s siege and surreal Soviet realities, has made us opened to the other people’s needs, rooted in our people’s heritage and belonging to its history. It is the most essential source of one’s life. So there is no surprise, actually, that Michael has devoted so many works in his oeuvre to the theme of a family, both his own one and in general, too.
That Jewish family’s origination and caring love is depicted in several of his lyrical works.
Ljuli-Ljuli, after the name of yet another beautiful Yiddish lullaby exists in two versions, initially as original drawing from Michael’s Jewish Melody series ( 2013) , and later on in its developed version as an oil painting from his Zion Waltz series ( 2016).
People who were looking for an oil version at special vernissage in 2017, stopped next to the work for a very long time. Then one of the guests, formerly top politician of an international fame, said in an unusual, cracked voice: “Michael, we have just seen a real classic. This work will live a long life, and it will warm people’s hearts all over the world. Ever”. My joy was that it was the reaction of a non-Jewish person.
Most of Jewish children have their hearts formed by their Jewish mother, and that’s why Yiddishe Mama song and the term are so universal in our midst. Self-demanding artist is always trying to avoid cliches, and so it took years for Michael to create that image of that love which we all know as Yiddishe Mama. He did it in 2018, and as I understand it, he did put into that work the essence of all Yiddishe Mamas in our extended family, from one generation to another.
Some of his works on family theme are speaking about the very birth of one more Jewish family, including his own, as the two drawings related to our chuppah, Before Chuppah ( 2009) and Chuppah Memories ( 2017).
To me, it is like Michael’s own niggun, just the one on canvas. He has many nigguns of his own, with some of them materialising as artworks. Every good niggun is good because it gets universal, with many people associating with it. I think and hope that it is the case with Michael’s nigguns on canvas, too.
He is known to international art critics as the master of rendering music in visual art in original and fine way. Some of his works on music are actually his works on his family theme, as Family Concert ( 2015) that was created for Divertimento series on classical music, but is staying apart of it precisely because its main theme is the family theme, actually.
The number of the artworks of Michael dedicated to his extended family is 13 which is a gematria for word ahava in Hebrew, love.
With Michael devoting so much of his effort to creating the consistent collection of the works depicting family theme throughout all his career, it is not coincidental that he also created several important works which are related not just to his own family, but are symbolic in to the theme generally.
Michael’s important work on the phenomenon of motherhood is The Next Year in Jerusalem ( 1995). The symbolism of this work is so universal in its message that it had been selected by the artist’s curators to be the part of many of his projects: his famous and unique Forefathers project of contemporary Biblical art, to his In the Mirror of Shoah series, as well as his Daily Miracles collection on Jewish heritage and his Zion Waltz series on the Jewish universe. In a word, this work speaks on so many themes and ‘clicks’ to so many allusions, addresses so many sides of dramas of past and present , both Jewish and non-Jewish ones, that it is regarded as the one of the most widely reaching works of Michael, with a universal message of powerful humanism. Which is all true, and we are especially glad and grateful that this image of Jewish woman protecting and caring for her Jewish child is perceived as a symbol of motherhood in general.
Michael’s another well-known work, Yiddish Son ( 2011) is highly symbolic work speaking on Jewish childhood and boyhood. The work has a special history and provenance. It has been commissioned to Michael by the leadership of the Vilnius Jewish Public Library with the purpose to be the only oil painting in the premises. Being Litvak on his maternal grandmother’s side, Michael took the commission close to his heart and has created one of the most lyrical of his works on Jewish heritage. The universally acclaimed work has been dedicated to Elie Wiesel ( who was an aspiring violinist and came to Auschwitz with his violin) after Elie’s passing away in 2016.
It is not coincidental for Michael’s vision as an artist that he analyses and portrays the biggest calamities and highest joy for our people through the prism of a family, symbolic one.
It has happened in the one of the most powerful re-addressing Holocaust in contemporarily art, Michael’s Faces of Holocaust triptych ( 1991-1992). It is telling, to me, that it was absolutely important for Michael to address the Shoah since the very beginning of his artistic career. Faces of Holocaust is the one of the early Michael’s works. The symbolism of the incurable tragedy of the Shoah conveyed here via the thorn images of three generations of a Jewish family. That boy, the artist himself, is a bearer of the pain of the generations of his parents and grandparents and acute remembrance of our people’s tragedy for good.
