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The
Holocaust is a subject that on the surface seems to defy
artistic representation. The dehumanization, humiliation and
mass murder of European Jewry by the Nazis was an event of
unparalleled proportions. Other groups such as Romani and
Sinti peoples (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals,
political prisoners and opponents to the Nazi regime became
part of the world of the concentration and death camps.
However, in the diabolical world of Nazi race theory, only
the Jews and most of the Gypsies were chosen for genocide.
[2]
Art had a lot to do with the
Nazi regime and has a logical relationship with the
Holocaust, despite the aesthetic and ethical problems that
are raised for artists in the aftermath of such horror.
Hitler himself aspired to become an artist but failed
admission to art school. Mein Kampf, Hitler's l923
plan for himself and the world, denounced modernism,
abstract and Dadaist art as an affront to civilization.
Hitler's artistic tastes can be judged by his favorite work
of art, a realistic, military World War I painting by Elk
Eber, The Last Hand Grenade.
Six hundred works of art
representing such heroic themes were hung for the Grosse
Deutsche Kunstausstellung ("Great German Art
Exhibition"), which opened in Munich on July l8, l937. A day
later, the first of many "degenerate" (Entartete
Kunst) art shows was opened just across the from the
Great German Art Exhibition. These shows, which may have
drawn the largest crowds in museum history, juxtaposed
"degenerate" art, "influenced by the Jews," to the Aryan
ideal as expressed in painting and sculpture. Many important
avant-garde works from the Weimar period were destroyed as
part of the war on culture. In l942, Hitler even had three
of his own paintings seized from private collections and
destroyed. [3]
These actions in Munich
signaled the start of the Nazi attack on culture, an attack
that ultimately could be considered a war against
imagination. The attack on imagination was a prelude to what
mutated into genocide
on a massive scale. The scale of Jewish death was so great
that the aftermath of World War II left the Jews and others
searching for a word to describe it. The preferred Hebrew
word was Shoah,
meaning calamity, but having a special reference to earlier
attempts to destroy the Jews during the biblical period. The
word Holocaust came into use during the late l950s. It too
is laden with religious implications, as its Greek origins
suggest a "burnt offering." More and more, Shoah is the
preferred descriptive word among Jews, as Holocaust has been
used in reference to non-Jewish victims as well as to other
horrible events in the post-1945 period.
[4]
Attempts by artists to grapple
with the catastrophe that would become the Shoah began in
the earliest days of the Nazi regime. It was a movement that
became visible during Hitler's rise and concentration of
power. Marc Chagall's White Crucifixion, a response
to Kristallnacht
&emdash; "The Night of Broken Glass," remains the icon among
many paintings that described Jewish suffering before l939.
Chagall used the theme of a crucified "Jewish" Jesus set
against vignettes of Jewish persecution that unfolded in the
Nazi era. Artists like Yankel Adler and Ben Shahn produced
strong responses to Jewish and other persecution during
World War II. Both Jewish and non-Jewish artists who were
interned in concentration camps and perished produced
artistic legacies of their victimization. A strong postwar
response appeared from the palette of many important
artists. Among postwar abstractionists, Rico LeBrun, a
non-Jew, insisted that "the Holocaust was a subject that no
serious artist could neglect....."
[5] The
American painter Leonard Baskin, LeBrun's colleague and
friend, described his approach to the subject as confronting
"the mind curdling reality of the least human of human
endeavors, and in paintings and drawings of dissolution,
dismemberment and incineration he is saying, all is not
vanity, all is horror."
[6]
In the 1960s the subject of
the Holocaust was not avoided, but appeared infrequently in
art, except in the realm of building public memorials,
principally at the sites of destruction in Europe. Artists
responded very much like survivors themselves who decided
against talking about the event. During the l970s and l980s,
a new generation of artists emerged who, with a sensitivity
toward the subject, attempted to grapple with the
difficulties of art after such a monstrous period of
destruction. There can be many conundrums and taboos. One is
when, as Elie Wiesel has said, "merchants of images and the
brokers of language would set themselves up to speak for the
victims." [7] Another
was described by Frank Rich when he noted that the numerous
Holocaust memorials in Europe and the United States share
one common trait: impermanence.
[8] Raul
Hilberg has gone even further and has described much of the
memorial architecture as "kitsch" or "done without taste,
without awareness.[9]
Despite such conditions,
especially the issue of artists simply trying to "reproduce"
a memory of an event they did not experience and competition
with the archival photographic record, the quest for a
visual language and a means to convey memory continues. Like
early Christian artists who tried to imagine the Crucifixion
of Jesus, contemporary artists are trying to artistically
convey the horror and memory of the Holocaust.
