Balthasar Klossowski (or Kłossowski) de Rola (February 29, 1908 in Paris – February 18, 2001 in Rossinière, Switzerland), best known as Balthus, was an esteemed but controversial Polish-French modern artist.
Throughout his career, Balthus rejected the usual conventions of the art world. He insisted that his paintings should be seen and not read about, and he resisted any attempts made to build a biographical profile. A telegram sent to the Tate Gallery as it prepared for its 1968 retrospective of his works read: "NO BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS. BEGIN: BALTHUS IS A PAINTER OF WHOM NOTHING IS KNOWN. NOW LET US LOOK AT THE PICTURES. REGARDS. B."[1]
In 1921 Mitsou, a book which included forty drawings by Balthus, was published. It depicted the story of a young boy and his cat, with a preface by Balthus's mentor, Rilke. The theme of the story foreshadowed his lifelong fascination with cats, which resurfaced with his self-portrait as The King of Cats (1935). In 1926 he visited Florence, copying frescos by Piero della Francesca, which inspired another early ambitious work by the young painter: the tempera wall paintings of the Protestant church of the Swiss village of Beatenberg (1927). From 1930 to 1932 he lived in Morocco, was drafted into the Moroccan infantry in Kenitra and Fes, worked as a secretary, and sketched his painting La Caserne (1933).
Balthus, Guitar Lesson, 1934, oil on canvas. The teacher may be a self-portrait.
In 1937 he married Antoinette de Watteville, who was from an old and influential aristocratic family from Bern. He had met her as early as 1924, and she was the model for the aforementioned La Toilette and for a series of portraits. Balthus had two children from this marriage, Thaddeus and Stanislas (Stash) Klossowski, who recently published books on their father, including the letters by their parents.
Early on his work was admired by writers and fellow painters, especially by André Breton and Pablo Picasso. His circle of friends in Paris included the novelists Pierre Jean Jouve, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Joseph Breitbach, Pierre Leyris, Henri Michaux, Michel Leiris and René Char, the photographer Man Ray, the playwright and actor Antonin Artaud, and the painters André Derain, Joan Miró and Alberto Giacometti (one of the most faithful of his friends). In 1948, another friend, Albert Camus, asked him to design the sets and costumes for his play L'Etat de Siège (The State of Siege, directed by Jean-Louis Barrault). Balthus also designed the sets and costumes for Artaud's adaptation for Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cenci (1935), Ugo Betti's Delitto all'isola delle capre (Crime on Goat-Island, 1953) and Barrault's adaptation of Julius Caesar (1959–1960).
In 1977 he moved to Rossinière, Switzerland. That he had a second, Japanese wife Setsuko Ideta whom he married in 1967 and was thirty-five years his junior, simply added to the air of mystery around him (he met her in Japan, during a diplomatic mission also initiated by Malraux). A son, Fumio, was born in 1968 but died two years later.
The photographers and friends Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martine Franck (Cartier-Bresson's wife), both portrayed the painter and his wife and their daughter Harumi (born 1973) in his Grand Chalet in Rossinière in 1999.
Balthus was one of the few living artists to be represented in the Louvre, when his painting The Children (1937) was acquired from the private collection of Pablo Picasso.[3][4]
Prime Ministers and rock stars alike attended the funeral of Balthus. Bono, lead-singer of U2, sang for the hundreds of mourners at the funeral, including the President of France, the Prince Sadruddhin Aga Khan, supermodel Elle Macpherson, and Cartier-Bresson.
Many of his paintings show young girls in an erotic context. Balthus insisted that his work was not erotic but that it recognized the discomforting facts of children's sexuality.
According to most biographies, Balthus denied having any ethnic Jewish heritage, claiming that biographers had confused his mother's true ancestry. In Balthus: A Biography, Nicholas Fox Weber, who is Jewish, attempts to find common ground while interviewing the painter by bringing up a biographical note stating that his mother was Jewish. Balthus replied, "No, sir, that is incorrect," and explained: "One of my father's best friends was a painter called Eugen Spiro, who was the son of a cantor. My mother was also called Spiro, but came apparently from a Protestant family in the south of France. One of the Midi Spiros - one of the ancestors - went to Russia. They were likely of Greek origin. We called Eugen Spiro "Uncle" because of the close relationship, but he was not my real uncle. The Protestant Spiros are still in the south of France."[citation needed]
Balthus continued by saying he did not think it was tasteful to forcefully correct these errors, given his many Jewish friends. Nicholas Fox Weber concludes in his biography that Balthus was lying about this "biographical error," though the exact reasoning behind this was never explained. Weber states that the name "Spiro" is only a Greek given name, though this is incorrect, as the personal name serves equally as a surname.[5] Balthus consistently repeated that if he, in fact, was Jewish, he would have no problem with it. In support of Weber's view, Balthus did make dubious claims about his ancestry before, once claiming he was descended from Lord Byron on his father's side.[citation needed]
According to Weber, Balthus would frequently add to the story of his mother's ancestry, saying that she was also related to the Romanov, Narischkin, and lesser known Raginet families among others, though conceding Balthus never claimed his mother's side was from a straight unmixed lineage. Despite the sensationalism with which Weber says he told these stories and the method in which Weber presents Balthus's claims, Balthus never saw himself as contradictory. The true extent of what Balthus was saying for artistic effect and what he was saying in earnest is unknown as he did not stick seriously to all his claims. Weber never interviewed Pierre Klossowski, the painter's brother, in order to confirm or deny their mother's ancestry. Weber did, however, present a quote by Baladine's lover, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in which Rilke states that the Spiros were descended from one of the richest Sephardic-Spanish families. In a seemingly conclusionary note, Weber writes: "The artist neglected, however, to tell me that, in the most miserable of ironies, Fumio (Balthus's son) suffered from Tay-Sachs disease."[citation needed] Weber holds this up as evidence that Balthus was lying about not having Jewish ancestry, given Tay-Sachs is a heavily Ashkenazic-Jewish disease. This, of course, conflicts with Rilke's report of the Spiros being Sephardic, which Weber later says was a "Rilke embellishment" and also brings up the relevance of the preponderance of Japanese infantile Tay-Sachs, since Balthus's wife was Japanese.
Nude with arms raised, oil on canvas, 1951 by Balthus
He has also influenced the filmmaker Jacques Rivette of the French New Wave. His film Hurlevent (1985) was inspired by Balthus's drawings made at the beginning of the 1930s. As he says in an interview with Valerie Hazette: "Seeing as he's a bit of an eccentric and all that, I am very fond of Balthus (...) I was struck by the fact that Balthus enormously simplified the costumes and stripped away the imagery trappings (...)".
A reproduction of Balthus's Girl at a Window (a painting from 1957) prominently appeared in François Truffaut's film Domicile Conjugal (Bed & Board, 1970). The two principal characters, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his wife Christine (Claude Jade), are arguing. Christine takes down from the wall a small drawing of approximately 25 x 25 cm and gives it to her husband: Christine: "Here, take the small Balthus." Antoine: "Ah, the small Balthus. I offered it to you, it's yours, keep it."
Harold Budd's album The White Arcades features a track titled "Balthus Bemused by Color."
Robert Dassanowsky's book Telegrams from the Metropole: Selected Poems 1980-1998 includes a work titled "The Balthus Poem."
South African novelist Christopher Hope wrote My Chocolate Redeemer around a painting by Balthus, The Golden Days (1944) and which is featured on the book jacket.
Stephen Dobyns' book The Balthus Poems (Atheneum, 1982) describes individual paintings by Balthus in 32 narrative poems.
His widow, Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, heads the Balthus Foundation established in 1998.
Throughout his career, Balthus rejected the usual conventions of the art world. He insisted that his paintings should be seen and not read about, and he resisted any attempts made to build a biographical profile. A telegram sent to the Tate Gallery as it prepared for its 1968 retrospective of his works read: "NO BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS. BEGIN: BALTHUS IS A PAINTER OF WHOM NOTHING IS KNOWN. NOW LET US LOOK AT THE PICTURES. REGARDS. B."[1]
Early years
In his formative years his art was sponsored by Rainer Maria Rilke, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse. His father, Erich Klossowski, a noted art historian who wrote a monograph on Daumier, and his mother Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro (known as the painter Baladine Klossowska) were part of the cultural elite in Paris. Balthus's older brother, Pierre Klossowski, was a philosopher and writer influenced by theology and the works of the Marquis de Sade. Among the visitors and friends of the Klossowskis were famous writers such as André Gide and Jean Cocteau, who found some inspiration for his novel Les Enfants Terribles (1929) in his visits to the family.In 1921 Mitsou, a book which included forty drawings by Balthus, was published. It depicted the story of a young boy and his cat, with a preface by Balthus's mentor, Rilke. The theme of the story foreshadowed his lifelong fascination with cats, which resurfaced with his self-portrait as The King of Cats (1935). In 1926 he visited Florence, copying frescos by Piero della Francesca, which inspired another early ambitious work by the young painter: the tempera wall paintings of the Protestant church of the Swiss village of Beatenberg (1927). From 1930 to 1932 he lived in Morocco, was drafted into the Moroccan infantry in Kenitra and Fes, worked as a secretary, and sketched his painting La Caserne (1933).
