Affirmations: Artists in the Holocaust
AFFIRMATIONS ARTISTS IN THE HOLOCAUST Each of us has seen them. The photographs of the dead and near dead, the hollows that were eyes and the shaved skulls and the naked skeletons that once...
...the Widener Memorial Library, Harvard University...
...Interior with Wooden Bunks, walercolor and pencil...
...The tears dry and the special place deep inside covers itself, in time, with the scar tissue called normalcy—until it is ripped at once again...
...Born in 1900 in Russia...
...The exhibit allows us to communicate with people, with distinct individuals, most of whom aren't here anymore...
...Those works are now part of the permanent collection at Kibbutz Lochamei HaGhettaot...
...Help the Refugees!, 1943, charcoal...
...Haas was interred in the Nisko labor camp, then in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz...
...as if the artist were simply recording the events without being subject to them...
...and Ebensee...
...But by far the more powerful impression of this remarkable collection is an affirmation of humanity that transcends the nightmare, that is somehow distant from it...
...The works survived in almost miraculous ways...
...The art establishes an empathy that is not based on guilt, but on a shared humanity...
...Jacques Gotko s familyjltd to Paris in 1905...
...The exhibit becomes a place for silent conversation with these people, the artists...
...The artist is a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and now lives in Tel A viv...
...watercolor...
...Miriam Novitch, curator of the art section of the museum, met Yitzhak Katzenelson when both were concentration camp inmates...
...we are drawn into these realities...
...Upon returning to the United States, they contacted the Union of American Hebrew Congregations...
...The effect on the viewer is of spiritual strength and muted defiance...
...There are many portraits that tug familiarly at us—reminiscences, flights of escape and imagination...
...But, finally, we walk away...
...The act of drawing and the act of viewing create a bond between ourselves and the artists...
...To March 4, 1944, With Best Wishes, ink and walercolor...
...The masses of hair, still curled or braided, the shoes and the baby pacifiers and eyeglasses, hundreds upon hundreds of pairs...
...David Olere lives in France...
...we can search the faces of their portraits for familiar types...
...For the past 35 years, she and many other kibbutz members have devoted themselves to the task of searching out, gathering, and documenting the works of art that survived...
...We are exposed, defenseless, as the enormity of it floods our brains and our souls, as we are assaulted by the tragedy named Holocaust...
...To draw was to say, "I am...
...Most people who visit the exhibition have steeled themselves against what they think will be undiluted doses of horror...
...The artists used whatever materials they could find—scraps of paper, cardboard or cloth, stubs of charcoal...
...we can appreciate the irony of musicians playing for some mad spectacle...
...Born in Prague...
...What we find, however, is not at all what we expect...
...The exhibit has generated enormous interest throughout the country...
...Drawings were hidden, buried, or passed to trusted others for safekeeping...
...The photographs of the dead and near dead, the hollows that were eyes and the shaved skulls and the naked skeletons that once were people...
...pencil on cardboard...
...Inevitably there is a momentary pause as they come to grips with the absolute humanity of the art...
...We may never be the same again...
...curator of the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles...
...it doesn't pretend to be a historical survey...
...And those pieces that were not destroyed were scattered all over the world...
...where she painted extensively...
...Portrait of Yitzhak Katzenelson, 1943...
...In an effort to understand the effect of the work upon the public, journalist Rochelle Braly interviewed Alice Greenwald...
...The real power of the exhibit is its ability to provide closure to so many interrupted lives...
...We can touch the paper they drew on, sometimes using both sides because it was so scarce...
...Out of the madness, there is normalcy...
...The exhibit doesn't explain the Holocaust...
...To Burn Their Sisters and Brothers, 1945...
...That the work exists at all is testimony to the will, the determination, and the needs of those who created it and those who preserved it...
...the Skirball Museum, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles...
...A well-known artist at the time of her deportation to Theresienstadt...
...pastel and charcoal...
...In circumstances deliberately designed to deprive one of any definition as a human being, the very act of drawing was an assertion of one's humanity...
...the Jewish Museum, New York...
...gouache...
...there are people, not victims, who hoped, who lived...
...A master of landscape and portrait...
...Leo Haas...
...Uri Kochba...
...The Ghetto Fighters' Museum, which is a part of the kibbutz, is dedicated to the memory of Yitzhak Katzenelson, a poet and underground resistance leader who perished in Auschwitz...
...Deponed to Theresienstadt at age 13, Jehuda Bacon studied with Leo Haas...
...Some even boiled their clothes and used the dyes as watercolors...
...She lives and paints in Prague...
...some were buried, some hidden in wall panels, some traded for food, cigarettes, others passed on to inmates for safekeeping...
...Feder died at A uschwilz...
...We identify with the artists and their subjects because we can see them and we can touch them—each one, each person—in a way that no history book or documentary film can ever transmit...
