Witness and Legacy
Stephen C. Feinstein
Co-curator of Witness and Legacy
University of Wisconsin at River Falls
The Golgotha of modern mankind is Auschwitz. The cross, the Roman gallows, was replaced by the gas chamber -Ignasz Maybaum All is not vanity, all is horror -Rico LeBrun Why this determination to show "everything" in pictures? A word, a glance, silence itself communicates more and better... the Holocaust is not a subject like all others. It imposes certain limits. -Elie Wiesel
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 favorite work of art, a realistic military World War One painting by Elk Eber, The Last Hand Grenade.
Six hundred works of art representing such heroic themes were hung for the GrosseDeutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition), which opened in Munich on July l8, l937. A day later, on July 19, l937, 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 it's Greek origins suggest a "burnt offering." More and more, Shoah is the preferred descriptive word among Jews, as Holocaust has been used to refer to non-Jewish victims as well as 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-- "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 post-war response appeared from the pallet of many important artists. Among post-war 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 in 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) Raoul 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 he was writing about his experiences, when 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. Grunwald'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 of society, has produced a substantial number of exhibitions which deal with subjects focused around 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 ten-inch thick, ten 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 thirty years.(14) The mediums include painting, sculpture, photography, graphic designs, needlepoint and multi-media 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, Jewish or non-Jewish, not directly connected with the Holocaust who have developed a sensitivity toward the subject because of their humanitarianism, empathy and attempt to understand the event and convey it to others through art.
Survivors share a special vision of having been victims during the Holocaust . Non survivors cannot claim the same vision. Survivors possess memories which others can comprehend only in indirect ways. In some respect, the only "authentic" Holocaust art may be said to be the art of survivors. Artists like Judith Goldstein, Samuel Bak, Kitty Klaidman and Neddie Vanderpol experienced the terror of the ghettos and 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 Speigelman, Deborah Teicholz and Mindy Weisel are representative of this group. Their mediums of expression represent the breathe 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 which 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 Jews or artist), a historical narrative, reflections on place, absence and presence, or a Proustian-like stimulus to a book, photograph, film, confrontation with a survivor, 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 who realistic paintings have increasing dealt with the 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, l933. 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 which may be compared with montage in filmaking, Trachtman depicts historical events, such as Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time" speech after the October, l938 Munich Agreement and the consequences-the production of mounds of bodies and material debris from the victims. Or pop-art like paintings about the complicity of German industry in building the death camps and using 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, which have dealt with far-ranging subjects such as McCarthyism, Feminist issues, Abortion Rights, Police brutality, the Klu 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 recreates part of the road to death at Auschwitz. In this provocative work, viewers becomes 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 completed recently 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 safe and apparently "normal" physical environments of their homes or work. 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 their 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-mache and other materials which is reminiscent of Medieval tableaux. Miller worked in puppet theaters and the fascination of such creativity provided her with an inroads to sculpture about the Holocaust. In addition, while seeing Claude Lanzmann's documentary film Shoah, she was struck by the testimony which indicated that the S.S. 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 tradition 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 sleeping car from the German schlafwagen. This sculptural piece is also loaded with the debris produced by the dead 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 Mach Frei, the cruel joke which 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 which 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 Philadelphia graphics artist who is deeply American in his Jewish identity and was removed from the Holocaust . In l992, Barancik attended an artists' retreat in Vermont which sensitized him to a more open discussion of the subject. Since then he produced two small books of folded messages entitled Kvitl Shoah. Each work contains six original cards which are made as collages and hand-painted works
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 intergenerational 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--Lodz, Prague and others. Some of the materials are photographic, while others are in some respects relics of the Jews themselves. Erony 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 which 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)." (l5) 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 alter-like works. By the 1970s, however, Bak was working in surrealist landscapes with both a Renaissance pallet and Margritte-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 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 which 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 is 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 even a 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 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. Goldtsein'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 smoke stack appears as a modern icon, with visions of human heads in the smoke. Vilno Ghetto was based on symbols in a ring Goldtstein'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 which 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 memories of the choir conductor, Durmashkin, 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, Netty and her family were deported to Westerbork concentration camp and then Terezin, north of Prague. Netty 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 as an 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 needlepoint 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 Kings 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 also universal expressions of grief. As a medium, it is also one specifically feminine, and in this case raised to the level of 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, carry with them some ominous overtones, but also a sense of abstraction which 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 some similarity of landscape with that of Joyce Lyon's work, and the use of photographs evokes come comparisons with Christian Boltanski's utilization of photographs in installations.