The quest, in a certain sense,
is for a new language with new symbols and new metaphors.
Primo Levi understood this well, when writing about his
experiences he said: "Daily language is for the description
of daily experience, but here is another world, here one
would need a language 'of the other world'."
[10]
It is also a form of memory
that treads on sacred soil: "In the Jewish tradition, death
is a private, intimate matter, and we are forbidden to
transform it into a spectacle. If that is true for an
individual, it is six million times more true for one of the
largest communities of the dead in history."
[11]
The Holocaust, as Witness
and Legacy tries to demonstrate, need not necessarily
produce a type of artistic response connected with horror.
Horror is a familiar subject in art. Medieval and
Renaissance artists portrayed the grim face of the Black
Death and a landscape of horror caused by war.
Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, a masterpiece
of the Northern Renaissance, has been referred to by many
artists as "a Holocaust work of art," in the way it depicts
the horror of the Crucifixion of Jesus. Goya depicted
massacres of civilians and atrocities of war. World War I
provided an impetus for artists to become involved in
burning political questions. George Grosz, Otto Dix, Max
Ernst, Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, to name a few, made
incomparable political statements and reflected on the
violence of the century in many of their works. Picasso's
Guernica, with its specific reference to the civil
war in Spain, later became a metaphor for the entire
century's violence.
The contemporary world's
exceptional focus on politics and rights for minorities,
with the lurking fear of brutalization close to the surface,
has produced a substantial number of exhibitions that deal
with subjects such as feminism, AIDS, homosexuality, black
consciousness and the new specter of genocide as seen in
Bosnia. Installation art has served as a particularly
responsive bridge between the artistic community and
political issues. These shows, however, may not solve the
question of permanence.
Permanence is part of the
United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
which opened in Washington, D.C., in April 1993. Here the
architect, James T. Freed, created a major interior space
dedicated to telling the story of the Holocaust, a space
where art plays a role. Outside the building is Joel
Shapiro's abstract bronze sculpture Loss and
Regeneration, suggesting a house turned upside down.
Ellsworth Kelly's white on white Memorial
installation creates a silent space between scenes of horror
for the museum visitor. Sol LeWitt's Consequence is a
large work applied directly to the museum walls with a theme
of variations on black and colored squares. Richard Serra's
Gravity, a 10-inch-thick, 10-foot-square standing
slab of Cor-ten steel, is an interior sculpture in the Hall
of Witnesses.
These works have all received
mixed reviews. They are all abstract and according to Paul
Richard, art critic for the Washington Post, were
"unnecessary, distorted and misguided,"
[12] as
they could suggest violence anywhere. Ken Johnson, writing
in Art in America, described the museum's approach to
art as "so much less daring," especially given the cutting
edge work by artists like Robert Morris, Christian
Boltanski, Jonathan Borofsky, Anselm Kiefer, Sue Coe and
others. [13] The
debate will continue.
Witness and Legacy
examines a spectrum of Holocaust related art produced by
some American artists during the last twenty years.
[14] The
mediums include painting, sculpture, photography, graphic
design, needlepoint and multimedia installation art. The
wide variety of work that has been produced is exceptional
in scope, but untested in thematic presentation.
In addition to division by
medium, Witness and Legacy deals with what might be
called "different generations" of the Holocaust-artists from
different backgrounds who bring to the subject their unique
perspectives because of their relationship to the event.
One-third of the artists
represented are Holocaust survivors themselves who have
worked as professional artists. Children of survivors,
sometimes called "the second generation," make up the second
group. The third group are artists not directly connected
with the Holocaust who have developed a sensitivity toward
the subject because of their humanitarianism and empathy and
attempt to understand the event and convey it to others
through art.
Survivors all share a special
vision of having been victims during the Holocaust. The
other artists cannot claim the same vision. Survivors
possess memories that other artists can comprehend only in
indirect ways. In some respect, the only "authentic"
Holocaust art may be the art of survivors. Artists such as
Judith
Goldstein,
Samuel
Bak,
Kitty
Klaidman and
Netty
Vanderpol
experienced the terror of the ghettos and the death camps.
Their art is somewhere between visual memoir and metaphoric
memory.
Sometimes art is created as a
coping mechanism. Questions of aesthetics may exist,
creating a tension between memory and witnessing versus a
purely artistic approach to the subject. Edith
Altman,
Gabrielle
Rossmer and
Gerda
Meyer-Bernstein
fall into a category between survivors and second generation
artists. Coming to the United States as children just before
the war, they escaped extended ghettoization and later
horrors, but carry with them some of the burdens of
survivors and certainly part of the trauma of their parents'
victimization and near destruction.