A young artist in Paris
Moving in 1933 into his first Paris studio at the Rue de Furstemberg and later another at the Cour de Rohan, Balthus showed no interest in modernist styles such as Cubism. His paintings often depicted pubescent young girls in erotic and voyeuristic poses. One of the most notorious works from his first exhibition in Paris was The Guitar Lesson (1934), which caused controversy due to its sexually explicit depiction of a girl arched on her back over the lap of her female teacher, whose hands are positioned on the girl as for playing the guitar: one near her exposed crotch, another grasping her hair. Other important works from the same exhibition included La Rue (1933), La Toilette de Cathy (1933) and Alice dans le miroir (1933).[2]
Early on his work was admired by writers and fellow painters, especially by André Breton and Pablo Picasso. His circle of friends in Paris included the novelists Pierre Jean Jouve, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Joseph Breitbach, Pierre Leyris, Henri Michaux, Michel Leiris and René Char, the photographer Man Ray, the playwright and actor Antonin Artaud, and the painters André Derain, Joan Miró and Alberto Giacometti (one of the most faithful of his friends). In 1948, another friend, Albert Camus, asked him to design the sets and costumes for his play L'Etat de Siège (The State of Siege, directed by Jean-Louis Barrault). Balthus also designed the sets and costumes for Artaud's adaptation for Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cenci (1935), Ugo Betti's Delitto all'isola delle capre (Crime on Goat-Island, 1953) and Barrault's adaptation of Julius Caesar (1959–1960).
Champrovent to Chassy
In 1940, with the invasion of France by German forces, Balthus fled with his wife Antoinette to Savoy to a farm in Champrovent near Aix-les-Bains, where he began work on two major paintings: Landscape near Champrovent (1942–1945) and The Living Room (1942). In 1942, he escaped from Nazi France to Switzerland, first to Bern and in 1945 to Geneva, where he made friends with the publisher Albert Skira as well as the writer and member of the French Resistance, André Malraux. Balthus returned to France in 1946 and a year later traveled with André Masson to Southern France, meeting figures such as Picasso and Jacques Lacan, who eventually became a collector of his work. With Adolphe Mouron Cassandre in 1950, Balthus designed stage decor for a production of Mozart's opera Così fan tutte in Aix-en-Provence. Three years later he moved into the Chateau de Chassy in the Morvan, living with his niece Frédérique Tison and finishing his large-scale masterpieces La Chambre (The Room 1952, possibly influenced by Pierre Klossowski's novels) and Le Passage du Commerce Saint-André (1954).Later years
As international fame grew with exhibitions in the gallery of Pierre Matisse (1938) and the Museum of Modern Art (1956) in New York City, he cultivated the image of himself as an enigma. In 1964, he moved to Rome where he presided over the Villa de Medici as director (appointed by the French Minister of Culture André Malraux) of the French Academy in Rome, and made friends with the filmmaker Federico Fellini and the painter Renato Guttuso.In 1977 he moved to Rossinière, Switzerland. That he had a second, Japanese wife Setsuko Ideta whom he married in 1967 and was thirty-five years his junior, simply added to the air of mystery around him (he met her in Japan, during a diplomatic mission also initiated by Malraux). A son, Fumio, was born in 1968 but died two years later.
The photographers and friends Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martine Franck (Cartier-Bresson's wife), both portrayed the painter and his wife and their daughter Harumi (born 1973) in his Grand Chalet in Rossinière in 1999.
Balthus was one of the few living artists to be represented in the Louvre, when his painting The Children (1937) was acquired from the private collection of Pablo Picasso.[3][4]
Prime Ministers and rock stars alike attended the funeral of Balthus. Bono, lead-singer of U2, sang for the hundreds of mourners at the funeral, including the President of France, the Prince Sadruddhin Aga Khan, supermodel Elle Macpherson, and Cartier-Bresson.
Style and themes
Balthus's style is primarily classical. His work shows numerous influences, including the writings of Emily Brontë, the writings and photography of Lewis Carroll, and the paintings of Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Simone Martini, Poussin, Jean Etienne Liotard, Joseph Reinhardt, Géricault, Ingres, Goya, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Courbet, Edgar Degas, Félix Vallotton and Paul Cézanne. Although his technique and compositions were inspired by pre-renaissance painters, there also are eerie intimations of contemporary surrealists like de Chirico. Painting the figure at a time when figurative art was largely ignored, he is widely recognised as an important 20th century artist.Many of his paintings show young girls in an erotic context. Balthus insisted that his work was not erotic but that it recognized the discomforting facts of children's sexuality.
Ancestral debates
Balthus's father, Erich, was born to a noble Polish family (szlachta) of the Rola coat of arms, that lived in Prussia. This was evidently the reason for his son Balthus, to add, later, "de Rola" to his family name Klossowski, which was in szlachta tradition (if he had lived in Poland, the arrangement of his last name would have been Rola-Kłossowski or Kłossowski h. Rola.) The artist was very conscious of his Polish ancestry and the Rola arms was embroidered onto many of his kimono, in the style of Japanese kamon.According to most biographies, Balthus denied having any ethnic Jewish heritage, claiming that biographers had confused his mother's true ancestry. In Balthus: A Biography, Nicholas Fox Weber, who is Jewish, attempts to find common ground while interviewing the painter by bringing up a biographical note stating that his mother was Jewish. Balthus replied, "No, sir, that is incorrect," and explained: "One of my father's best friends was a painter called Eugen Spiro, who was the son of a cantor. My mother was also called Spiro, but came apparently from a Protestant family in the south of France. One of the Midi Spiros - one of the ancestors - went to Russia. They were likely of Greek origin. We called Eugen Spiro "Uncle" because of the close relationship, but he was not my real uncle. The Protestant Spiros are still in the south of France."[citation needed]
Balthus continued by saying he did not think it was tasteful to forcefully correct these errors, given his many Jewish friends. Nicholas Fox Weber concludes in his biography that Balthus was lying about this "biographical error," though the exact reasoning behind this was never explained. Weber states that the name "Spiro" is only a Greek given name, though this is incorrect, as the personal name serves equally as a surname.[5] Balthus consistently repeated that if he, in fact, was Jewish, he would have no problem with it. In support of Weber's view, Balthus did make dubious claims about his ancestry before, once claiming he was descended from Lord Byron on his father's side.[citation needed]
According to Weber, Balthus would frequently add to the story of his mother's ancestry, saying that she was also related to the Romanov, Narischkin, and lesser known Raginet families among others, though conceding Balthus never claimed his mother's side was from a straight unmixed lineage. Despite the sensationalism with which Weber says he told these stories and the method in which Weber presents Balthus's claims, Balthus never saw himself as contradictory. The true extent of what Balthus was saying for artistic effect and what he was saying in earnest is unknown as he did not stick seriously to all his claims. Weber never interviewed Pierre Klossowski, the painter's brother, in order to confirm or deny their mother's ancestry. Weber did, however, present a quote by Baladine's lover, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in which Rilke states that the Spiros were descended from one of the richest Sephardic-Spanish families. In a seemingly conclusionary note, Weber writes: "The artist neglected, however, to tell me that, in the most miserable of ironies, Fumio (Balthus's son) suffered from Tay-Sachs disease."[citation needed] Weber holds this up as evidence that Balthus was lying about not having Jewish ancestry, given Tay-Sachs is a heavily Ashkenazic-Jewish disease. This, of course, conflicts with Rilke's report of the Spiros being Sephardic, which Weber later says was a "Rilke embellishment" and also brings up the relevance of the preponderance of Japanese infantile Tay-Sachs, since Balthus's wife was Japanese.
Influence and legacy
His work has strongly influenced several contemporary artists; among them Jan Saudek, Will Barnet, Duane Michals, John Currin, Eli Levin, Emile Chambon, Fred Bandekow, Elena Zolotnitsky, and Hisaji Hara.He has also influenced the filmmaker Jacques Rivette of the French New Wave. His film Hurlevent (1985) was inspired by Balthus's drawings made at the beginning of the 1930s. As he says in an interview with Valerie Hazette: "Seeing as he's a bit of an eccentric and all that, I am very fond of Balthus (...) I was struck by the fact that Balthus enormously simplified the costumes and stripped away the imagery trappings (...)".
A reproduction of Balthus's Girl at a Window (a painting from 1957) prominently appeared in François Truffaut's film Domicile Conjugal (Bed & Board, 1970). The two principal characters, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his wife Christine (Claude Jade), are arguing. Christine takes down from the wall a small drawing of approximately 25 x 25 cm and gives it to her husband: Christine: "Here, take the small Balthus." Antoine: "Ah, the small Balthus. I offered it to you, it's yours, keep it."
Harold Budd's album The White Arcades features a track titled "Balthus Bemused by Color."
Robert Dassanowsky's book Telegrams from the Metropole: Selected Poems 1980-1998 includes a work titled "The Balthus Poem."
South African novelist Christopher Hope wrote My Chocolate Redeemer around a painting by Balthus, The Golden Days (1944) and which is featured on the book jacket.
Stephen Dobyns' book The Balthus Poems (Atheneum, 1982) describes individual paintings by Balthus in 32 narrative poems.
His widow, Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, heads the Balthus Foundation established in 1998.
Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed. He then spent a year living with his mother in Columbia, South Carolina
and thereafter he spent several years living with his aunt Gladys in
Lake Murray, South Carolina, twenty-two miles from Columbia. He
completed high school in Sumter, South Carolina, where he once again lived with his mother.[1]
Recounting this period in his life, he says, "In the place where I was a
child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't
know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a
situation different than the one that I was in." He began drawing when
he was three and has continued doing art ever since.[2]
Johns studied at the University of South Carolina from 1947 to 1948, a total of three semesters.[3] He then moved to New York City and studied briefly at the Parsons School of Design in 1949.[3] In 1952 and 1953 he was stationed in Sendai, Japan during the Korean War.[3]
In 1954, after returning to New York, Johns met Robert Rauschenberg and they became long term lovers.[4][5][6] In the same period he was strongly influenced by the gay couple Merce Cunningham (a choreographer) and John Cage (a composer).[7][8] Working together they explored the contemporary art scene, and began developing their ideas on art. In 1958, gallery owner Leo Castelli discovered Johns while visiting Rauschenberg's studio.[3] Castelli gave him his first solo show. It was here that Alfred Barr, the founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, purchased four works from his exhibition.[2] In 1963, Johns and Cage founded Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, now known as Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York City.