Gabrielle Rossmer did not have memories of attic hiding. However, 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 Museum which formerly had been the Judenhaus, the very place of the grandparents' house arrest.
Rossmer's installation uses artifacts which the viewer can feel, touch and read. They are photo-copies of German passports and identification marked with a "J,"(Jude), documents on Aryanization of the family's business and property, and papers detailed the road away 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 which cannot be retrieved. They 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 that this is the story of a "normal" middle-class family that suddenly found itself torn apart.
Edith Altman's father was arrested in Altenberg, 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 alchemist-like way 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 like "Arbeit Macht Frei" created negative connotations to otherwise innocent words.
Altman's 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 which cannot be 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, and changing it back to a positive force by introducing powders and earth that neutralize it's 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 l5. Later she came to Chicago. Meyer Bernstein has been involved with 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 non-violent 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. Anti-war 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 and 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 art work, 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 behind the wire. This is the world which Eli 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 Hoss, commandant at Auschwitz, who helped build the camp and run it during its first three years. Hoss, who was tried in Poland after the war came to represent the relative "normal" 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 Artist
Witness and Legacy contains the work of five artists who represent the second generation. Debbie Teicholtz'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. Teicholtz'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 non-specific aspects of place suggests 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 of 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 are indicate that memory about genocide can be induced particularly from non-political 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 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 medium of the video interview of children of survivors called Say I'm a Jew, with projection as part of an installation entitled Jew, set in a cattle car. Being a member of the second generation and experiencing European anti-Semitism by growing up in France in the l950s and l960s 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 the atmosphere of Europe after World War II. While attending a convention of second generation survivors, Marton advertised for individuals willing to tell their own story before a camera of their European and Jewish identity experiences. Many volunteered. Marton edited bits and pieces of the video together to form an engaging artistic and psychological work.
The American-European painter R.B. 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 box car 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 is 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.
Art Spiegelman's use of the comic book is both an innovative and problematic form of art and literary conveyance. Many survivors found Maus something that came close to blasphemy. The depiction of Jews as mice and Germans as cats seemed to be a somewhat unfitting reminder of German propaganda through films such as Hippler's The Eternal Jew (l940).
Spiegelman was the product of a thoroughly American environment of the late l950s and l960s, dominated by his interest in comic books and the untold story of his parents' survival. His mother, Anja, committed suicide in 1968. Subsequently, Spiegelman's father, Vladek, burned Anja's diaries. The loss of his mother as well as Anja's story was the stimulus for researching the true story of his parent's involvement in the Holocaust. The result was more than forty hours of audio taping with Vladek Spiegelman, substantial technical and artistic research, and the translating of that story into Maus.
Is Maus art? The art critic Adam Gopnik has tried to answer this interesting question:
If you ask educated people to tell you everything they know about the history and psychology of cartooning, they will probably offer something like this: cartoons (taking caricature, political cartooning, and comic strips all together as a single form) are a relic of the infancy of art, one of the earliest forms of visual communication (and therefore, by implication, especially well-suited to children); they are naturally funny and popular; and their gift is above all for the diminutive. (21) Gopnik goes on to suggest the truth is actually the opposite and that cartoons represent "a relatively novel offspring of an extremely sophisticated visual culture." (22)
Previous exhibitions of Spiegelman's drawings have made it clear that he first utilized the format of Maus and Prisoner on the Hell Planet in l972. The idea of the mouse metaphor while exploring the possibility of doing a comic strip relating to the history of Afro-Americans. As Spiegelman progressed into the drawing of Maus, he became concerned with various aesthetic aspects which were important from the point of view of the visual artist: "He was becoming increasingly concerned with deconstructing the basic narrative and visual elements of the comic strip: How does one panel on a page relate to others? How do a strip's artificial cropping and use of pictorial illusion manipulate reality?...How do words and pictures combine in the human brain." (23) In this quest, the artist rejected a photo-realism, elaborate detail and shading, and ultimately developed a particular reduction process where text was reduced to fit the artistic space.
