Artist Statement
Statement for the Exhibition at the University of Minnesota
The events of World War II are an important part of my background. I was born in Vienna, Austria, and my family's experiences of the Holocaust are the inspiration for this series of paintings. Both my parents grew up and were educated in Vienna, and felt completely a part of the culture of the city. My father was a successful and prosperous businessman and our family had business interests in several countries throughout Europe. My immediate family left in 1938, fleeing the Nazis. With many difficulties, and some good luck, we went to Italy, then Holland, then England, then Ireland where we finally received a visa for the United States. Other family members went to Holland, Yugoslavia and Italy where there were branches of our business.
My father was always pained and bitter about what had happened. Once we left Europe, German was not spoken in our home, only French or English, and my family never purchased German products.
The family members in Yugoslavia were all killed. My uncle who went to Holland was taken by the Gestapo and was never heard from again. His wife and two small children were sent to concentration camps. These orphaned children survived, and after the war, when they were nine and ten years old, my parents were able to bring them to the United States to live with my family. They talked vividly about the camps. Thus the Holocaust came into our home with these children. This made an indelible impression on me and led me, for as long as I can remember, to read whatever I could on the subject.
So I knew from a very young age about the Holocaust. It was part of the fabric of my life, but I just wanted to be an "average" American. At that time the forties and fifties an ethnic identity was not something to be proud of; you were supposed to be assimilated, to conform, to fit in. Outwardly I conformed, but in my family there were these private memories and they were kept private.
As an artist, I painted abstractly for the first few years, then figures and landscapes and still lifes, but I never painted anything to do with my past or personal history.
In 1989 during a visit to an elderly aunt in California, she showed me some old family photographs Among them was a miniscule photo of my uncle from Yugoslavia and one of his daughters. I then remembered the stories about him I had heard as a child that he was special, that he had married a writer/poet and had two brilliant daughters, that all of them had disappeared during the war. As a child I always had a fantasy that if they had lived I would have loved this family, for they seemed so interesting and artistic. Looking at that tiny photograph it suddenly occurred to me that these four people had been totally obliterated and a few small photographs were the only evidence that they had ever existed. (We have been unable to find any record of them in any archives.)
When I returned to New York I did a painting based on this photograph just for myself, not to be exhibited. It was too personal, it was to be a documentation of their existence, a way to remember them. I wrote on the painting "Michael and Dorrit Kurz, deported in 1940's from Yugoslavia to an unknown destination, They were never heard from again." I had never written words on a painting before, but I wanted to memorialize who they were and their fate. It was also the first time I ever worked from a photograph.
At the time I started this painting, I did not realize that it would lead me to more paintings relating to the Holocaust, and that this would be a subject that would preoccupy me for the next ten years.
All of the works in this series have been inspired by photographs, some of them well known and in public collections, others from family sources. I'm not a photorealist rather I have used the photograph as a point of departure. Out of respect, I did not want to paint anything I hadn't experienced and I hadn't experienced the Holocaust directly, only through other people's personal history and accounts. I hadn't personally seen the piles of bodies, mass graves, starvation, the death camps, etc. Therefore I concentrated on individual people. Some were my family, some were not, but all are specific individuals. Usually the people portrayed are on the verge of having something tragic about to happen to them, we know it, they may not.
The colors in my paintings are purposefully bright and highkey. Many art works about the Holocaust are black, white, gray and maybe some red for blood, perhaps because the images we have of those years are black and white photographs. But one thing that struck me when I read memoirs and recollections of Holocaust experiences was the irony of the fact that terrible, unspeakable things were going on while the sky was blue and the birds were singing. It was this dichotomy of beautiful weather and horrible events that I found compelling. By keeping the colors realistic, even appealing, it makes the images truer to life, and possibly even more poignant.
In several of the paintings, ex: Zora and Michael Kurz and Freedom Fighters, I wanted to document the layers of time, and to suggest what happened to the people portrayed. Brothers is also about time. It was inspired by the tragic story a friend told me of the loss of many of his relatives and the photograph he showed me of two brothers. It touched me deeply for they seemed so full of hope and so innocent of their impending fate.
Untitled was painted at the time of the beginning of the fighting in Bosnia. It is the most "universal" work in the series. The figure in the middle was inspired by a photograph taken by Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War. Much in the painting is ambiguous it is up to the viewer to construct the "narrative". I wanted to show that things really haven't changed, that racially motivated violence and "ethnic cleansing" are still going on today even though nobody can any more claim ignorance of these events. I wanted to write about this on the painting but I had trouble finding the exact words. I knew I was trying to express the inexpressible, to ask how it is that we can go on making the same mistakes repeatedly. I kept writing things down on the canvas but nothing seemed right, so I would wash the words off with turpentine. After a while they wouldn't wash off any more. Certain words and phrases emerged, and it up to the viewer to get involved and complete the thoughts. The sequence of images in the bottom panel relate the central image to the Holocaust: young girls in the Warsaw Ghetto; a statement (in French) about the world's indifference to what they knew was happening; a photo of women and children waiting to be gassed at Auschwitz. To really see the lowest bottom panel the viewer has to bend down, thereby getting physically involved as well.
In SelfPortrait. 1999, I painted myself in front of a portion of my large multipaneled painting Vienna (now in the collection of Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien). The figures portrayed are based on a portion of a photograph well known in Austria. It was taken by a German officer of Viennese Jews. I identified with the women portrayed in the photo and thought they could easily have been my own family.
Most of my works refer to women and children possibly because as a Jewish woman I identify with them in a special way.
In the summer of 1997 I was awarded an artistinresidence grant to paint and live in Vienna. Prior to this, although I loved traveling and spending time in Europe, I had absolutely no interest in going to Austria. After years of working on this series of paintings, I wanted to see how I felt about being in Vienna. By chance, I was given a studio right next door to the building that had housed my father's office. This space was now rented by two artists. We became good friends, they invited me to work in their studio, and so I ended up spending time in my father's old office where I had spent many hours as a young child. I did research in various archives and found out what had happened to our family's business and how it was taken from us, and I located my birth records and other documents about my family. I visited the cemetery and saw the graves of relatives. All of this was a healing experience for me. I found out where I came from and what my roots were. It was something I hadn't realized I was looking for until I found it.
I was invited to have a solo exhibition of my Holocaust work in Vienna the following year in the context of the city's commemoration of the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht. It was most meaningful for me to show these particular paintings in Austria.