For many members of the second
generation, art and literature are mediums for expressing
their special relationship to the Holocaust and to their
parents. The second generation does not have a direct memory
of ghettos
and death camps. But they may carry the memory and burdens
of their parents' trauma, conveyed directly or indirectly.
After the camps were liberated, many survivors made new
lives for themselves in Israel, Western Europe or the United
States. Some bore no outward traces of their dehumanization.
Others suffered a great deal in a way that was conveyed
directly or indirectly to their children. Some things could
not disappear: numbers tattooed on parents' forearms,
screams in the night, the absence of grandparents, uncles,
aunts and other family members and dark shadows in a family
past that would not be talked about.
For the second generation, art
provided an appropriate entry for questions of memory,
absence, presence and identity. The visual representations
of the second generation mark the continued impact of the
terrible period of the Holocaust on a generation that did
not directly experience it. These are children who cannot
conceive of their existence without the vast imprint of the
Holocaust upon it. In this exhibition, Joyce
Lyon,
Pier
Marton,
Gabrielle
Rossmer,
Art
Spiegelman,
Debbie
Teicholz and
Mindy
Weisel are
representative of this group. Their mediums of expression
represent the breadth of the art: painting, photography,
video, installation art and the comic strip.
Artists who were not directly
involved with the Holocaust have also attempted to enter the
subject. This is probably the most difficult road. The
stimulus may be some knowledge about the Holocaust itself or
analogies made between the Holocaust and contemporary events
that demand an emotional or political response in art.
Artists may be Jews or non-Jews. Rico LeBrun, a non-Jew
known for his Crucifixion scenes, suggested that artists had
to deal with the Holocaust. This "outsider" generation
(sometimes called "empathizers") has important ethical
boundaries to consider when approaching the subject. The art
of this group cannot be "memory," for they did not
experience the event itself. It may be an interpretation
(derived from a sense of vulnerability as a Jew or artist),
a historical narrative, reflections on place, absence and
presence, a Proustian stimulus to a book, photograph or
film, confrontation with a survivor or neo-Nazi or simply a
confrontation with the impenetrability of the subject. The
greater question at hand, however, may not be the Holocaust,
but an attempt to penetrate the nature of man and seek light
through the darkness of the late twentieth century.
In
Witness and Legacy, eight artists are represented who
have no direct connection with the event. Mauricio
Lasansky, a
native of Argentina and now professor emeritus at the
University of Iowa, produced The Nazi Drawings
during the mid-l960s. The thirty large works in this series
made a strong impact when shown at the Philadelphia Museum
of Art in l967 and later at the Whitney Museum in New York.
The series Kaddish represents an ongoing
digression into the dignity, self destructiveness and
suffering of mankind. The title is derived from the Jewish
prayer for the dead, the text of which is an affirmation of
God.
Larry
Rivers has done
occasional paintings as responses to reading Primo Levi and
seeing Nazi photographs of Jews awaiting selection at
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Several paintings were done as commissions. The Holocaust is
not a major part of Rivers' oeuvre. The Holocaust well fits
Rivers' larger themes that have dealt with political
questions of other groups and how memory is made and
revised.
Jerome
Witkin is an
American born Jewish artist whose realistic paintings have
increasingly dealt with the Holocaust. Among his recent
large and often frightening works are Hitler as an
Usher, The Butcher's Helper, and the painting
featured in this show, The Beating Station, Berlin,
1933. Witkin uses historical information to produce
narrative works that focus, with their metaphoric realism,
on the brutality of Nazism. This violence was not invisible,
as the beatings and the rape of a Jewish woman on the
streets of Berlin suggest. Witkin implicitly brings the
viewer to contemplate religious issues connected with the
Holocaust, as the title, bearing within it the word
"station," can refer to a deportation point and the stations
of the cross in the Passion of Jesus.
Arnold
Trachtman is a
Boston-born artist who grew up during World War II and has
strong memories of American anti-Semitism. Utilizing a
disjointed technique that may be compared with montage in
filmmaking, Trachtman depicts historical events, such as
Neville
Chamberlain's
"Peace
in Our Time" speech
after the October l938 Munich Agreement, and its
consequences &endash; the production of mounds of bodies and
material debris from the victims. Trachtman has also
produced pop-art-like paintings about the complicity of
German industry in building the death camps and the use of
slave labor as the basis for their profits.