Johns currently lives in Sharon, Connecticut and the Island of Saint Martin.[9] He first began visiting St. Martin in the late 1960s and bought the property here in 1972. The architect Philip Johnson is the principal designer of his home, a long, white, rectangular structure divided into three distinct sections.[10]
Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers. Johns' treatment of the surface is often lush and painterly; he is famous for incorporating such media as encaustic and plaster relief in his paintings. Johns played with and presented opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp (who was associated with the Dada movement). Johns also produces intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs.
Johns' breakthrough move, which was to inform much later work by others, was to appropriate popular iconography for painting, thus allowing a set of familiar associations to answer the need for subject. Though the Abstract Expressionists disdained subject matter, it could be argued that in the end, they had simply changed subjects. Johns neutralized the subject, so that something like a pure painted surface could declare itself. For twenty years after Johns painted Flag, the surface could suffice – for example, in Andy Warhol's silkscreens, or in Robert Irwin's illuminated ambient works.
Abstract Expressionist figures like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning subscribed to the concept of a macho "artist hero," and their paintings are indexical in that they stand effectively as a signature on canvas. In contrast, Neo-Dadaists like Johns and Rauschenberg seemed preoccupied with a lessening of the reliance of their art on indexical qualities, seeking instead to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols. Some have interpreted this as a rejection of the hallowed individualism of the Abstract Expressionists. Their works also imply symbols existing outside of any referential context. Johns' Flag, for instance, is primarily a visual object, divorced from its symbolic connotations and reduced to something in-itself.
Already in 1980 the Whitney Museum of American Art spent $1 million for Three Flags (1958), then the highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist.[10] In 2006, private collectors Anne and Kenneth Griffin (founder of the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel LLC) bought Johns' False Start (1959) from David Geffen[20] for $80 million, making it the most expensive painting by a living artist.[10]
Between 1957 and 1999, Johns had sold his work through Leo Castelli.[22] Since 2000, he has been represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York City, and in the spring 2008, a ten-year retrospective of Johns' drawings was mounted there.
Johns studied at the University of South Carolina from 1947 to 1948, a total of three semesters.[3] He then moved to New York City and studied briefly at the Parsons School of Design in 1949.[3] In 1952 and 1953 he was stationed in Sendai, Japan during the Korean War.[3]
In 1954, after returning to New York, Johns met Robert Rauschenberg and they became long term lovers.[4][5][6] In the same period he was strongly influenced by the gay couple Merce Cunningham (a choreographer) and John Cage (a composer).[7][8] Working together they explored the contemporary art scene, and began developing their ideas on art. In 1958, gallery owner Leo Castelli discovered Johns while visiting Rauschenberg's studio.[3] Castelli gave him his first solo show. It was here that Alfred Barr, the founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, purchased four works from his exhibition.[2] In 1963, Johns and Cage founded Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, now known as Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York City.
Johns currently lives in Sharon, Connecticut and the Island of Saint Martin.[9] He first began visiting St. Martin in the late 1960s and bought the property here in 1972. The architect Philip Johnson is the principal designer of his home, a long, white, rectangular structure divided into three distinct sections.[10]
Work
Johns is best known for his painting Flag (1954–55), which he painted after having a dream of the American flag. His work is often described as a Neo-Dadaist, as opposed to pop art, even though his subject matter often includes images and objects from popular culture.[citation needed] Still, many compilations on pop art include Jasper Johns as a pop artist because of his artistic use of classical iconography.Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers. Johns' treatment of the surface is often lush and painterly; he is famous for incorporating such media as encaustic and plaster relief in his paintings. Johns played with and presented opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp (who was associated with the Dada movement). Johns also produces intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs.
Johns' breakthrough move, which was to inform much later work by others, was to appropriate popular iconography for painting, thus allowing a set of familiar associations to answer the need for subject. Though the Abstract Expressionists disdained subject matter, it could be argued that in the end, they had simply changed subjects. Johns neutralized the subject, so that something like a pure painted surface could declare itself. For twenty years after Johns painted Flag, the surface could suffice – for example, in Andy Warhol's silkscreens, or in Robert Irwin's illuminated ambient works.
Abstract Expressionist figures like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning subscribed to the concept of a macho "artist hero," and their paintings are indexical in that they stand effectively as a signature on canvas. In contrast, Neo-Dadaists like Johns and Rauschenberg seemed preoccupied with a lessening of the reliance of their art on indexical qualities, seeking instead to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols. Some have interpreted this as a rejection of the hallowed individualism of the Abstract Expressionists. Their works also imply symbols existing outside of any referential context. Johns' Flag, for instance, is primarily a visual object, divorced from its symbolic connotations and reduced to something in-itself.
Commissions
In 1964, architect Philip Johnson, a friend, commissioned Johns to make a piece for what is now the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center.[11] After presiding over the theatre’s lobby for 35 years, Numbers (1964), an enormous 9-foot-by-7-foot grid of numerals, was supposed to be sold by the center for a reported $15m. Art historians consider Numbers a historically important work in part because it is the largest of the artist's numbers motifs and the only one where each unit is on a separate stretcher, fashioned from a material called Sculpmetal, which was chosen by the artist for its durability.[12] Responding to widespread criticism, the board of Lincoln Center had to drop its selling plans.[13]Collections
In 1998, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought Johns' White Flag. While the Met would not disclose how much was paid, "experts estimate [the painting's] value at more than $20 million."[14] The National Gallery of Art acquired about 1,700 of Johns' proofs in 2007. This made the Gallery home to the largest number of Johns' works held by a single institution. The exhibition showed works from many points in Johns' career, including recent proofs of his prints. [15] The Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina, has several of his pieces in their permanent collection.Prints
Since 1960 Johns has worked closely with Universal Limited Art Editions, Inc (ULAE) in a variety of printmaking techniques to investigate and develop existing compositions.[16] Initially, lithography suited Johns and enabled him to create print versions of iconic depiction of flags, maps, and targets that filled his paintings. In 1971, Johns became the first artist at ULAE to use the handfed offset lithographic press, resulting in Decoy - an image realized in printmaking before it was made in drawing or painting. However, apart from the Lead Reliefs series of 1969, he has concentrated his efforts on lithography at Gemini G.E.L.[17] In 1976, Johns partnered with writer Samuel Beckett to create Foirades/Fizzles; the book includes 33 etchings, which revisit an earlier work by Johns and five text fragments by Beckett. He has also worked with Atelier Crommelynck in Paris, in association with Petersburg Press of London and New York; and Simca Print Artists in New York.[18]Recognition
Johns was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984.[19] In 1990, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. On February 15, 2011 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, becoming the first painter or sculptor to receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom since Alexander Calder in 1977.Art market
Since the 1980s, Johns produces paintings at four to five a year, sometimes not at all during a year. His large scale paintings are much favored by collectors and because of their rarity, it is known that Johns' works are extremely difficult to acquire. His works from the mid to late 1950s, typically viewed as his period of rebellion against Abstract Expressionism, remain his most sought after.[20] Skate’s Art Market Research (Skate Press, Ltd.), a New York based advisory firm servicing private and institutional investors in the art market, has ranked Jasper Johns as the 30th most valuable artist.[21] The firm’s index of the 1,000 most valuable works of art sold at auction – Skate’s Top 1000 – contains 7 works by Johns.Already in 1980 the Whitney Museum of American Art spent $1 million for Three Flags (1958), then the highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist.[10] In 2006, private collectors Anne and Kenneth Griffin (founder of the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel LLC) bought Johns' False Start (1959) from David Geffen[20] for $80 million, making it the most expensive painting by a living artist.[10]
Between 1957 and 1999, Johns had sold his work through Leo Castelli.[22] Since 2000, he has been represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York City, and in the spring 2008, a ten-year retrospective of Johns' drawings was mounted there.