And of course, it is important for Jewish artist Michael Rogatchi to show that the domain of joy and gladness lives and thrives in the domain of the family, as well. Not only lives but accelerates via its different generations, strengthens and spreads on. This is the message of another symbolic work on family theme by Michael, Kletzmerim ( Klezmer Players), 2016. There are three generations of the same family of Jewish musicians in this shining and engaging work, as Michael believes strongly in the strength of family in everything that a human being, and in this case, a Jewish person, endures.
In Michael’s understanding, “there is no family without love, and there is no Jewish family without devotion’. This is what we both are deeply grateful about to the Creator in the case of our both lovely, loving, living-does-not-matter-what families which created for us the universe of warmth, gentleness, loving care, caring endurance, joy and laughs, talent and depth, music and literature, arts and culture, books and more books, science and more science, and the strong feeling of belonging to our people, its heritage and its history. The silver thread and the heart cord.
The one of Michael’s works on family theme is called Heart Talk ( 2015). It symbolises that beautiful unity when a man and a woman become the one and set up a family which is our first and last home of all things good.
The number of these works of Michael on the symbolism in family theme is 5 which is a very good, strong and beautiful number corresponding to Joseph in Jewish tradition. Together with previous 13 works dedicated by Michael to his family, it produces 18, the magic and hopeful gemara in our tradition, standing for Chai, alive and living.
It is not without a reason that the new film about Michael, his life and career, to be released in 2021, is named Dream, Memory, Love ( Rogatchi Productions, 2021).
Without a dream, there is no creativity.
Without memory, there is no decency.
Without love, there is no true artist. Especially Jewish one.
More themes in Michael Rogatchi’s art can be seen at the artist’s site.
(C) Inna Rogatchi
From GULAG to Laogai was a very special project of Michael Rogatchi, and a strong contribution into The Rogatchi Foundation Outreach to Humanity series of international cultural educational projects.
As previously – and continuously – regarding his artistic reflections and re-addressing Holocaust, Michael has his artistic word to say also about another terrible crimes against humanity, the Gulag which Michael and his family happened to know first-hand.
It was so terrible reality that although Michael did a few works about it, reflecting on it, showing its mercilessness and rare in life but very truthful black & white reality, the artist does not show them, nor he is dwelling on these works in any way. At the same time, Michael believes that these works should serve as the testimony of the formatting , unprecedented violence against humanity what communism and its cruel system is about.
The history of one particular painting from the works dedicated to Michael Rogatchi’s reflections on his first-hand experience of Gulag is truly unique and reverberating. The work’s title is Year 1953 which is the year of the artist’s birth which happened to be in the Gulag, in the Soviet Far East, in the terrible place known as Valley of Death, after famous writer Varlam Shalamov who had spent 17 years in the Gulag himself. 1953 is also the year of the death of Stalin, the event which was paramount for millions of people.
Michael created that work as chilling memories of the endless columns of the prisoners of Gulag, the columns of the people reduced to nothingness by oppression, violence, humiliation, cold, hunger and forced labour. These columns small Michael was witnessing himself on the streets of the place in Kazakhstan where his family had been exiled after the Stalin’s death, as millions of other Gulag’s prisoners. The artist remembers how he saw those columns of horror even when he was a small boy, on his way to a kindergarten. He remembers as he asked his Mom who was the wife of the Gulag’s prisoner, “Who are those people, Mom?” and heard from his mother: “These people are very misfortunate people, my son. Very, very misfortunate ones”, and his Mom sighed deeply.
Michael created this painting in 1993, as a reminder on his 40th birthday, on those people. Endless columns of them, millions, tens, perhaps hundred million human beings, all of them destroyed psychologically, and many annihilated physically by the Soviet regime in Gulag.
Alexander Solzenitsyn who did return to Russia after many years of his and his family exile, was enthusiastic about that special art work. He wanted very much to have it. Michael understood the desire of famous writer, the author of Gulag Archipelago. He did a special copy of the painting ( as he was not ready to give that very work away), and sent to Solzhenitsyn in Moscow safely, on which Michael was cordially thanked by the writer.