Pearl
Hirshfield is a
Chicago-born installation artist whose life has been heavily
involved in political and social issues and whose art
reflects a necessity of involvement. Her installations have
dealt with far-ranging subjects such as McCarthyism,
feminist issues, abortion rights, police brutality, the Ku
Klux Klan and cultural differences. She often opts for
theatrical presentations in installations, utilizing
disparate elements such as mirrors, sound systems, water
fountains and texts of diaries recorded on audio tape. Her
installation in this show, Shadows of
Auschwitz, is an environment of memory with negative
and positive spaces that recreate part of the road to death
at Auschwitz. In this provocative work, viewers become
victims as actual Auschwitz camp numbers reflect on their
own images.
Jeffrey
Wolin, a
professor at Indiana University, has developed a unique
photographic approach to the Holocaust. Wolin recently
completed a Guggenheim Fellowship that involved
photographing and videotaping accounts of Holocaust
survivors. His photographs show survivors as they look
today, for the most part in the safe and apparently "normal"
physical environments of their homes or workplaces. However,
the menacing past experiences, traumas and suffering, plus
the persistence of memory, is imposed on the photograph by a
textual narration of the subject's history. The stories are
intimate and recall the absolute horror of the subjects'
humiliation, near destruction and survival.
Marlene
Miller and
Shirley
Samberg provide
two varying approaches to Holocaust-related sculpture.
Miller, a professor at Bucks County Community College
outside of Philadelphia, creates sculpture from
papier-mâché and other materials that is
reminiscent of medieval tableaux. Miller worked in puppet
theaters, and the fascination about such creativity provided
her with an inroad to sculpture about the Holocaust. In
addition, while seeing Claude Lanzmann's documentary film
Shoah, she was struck by testimony that indicated
that the SS
guards forced
inmates to call the dead bodies figuren or "puppets."
One of her large sculptures (not in this show) depicts three
crucified figures, two men and a woman, with Arbeit Macht
Frei (Work Makes You Free) written in place of the
traditional INRI of Crucifixion scenes. Schlafwagen:
Who Will Say Kaddish For Them? is a meditation on
the absence of honor for the dead during the Holocaust and a
sardonic interpretation of a sleeping car from the German
schlafwagen. This sculptural piece is also loaded
with the debris produced by the death camps: shoes,
photographs, religious objects and aspects of bodies
themselves. Miller's creations are suggestive of the
"plastic" works of the Polish artist and theater producer
Jozef Szajna, who, as an Auschwitz survivor himself, sees
civilization constantly trying to forget the meaning of
Arbeit Macht Frei, the cruel joke that greeted
inmates as they arrived at the death camps.
Shirley
Samberg's works
can be read with a Holocaust context, but their metaphorical
connections are more tenuous. Using glue, paint, sand,
stucco and dirt on wet burlap, Samberg's
Wrappings represent groupings of survivors
from any type of disaster. Devoid of both faces and normal
limbs, they appear as specters. Yet at the same time, they
convey a sense of tragedy that is all too familiar to the
contemporary world. The human form with absence of face and
hands also conforms to limitations imposed on traditional
Jewish and Islamic art from the commandment against false
idols.
Robert
Barancik and
Susan
Erony take two
radically different approaches to the Holocaust theme.
Barancik is a Philadelphia graphic artist who is deeply
American in his Jewish identity and was removed from the
Holocaust. In l990 Barancik attended an artists' retreat in
Vermont that sensitized him to a more open discussion of the
subject. Since then, he has produced two small books of
folded messages entitled Kvitl Shoah. Each
work contains six original cards that are made as collages
and hand painted in colorful gouache. The inner spaces of
each card contain meditations about the Holocaust. These
works derive a great amount of their content from biblical
imagery, both Jewish and Christian. But the main focus is
Jewish absence and the deep inter generational effect on all
Jews as potential victims: "Jewish bones leach unseen into
the hard old world soil. Crematoria smoke vanishes into the
blue lungs of empty sky...." reads one of the messages.
Erony,
living in Boston, is involved in a large project about the
Holocaust based on her sense of responsibility as a Jewish
artist to retell the story visually. Her specific focus is
the technological aspects of modern barbarism,
dehumanization and statements against genocide and its
recent variant, "ethnic cleansing." Additional works in the
series deal with destroyed Jewish communities &endash; Lodz,
Prague and others. Some of the materials are photographic,
while others are in some respects relics of the Jews
themselves. Erony's visit to Lodz, Poland, in l989 came
after a fire at the only synagogue there. Burned prayer
books were being thrown away. She took them and integrated
the charred remains into several works as memorials to the
victims. Erony is sensitive to certain limits of politically
oriented art. The work must always be art and avoid
trivialization.