Mo Yan was born in 1955, in the northeast Gaomi township in Shandong province to a family of farmers. He left school during the Cultural Revolution to work in a factory that produced oil. After the Cultural Revolution he joined the People's Liberation Army,[6] and began writing while he was still a soldier, in 1981. Three years later, he was given a teaching position at the Department of Literature in the Army's Cultural Academy. In 1991, he got a master's degree in Literature from Beijing Normal University.[6]
Mo Yan began his career as a writer in the reform and opening up period, publishing dozens of short stories and novels in Chinese. His first novel was Falling Rain on a Spring Night, published in 1981. Several of his novels were translated into English by Howard Goldblatt, professor of East Asian languages and literatures at the University of Notre Dame.[8]
Mo Yan's Red Sorghum is a non-chronological novel about the generations of a Shandong family between 1923 and 1976. The author deals with upheavals in Chinese history such as the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Communist revolution, and the Cultural Revolution, but in an unconventional way; for example by portraying the suffering of the invading Japanese soldiers.[1] His second novel, The Garlic Ballads, is based on a true story of when the farmers of Gaomi Township rioted against a government that would not buy its crops. The Republic of Wine is a satire around gastronomy and alcohol, which uses cannibalism as a metaphor for Chinese self-destruction, following Lu Xun.[1] Big Breasts & Wide Hips deals with female bodies, from a grandmother whose breasts are shattered by Japanese bullets, to a festival where one of the child characters, Shangguan Jintong, blesses each woman of his town by stroking her breasts.[9] The book was controversial in China because some leftist critics regarded Big Breasts's portrayal of Communist soldiers as lazy, indiscriminate slaughterers, as an endorsement of the Kuomintang's role in fighting the Anti-Japanese War.[9]
Extremely prolific, Mo Yan wrote his latest novel, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out in only 42 days.[3] He composed the more than 500,000 characters contained in the original manuscript on traditional Chinese paper using only ink and a writing brush. He prefers writing his novels by hand rather than by using a pinyin input method, because the latter method "limits your vocabulary".[3]
Mo Yan's writing is characterised by the blurring of distinction between "past and present, dead and living, as well as good and bad". His female characters often fail to observe traditional Chinese gender roles, as the mother in the Shangguan family in Red Sorghum fails to bear her husband sons, and is instead an adulterer, becoming pregnant with girls by a Swedish missionary and a Japanese soldier, among others. Male power is portrayed cynically in Big Breasts & Full Hips, and there is only one male hero in the novel.[9]
The Chinese writer Ma Jian has deplored the lack of solidarity and commitment of Mo Yan vis-a-vis other Chinese writers and intellectuals who were punished and/or detained despite the freedom of expression recognized by the Constitution.[clarification needed][13]
Mo Yan has been criticised for hand-copying Mao Zedong's Yan'an Talks on Literature and Art in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the speech.[14]
Work
"Mo Yan"—meaning "don't speak" in Chinese—is a pen name.[7] In an interview with Jim Leach, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he explains that name comes from a warning from his father and mother not to speak his mind while outside, because of China's revolutionary political situation from the 1950s, when he grew up.[3]Mo Yan began his career as a writer in the reform and opening up period, publishing dozens of short stories and novels in Chinese. His first novel was Falling Rain on a Spring Night, published in 1981. Several of his novels were translated into English by Howard Goldblatt, professor of East Asian languages and literatures at the University of Notre Dame.[8]
Mo Yan's Red Sorghum is a non-chronological novel about the generations of a Shandong family between 1923 and 1976. The author deals with upheavals in Chinese history such as the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Communist revolution, and the Cultural Revolution, but in an unconventional way; for example by portraying the suffering of the invading Japanese soldiers.[1] His second novel, The Garlic Ballads, is based on a true story of when the farmers of Gaomi Township rioted against a government that would not buy its crops. The Republic of Wine is a satire around gastronomy and alcohol, which uses cannibalism as a metaphor for Chinese self-destruction, following Lu Xun.[1] Big Breasts & Wide Hips deals with female bodies, from a grandmother whose breasts are shattered by Japanese bullets, to a festival where one of the child characters, Shangguan Jintong, blesses each woman of his town by stroking her breasts.[9] The book was controversial in China because some leftist critics regarded Big Breasts's portrayal of Communist soldiers as lazy, indiscriminate slaughterers, as an endorsement of the Kuomintang's role in fighting the Anti-Japanese War.[9]
Extremely prolific, Mo Yan wrote his latest novel, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out in only 42 days.[3] He composed the more than 500,000 characters contained in the original manuscript on traditional Chinese paper using only ink and a writing brush. He prefers writing his novels by hand rather than by using a pinyin input method, because the latter method "limits your vocabulary".[3]
Style
Mo Yan's works are predominantly social commentary, and he is strongly influenced by the social realism of Lu Xun and the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez. In terms of traditional Chinese literature, he is deeply inspired by the folklore-based classical epic novel Water Margin.[10] He also cites Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber as formative influences.[3] A major theme in Mo Yan's works is the constancy of human greed and corruption, despite the influence of ideology.[1] Using dazzling, complex, and often graphically violent images, he sets many of his stories near his hometown, Northeast Gaomi Township in Shandong province. Mo Yan says he realised that he could make "his family, people I'm familiar with, the villagers..." his characters after reading William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.[3]Mo Yan's writing is characterised by the blurring of distinction between "past and present, dead and living, as well as good and bad". His female characters often fail to observe traditional Chinese gender roles, as the mother in the Shangguan family in Red Sorghum fails to bear her husband sons, and is instead an adulterer, becoming pregnant with girls by a Swedish missionary and a Japanese soldier, among others. Male power is portrayed cynically in Big Breasts & Full Hips, and there is only one male hero in the novel.[9]
Relationship with other writers
Mo Yan strongly advocates that Chinese authors read foreign authors and world literature.[11] At a speech to open the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, he discussed Goethe's idea of "world literature", stating that "literature can overcome the barriers that separate countries and nations".[12]The Chinese writer Ma Jian has deplored the lack of solidarity and commitment of Mo Yan vis-a-vis other Chinese writers and intellectuals who were punished and/or detained despite the freedom of expression recognized by the Constitution.[clarification needed][13]
Mo Yan has been criticised for hand-copying Mao Zedong's Yan'an Talks on Literature and Art in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the speech.[14]
Soros was born in Budapest, Hungary to a nonobservant Jewish family. His mother Elizabeth (also known as Erzsebet) came from a family that owned a thriving silk shop. His father Tivadar (also known as Teodoro) was a lawyer[10] and had been a prisoner of war during and after World War I until he escaped from Russia and rejoined his family in Budapest.[11][12] The two married in 1924. Tivadar was an Esperantist writer and taught George to speak Esperanto from birth.[13] Soros later said that he grew up in a Jewish home and that his parents were cautious with their religious roots.[14] Soros was thirteen years old in March 1944 when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary.[15] Soros took a job with the Jewish Council, which had been established during the Nazi occupation of Hungary. Soros later described this time to writer Michael Lewis:
Soros emigrated to England in 1947 and, as an impoverished student, lived with his uncle, an Orthodox Jew. His uncle paid his living expenses while he attended the London School of Economics, where he received a Bachelor of Science in 1952.[18] While a student of the philosopher Karl Popper, Soros worked as a railway porter and as a waiter. A university tutor requested aid for Soros, and he received GB£40 from a Religious Society of Friends (Quaker) charity.[19] In a discussion at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council in 2006, Alvin Shuster, former foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times, asked Soros, "How does one go from an immigrant to a financier? ... When did you realize that you knew how to make money?" Soros replied, "Well, I had a variety of jobs and I ended up selling fancy goods on the sea side, souvenir shops, and I thought, that's really not what I was cut out to do. So, I wrote to every managing director in every merchant bank in London, got just one or two replies, and eventually that's how I got a job in a merchant bank."[20] That job was an entry-level position in Singer & Friedlander.
Soros' experience from 1963 to 1973 as a vice-president at Arnhold and S. Bleichroderl resulted in little enthusiasm for the job and a desire to assert himself as an investor to make reflexivity profitable. In 1967, First Eagle Funds created an opportunity for Soros to run an offshore investment fund as well as the Double Eagle hedge fund in 1969.[21] In 1973, due to regulatory restrictions limiting his ability to run the funds, Soros resigned from his First Eagle funds. He then established the Quantum Fund in partnership with Jim Rogers, hoping to earn $500,000 after five years to support his ambitions as a writer and philosopher.[21]
In 1970, Soros founded Soros Fund Management and became its chairman. Among those who held senior positions there at various times were Jim Rogers, Stanley Druckenmiller, Mark Schwartz, Keith Anderson, and Soros' two sons.[22][23][24]
In August 2010, Soros bought a 4 per cent stake in the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) for about $35 million.[25] In July 2011, Soros announced that he had returned funds from outside investors' money (valued at $1 billion) and instead invested funds from his $24.5 billion family fortune due to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure rules.[26]
Finally, the UK withdrew from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, devaluing the pound, earning Soros an estimated $1.1 billion. He was dubbed "the man who broke the Bank of England".[27] In 1997, the UK Treasury estimated the cost of Black Wednesday at £3.4 billion.
On Monday, October 26, 1992, The Times quoted Soros as saying: "Our total position by Black Wednesday had to be worth almost $10 billion. We planned to sell more than that. In fact, when Norman Lamont said just before the devaluation that he would borrow nearly $15 billion to defend sterling, we were amused because that was about how much we wanted to sell."
Stanley Druckenmiller, who traded under Soros, originally saw the weakness in the pound. "Soros' contribution was pushing him to take a gigantic position."[28][29]
In 1997, during the Asian financial crisis, the Prime Minister of Malaysia Mahathir bin Mohamad accused Soros of using the wealth under his control to punish the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for welcoming Myanmar as a member. Following on a history of antisemitic remarks, Mahathir made specific reference to Soros' Jewish background ("It is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge"[30]) and implied Soros was orchestrating the crash as part of a larger Jewish conspiracy. Nine years later, in 2006, Mahathir met with Soros and afterwards stated that he accepted that Soros had not been responsible for the crisis.[31] In 1998's The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered Soros explained his role in the crisis as follows:
Economist Paul Krugman is critical of Soros' effect on financial markets.
The advisor reported to Soros that Pébereau's plan was ambiguous and included an implausible takeover plan (it would indeed fail). On that advice, and without ever meeting the financier, Soros decided against participating.[36] He did, however, move forward with his strategy of accumulating shares in four French companies: Société Générale, as well as Suez, Paribas and the Compagnie Générale d'Électricité.