Witness and Legacy marks a beginning of the process of investigating the subject of the Holocaust. In addition, the exhibition raises the greater question of whether or not it is possible to enter into the subject without trivializing the event and developing visual forms which are distortions. Just as Greek and Roman art developed its own symbols based on mythology, and Christian art its symbols related to the Passion of Jesus and the Biblical stories, so too is a common visual language emerging to describe the Holocaust. In this Holocaust imagery, there is a spectrum that runs from the realistic scenes of barbed wire, gas chambers, crematoria, children, mounds of bodies and relics to more abstract, metaphorical and allusive gestures.
From the perspective of the Torah, the Holocaust demands some re-investigation of old stories and their current meaning: the presence of God, original sin, the sacrifice of Isaac the story of Job. Beyond this is the story of Man himself, with both the potential for good and evil.
As the twentieth century closes, there is more and more of a burden and an increasing urgency to tell the story. The generation of witnessesis passing. All that will be left is the legacy. Throughout history, art has been a means of such telling. Within the realm of art, the Holocaust era may just be emerging.
Footnotes:
(1) Elie Wiesel, "Art and the Holocaust: Trivializing Memory," in The New York Times, Sunday, June 11, l989 Section 2, p.l (continues on pp.38 and 40).
(2) . The literature on the destruction of the Gypsies is complicated negative stereotypes both before and after World War II, lack of literary tradition among the Romani and Sinti peoples, absence of significant numbers of both memoirs and scholarly books, and few representative artists. The only gypsy artist who has been exhibited recently is Karl Stojko, who survived Auschwitz and lives in Austria.
(3) Raoul Hilberg. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders. (New York. HarperCollins. l992), p. 11.
(4) James T. Young. Writing and Rewriting The Holocaust. (Bloomington, Indiana. Indiana University Press. l988), pp.96-97.
(5) Leonard Baskin, Iconologia. (London. Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich. l988), p.22.
(6) Baskin, Ibid. p.23.
(7) Wiesel, Op. Cit.
(8) Frank Rich, "The Holocaust Boom," in The New York Times, April 7, 1994, p.A15.
(9) Raul Hilberg, "Conscience from Burlington," Hadassah Magazine, August/September, 1991, p.23.
(10) Primo Levi as quoted in Michael Kimmelman, "Horror Unforgotten: The Politics of Memory," in The New York Times, Friday, March 11, 1994, page B1.
(11) Wiesel, Op. Cit.,
(12)) Paul Richard, "Obscene Pleasure: Art Among the Corpses," The Washington Post, Sunday, April 18,1993, p.G6.
(13)) Ken Johnson, "Art and Memory," Art in America, November, 1993, p.98.
(14) For purposes of the exhibition, "American" was defined as artists currently living and working in the United States.
(15) "Minutes of the Exhibition Jury, March 16, 1943, Vilna Ghetto." Translation of YIVO Document #466 by Dina Abramowicz. (New York. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research).
(16) Samuel Bak as quoted in Bak: Oils, Watercolors, Drawings, l972-l974. (New York. Aberbach Fine Art , October-November, 1974), 3.
(17)Paul Kresh, "Photograph Exhibit Evokes Memories of the Holocaust," in The Jewish Weeks, Inc. (New York), May l0-l6, l99l, p.38.
(18) Joyce Lyon. Conversations with Rzezsow, page 2.
(19) Pier Marton, Letter to Stephen Feinstein, April 11, l994.
(20)For an extended discussion of Weisel's background with longer personal statements, see Vivian Alpert Thompson, A Mission in Art (Macon, Ga. Mercer University Press, l988), pp.94-95.
(21) Adam Gopnik, "Comics and Catastrophe," New Republic, June 22, l987.
(22) Ibid.
(23) Galerie St. Etienne. Art Spiegelman: The Road to Maus. (New York, Galerie St. Etienne. l992). Brochure to accompany exhibition.