About Alexander Babel

In Detail:

I was born in central Russia 12 hours before the Chernobyl disaster. At the age of five, my mother took me to music school to learn the piano (which she now regrets). From the age of six, she drove me four bus stops away to a regular school where English was taught from the first grade, although the nearest school was separated from our yard by only a fence (the second episode she now regrets, as I still do not really know English).

At the age of eleven, a conscious period of my biography began, when without outside influence I started attending a model aircraft club and art school, leaving music school behind.
In 2000, I participated in the regional exhibition “Craftsmen of the New Millennium,” won a prize, and was awarded a one-week trip to Velegozh (a recreation center in the Tula region near the Polenov Estate Museum). In 2001, I successfully graduated from art school with an average grade of 4.8.

A year later, our family moved to Germany, and my gradual path toward higher education began: first a language course combined with studying German school subjects, then grammar school, and finally the Faculty of Architecture at the Hochschule in Frankfurt am Main. However, the process took an unexpected turn: after the first semester, the student outfit had to be replaced with Bundeswehr boots.

In 2006, I began making the case for a grandfather clock. This art object can, in some sense, be described as an “experimentally universal” combination of many techniques: wood carving, bone carving, stone carving, intarsia, and inlay.

Since March 2008, I have helped create articles for Watch-Wiki, and since 2010 I have been one of its administrators.

Participation in the “Society of Saxon Watchmaking Art” in Glashütte provided an opportunity for further development. The first industrial machines appeared in my workshop. In 2009, I began a project to manufacture a watch movement made of ivory. Some components have already been produced. The project is currently on hold.

The idea of such watches interested Mr. Marco Lang (member of AHCI, son of Rolf Lang and owner of the Lang & Heyne manufacture). In 2011, he asked whether I could imagine that one day watches made of ivory under the “Project Alexander Babel” might be created together with Lang & Heyne. In March 2012, one example was already completed, and a few weeks later the first such watches were presented at the opening of the watch salon “Hartding 1903.”

In the summer of 2004, I participated in the Graffiti Workshop 2004 project of the IMAGO School of Design.

Graffiti – is it a crime or art? The InterCityHotel is located at the railway station in Erfurt. One of its walls faced the railway tracks and had become a victim of spray-can graffiti. What should be done with a simply defaced wall?

The hotel manager Jürgen Karl Kramer and the head of the IMAGO school, Anne-Katrain Maschke, gathered several people to create art on this 13 × 15 meter wall. These were Leon Wagner, Aron Pekar, Claudia Otte, Alexander Babel, Jenny Seidel, Josefa Holland-Merten, David Ehrenberg, Matthias Flücke, and Oliver König. Erfurt, 07.2004.

Ancestors

Alexander Babel – Father

Born 17.01.1960 – Died 09.11.1987

By profession he was a musician (violin, piano).

Arthur Babel – Paternal Grandfather

Born 19.06.1924 – Died 23.10.2009

He was an electrician by profession. He worked his entire life at the industrial association “Azot.” When he was younger, he participated in assembling electrical installations and setting up the New Year’s tree on the central square of the city of Novomoskovsk.

A newspaper clipping from 1976 describing the Soviet planned economy and the brigade of Alexey (Arthur) Iosifovich.

Josef Babel – Great-Grandfather

Born 1896 – Executed 05.03.1938
(Posthumously rehabilitated in the 1990s)

He was a turner by profession.

This is his certificate as “Distinguished Person of the Sovkhoz,” No. 1. Issued on January 1, 1936, for high productivity at the “Krause” lathe and exemplary community work in the workshop. Two years later, in 1938, he was arrested under the charge of “enemy of the people” and sentenced to execution. In the 1990s, he was posthumously rehabilitated.

Pavel Pavlovich Skorobogatov – Maternal Grandfather

Born 25.01.1931 – Died 02.02.1964

He was a cooper by profession.

He served in Kamchatka.

After his demobilization, he sailed on the steamship “Ilyich” from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Vladivostok. The vessel was built in 1933 at the Blohm+Voss shipyard in Hamburg (Germany); in 1981 it was decommissioned and scrapped.

Photographs from the period of the children’s art school