In 1989, the Commission des Opérations de Bourse (the French stock exchange regulatory authority) conducted an investigation of whether Soros' transaction in Société Générale should be considered insider trading. Soros had received no information from the Société Générale, and had no insider knowledge of the business, but he did possess knowledge that a group of investors was planning a takeover attempt. The COB concluded that the statutes, regulations and case law relating to insider trading did not clearly establish that a crime had occurred, and that no charges should be brought against Soros.[37]
Several years later, a Paris-based prosecutor reopened the case against Soros and two other French businessmen, disregarding the COB's findings. This resulted in Soros' 2005 conviction for insider trading by the Court of Appeals (he was the only one of the three to receive a conviction). The French Supreme Court confirmed the conviction on June 14, 2006, but reduced the penalty to the minimum.[38]
Punitive damages were not sought because of the delay in bringing the case to trial. Soros denied any wrongdoing, saying news of the takeover was public knowledge[39] and it was documented that his intent to acquire shares of the company predated his own awareness of the takeover.[38]
His insider trading conviction was upheld by the highest court in France on June 14, 2006.[38] In December 2006, he appealed to the European Court of Human Rights on various grounds including that the 14-year delay in bringing the case to trial precluded a fair hearing.[40] On the basis of Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights, stating that no person may be punished for an act that was not a criminal offense at the time that it was committed, the Court agreed to hear the appeal.[41] In October 2011, the court rejected his appeal in a 4–3 decision, saying that Soros had been aware of the risk of breaking insider trading laws.[42]
In 2008, Soros' name was associated with AS Roma, an Italian association football team, but the club was not sold. Soros was also a financial backer of Washington Soccer L.P., the group that owned the operating rights to Major League Soccer club D.C. United when the league was founded in 1995, but the group lost these rights in 2000.[44]
On August 21, 2012, the BBC reported SEC filings showing Soros acquired a roughly 1.9% stake in English football club Manchester United through the purchase of 3.1 million of the club's Class-A shares.[45]
George Soros (left) and James H. Billington.
Soros has been active as a philanthropist since the 1970s, when he began providing funds to help black students attend the University of Cape Town in apartheid South Africa,[46] and began funding dissident movements behind the iron curtain.
Soros' philanthropic funding includes efforts to promote non-violent democratization in the post-Soviet states. These efforts, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, occur primarily through the Open Society Institute (OSI) and national Soros Foundations, which sometimes go under other names (such as the Stefan Batory Foundation in Poland). As of 2003, PBS estimated that he had given away a total of $4 billion.[39] The OSI says it has spent about $500 million annually in recent years.
In 2003, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker wrote in the foreword of Soros' book The Alchemy of Finance:
Other notable projects have included aid to scientists and universities throughout Central and Eastern Europe, help to civilians during the siege of Sarajevo, and Transparency International. Soros also pledged an endowment of €420 million to the Central European University (CEU). The Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and his microfinance bank Grameen Bank received support from the OSI.
According to National Review[49] the Open Society Institute gave $20,000 in September 2002 to the Defense Committee of Lynne Stewart, the lawyer who has defended alleged terrorists in court and was sentenced to 2⅓ years in prison for "providing material support for a terrorist conspiracy" via a press conference for a client. An OSI spokeswoman said "it appeared to us at that time that there was a right-to-counsel issue worthy of our support."
In September 2006 Soros pledged $50 million to the Millennium Promise, led by economist Jeffrey Sachs to provide educational, agricultural, and medical aid to help villages in Africa enduring poverty. The New York Times termed this endeavor a "departure" for Soros whose philanthropic focus had been on fostering democracy and good government, but Soros noted that most poverty resulted from bad governance.[50]
He received honorary doctoral degrees from the New School for Social Research (New York), the University of Oxford in 1980, the Corvinus University of Budapest, and Yale University in 1991. Soros also received the Yale International Center for Finance Award from the Yale School of Management in 2000 as well as the Laurea Honoris Causa, the highest honor of the University of Bologna in 1995.
Soros played a role in the peaceful transition from communism to capitalism in Hungary (1984–89)[7] and provided Europe's largest-ever higher education endowment to Central European University in Budapest.[51] Later, the Open Society Institute's programs in Georgia were considered by Russian and Western observers to have been crucial in the success of the Rose Revolution.
In the United States, he donated large sums of money in an effort to defeat President George W. Bush's bid for re-election in 2004. In 2010, he donated $1 million in support of Proposition 19, which would have legalized marijuana in the state of California. He was an initial donor to the Center for American Progress, and he continues to support the organization through the Open Society Foundations. The Open Society Institute has active programs in more than 60 countries around the world with total expenditures currently averaging approximately $600 million a year.[52] Between 1979 and 2011, Soros gave away over $8 billion to human rights, public health, and education causes.[1]
Soros was not a large donor to US political causes until the 2004 presidential election, but according to the Center for Responsive Politics, during the 2003–2004 election cycle, Soros donated $23,581,000 to various 527 groups dedicated to defeating President Bush. A 527 group is a type of American tax-exempt organization named after a section of the United States tax code, 26 U.S.C. § 527.
After Bush's re-election, Soros and other donors backed a new political fundraising group called Democracy Alliance, which supports progressive causes and the formation of a stronger progressive infrastructure in America.[58]
In August 2009, Soros donated $35 million to the state of New York to be ear-marked for under-privileged children and given to parents who had benefit cards at the rate of $200 per child aged 3 through 17, with no limit as to the number of children that qualified. An additional $140 million was put into the fund by the state of New York from money they had received from the 2009 federal recovery act.[19]
On October 26, 2010, Soros donated $1 million, the largest donation in the campaign, to the Drug Policy Alliance to fund Proposition 19, that would have legalized marijuana in the state of California if it had passed in the November 2, 2010 elections.[59]
In October 2011 a Reuters story titled "Soros: not a funder of Wall Street protests" was published after several commentators pointed out errors in an earlier Reuters story headlined "Who's behind the Wall St. protests?"with a lede stating that the Occupy Wall Street movement "may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world's richest men [Soros]". Reuters' follow-up article also reported a Soros spokesperson and Adbusters' co-founder Kalle Lasn both saying that Adbusters – which was the catalyst for the first Occupy Wall Street protests – had never received any contributions from Soros, contrary to Reuters' earlier story which reported that "indirect financial links" existed between the two as late as 2010.[60][61]
On September 27, 2012, Soros announced that he was donating $1 million to the "SuperPAC" Priorities USA Action.[62]
Former Georgian Foreign Minister Salomé Zourabichvili wrote that institutions like the Soros Foundation were the cradle of democratisation and that all the NGOs which gravitated around the Soros Foundation undeniably carried the revolution. She opines that after the revolution the Soros Foundation and the NGOs were integrated into power.[68]
Some Soros-backed pro-democracy initiatives have been banned in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.[69] Ercis Kurtulus, head of the Social Transparency Movement Association (TSHD) in Turkey, said in an interview that "Soros carried out his will in Ukraine and Georgia by using these NGOs ... Last year Russia passed a special law prohibiting NGOs from taking money from foreigners. I think this should be banned in Turkey as well."[70] In 1997, Soros had to close his foundation in Belarus after it was fined $3 million by the government for "tax and currency violations". According to The New York Times, the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko has been widely criticized in the West and in Russia for his efforts to control the Belarus Soros Foundation and other independent NGOs and to suppress civil and human rights. Soros called the fines part of a campaign to "destroy independent society".[71]
In June 2009, Soros donated $100m to Central Europe and Eastern Europe to counter the impact of the economic crisis on the poor, voluntary groups and non-government organisations.[72]
In October 2010, Soros donated $1 million to support California's Proposition 19.[77]
According to remarks in an interview in October 2009, it is Soros' opinion that marijuana is less addictive but not appropriate for use by children and students. He himself has not used marijuana for years.[78]
He has stated that his own financial success has been attributable to the edge accorded by his understanding of the action of the reflexive effect.
Reflexivity is based on three main ideas:[21]
This was further amplified by public policy. In the US, home loans were guaranteed by the Federal government. Many national governments saw home ownership as a positive outcome and so introduced grants for first-time home buyers and other financial subsidies, such as the exemption of a primary residence from capital gains taxation. These further encouraged house purchases, leading to further price rises and further relaxation of lending standards.
The concept of reflexivity attempts to explain why markets moving from one equilibrium state to another tend to overshoot or undershoot.
Victor Niederhoffer said of Soros: "Most of all, George believed even then[when?] in a mixed economy, one with a strong central international government to correct for the excesses of self-interest."
Soros claims to draw a distinction between being a participant in the market and working to change the rules that market participants must follow. According to Mahathir bin Mohamed, Prime Minister of Malaysia from July 1981 to October 2003, Soros – as the hedge fund chief of Quantum – may have been partially responsible for the economic crash in 1997 of East Asian markets when the Thai currency relinquished its peg to the US dollar. According to Mahathir, in the three years leading to the crash, Soros invested in short-term speculative investment in East Asian stock markets and real estate, then divested with "indecent haste" at the first signs of currency devaluation.[83] Soros replied, saying that Mahathir was using him "as a scapegoat for his own mistakes", that Mahathir's promises to ban currency trading (which Malaysian finance officials hastily retracted) were "a recipe for disaster" and that Mahathir "is a menace to his own country".[84]
In an interview regarding the late-2000s recession, Soros referred to it as the most serious crisis since the 1930s. According to Soros, market fundamentalism with its assumption that markets will correct themselves with no need for government intervention in financial affairs has been "some kind of an ideological excess". In Soros' view, the markets' moods – a "mood" of the markets being a prevailing bias or optimism/pessimism with which the markets look at reality – "actually can reinforce themselves so that there are these initially self-reinforcing but eventually unsustainable and self-defeating boom/bust sequences or bubbles".[85]
In reaction to the late-2000s recession, he founded the Institute for New Economic Thinking in October 2009. This is a think tank composed of international economic, business and financial experts, mandated to investigate radical new approaches to organising the international economic and financial system.
