Of Love, Loss And Making Art

Frederico Garcia Lorca, the finest Spanish poet of the 20th century, was tortured by the conflict between his public success and his private homosexuality. Leonard Cohen, one of the finest — and surely most cerebral — popular songwriters of the last 50 years, discovered Lorca’s poems in a Montreal bookstore at age 15 and determined then and there to become a poet instead of the lawyer or doctor his parents expected.

   The poem that changed Cohen’s life, “Little Viennese Waltz,â€� and became — in his own translation — the haunting song, “Take This Waltz,â€� is the basis for half of a new, husband-and-wife art show at the Tremaine Gallery in The Hotchkiss School.

   New York City’s East Village of the 1970s with its unique, poetic energy is the theme of the other half.

   Ingrid Freidenbergs and Jack Feder are retired psychologists who live now in Lakeville. Throughout their careers, art — collage for her, photography for him — were outlets for self-expression and exploration.

   Her work developed intensely private themes, many concerning her birth in Latvia during World War II and her family history of displacement; his often the juxtapositions and surprises of urban life.

   It is apparent that Freidenbergs feels the ache of mourning and loss in the Cohen song. Lorca wrote his poem in 1929 after the end of his long love affair with Salvador Dali and a shorter one with the sculptor Emilio Aladren.

   Cohen took 10 years to translate the poem into his own lyrics and music. It was finally released in 1988 on his “I’m Your Manâ€� album as he was dealing with a psychological crisis that would send him to a Zen monastery for a decade to recover from long years of love affairs — including those with Janis Joplin and Patti Smith — along with booze and depression.

   The artist’s 16-by-20-inch collages follow “Take This Waltzâ€� line by line.

   This is both precious and difficult.

   With a line from the song under each piece, you find yourself analyzing the works literally instead of experiencing them as artistic expressions influenced by words.

   The works are both lovely and sometimes melancholy. But like Cohen’s song, great as it is, the pieces do not entirely capture the despair of Lorca’s poem. And they edge toward sentimentality.

    Feder’s photographs,  grouped as “Looking In, Looking Out,â€� are peculiar. Originally shot with an SLR camera using very slow film, the images have been digitized and rendered in prints of uniform, bright color and intensity. Sometimes they feel more like illustrations than photographs, with the attendant loss of immediacy and intimacy. The subjects seem frozen in time; you cannot imagine — as you can with usual street photographs — what the subjects will do next.

   Yet the original shots are very fine.

   It’s as if Feder animated Jane Jacobs’ seminal book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.â€� Here are her New Yorkers observing the life of the street. “East Village Sceneâ€� is so good it almost looks posed: Men are frozen beside and in front of a storefront and first floor of an ordinary, somewhat rundown (as was most of the East Village in the 1970s) building. Are they out of work or merely pausing for a moment in their daily routines?

   “Flag Dayâ€� shows people looking out of windows of a reddish tenement building bedecked with American flags. And a dog observes too, with its paws crossed on the sill in detached dignity. A feline gets its day in “Cat Behind Bars,â€� while “Broken Windowsâ€� tells of urban decay and neglect. These are quite painterly prints; but I wish Feder could have given us the originals with their greater realism and impact.

     The Freidenbergs/Feder show is in the Tremaine

Gallery at The Hotchkiss School through Feb. 3.

Hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m.