The Survivor
Artist
A document that survives from
the art jury committee in the Vilna ghetto from March 16,
1943, indicated approval for exhibiting twenty-seven
sketches by "S. Bak (9 years old)."
[15] Since
then, Samuel
Bak's entire
life has been involved with the difficult memories of the
Holocaust. He survived physically, but only barely on an
emotional level.
His art began as abstract
expressionism, with some similarities to Rothko's altar-like
works. By the 1970s, however, Bak was working in
surrealistic landscapes with both a Renaissance palette and
Magritte-like irony in most of his works. However, the major
focus was not a flippant humor, rather a serious attempt to
deal with his survival. His work may be likened to a healing
art or reflect the deep tragedy of the powerlessness of
ghetto existence. In The Observers, from 1973,
his figures appear like concentration camp survivors, cut
off at the shoulder. The have no limbs and are juxtaposed to
constructive-like paper cutouts and chess pawns. The
Ghetto (1976) appears as a destroyed town set within
a tomb in the earth in the shape of a Star of David.
Variations of this work have integrated Judaic themes of
Sabbath or yahrzeit (memorial) candles, expressing a
deep grieving process the artist continues to go through. In
his still-life scenes, the objects are dysfunctional. In
other paintings, angels, often bearers of biblical prophecy
and rescue, have leather wings that seem not to work or are
themselves in chains. Many of his works refer to the
obliteration of the Ten Commandments. That Is the
Question, a l989 still life of broken objects,
reminds one of Hamlet's soliloquy and the words that came
earlier, "To be or not to be," which was part of daily
survival in the ghetto. The layers of destruction that Bak
paints are set against beautiful landscape backgrounds and
calm skies, references to the isolation of the victims and
perhaps the complacency of the world of the onlookers.
Living now near Boston, Bak
continues to paint on an even grander scale, and his works
have drawn in more symbols of the past and contemporary
worlds and their illusions. Pears, wine bottles, broken
clocks and clocks, chess pieces and Hebrew letters are
symbols that appear in various states of decomposition in
Bak's works, conveying in their own way layerings of pain
for the viewer. Bak sees an absolute need to use the
metaphor of surrealism as a way of confronting the
Holocaust. He has written:
My reluctance to
deal with these subjects in a direct way must have
multiple reasons. Objectively, documents, films and
memoirs seem to me more eloquent than a painter's
creation. And yet they seldom achieve more than a faint
echo of the reality that they try to describe. One might
possibly solve this by way of a meaningful
transfiguration, but the forms or subjective
expressionism, brought to their maximal development by
the advent of two World Wars, are at present exhausted.
[16]
Viewers
will note that Bak's paintings come exceptionally close to
creating an entirely new visual vocabulary for interpreting
the Holocaust, through both his own suffering and as a
metaphor for specific and universalized disturbances.
Judith
Goldstein is
also a survivor of the Vilna ghetto and Stutthof and
Buchenwald
concentration camps. Her father was killed, although her
mother and brother survived. Most of her relatives perished
at Ponar, a massacre site outside Vilna, which, like Babi
Yar outside of Kiev, for many years had no commemorative
marker. Goldstein's art possesses a certain naive style,
which has been used also by Ilex Beller in France, Pearl
Hessing in England and the American-Jewish artist Harry
Lieberman, who was not a survivor but painted some
interesting Holocaust paintings. This style, when related to
the theme of the Holocaust, is sometimes disarming to the
viewer, as the power of the subject is in some conflict with
the apparent lightness of the medium. Goldstein's collages
are her memories and hopes as she constantly reflects back
on her period of captivity. In Crematory, the
oven and smokestack appear as a modern icon, with visions of
human heads in the smoke. Vilno Ghetto was
based on symbols in a ring Goldstein's father made in the
ghetto from a silver coin. She managed to keep it, despite
searches that necessitated giving up every other possession
as she went through Stutthof and Buchenwald. The collage
utilizes the Hebrew letters vov and gimmel,
the abbreviation for the Vilna ghetto, as a title for a
triangle that incorporates symbols of oppression and
dehumanization with a few elements of hope. Vilno
Ghetto also contains references to the musical life
of the ghetto and to Goldstein's memories of the choir
conductor, Dumashkin, who was later killed. Goldstein
herself has also explored musical approaches to the
Holocaust, having written several songs about her
experiences.
Netty
Schwartz Vanderpol
was born in Amsterdam and was thirteen years old when Nazi
Germany invaded the Netherlands. She was a classmate of Anne
Frank, whose diary is one of the most celebrated works of
modern literature. In 1943, Vanderpol and her family were
deported to Westerbork concentration camp and then
Terezin,
north of Prague. Vanderpol was placed on several deportation
trains for Auschwitz, only to be removed at the last minute.
