Sur-Rational
Sur - Beyond; Rational - Reasonable, showing reason.
Sur-Rational - Beyond the reasonable.
This definition was invented by Fritz Hirschberger offer he read the diary of a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz who, in the same entry, described with equal relish the deaths of hundreds of Jews and his delicious dinner. Hirschberger applies the term to the series of Holocaust paintings that he was able to produce only forty years offer the war.
Hirschberger, whose father was killed in Camp Dora, Germany, confronted his long suppressed feelings about the Holocaust in 1980 when he began reading hundreds of articles and books about it. He was horrified by the obsessive use of numbers: the numbers of people killed in each camp; the numbers of people exterminated by various methods; the numbers of Jewish villages erased. His anger was also kindled after reading about those people who distorted the details ond questioned the existence of the Holocaust, those who colloborated with the Nazis, and the governments who continued to persecute others even after the war, as well as by the supposedly "reasonable" players during the war: the world leaders who turned their backs and shut their eyes to the atrocities being committed. It was then that Hirschberger set out to capture his anger on canvas.
Although the paintings are based on facts, they serve as vehicles for Hirschberger's denunciation of those who betrayed and dehumanized others, rather than as documents. To do so, he needed to develop a new pictorial language that would be more easily understood than his then-current abstoct style of painting. Rejecting the forceful expressionistic means of artists whom he admires such as George Grasz ond Max Beckmann, Hirschberger peopled his canvases with masked creatures, masks that equally dehumanize the victim and the victimizer rendered in colors more often used for neutral, decorative subjects. By these means the paintings, at first glance, appear deceptively simple until the strength and horror of each message becomes clear, a message that brings the experience from the general to the personal by isolating the incidents by reducing the astronomical numbers to one. Hirschberger originally created the series between 1985 and 1989. In April 1990 his studio and all the paintings in it were destoyed by fire. Arson is suspected. Hirschberger has re-created the pieces in order that their message not be lost.
With the Sur-Rational series, Hirschberger adds his vision to the vast and growing body of work with Holocaust themes in all media art, film, literature, performance, and TV. The issues of who has the "right" to express the Holocaust ond what are the best means to do so are hotly debated and difficult to resolve. As the generation of those who experienced it is fading, artists with no direct links to the Holocaust ore responding to it, and a growing number of people are applying "Holocaust" language to current ond personal disasters. Some scholars such as Elie Wiesel, believe that the subject can be properly addressed only by those who suffered it: "Just as no one could imagine Auschwitz before Auschwitz, no one can now retell Auschwitz after Auschwitz." Others maintain that artists hove the need to respond to something that affects them deeply and that through them the catastophe will not fade from memory. The Magnes Museum ond the University of Judaism believe that one way to keep the memory from fading is to present exhibitions such as Fritz Hirschberger's Sur-Rational Paintings.
-Sheila B. Braufman, Curator
The Magnes Museum