The reason An Imagined Museum is such a delightful and thought-provoking show is that it is full of works that catch in memory like a fishbone, in the words of Robert Lowell.
"The real things, the true things", as Maskell puts it with unembarrassed directness, are the painterly particularities, caught in the memory.
Have you ever been caught in a memory you can't entirely recall?
And really, all we can do when we get caught in those vivid memories, these flashbacks to our use, is refocus ourselves on the here and now.
The images feel like memories, caught in a realm between dreams and wakefulness.With their impressionistic brushstrokes, inventive colours and exotic subjects, these paintings invite comparisons with Paul Gauguin, who similarly fled Europe's stuffiness for an island idyll.
He is surprised that his own son, Aaron, affirms his Jewish identity until he recalls the art critic Harold Rosenberg's definition of a New York Jew as someone caught in a particular net of "memory and expectation".
But in practice, they added, no one in recent memory has been caught in the act.
HOW TO Dr. Beilock, the author of "Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To," offers two interventions that can free up working memory in students caught in the grip of test anxiety.
Memory is the onion of the title: 'Peeled, it renews itself; chopped, it brings tears; only during peeling does it speak the truth.' But the onion skin is difficult to read: 'It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or otherwise disguised.' Memory is also caught in the beads of amber washed up on the Baltic shore where, in childhood, Grass and his sister searched for them.
"The Jews of France are caught in a contradiction between protection of memory and the intolerable nature of the massacres committed by the Jewish state".