Soros has been married and divorced twice:
In 1960, Soros married Annaliese Witschak. Annaliese was an ethnic German immigrant from Germany who had been orphaned during the war. Although she was not Jewish, she was well liked by Soros' parents as she had also experienced the deprivations and dislocation brought about by World War II.[93] They divorced in 1983. They had three children:
Soros has one elder brother, Paul Soros, who is a private investor and philanthropist. He is also an engineer who headed Soros Associates and established the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for Young Americans.[100][101] He is married to Daisy (née Schlenger), who like her husband, was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant.[102] They have two sons Peter and Jeffrey.[103] Peter Soros was married to the former Flora Fraser – a daughter of Lady Antonia Fraser and the late Sir Hugh Fraser and a stepdaughter of the late 2005 Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter. Fraser and Soros separated in 2009.[104]
The Jewish Council asked the little kids to hand out the deportation notices. I was told to go to the Jewish Council. And there I was given these small slips of paper ... It said report to the rabbi seminary at 9 am ... And I was given this list of names. I took this piece of paper to my father. He instantly recognized it. This was a list of Hungarian Jewish lawyers. He said, "You deliver the slips of paper and tell the people that if they report they will be deported."[16]Later that year, at age 14, Soros lived with and posed as the godson of an employee of the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture. The official was at one point ordered to inventory the remaining contents of the estate of a wealthy Jewish family that had fled the country; rather than leave the young Soros alone in the city, the official brought him along.[17] The next year, 1945, Soros survived the Battle of Budapest, in which Soviet and German forces fought house-to-house through the city.
Soros emigrated to England in 1947 and, as an impoverished student, lived with his uncle, an Orthodox Jew. His uncle paid his living expenses while he attended the London School of Economics, where he received a Bachelor of Science in 1952.[18] While a student of the philosopher Karl Popper, Soros worked as a railway porter and as a waiter. A university tutor requested aid for Soros, and he received GB£40 from a Religious Society of Friends (Quaker) charity.[19] In a discussion at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council in 2006, Alvin Shuster, former foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times, asked Soros, "How does one go from an immigrant to a financier? ... When did you realize that you knew how to make money?" Soros replied, "Well, I had a variety of jobs and I ended up selling fancy goods on the sea side, souvenir shops, and I thought, that's really not what I was cut out to do. So, I wrote to every managing director in every merchant bank in London, got just one or two replies, and eventually that's how I got a job in a merchant bank."[20] That job was an entry-level position in Singer & Friedlander.
Career
In 1956 Soros moved to New York City working as an arbitrage trader for F. M. Mayer (1956–59) and as an analyst for Wertheim & Co. (1959–63). During this period, Soros developed the theory of reflexivity based on the ideas of Karl Popper. Reflexivity posited that the valuation of any market produces a procyclical "virtuous or vicious" circle that further affects the market.[21]Soros' experience from 1963 to 1973 as a vice-president at Arnhold and S. Bleichroderl resulted in little enthusiasm for the job and a desire to assert himself as an investor to make reflexivity profitable. In 1967, First Eagle Funds created an opportunity for Soros to run an offshore investment fund as well as the Double Eagle hedge fund in 1969.[21] In 1973, due to regulatory restrictions limiting his ability to run the funds, Soros resigned from his First Eagle funds. He then established the Quantum Fund in partnership with Jim Rogers, hoping to earn $500,000 after five years to support his ambitions as a writer and philosopher.[21]
In 1970, Soros founded Soros Fund Management and became its chairman. Among those who held senior positions there at various times were Jim Rogers, Stanley Druckenmiller, Mark Schwartz, Keith Anderson, and Soros' two sons.[22][23][24]
In August 2010, Soros bought a 4 per cent stake in the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) for about $35 million.[25] In July 2011, Soros announced that he had returned funds from outside investors' money (valued at $1 billion) and instead invested funds from his $24.5 billion family fortune due to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure rules.[26]
Currency speculation
On September 16, 1992, Black Wednesday, Soros' fund sold short more than $10 billion in pounds,[22] profiting from the UK government's reluctance to either raise its interest rates to levels comparable to those of other European Exchange Rate Mechanism countries or to float its currency.Finally, the UK withdrew from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, devaluing the pound, earning Soros an estimated $1.1 billion. He was dubbed "the man who broke the Bank of England".[27] In 1997, the UK Treasury estimated the cost of Black Wednesday at £3.4 billion.
On Monday, October 26, 1992, The Times quoted Soros as saying: "Our total position by Black Wednesday had to be worth almost $10 billion. We planned to sell more than that. In fact, when Norman Lamont said just before the devaluation that he would borrow nearly $15 billion to defend sterling, we were amused because that was about how much we wanted to sell."
Stanley Druckenmiller, who traded under Soros, originally saw the weakness in the pound. "Soros' contribution was pushing him to take a gigantic position."[28][29]
In 1997, during the Asian financial crisis, the Prime Minister of Malaysia Mahathir bin Mohamad accused Soros of using the wealth under his control to punish the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for welcoming Myanmar as a member. Following on a history of antisemitic remarks, Mahathir made specific reference to Soros' Jewish background ("It is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge"[30]) and implied Soros was orchestrating the crash as part of a larger Jewish conspiracy. Nine years later, in 2006, Mahathir met with Soros and afterwards stated that he accepted that Soros had not been responsible for the crisis.[31] In 1998's The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered Soros explained his role in the crisis as follows:
The financial crisis that originated in Thailand in 1997 was particularly unnerving because of its scope and severity. ... By the beginning of 1997, it was clear to Soros Fund Management that the discrepancy between the trade account and the capital account was becoming untenable. We sold short the Thai baht and the Malaysian ringgit early in 1997 with maturities ranging from six months to a year. (That is, we entered into contracts to deliver at future dates Thai Baht and Malaysian ringgit that we did not currently hold.) Subsequently Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia accused me of causing the crisis, a wholly unfounded accusation. We were not sellers of the currency during or several months before the crisis; on the contrary, we were buyers when the currencies began to decline – we were purchasing ringgits to realize the profits on our earlier speculation. (Much too soon, as it turned out. We left most of the potential gain on the table because we were afraid that Mahathir would impose capital controls. He did so, but much later.)[32]The nominal U.S. dollar GDP of the ASEAN fell by $9.2 billion in 1997 and $218.2 billion (31.7%) in 1998.
Economist Paul Krugman is critical of Soros' effect on financial markets.
"[N]obody who has read a business magazine in the last few years can be unaware that these days there really are investors who not only move money in anticipation of a currency crisis, but actually do their best to trigger that crisis for fun and profit. These new actors on the scene do not yet have a standard name; my proposed term is 'Soroi'."[33]
Public predictions
Soros' book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets (May 2008), described a "superbubble" that had built up over the past 25 years and was ready to collapse. This was the third in a series of books he has written that have predicted disaster. As he states:He ascribes his own success to being able to recognize when his predictions are wrong.I have a record of crying wolf ... I did it first in The Alchemy of Finance (in 1987), then in The Crisis of Global Capitalism (in 1998) and now in this book. So it's three books predicting disaster. (After) the boy cried wolf three times ... the wolf really came.[34]
In February 2009, Soros said the world financial system had effectively disintegrated, adding that there was no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis.[35] "We witnessed the collapse of the financial system ... It was placed on life support, and it's still on life support. There's no sign that we are anywhere near a bottom."I'm only rich because I know when I'm wrong ... I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes. I very often used to get backaches due to the fact that I was wrong. Whenever you are wrong you have to fight or [take] flight. When [I] make the decision, the backache goes away.[34]
Insider trading conviction
In 1988 Soros was interested in purchasing shares in French companies. The Socialist party had lost its majority of seats in the Assembly, and the new government under Chirac had instituted an aggressive privatization program. Many people considered shares in the newly privatized companies undervalued. During this period, a French financier named Georges Pébereau contacted one of Soros' advisors in an effort to assemble a group of investors to purchase a large amount of shares in Société Générale, a leading French bank that was part of the program.The advisor reported to Soros that Pébereau's plan was ambiguous and included an implausible takeover plan (it would indeed fail). On that advice, and without ever meeting the financier, Soros decided against participating.[36] He did, however, move forward with his strategy of accumulating shares in four French companies: Société Générale, as well as Suez, Paribas and the Compagnie Générale d'Électricité.
In 1989, the Commission des Opérations de Bourse (the French stock exchange regulatory authority) conducted an investigation of whether Soros' transaction in Société Générale should be considered insider trading. Soros had received no information from the Société Générale, and had no insider knowledge of the business, but he did possess knowledge that a group of investors was planning a takeover attempt. The COB concluded that the statutes, regulations and case law relating to insider trading did not clearly establish that a crime had occurred, and that no charges should be brought against Soros.[37]
Several years later, a Paris-based prosecutor reopened the case against Soros and two other French businessmen, disregarding the COB's findings. This resulted in Soros' 2005 conviction for insider trading by the Court of Appeals (he was the only one of the three to receive a conviction). The French Supreme Court confirmed the conviction on June 14, 2006, but reduced the penalty to the minimum.[38]
Punitive damages were not sought because of the delay in bringing the case to trial. Soros denied any wrongdoing, saying news of the takeover was public knowledge[39] and it was documented that his intent to acquire shares of the company predated his own awareness of the takeover.[38]
His insider trading conviction was upheld by the highest court in France on June 14, 2006.[38] In December 2006, he appealed to the European Court of Human Rights on various grounds including that the 14-year delay in bringing the case to trial precluded a fair hearing.[40] On the basis of Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights, stating that no person may be punished for an act that was not a criminal offense at the time that it was committed, the Court agreed to hear the appeal.[41] In October 2011, the court rejected his appeal in a 4–3 decision, saying that Soros had been aware of the risk of breaking insider trading laws.[42]
Sports
In 2005, Soros was a minority partner in a group that tried to buy the Washington Nationals, a Major League baseball team. Some Republican lawmakers suggested that they might move to revoke baseball's antitrust exemption if Soros bought the team.[43]In 2008, Soros' name was associated with AS Roma, an Italian association football team, but the club was not sold. Soros was also a financial backer of Washington Soccer L.P., the group that owned the operating rights to Major League Soccer club D.C. United when the league was founded in 1995, but the group lost these rights in 2000.[44]
On August 21, 2012, the BBC reported SEC filings showing Soros acquired a roughly 1.9% stake in English football club Manchester United through the purchase of 3.1 million of the club's Class-A shares.[45]
Philanthropy
Main article: List of projects supported by George Soros
Soros' philanthropic funding includes efforts to promote non-violent democratization in the post-Soviet states. These efforts, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, occur primarily through the Open Society Institute (OSI) and national Soros Foundations, which sometimes go under other names (such as the Stefan Batory Foundation in Poland). As of 2003, PBS estimated that he had given away a total of $4 billion.[39] The OSI says it has spent about $500 million annually in recent years.
