NEW YORK – The Jewish Museum presents Theaters of Memory: Art and the Holocaust from November 9, 2008 through February 1, 2009. This exhibition offers a focused selection of works including George Segal’s sculpture The Holocaust, 1982. A full-scale study for the monument (located in San Francisco’s Lincoln Park) is in the collection of The Jewish Museum. Segal’s work has become an icon not only of art about the Holocaust but also a work of art intimately associated with The Jewish Museum. Exhibited with the Segal are a select group of works drawn from the Museum’s collection – painting, sculpture and video – by Eleanor Antin, Christian Boltanski, Tadeusz Kantor, Anselm Kiefer, Fabio Mauri and Frederic Matys Thursz. Together with the loan of a recent video installation, Everything I Need, by Matthew Buckingham, the exhibition presents key contemporary artistic responses to the tragic history of World War II and the Holocaust.
Making art about the Holocaust has long been considered problematic. The first three decades after World War II witnessed only rare and usually modest artistic attempts at dealing with the Holocaust. But it was the appearance in 1978 of the U.S. television miniseries Holocaust that catapulted the subject into public consciousness. Taken together, the art on display in Theaters of Memory grapples with the histories surrounding World War II – the atrocities of genocide and their attendant mass destruction and moral devastation.
In light of the initial reticence to deal with Holocaust subjects in aesthetic terms, it is noteworthy that the works in this exhibition, made between 1975 and 2007, often take highly theatrical approaches toward these tragic histories. In The Holocaust, George Segal transforms a photograph of corpses in a concentration camp into a three-dimensional monument that resembles a stage set. The other works in this exhibition all bear elements of the theatrical: the poignant lighting in Christian Boltanski’s Monument (Odessa); the eerie stage set of Tadeusz Kantor’s The Desk; Fabio Mauri’s props for a performance; and the operatic scale and dramatic brushwork of Anselm Kiefer’s Die Himmelspaläste (The Heavenly Palaces). Matthew Buckingham’s two-screen projection is a cinematic backdrop for the personal recollections of a refugee from Nazi Germany. Through their theatrical nature and performance aesthetics, these works engage historical tragedy with dramatic immediacy and visceral impact.
George Segal (1924-2000) created The Holocaust (1982) at a time of renewed attention to the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. Segal’s sculpture won a competition for an official Holocaust memorial for the city of San Francisco and the bronze version is located in that city’s Lincoln Park. The Holocaust was produced using Segal’s signature technique of casting living persons directly in plaster. Segal scoured hundreds of photographs of victims and emaciated survivors – taken immediately after the liberation of the camps – as sources for the monument. He then created a three-dimensional, life-size stage set of Nazi carnage. To create this work, he directed his models to engage in theatrical gestures, instructing them to fall down, collapse, or imagine that they were dead. The star-shaped arrangement of the bodies includes the figure of a woman with a half-eaten apple, an allusion to the biblical figure Eve. A figure with outstretched arms symbolizes Jesus and suffering. The older man holding a boy is a reference to Segal’s controversial 1978 sculpture Abraham and Isaac, which he created to memorialize the students killed at Kent State University in protests against the Vietnam War.
Characteristic of Italy’s Arte Povera movement, the art of Fabio Mauri (b. 1926) fuses minimalist aesthetics with theatrical gesture. The elements of Small Closet with Shirt (1971) are props from a performance of Ebrea, first staged in Venice in 1971. In Ebrea, an actress stands before the mirror as she removes her clothes, gradually cuts pieces of her hair, and glues the strands onto the mirror. Her silent, repetitive actions form a Star of David. The cutting of the hair, the prominent star, and the work shirt symbolize the experience of the concentration camp. For Mauri, Ebrea becomes the personification of the Jew in the wake of the Holocaust: vestige and victim, stereotype and survivor.
Initially, Mauri had created Ebrea to remind Italians of their fascist past, a history he felt was quickly being forgotten. Performed again at the 1993 Venice Biennale, Ebrea responded in its new incarnation to the genocide in the former Yugoslavia.
In Monument (Odessa), (1989–2003), Christian Boltanski (b. 1944) enlarges and manipulates found photographs to grainy, dramatic effect. In doing so, he creates a distance between these new images and the original photographic documents of anonymous sitters. The six children in this work have been identified as Jewish students celebrating the holiday of Purim in France in 1939. The date of the photograph, the children’s religion, and their ghostly presence link them to the Holocaust, simultaneously begging questions about their fate.
