It is the small pleasures that count in life. India’s prime minister Nehru is having a cigarette during a short break from an interview in the garden of the presidential villa. Actor Milo O’Shea daydreams in a scene of the film Ulysses. Rehearsing a new part can also be fun, as long as – like actress Deborah Kerr – you can relax on a meadow while reading the script. The audience at the cricket pitch even puts up with the glaring sun to see the game from up close. Others prefer to keep their distance at the exclusive sporting club, as do the two ducks that seem to watch the game from the referee’s vantage point.
What parties and revelries need is music, good food, an exuberant atmosphere, joyful dancing and high spirits. Keeping up the good spirit is what Gerd and Agnes Arntz managed to do, despite all the adversities of exile: “Gerd was an artist, working mainly in black and white lino or woodcuts, but he painted in oil too. His day-job was for the Institute of Pictorial Statistics that Otto Neurath had started in Vienna for the Town Hall. It was he who designed the isotypes – one man representing 10,000, ten men 100,000, and so on. I met Gerd in Vienna in 1932 or ’33. Later, when Austro-fascism reared its ugly head, the Institute and Gerd moved to The Hague.When I had to leave Austria, I spent a year in Holland. I visited Gerd and Agnes frequently, and we became good friends. After I had moved to England, I still visited them as often as I could. Our friendship continued until Gerd’s death in 1988. The photograph was taken on the beach of Scheveningen.”