In 2003, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker wrote in the foreword of Soros' book The Alchemy of Finance:
George Soros has made his mark as an enormously successful speculator, wise enough to largely withdraw when still way ahead of the game. The bulk of his enormous winnings is now devoted to encouraging transitional and emerging nations to become "open societies", open not only in the sense of freedom of commerce but – more important – tolerant of new ideas and different modes of thinking and behavior.[47]Time magazine in 2007 cited two specific projects – $100 million toward Internet infrastructure for regional Russian universities, and $50 million for the Millennium Promise to eradicate extreme poverty in Africa – while noting that Soros had given $742 million to projects in the U.S., and given away a total of more than $7 billion.[48]
Other notable projects have included aid to scientists and universities throughout Central and Eastern Europe, help to civilians during the siege of Sarajevo, and Transparency International. Soros also pledged an endowment of €420 million to the Central European University (CEU). The Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and his microfinance bank Grameen Bank received support from the OSI.
According to National Review[49] the Open Society Institute gave $20,000 in September 2002 to the Defense Committee of Lynne Stewart, the lawyer who has defended alleged terrorists in court and was sentenced to 2⅓ years in prison for "providing material support for a terrorist conspiracy" via a press conference for a client. An OSI spokeswoman said "it appeared to us at that time that there was a right-to-counsel issue worthy of our support."
In September 2006 Soros pledged $50 million to the Millennium Promise, led by economist Jeffrey Sachs to provide educational, agricultural, and medical aid to help villages in Africa enduring poverty. The New York Times termed this endeavor a "departure" for Soros whose philanthropic focus had been on fostering democracy and good government, but Soros noted that most poverty resulted from bad governance.[50]
He received honorary doctoral degrees from the New School for Social Research (New York), the University of Oxford in 1980, the Corvinus University of Budapest, and Yale University in 1991. Soros also received the Yale International Center for Finance Award from the Yale School of Management in 2000 as well as the Laurea Honoris Causa, the highest honor of the University of Bologna in 1995.
Soros played a role in the peaceful transition from communism to capitalism in Hungary (1984–89)[7] and provided Europe's largest-ever higher education endowment to Central European University in Budapest.[51] Later, the Open Society Institute's programs in Georgia were considered by Russian and Western observers to have been crucial in the success of the Rose Revolution.
In the United States, he donated large sums of money in an effort to defeat President George W. Bush's bid for re-election in 2004. In 2010, he donated $1 million in support of Proposition 19, which would have legalized marijuana in the state of California. He was an initial donor to the Center for American Progress, and he continues to support the organization through the Open Society Foundations. The Open Society Institute has active programs in more than 60 countries around the world with total expenditures currently averaging approximately $600 million a year.[52] Between 1979 and 2011, Soros gave away over $8 billion to human rights, public health, and education causes.[1]
Political donations and activism
United States
In an interview with The Washington Post on November 11, 2003, Soros said that removing President George W. Bush from office was the "central focus of my life" and "a matter of life and death". He said he would sacrifice his entire fortune to defeat President Bush "if someone guaranteed it".[53] Soros gave $3 million to the Center for American Progress, $2.5 million to MoveOn.org, and $20 million[54] to America Coming Together. These groups worked to support Democrats in the 2004 election. On September 28, 2004 he dedicated more money to the campaign and kicked off his own multi-state tour with a speech: Why We Must Not Re-elect President Bush[55] delivered at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The online transcript to this speech received many hits after Dick Cheney accidentally referred to FactCheck.org as "factcheck.com" in the Vice Presidential debate, causing the owner of that domain to redirect all traffic to Soros' site.[56] Asked in 2006 about his statement in The Age of Fallibility that "the main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States", Soros responded that "it happens to coincide with the prevailing opinion in the world. And I think that's rather shocking for Americans to hear. The United States sets the agenda for the world. And the rest of the world has to respond to that agenda. By declaring a 'war on terror' after September 11, we set the wrong agenda for the world. ... when you wage war, you inevitably create innocent victims."[57]Soros was not a large donor to US political causes until the 2004 presidential election, but according to the Center for Responsive Politics, during the 2003–2004 election cycle, Soros donated $23,581,000 to various 527 groups dedicated to defeating President Bush. A 527 group is a type of American tax-exempt organization named after a section of the United States tax code, 26 U.S.C. § 527.
After Bush's re-election, Soros and other donors backed a new political fundraising group called Democracy Alliance, which supports progressive causes and the formation of a stronger progressive infrastructure in America.[58]
In August 2009, Soros donated $35 million to the state of New York to be ear-marked for under-privileged children and given to parents who had benefit cards at the rate of $200 per child aged 3 through 17, with no limit as to the number of children that qualified. An additional $140 million was put into the fund by the state of New York from money they had received from the 2009 federal recovery act.[19]
On October 26, 2010, Soros donated $1 million, the largest donation in the campaign, to the Drug Policy Alliance to fund Proposition 19, that would have legalized marijuana in the state of California if it had passed in the November 2, 2010 elections.[59]
In October 2011 a Reuters story titled "Soros: not a funder of Wall Street protests" was published after several commentators pointed out errors in an earlier Reuters story headlined "Who's behind the Wall St. protests?"with a lede stating that the Occupy Wall Street movement "may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world's richest men [Soros]". Reuters' follow-up article also reported a Soros spokesperson and Adbusters' co-founder Kalle Lasn both saying that Adbusters – which was the catalyst for the first Occupy Wall Street protests – had never received any contributions from Soros, contrary to Reuters' earlier story which reported that "indirect financial links" existed between the two as late as 2010.[60][61]
On September 27, 2012, Soros announced that he was donating $1 million to the "SuperPAC" Priorities USA Action.[62]
Central and Eastern Europe
According to Waldemar A. Nielsen, an authority on American philanthropy,[63] "[Soros] has undertaken ... nothing less than to open up the once-closed Communist societies of Eastern Europe to a free flow of ideas and scientific knowledge from the ouside world".[64] From 1979, as an advocate of 'open societies', Soros financially supported dissidents including Poland's Solidarity movement, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union.[46] In 1984, he founded his first Open Society Institute in Hungary with a budget of $3 million.[65] Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Soros' funding has continued to play an important role in the former Soviet sphere. His funding of pro-democratic programs in Georgia was considered by Russian and Western observers to be crucial to the success of the Rose Revolution, although Soros has said that his role has been "greatly exaggerated".[66] Alexander Lomaia, Secretary of the Georgian Security Council and former Minister of Education and Science, is a former Executive Director of the Open Society Georgia Foundation (Soros Foundation), overseeing a staff of 50 and a budget of $2,500,000.[67]Former Georgian Foreign Minister Salomé Zourabichvili wrote that institutions like the Soros Foundation were the cradle of democratisation and that all the NGOs which gravitated around the Soros Foundation undeniably carried the revolution. She opines that after the revolution the Soros Foundation and the NGOs were integrated into power.[68]
Some Soros-backed pro-democracy initiatives have been banned in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.[69] Ercis Kurtulus, head of the Social Transparency Movement Association (TSHD) in Turkey, said in an interview that "Soros carried out his will in Ukraine and Georgia by using these NGOs ... Last year Russia passed a special law prohibiting NGOs from taking money from foreigners. I think this should be banned in Turkey as well."[70] In 1997, Soros had to close his foundation in Belarus after it was fined $3 million by the government for "tax and currency violations". According to The New York Times, the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko has been widely criticized in the West and in Russia for his efforts to control the Belarus Soros Foundation and other independent NGOs and to suppress civil and human rights. Soros called the fines part of a campaign to "destroy independent society".[71]
In June 2009, Soros donated $100m to Central Europe and Eastern Europe to counter the impact of the economic crisis on the poor, voluntary groups and non-government organisations.[72]
Africa
The Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa is a Soros-affiliated organization.[73] Its director for Zimbabwe is Godfrey Kanyenze, who also directs the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), which was the main force behind the founding of the Movement for Democratic Change, the principal indigenous organization promoting regime change in Zimbabwe.Drug policy reform
Soros has funded worldwide efforts to promote drug policy reform. In 2008, Soros donated $400,000 to help fund a successful ballot measure in Massachusetts known as the Massachusetts Sensible Marijuana Policy Initiative which decriminalized possession of less than 1 oz (28g) of marijuana in the state. Soros has also funded similar measures in California, Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Nevada and Maine.[74] Among the drug decriminalization groups that have received funding from Soros are the Lindesmith Center and Drug Policy Foundation.[75] Soros donated $1.4 million to publicity efforts to support California's Proposition 5 in 2008, a failed ballot measure that would have expanded drug rehabilitation programs as alternatives to prison for persons convicted of non-violent drug-related offenses.[76]In October 2010, Soros donated $1 million to support California's Proposition 19.[77]
According to remarks in an interview in October 2009, it is Soros' opinion that marijuana is less addictive but not appropriate for use by children and students. He himself has not used marijuana for years.[78]
Death and dying
The Project on Death in America, active from 2001 to 2003, was one of the Open Society Institute's projects, which sought to "understand and transform the culture and experience of dying and bereavement".[79] In 1994, Soros delivered a speech in which he reported that he had offered to help his mother, a member of the Hemlock Society, commit suicide.[80] In the same speech, he also endorsed the Oregon Death with Dignity Act,[81] the campaign which he helped fund.[82]Philosophy
Education and beliefs
His philosophical outlook is influenced by Karl Popper, under whom he studied at the London School of Economics (LSE). His Open Society Institute is named after Popper's two volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies, and Soros' ongoing philosophical commitment to the principle of fallibilism (that anything he believes may in fact be wrong, and is therefore to be questioned and improved) stems from Popper's philosophy.Reflexivity, financial markets, and economic theory
Soros' writings focus heavily on the concept of reflexivity, where the biases of individuals enter into market transactions, potentially changing the perception of fundamentals of the economy. Soros argues that different principles apply in markets depending on whether they are in a "near to equilibrium" or a "far from equilibrium" state. He argues that, when markets are rising or falling rapidly, they are typically marked by disequilibrium rather than equilibrium, and that the conventional economic theory of the market (the 'efficient market hypothesis') does not apply in these situations. Soros has popularized the concepts of dynamic disequilibrium, static disequilibrium, and near-equilibrium conditions.[21]He has stated that his own financial success has been attributable to the edge accorded by his understanding of the action of the reflexive effect.