In February 1945, she and a group of fellow inmates from
Terezin were sent to Switzerland in exchange for German
prisoners of war, the only such exchange of the war.
Vanderpol started doing
needlepoint in 1984, and it became a vehicle for dealing
with her emotions and "guilt of survival," a form of
therapy. Her work represents an abstract type of art, with a
collective title for her work, Every Stitch a
Memory. Each work deals with various "textures of
grief," as she describes it, and is both art for viewing and
therapy for the artist. Some works contain direct Holocaust
imagery, such as the Star of David with the Dutch word,
Jood, barbed wire, concentration camp numbers,
vignettes of flowers that grew near the perimeter fence at
Terezin and train tracks. One work, All the King's
Horses and All the King's Men, is a needlepoint
design that includes a broken mirror, a testimony to the
broken life of her mother, who later was a victim of
Alzheimer's disease but still remembered the camps. The
broken mirror is also a metaphor for her own broken
life.
Vanderpol's medium,
needlepoint, is unique and is often difficult for the art
critic to approach. Her focus within the medium is
abstraction, and her works have been compared to some of the
chromaticists of the abstract expressionist movement of the
post-1945 period. Each work contains very quiet and
controlled symbols and perhaps an inner rage. Powerful
textures of the yarn itself are woven into evocative
designs. One cannot go away from Vanderpol's work without
the feeling of having witnessed a vast disturbance, which
may be Holocaust-specific in most works, but is also a
universal expression of grief. As a medium, needlepoint is
also specifically feminine, and in this case it is raised to
the level of a higher contemporary art form.
During
the Holocaust, Kitty
Klaidman was a
hidden child. She was protected at first by a Christian
neighbor, Jan Velicky, who then found refuge for her family
with the Drinas family, who were farmers. The Klaidmans
lived for two years in an attic space of the farmhouse.
Klaidman's visual memory of her youth, therefore, is heavily
involved in recalling horrible and long periods of anxiety.
Hidden Memories is a series of paintings that
focus on these attic spaces. They carry with them some
ominous overtones, but also a sense of abstraction that can
produce a non-Holocaust interpretation emphasizing painterly
aspects of the works. Ghost Games is a series
that juxtaposes the view down circular staircases with old
family photographs. Childhood Revisited is a
mixed-media series that peers at the past as if through
shaded and aged photographs. One might detect in these works
some similarity of landscape with that of Joyce
Lyon's work, and
the use of photographs evokes some comparisons with
Christian Boltanski's utilization of photographs in
installations.
Gabrielle
Rossmer did not
have memories of attic hiding. However, her evading the
Holocaust by coming to America just before the outbreak of
World War II did not have a totally happy ending. While she
and her immediate family escaped from Bamberg, Germany, her
grandparents did not. After a long struggle to obtain visas,
they were "transferred to an old age home in the East,"
where they perished. Rossmer was invited to return to
Germany at the end of 1991 to install a sculptural ensemble
that recalled her own family's emigration from Germany and
the horrors of her grandparents' deportation and
extermination. The exhibition took the title of In
Search of the Lost Object and was installed in the
Bamberg Municipal Museum that formerly had been the
Judenhaus, the very place of the grandparents' house
arrest.
Rossmer's installation uses
artifacts that the viewer can feel, touch and read. There
are photocopies of German passports and identification
papers marked with a "J" (Jude), documents on
Aryanization of the family's business and property and
papers detailing the road from Germany to America, including
tickets and menus from the voyage on the SS President
Harding. Ghost-like apparitions appear amid the
documents and family photographs. There are many objects,
but the lost object is the one most dear that cannot be
retrieved. Objects appear in a sense only as ghosts moving
throughout the environment, alongside the viewer. Rossmer's
individual loss becomes a tragic episode through the power
of the installation, but also a metaphor for all
displacement and similar suffering. What is most frightening
is the conclusion that must be sensed &endash; that this is
the story of a "normal" middle-class family that suddenly
found itself torn apart.
Edith
Altman's father
was arrested in Altenburg, Germany, and detained in
Buchenwald
in the days after Kristallnacht
in November 1938. Eventually he was released and the family
emigrated, after many desperate encounters, to Chicago.
After an evolution through an academically-based art, Altman
became a political artist, using installations as her form
of fighting racism and prejudice. Altman's chief interest is
in symbols and words, which she regards as having strong
positive and negative attributes. An analysis of such words
and symbols and their transformation from positive to
negative and back again in an alchemical manner provides a
way of understanding her art and aspects of contemporary
history. The Nazis, for example, used all sorts of
euphemisms to describe the killing of the Jews, the ultimate
one being Endosslung or "final solution." Other
phrases and words, such as Arbeit Macht Frei, created
negative connotations to otherwise innocent words.