The painting have had a very special place in the artist’s studio ever since. It hanged in the place where Michael’s eyes always were on it while he was working in his studio. It was a very meaningful work for him.
Almost twenty years after the creation of Year 1953, Michael’s wife Inna happened to be in Washington DC, at the famous and unique Laogai Museum, the only museum in the world that tells a horrible story on Laogai, the Chinese Gulag which still be functioning today. Laogai Museum was founded by famous Chinese dissident, Nobel prize nominee, writer and freedom fighter Harry Wu, a good friend of Inna and Michael Rogatchi. Laogai Museum used to have two important sections which were vital for explaining to the visitors the origins of Chinese Gulag, the sections on Holocaust and on Stalinist Gulag.
During her first visit to Laogai Museum, Inna was stunned by seeing a real life photograph from the Chinese Gulag taken in 1970s which was literally the same that Michael’s painting Year 1953. After consultations with Harry Wu , the Laogai Museum and Foundation, and The Rogatchi Foundation, Michael Rogatchi had decided to run this special project on history education by the means of art, together wth Harry Wu and The Laogai Museum and Foundation.
He also decided to donate that essentially important painting for him to Laogai Museum.
Special events and lectured had been set and organised in Washington DC in 2013 as this project was implement, with participation of many leading American public figures and the senior representatives of The Rogatchi Foundation Internationally Advisory Board, including the Members of the European Parliament, and leading politicians. These lectures on humanity as the main tool of surviving in the inhuman conditions of both Gulag and Laogai, conducted by Michael Rogatchi, Harry Wu and many of our colleagues, has become a memorable and very important project on human rights.
In more detail, on this particular project built around Michael Rogatchi’s special art work, it can be read here.
Many of Michael Rogatchi’s artworks reflecting Holocaust has become the main art element in the Inna Rogatchi’s internationally critically acclaimed documentary The Lessons of Survival: Conversations with Simon Wiesenthal ( 2013-2014).
It was a special project for the artist who together with his wife did know famous Nazi-hunter well and was friendly with Wiesenthal for many years. After Wiesenthal’s death in 2005, Michael and Inna Rogatchi are still in friendly relationships with his daughter Paulinka , her husband Gerard and their big family.
Among the art works that become the central art element in the film, there was Michael’s well-known The Way painting which belonged to Simon Wiesenthal and his wife Cyla for many years. After his death, the work is with The Wiesenthal Centre in Lon-Angeles, the USA.
Due to its theme, the work on selecting and placing Michael’s art works as central element of his wife’s film on Simon Wiesenthal has become the one of the Rogatchi couple and their Foundation Outreach to Humanity project.
The project was special and demanding in many senses: it was personal and with wide public reverberation at the same time; it is not easy to create art on such horror as Holocaust; the art needed to be balanced against documentary factological material, it all should be meaningful, delicate, laconic and tasteful. And importantly, serious art adds another dimension to a genre of a documentary film.
The project was very interesting and rewarding, the film is internationally acclaimed and shown world-wide, and many people and art critics has perceived it as ‘art film’ – which was not a purpose in the beginning of its creation, but as it evolves, Michael Rogatchi’s art has set the film’s tone and its atmosphere in a very special way, the way which only deep, qualified and humanistic art can do. Michael’s art works has added a very important dimension of reflections to the documentary’s narrative of the film, thus prolonged and deepened its effect on the viewers.
The new release of The Lessons of Survival is planned for 2022, alongside with Inna Rogatchi’s new book on her and her husband Michael’s friendship, meetings and conversations with Simon Wiesenthal.
Michael Rogatchi’s new work Maestro’s Tune pays the artist’s tribute to Ennio Morricone, great Italian composer who passed away on July 6th 2020. The work is executed in Michael’s signature technique for his works on paper, it is original drawing in oil pastel and Indian ink on unique hand-made Italian cotton paper on which Michael works exclusively for his works on paper. The title of the work is Maestro’s Tune I. Tribute to Ennio Morricone. The work belongs to The Rogatchi Art Collection.
