Conscience of Humanity
The Conscience of Humanity Stands Aghast
My title is taken from an article in the London News Chronicle of 5 December, 1942 in which the word holocaust is first used to describe Hitler's persecution of the Jews.1 A year later, in 1943, Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide. 2 It is a poignant irony that root of the word holocaust, now so firmly established with the agonies of World War II , can be traced back to old middle English when it referred to "the sacrificial offering of an animal burnt whole," and from thence via Greek to an ancient Hebrew word meaning "that which goes up in smoke," a prophetically pathetic phrase that evokes the terrible ovens of destruction at the death camps. Still, Holocaust and genocide as we use them are essentially an invention of our century. So is an exhibition like this one that is dedicated to Holocaust and genocide themes. Within our century and before, it was common enough to produce paintings that honor combat, sculptural monuments commemorating victories or tablets memorializing the dead; such things have existed for thousands of years. It is not so easy to find works of art that protest the ravages of war or atrocities; Breughel's Massacre of the Innocents and Goya's Disasters of War are the exception to the rule. In effect, this exhibition presents a genre new to our times, one that forces us to confront the aftermath of our worst instincts for prejudice and hate.
Naturally, there is resistance to an art of this sort. Standing before such a painting (shown in a synagogue), a Jewish acquaintance remarked "who would want such a thing in their living room?" Who indeed? Neither there, nor in a museum nor anywhere else. Yet works of this sort cry out to be seen. For the victims and the descendants of victims these images are righteous testament of old and fatal wrongs; they offer an inadequate cathartic for insuperable suffering. Better this than silence. But can these works touch those who were not there? Goya wrote "I saw this" in the margin of one of the prints of the Disasters of War series; under another, "One can't bear to see such things." Most of us, bystanders to the central tragedy, may feel uneasy in the face of these reminders of times past, all the more so, since genocide, now that we have named it, can be seen rampaging like a Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse across our world today. Yet, we must see such things and artists must record them.
There is an incipient call to moral action in these works. In that, they differ from the pictures in the art history books; this massacre of the innocents is in our times and it is still going on. All of this makes for an emotionally charged environment; the very content of a holocaust art fractures the audience into disparate constituencies. Even indifference is controversial; there is no neutral ground. That attitude and this exhibition is very much a product of recent times, post modern rather than modernist in its view of the world and the role of art in society. In the sixties the Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz could declare "The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words that what those words designate." 3 This formalist view was applied with equal rigor to painting and all the other arts and, even in scholarship one hoped that a general humanism could save the day.
In the bitter era following World War II the world had to confront science, the science of the Salk vaccine and the Green Revolution as well as the science of the Atomic Bomb and the knowledge of the experiments at the concentration camps. Prior to the war W.H. Auden had high hopes for science's ability to bring about a recognition of our common biological heritage and hence greater social equality among all people. Auden praised the "true men of action of our times, those who transform the world... the scientists;" but by war's end after visiting the camps he would write that the scientists to be truthful, must remind us to take all that they say as a tall story." 4 A similar and more profound distrust of science came from another quarter. In November 1947, D.S. Gottesmann wrote a letter to the Swedish Consul General in New York indicating his gratitude to the Swedish people and to King Gustav V for "organizing aid to the Jews in the Nazi-dominated countries in their truly painful predicament." 5 Gottesmann proposed a gift of $50,000 to Uppsala University (home to one of the oldest operating amphitheaters in Europe) to support an effort in the humanities. Gottesmann stated his fears in what came to be known as the Atomic Age:
The Administration of human affairs has fallen behind our technical advances with the result that the physical and moral destruction of the human race is in the air. It is not to science that we must turn for guidance but to the humanities-- to the several fields of learning having to do with the social and moral fibres of our people. We must develop the ethical, cultural and philosophical values and learn from history and literature. In that way we can build up the liberalism and understanding that is so necessary to win the race against the weapons of man's own creation.
Gottesmann's gift was used to sponsor a series of lectures on "The Renaissance Problem in the History of Art" delivered by Erwin Panofsky in August 1952 in Grisholm Castle and later published as Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. In the Author's Preface Panofsky speaks of the ideal setting that can be described only by the phrase "Et in Arcadia ego" and of the scholarly discussions "occasionally attended by the inquisitive inhabitants of the deer park" or again, of the difficulty of his subject and the "almost superhuman task" of accomplishing his end. Not a single word amidst this erudite elegance is devoted to the Jews, nor does he acknowledge the tragic circumstances which provided the stimulus for this learned gathering (he does tell us that the choir of Nuremberg was finished in 1472). How detached, how aloof and in retrospect, how naive!
The race to save humanity, or at least significant parts of it is still on. Hopefully those of us in the humanities (I most emphatically include the sciences) can do more today than simply dedicate our craft to the abstract idea of righting social injustice. In exhibitions like this one, held in a great public institution of education, we can confront the issues directly as do the artists represented here. Their work puts faces on the victims, identifies the tormentors and specifies the places of torture where these crimes were and still are being committed. The cool reserve of a modernist art or the exuberant detachment of pop art has no place here nor does procrastination. These artists have learned what an earlier generation had not; waiting thirty years or so, as Goya did before he published the Disasters of War, does not solve anything. Inaction serves the oppressor and not the oppressed.
Does this mean that an art exhibition will really stop the slaughter? After all the photographs, films, paintings, images of every sort, why should we think so? And why should we be optimistic that the "humanities" or "science" or some new "humanism" will somehow bring redemption. Our age is not the only one that has borne witness to such terrible events and turned to some comfortable idea like humanism to pull itself out of the fire. Sir Thomas More was a humanist; he enthusiastically sent heretics to their destruction lamenting only that they died so quickly before they were subjected to the fires of eternal suffering and damnation. Speer, Heidegger, Riefenstahl, architect, philosopher, film maker, were all "humanists". Let us be wary of the quick fixes, the panaceas of some new humanism or scientific credo. The fault dear Brutus....
The art shown here offers a meditation on ourselves. But more than just a meditation. A call to action. Picasso, whose Guernica is the most famous political painting of our century, proclaimed that "painting is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy." That is the spirit of this exhibition.
Robert Poor, Professor
Department of Art History University of Minnesota
Maciej Toporowicz, from the photo series: Obsession. Approximately 35" x 28". 1993
1 According to the Oxford English Dictionary.
2 Ibid.
3 The very first essay in The Alternating Current, Arcade Edition, NY (1990), p. 3 ( reproducing and translating the original essay written between 1959-61).
4 More fully quoted in Gerald Weissmann, "Auden and the Liposome", Darwin's Audubon: Science and the Liberal Imagination. Plenum Trade, New York and London, 1998. Ch. 11, p.115-123.
5 Panofsky, Erwin. Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. Harper Torchbooks, 1969 (first published Almqvist & Wiksells, Stockholm, 1960). The background on the circumstance of writing the book is from the Editor's Preface, p. VII-VIII. The first Author's Preface, p. XVII-XVIII contains the material cited in my text. A second Preface notes corrections and adds a small bibliography .