Altman sees her role as a
priestess or shaman, with artistic powers to "reclaim"
inverted symbols and words. The study of the Kabbala, with
its focus on positive and negative attributes, white and
black, forces of light and darkness, produces in her
installation works a dialectic of words that cannot but
impel the viewer to question his own values and prejudices.
The Holocaust emerges as the greatest negative force. In the
installation show It was Beyond Human
Imagination, Altman asks questions about the working
of the human mind and our learning processes, especially
regarding definition of "the other" and victimization. The
power of words is inescapable in Altman's works, as well as
an understanding of how Hitler manipulated similar words as
a language for genocide. Altman's healing power through art
aims at deconstructing ominous symbols, like the black
swastika. She changes it back to a positive force by
introducing powders and earth that neutralize its negative
attributes and transform it into spiritual gold.
Reclaiming the Symbol/The Art of Memory is a
powerful statement of the artist's ability to mend the world
in the post-Holocaust era. Implicitly, it is the obligation
of victims, like Altman herself, to take the leadership in
this rebuilding process.
Gerda
Meyer-Bernstein
came from Hagen, Germany, to England in the l939 children's
special emigration at the age of fifteen. Later she came to
Chicago. Meyer-Bernstein has been involved with the creation
of politically charged installations. According to the
artist, her work "is political because political events have
shaped my life." Art for the artist, however, is not merely
political commentary or mourning. Installation art for
Meyer-Bernstein has become a way to effect nonviolent
change. She has done many works on the Holocaust, as this is
a direct reflection on her own life and fate, as well as
that of her father, who was also an artist. However, she has
also created powerful statements about other forms of
violence in the twentieth century. Antiwar themes are woven
into her works such as Vietnam Memorial
(l983), Procession (l981) and Garden of
Eden (l981-82). Other issues addressed in her
installations include apartheid in South Africa, civil wars
around the world, destruction of human lives, boat people,
nuclear war and, most recently, the relationship between
blacks and Jews in America. These works, when placed
alongside her Holocaust installations such as Block
11 (l989), Volcano, (l993) Aus
der Asch (l985-86), Requiem (l983) and
Hommage of Raoul Wallenberg (l972), suggest a
redemptive role for art by opening wounds and allowing for a
healing process. Meyer-Bernstein makes an important point of
utilizing the Holocaust as a personal springboard for
comprehending all later acts of violence. These events,
however tragic they may be, are not a "Holocaust."
Meyer-Bernstein's installation
for Witness and Legacy is Shrine. As an
artwork, Shrine is an extended meditation on
the meaning of Auschwitz and the people who ran it. The
installation, set in a darkened room with hay strewn on the
floor, evokes the bleakness of the Auschwitz environment.
Barbed wires line the walls, with photographs of the
crematoria and appelplatz (roll-call square) behind
the wire. This is the world that Elie Wiesel has called "the
kingdom of night," and the sense of that darkness is well
understood in the darkness and silence of the
installation.
The other side juxtaposes
scenes of the crematoria with individual photos of
Rudolph
Hess, commandant at
Auschwitz, who helped build the camp and run it during its
first three years. Hess, who was tried in Poland after the
war, came to represent the relative "normal" or banal
background of perpetrators. His father wanted him to be a
priest, but he often complained of the endlessness of
religious ritual. Below a larger center photograph of a
crematoria are three memorial candles, lit with bulbs. The
overriding sense of death and hopelessness is barely
relieved, except in the few photographic scenes of the
outdoors. These do not necessarily suggest hope, but the
other reality of deception, where the phrase Arbeit Macht
Frei greeted inmates at the gates.
The
Second-Generation Artists
Witness and Legacy
contains the work of five artists who represent the second
generation. Debbie
Teicholz's
medium is photography and photo reliefs, highly affected by
use of destructive techniques of annulled images, charred
wood and color tinting. Her main series, A Prayer by
the Wall, contains strong points of reference to the
Holocaust, but not in a literal manner. The evocation of
images of train tracks, plowed earth, cut trees, targets and
a sensitive reflection on decaying landscapes was inspired
by the memory of the Holocaust on one hand and experiences
in Israel. In Teicholz's photographic triptychs, the
landscape of Israel and the Western Wall, the most holy site
in Judaism, creates a sense of redemption, transforming the
dead landscape of tracks and barren land. Teicholz's
identity is strongly influenced by the memory of
displacement and, being of the second generation, "My
identity was greatly influenced by a past from which I am
once removed. My art bears witness to this feeling of
displacement, of living in a time warp, where a flashback to
the Holocaust takes place simultaneously with events of
today." [17] The
nonspecific aspects of place suggest the difficulty of
memory in identifying places of mass murder. Is this perhaps
an allusion to the ethical question about how to commemorate
memory in the concentration camps? Should they be left to
rot and return to the earth, or should they be preserved in
a fashion that might become mini-amusement parks?