Reflexivity is based on three main ideas:[21]
- Reflexivity is best observed under special conditions where investor bias grows and spreads throughout the investment arena. Examples of factors that may give rise to this bias include (a) equity leveraging or (b) the trend-following habits of speculators.
- Reflexivity appears intermittently since it is most likely to be revealed under certain conditions; i.e., the character of the equilibrium process is best considered in terms of probabilities.
- Investors' observation of and participation in the capital markets may at times influence valuations and fundamental conditions or outcomes.
This was further amplified by public policy. In the US, home loans were guaranteed by the Federal government. Many national governments saw home ownership as a positive outcome and so introduced grants for first-time home buyers and other financial subsidies, such as the exemption of a primary residence from capital gains taxation. These further encouraged house purchases, leading to further price rises and further relaxation of lending standards.
The concept of reflexivity attempts to explain why markets moving from one equilibrium state to another tend to overshoot or undershoot.
View of problems in the free market system
Despite working as an investor and currency trader, Soros argues that the current system of financial speculation undermines healthy economic development in many underdeveloped countries. He blames many of the world's problems on the failures inherent in what he characterizes as market fundamentalism. His opposition to many aspects of globalization has made him a controversial figure.Victor Niederhoffer said of Soros: "Most of all, George believed even then[when?] in a mixed economy, one with a strong central international government to correct for the excesses of self-interest."
Soros claims to draw a distinction between being a participant in the market and working to change the rules that market participants must follow. According to Mahathir bin Mohamed, Prime Minister of Malaysia from July 1981 to October 2003, Soros – as the hedge fund chief of Quantum – may have been partially responsible for the economic crash in 1997 of East Asian markets when the Thai currency relinquished its peg to the US dollar. According to Mahathir, in the three years leading to the crash, Soros invested in short-term speculative investment in East Asian stock markets and real estate, then divested with "indecent haste" at the first signs of currency devaluation.[83] Soros replied, saying that Mahathir was using him "as a scapegoat for his own mistakes", that Mahathir's promises to ban currency trading (which Malaysian finance officials hastily retracted) were "a recipe for disaster" and that Mahathir "is a menace to his own country".[84]
In an interview regarding the late-2000s recession, Soros referred to it as the most serious crisis since the 1930s. According to Soros, market fundamentalism with its assumption that markets will correct themselves with no need for government intervention in financial affairs has been "some kind of an ideological excess". In Soros' view, the markets' moods – a "mood" of the markets being a prevailing bias or optimism/pessimism with which the markets look at reality – "actually can reinforce themselves so that there are these initially self-reinforcing but eventually unsustainable and self-defeating boom/bust sequences or bubbles".[85]
In reaction to the late-2000s recession, he founded the Institute for New Economic Thinking in October 2009. This is a think tank composed of international economic, business and financial experts, mandated to investigate radical new approaches to organising the international economic and financial system.
Views on antisemitism
At a Jewish forum in New York City, November 5, 2003, Soros partially attributed a recent resurgence of antisemitism to the policies of Israel and the United States, and the role of wealthy and influential individuals:There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that. It's not specifically anti-Semitism, but it does manifest itself in anti-Semitism as well. I'm critical of those policies ... If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish. I can't see how one could confront it directly ... I'm also very concerned about my own role because the new anti-Semitism holds that the Jews rule the world ... As an unintended consequence of my actions ... I also contribute to that image.[86]In a subsequent article for The New York Review of Books, Soros emphasized that
I do not subscribe to the myths propagated by enemies of Israel and I am not blaming Jews for anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism predates the birth of Israel. Neither Israel's policies nor the critics of those policies should be held responsible for anti-Semitism. At the same time, I do believe that attitudes toward Israel are influenced by Israel's policies, and attitudes toward the Jewish community are influenced by the pro-Israel lobby's success in suppressing divergent views.[87]
Views on Europe
In October 2011, Soros drafted an open letter entitled "As concerned Europeans we urge Eurozone leaders to unite",[88] in which he calls for a stronger economic government for Europe using federal means (Common EU treasury, common fiscal supervision, etc.) and warns against the danger of nationalistic solutions to the economic crisis. The letter was co-signed by prominent Europeans such as Javier Solana, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Andrew Duff, Emma Bonino, Massimo d'Alema, Vaira Vike-Freiberga.Views on China
Soros has expressed concern about the growth of Chinese economic and political power. "China has risen very rapidly by looking out for its own interests ... They have now got to accept responsibility for world order and the interests of other people as well." Regarding the political gridlock in America, he said, "Today China has not only a more vigorous economy, but actually a better functioning government than the United States".[89]Wealth
As of March 12, 2012 Forbes listed Soros, at 81, as the 22nd richest person in the world, the world's richest hedge-fund manager, and number 7 on its list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, with a net worth estimated at $20 billion.[90] Soros has given away $8 billion to various causes since 1979.[91]Relation to Hungarian politics
In the 1980s Viktor Orbán, a future Chairman of Fidesz (1994–2000, 2000–) and Hungarian Prime Minister (1998–2002, 2010–), along with László Kövér, a future Chairman of Fidesz (2000), Secret Service Minister (1998–2002) and Speaker of the National Assembly of Hungary (2010–), were Soros scholarship recipients. Deputy Prime Minister István Stumpf – now a member of the Constitutional Court – was a member of Soros Foundation's Board of Trustees between 1994 and 2002.Personal life
Soros' family changed their name from Schwartz to Soros in 1936, in response to growing anti-semitism with the rise of fascism. Tivadar liked the new name because it is a palindrome and because of its meaning. Although the specific meaning is left unstated in Kaufman's biography, in Hungarian, soros means "next in line", or "designated successor"; and, in Esperanto, it means "will soar".[92]Soros has been married and divorced twice:
In 1960, Soros married Annaliese Witschak. Annaliese was an ethnic German immigrant from Germany who had been orphaned during the war. Although she was not Jewish, she was well liked by Soros' parents as she had also experienced the deprivations and dislocation brought about by World War II.[93] They divorced in 1983. They had three children:
- Robert Daniel Soros (born 1963) – He is the founder of the Central European University in Prague, as well as a network of foundations in Eastern Europe. In 1992, he married Marlene S. Schiff at the Temple Emanu-El in New York City. The Rabbi Dr. David Posner officiated the ceremony.[94]
- Andrea Soros Colombel (born 1965) – She is the founder and president of Trace Foundation, established in 1993 to promote the cultural continuity and sustainable development of Tibetan communities within China. She is also a founding partner and member of the board of directors of the Acumen Fund, a global venture fund that employs an entrepreneurial approach in addressing the problems of global poverty[95] She is married to Eric Colombel.
- Jonathan Tivadar Soros (born 1970) – In 1997, married Jennifer Ann Allan at the Siasconset Union Chapel in Nantucket, Massachusetts. The Rev. Edward B. Anderson, a Unitarian minister, officiated the ceremony.[96]
- Alexander Soros (born 1985) – Alexander is also gaining prominence for his donations to social and political causes, focusing his philanthropic efforts on "progressive causes that might not have widespread support".[97] Alexander serves on the boards of Jewish Funds for Justice and Global Witness, and led the list of student political donors in the 2010 election cycle.[98]
- Gregory Soros (born 1989)
Soros has one elder brother, Paul Soros, who is a private investor and philanthropist. He is also an engineer who headed Soros Associates and established the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for Young Americans.[100][101] He is married to Daisy (née Schlenger), who like her husband, was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant.[102] They have two sons Peter and Jeffrey.[103] Peter Soros was married to the former Flora Fraser – a daughter of Lady Antonia Fraser and the late Sir Hugh Fraser and a stepdaughter of the late 2005 Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter. Fraser and Soros separated in 2009.[104]
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