The videos of Matthew Buckingham (b. 1963) present intimate histories of persons and places, real and imagined. Unearthing biographies or recasting literary characters, his projections make us witnesses to his protagonists’ hermetic worlds. In Everything I Need (2007), we are introduced to the German Jewish refugee Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986), who lost most of her family during the Holocaust. In 1974, she returned to her native city of Berlin for the first time in forty years. Buckingham’s video presents her disembodied voice, recalling memories stirred by the visit. The intonation of her words is set against images of a 1970s-era aircraft like the one on which she made the momentous trip. Charlotte Wolff was a Jewish physician, psychologist, radical feminist, and lesbian activist. She fled Nazi Germany in 1933 for Paris, where she became involved with André Breton and the Surrealists. When Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940, Wolff moved to London and associated herself with British literary figures such as Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley. Unable to practice medicine outside Germany, she turned her scholarly attention to psychology, sexuality, and the scientific study of the hand. Her biography is emblematic of the plight of the refugee.
Connected with numerous avant-garde movements including Informel painting, Conceptual Art, Fluxus, and Happenings, Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990) was primarily a theatrical impresario. The Desk is a sculpture related to his 1975 theater work, The Dead Class. In this performance, live actors carried effigies of their younger selves, an evocation of the tragic history Kantor lived through during World War II. Kantor proclaimed through his Theaters of Death an existential despair in the face of political conflict and senseless annihilation.
Born in Wielopole in eastern Poland, a town with a sizable Jewish community, Kantor kept his Jewish roots purposefully ambiguous. Yet his work from the very beginning was founded on remembrance of the “Jewish, amputated part of Polish culture.” For an artist who grew up between the omnipresent Catholic Church and the Jewish cemetery of his hometown, the cross and the ghost-like figure of the body of a young boy serve as universal symbols for death, martyrdom, and loss.
The paintings of Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) often employ grand gestures of historical and mythic subjects in combination with a mixture of tactile materials and opulently worked surfaces. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Kiefer became occupied with the tragic history of Germany’s lost Jews. He has used biblical and literary subjects as metaphors to evoke these devastating losses, from the Book of Exodus to the works of Jewish poet Paul Celan. Kiefer’s engagement with Holocaust memory and the void left in contemporary German culture by the destruction of its Jewish community has recently led him to an obsession with Kabbalistic subjects, as seen in Die Himmelspaläste (The Heavenly Palaces), 2004. This painting takes its title from the Book of the Heavenly Palaces, a work based on a Kabbalistic mode of inquiry. Seven rusted cages sprouting lead ribbons represent the Hekhaloth, the seven steps of the spiritual journey toward perfect cognition. The metal cages also represent the prison of German history that remains an enduring burden for the artist.
Ashes and Dust (1986-89) is part of Frederic Matys Thursz’s series, Elegia Judaica, and serves as a memorial to his uncle Jakob Gutglas, who died in Dachau, and to other victims of the Nazis. Despite its monochromatic nature, the painting features the artist’s complex palette and his method of glazing, scraping, and sometimes burning his medium. To create Ashes and Dust, Thursz (2930-1992) performed what he considered a a highly symbolic act: he charred organic material that he then used for his leaden-tone pigments. The artist once explained that the work was inspired by profoundly felt memories of his uncle: “I know that his ashes become my pigment, that his blood legacy is my . . . medium, and that his elegy is now my coherence.”
The highly personal oeuvre of Eleanor Antin, (b. 1935) a first-generation feminist artist, countered the abstract purity of high modernist painting and sculpture of the 1960s. As with much of Antin’s work, Vilna Nights (1993-97) combines elements of theater and narrative. Vilna, the capital of Lithuania and a major center of Jewish culture and learning during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, provides the setting. One of three staged vignettes, this video forms part of a larger installation that evokes a bombed-out courtyard in a destroyed shtetl. A boy and a girl, presumably brother and sister, are shown cold and hungry as they share a crust of bread. Magically, a lighted Hanukkah menorah levitates above them in mid-air. Chairs and a table set with an unexpected meal appear but when they sit down to enjoy the food and drink, the apparition vanishes and the children return to their forlorn state. The melancholy of Antin’s work jumps between the real and the imagined, enchantment and sadness, history and memory.
