A Family Story - Cover

GS_FamilyStory_cover.JPG

Title

A Family Story - Cover

Subject

artist book

Description

My limited edition artist book titled "A Family Story, as Told by Peter Bentley" combines oral storytelling with found photographs, beautiful medium format Kodachrome slides from around 1960 showing the life of an elegant, wealthy family. These objects lay dormant for decades, and then discarded, only for me to find them in a yard sale in 2005. Though at that time I had no way of knowing who the family was, extensive research, particularly of Holocaust-era restitution documents, led me to the Viennese Bloch-Bauer family, wealthy industrialists, well known art collectors, and patrons of Gustav Klimt and Oscar Kokoschka. They escaped during the night of the Anschluss and settled in Vancouver, Canada, where they anglicized their name to Bentley.
In 2009, responding to my kind request, Peter Bentley (né Peter Bloch-Bauer) invited me to his home in Vancouver and invoked memories of the people on the images. I heard stories from the lovely to the peculiar to the horrific. The text in the book is the transcript of Mr. Bentley’s oral storytelling and it shows the freshness and immediacy only the speaking voice can convey allowing the reader to feel that Mr. Bentley talks directly to them.
I felt a lot of connection with the story of this family as I am from Budapest, Hungary and the history of Central Europe which deeply affected my own family is part of my personal history. What truly attracted me to this book project after I learned the historical facts about the Bloch-Bauer family is the many layers of truth that can spring up from the memory through  personal storytelling and remembering the past. This book is a testimony of the complex intertwining of current experience, personal memory, and world historical events.

Creator

Gabriella Solti

Date

2011-2013

Rights

Copyright is held by the creator, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. Material may not be reproduced without permission.

Format

.jpg 101kb

Language

English

Original Format

Artist Book

Physical Dimensions

8.25" x 8.25" closed