Conceptually
similar to the photographs of Teicholz is the work of
Joyce
Lyon, a
Minneapolis artist whose father is a Holocaust survivor from
Rzeszow, Poland. Most of his family was killed at
Belzec
death camp. Lyon's situation as a member of the second
generation led her to inquiry about relatives who
disappeared, about literature and testimony about the
Holocaust and ultimately to her own expression,
Conversations with Rzeszow: A Dialogue Exploring
Different Kinds of Knowing.
Conversations is based on a series of
paintings that were also transformed into a book of the same
title. It is, as Lyon points out, "a dialogue between what
is familiar to me...and experiences that I do not-and
cannot-know first hand."
[18] The
artistic aspect of Conversations juxtaposes paintings
around Rzeszow, including scenes of mass graves in the
Glogow Woods, with remarkably similar landscapes from
Minnesota and New York. The message is clear and suggestive
of the terrible burden that memory imposes: The similarity
of landscape between Poland and parts of North America
indicates that memory about genocide can be induced
particularly from nonpolitical sources. A bird sanctuary,
woods near Tofte, Minnesota, or the remains of a razed hotel
from a New York resort have a magical potency of evoking
images of isolation and death in Poland's camps and forests.
Just as Teicholz's enigmatic photographs of railroad tracks
convey a powerful sense of tragedy, so too do Lyon's
paintings suggest that the Holocaust's landscape was very
much like places we know and enjoy.
Pier
Marton is a
second-generation artist who has wrestled with problems of
his parents' survival and the impact of contemporary
anti-Semitism. This led him to merge the video interview of
children of survivors, called Say
I'm a Jew,
with an installation entitled Jew, set in a
cattle car. Being a member of the second generation and
experiencing European anti-Semitism in France in the 1950s
and 1960s led Marton to the inability to openly express his
Jewishness. Drawing from his own experience, Marton was
obsessed with the question of how children of the second
generation have coped with growing up in Europe after World
War II. While attending a convention of second-generation
survivors, Marton advertised for individuals willing to tell
the story of their European and Jewish identity experiences
on camera. Many volunteered. Marton edited bits and pieces
of the video together to form an engaging artistic and
psychological work.
The American-European painter
R. J. Kitaj has represented what he terms "diasporism" as a
major component in contemporary artistic life. This is a
useful concept to explain the works of many artists in this
show, who constantly have to deal with a Jewish identity
problem in a world that is potentially enticing and
supportive and also contains anti-Semitism, denial and
insult. Marton's space was made to represent a blend of
cattle car, barracks and a mausoleum. As Marton has written,
"Memory can fuse separate locations in an inextricable
blend." [19] Within
the installation area were seats where the video played
continuously. Those attending the show were encouraged to
write their responses on the walls of the entrance and
boxcar itself, recalling the memory of how deportees did the
same on their way to death camps.
Mindy
Weisel, a
Washington-based, second-generation painter, has moved her
work in the direction of an abstraction involving intensive
color washes and infusion of small signs of the
ever-presence of the past. This is suggestive of varying
levels of emotional coping with events that were connected
with her parents. Born in the Bergen-Belsen
displaced persons (DP) camp in l947, Weisel has noted that
she struggled for recognition from her parents, who seemed
to have established a psychic and real distance from her
during childhood, a function of their own problems of
survival and loss. Art for Weisel has become a method of
coping with the emotions she inherited from her parents'
survival. She began showing her art in l977, and a l980
exhibit was entitled Paintings of the
Holocaust, a series of works done in pastel, oil
paint, crayon and pencil on paper.
[20] Her
father's Auschwitz number figures prominently in some of the
works, and most of them have a sense of brooding, although
some optimism may be detected. Weisel's works have a
spiritual feel to them, especially with color choice: Strong
blacks, blues and aquamarine colors prevail in most of her
works, often with yellowish tan backgrounds or intrusions.
Symbols abound, be they concentration camp numbers, Hebrew
words, or visual references. Above all, Weisel's art can be
appreciated on a purely aesthetic level as abstraction, and
the Holocaust-related symbols may evade the inattentive
viewer.
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