Michael Rogatchi has issued a special tribute to Maestro Ennio Morricone who passed away on the early hours of July 6th, 2020 in Rome. In his tribute, Michael Rogatchi emphasised that Maestro Morricone was a very special person for him, both personally and professionally. Previously, Michael did collaborate with his wife Inna Rogatchi, on creating homages to Maestro Morricone, in special Outreach to Humanity project Amarcord Forever. Homage to Italian Cinema. The project started in 2012, was developed further on in 2017, and will be expanded more.
In the first edition of the project, two of Michael and Inna Rogatchi’s art works are dedicated to Maestro Morricone: Before Sunset. Homage to Ennio Morricone ( 2012) and Don Quichot Dimension. Homage to Ettore Scola and Ennio Morricone ( 2012).
More about Michael and Inna Rogatchi’s tribute to great master of Italian and world music can be read here.
Throughout year 2013, the world commemorated the 50th anniversary of the establishing of Yad Vashem, the world pioneering and leading institution on the Holocaust remembrance. Michael Rogatchi together with his wife Inna Rogatchi and their The Rogatchi Foundation has created and run special art, educational and commemorative project called For the Name and The Place, the phrase from prophet Isaiah which is sculptured in the very high arch, the entrance into the Yad Vashem. The project is the part of The Rogatchi Foundation Outreach to Humanity series of special cultural international projects.
The project included special art film For the Name and the Place containing Michael and Inna Rogatchis’ artworks reflecting Holocaust, lectures and public addresses, series of articles and public events. Please consult Video Presentations page on this site to watch the film.
The art film has been shown widely internationally, and it has been acquired by Yad Vashem for their Film Library and Collection. Since 2013, many international commemorative events on Holocaust had included this film into tehir official programs. The film has been shown also at the Finnish Parliament in 2017.
The commemorative project on this film and related to it presentations continues in many countries.
ROGATCHI’s BLUES Project was conceived in 2010, upon the invitation by the Italian initial hosts and organisers from Milan and Florence. Michael was invited to create and to show in the several Italian cities his personal artistic reflections on Italy which the artist loves and knows well, and where he lives and works often and regularly, for a part of a year.
The idea for the initial stage of the project in Florence was also to challenge artistically recently restored premises of Cioffi-Jacometti Palazzo which is very well-known historical building initially being a residence for the Pope’s treasurer in the XVIII century. The idea to challenge artistically historical premises designed in late Baroque, Rococo style with contemporary figurative art collection was fresh, interesting, and demanding. Inna Rogatchi curated that special exhibition and the project around it.
The title of the project, Rogatchi’s Blues is a play of words, reflecting on the musical theme of many artworks created by Michael Rogatchi for this project, and also reflecting on the fact that all these works were created in shades of ultra-marine colours.
Michael Rogatchi’s reflections on Italy created for this quite special series are different in character from the conventional reactions of many artists to that unparalleled country known as a source of beauty. Michael does not create another landscape however beautiful it might be, not thinking in a category of ‘ tourist postcards’, not copying one of another Italian famous place or image. What he does in the matter of artistic reflections to the country which is highly important for him it is to process its culture, literature, music, its nature and its people in his inner world, and creates the works which his Italy has fed the artist with. They might be on totally independent themes, some of them does bear references to Italy in various way, and all of them are intensely lyrical. There is no surprise that the Rogatchi Blues are covering three major themes: love, music, and Italy’s presence.
The project which has become extremely successful included the core exhibition, Artist’s Lecture, Q & A, Artist’s Talk.The exhibition had been so successful and has caused such huge interest that it has been prolonged by the Italian organisers from initial five months to ten months, unprecedented move for Italy full of art programs and events. The project did run in Florence from May 2011 until April 2012. The Culture Committee of the City Administration of Florence has been happily advertising the exhibition, on their own, alongside with the retrospective of Botticelli. The exhibition and the whole project were highly praised not only in Italy, but also in Germany and Switzerland.
The project also did bear important charitable cause, with conducting a special charitable auction in support of victims Fukusima nuclear plant disaster in Japan, especially children and their families. Michael Rogatchi in typical for him way did donate the whole sum of successful charitable auction sales to the special fund for the purpose in Japan.
There are plans in progress of continuing that interesting and worthy project in other places of Italy, starting from Rome, after 2021.