...Ironically, the Nazis themselves created conditions under which some of the artists could work, especially the talented Czecho-slovakian Jewish artists, writers, and musicians sent to the "paradise ghetto" of Theresienstadt...
...and the Newark Art Museum...
...The artists never knew if their communications would reach anyone...
...He has lived in East Berlin since 1955...
...Discovery meant deportation, torture, death...
...Concentration camp art created during the height of the terror embodies a determination for survival and a vitality that is at the core of Judaism...
...With a grant from the Merians in memory of their fathers, UAHC became the sponsor of the exhibit, which has now been mounted in the Baltimore Art Museum...
...A survivor of Auschwitz...
...the Spertus Museum of Judaica, Chicago...
...We know about vulnerability, and about hurt and guilt and terror...
...The circumstances around which the collection was created and survived are quite enough to make it exceptional...
...Charlotte Bufesova...
...Young Man in Golf Trousers, Seated, 1943...
...Yes, there are some gaunt faces, some representations of despair...
...Leo Lilienblum...
...Ai:ik Feder, Portrait of a Man with Yellow Star and Cap, 1942...
...But there is more here, and it has to do with new connections and new understandings...
...C.K...
...This exhibit offers the opportunity to know 35 artists, not six million anonymous dead...
...Commissioned to decorate the camp and to paint portraits of Nazi officials, these artists seized the opportunity and made use of available materials to record the sad realities of the camp, knowing full well that exposure meant deportation to Auschwitz...
...Jehuda Bacon, Muselmann, 1945, walercolor and gouache...
...Now comes another Holocaust exhibit, and it is called "Spiritual Resistance, 1940-1945...
...In northern Israel, in the Galilee, stands Kibbutz Lochamei HaGhettaot, the Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz, founded in 1949 by a group of Jews, mostly Polish and Lithuanian, who had survived the concentration camps and ghettos of Eastern Europe...
...Georges Kars...
...His work, which portrays only the Holocaust, is exhibited often in Israel and France...
...During the occupation he lived in Lyon, committing suicide in 1945 when he teamed that much of his family had died at Auschwitz...
...The story these pictures tell is less that of victims and oppressors than of human capacity to transcend horror, to gain distance from it...
...Front, Stalag 122, 1942...
...Jacques Gotko...
...These artists were people experiencing the most cataclysmic event of the 20th century...
...Otto Ungar and Karel Fleischman...
...Charlotte Bufesova was deported to Theresienstadl in 1942...
...Israel...
...He now lives in Jerusalem and teaches at the Bezalel School of Art...
...Melk...
...woodcut...
...Deportation: The Last Road, 1942...
...After fleeing Russia in 1887, Aizik Feder traveled from Berlin to Geneva to Paris...
...Yet most of the work, like most of its creators, never survived...
...Many had been freedom fighters...
...Schalkova became a portrait painter for her Nazi captors...
...In viewing their art...
...General View of the Prison Camp, 1945...
...Thef-e is a simulation of normalcy . .. there is humor, there is satire...
...These works are finally reaching the audience for whom they were intended, and the connection is complex and intimate, dissolving any distance we might have set up between each other...
...And we approach it (as we must), but not without fear...
...There is an overwhelming feeling of familiarity here—distorted, but real...
...ink and waler-color...
...There is no way to look at these works and say that this could not be you, that this happened to people markedly different from you...
...We are saying, "Yes, you lived...
...A native of Czechoslovakia, Georges Kars was a member of the Ecole de Paris...
...While some of the drawings may reflect the artist's dream of other times, or of the wish for release, all the works are forthright declarations of how these artists perceived their worlds...
...the J. B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville...
...we are ultimately grateful to them for declaring that their lives had value...
...the Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley...
...And what we see is not despair...
...For some, the experience of the Holocaust has to remain utterly remote and alien to be dealt with at all...
...When Elaine and Melvin Merians visited the kibbutz, they were deeply moved by what they saw, and particularly by the extraordinary art collection...
...Born in Czechoslovakia...
...Because we know...
...Matvina Schalkova...
...After being liberated from the camp of Malines, she and her husband settled in Safed...
...Irene Awret fled Germany for Brussels...
...Irene Awret...
...We share the struggle to affirm the self, to resist annihilation...
...He was arrested in 1941 and later sent to Drancy and the Birkenau, where he died of typhus...
...Excerpts of that conversation appear below...
...Spiritual Resistance" is a sampling of the work of artists who were interred in Nazi concentration camps throughout Europe during the years 1940-45...
...Spiritual Resistance" is an affirmation simply because it is so essentially human, because its creators, true to their art and to themselves, drew and painted what they saw and felt and dreamed...
...And when we look at the pictures, there is reciprocity...
...David Ol'ere...
...Uri Kochba was rescued by the Russian underground after being interned in several concentration camps...
...For the artists, who didn't know if their communication would ever reach an audience, the art is self-affirmation...
...He now lives on a Kibbutz in Israel...
Vol. 5 • December 1979 • No. 1
