Adam and Eve 2011

Adam & Eve Recent Paintings by SAMUEL BAK

PUCKER GALLERY I BOSTON Samuel Bak’s Adam & Eve: On Holocaust and Beauty

ver a prolific career that began in 1942 at the age of nine in the Vilna Ghetto and continues to flourish today in a studio near Boston with a lush forest view, Samuel Bak has provided an aesthetic language for contemplating the Holocaust, a history Ooften described as “inconceivable.” After a brief period of abstract expres- sionist work in the late 1950s, in which the Holocaust lurked in rather than loomed over his compositions, Bak decisively turned to a more classical vocabulary, having settled in Rome amidst the glories of the Italian Renaissance. Bak initially struggled with directly representing the Holocaust, especially in the more realist modes he adopted in Rome, but eventually surrendered to his childhood memories in a series of painful stages, which led to the exhibition of his work in the German National Museum in Nuremberg in 1978 (figure 1). In his recent large-numbered series Adam and Eve, Bak casts the first couple as lone survivors of a biblical narrative of a God who birthed humanity and promised never to destroy it. Unable to make good on the greatest of all literary promises, God becomes another one of the relics that displaced persons carry around with them in the disorienting aftermath of world war. Adam and Eve devotedly shlep this God-artifact along with them on their exilic odyssey to nowhere. Viewers often describe Bak as a tragedian, but if classical tragedy describes the fall of royal families, Bak narrates the disintegration and disillusion of the chosen people. FIG 1. Samuel Bak exhibition catalogue German National Museum, Nuremberg, 1978 Bak draws upon the biblical heroes of the Genesis story, yet he is more preoccupied with the visual legacy of the creation story as immortalized by Italian and North Renaissance artists. Bak’s conscious allusions to Renaissance ideals of beauty should not be confused with simple artistic sourcing. Artists delving into Jewish identity tend to see the Renaissance construction of beauty as one that consciously excluded non-Christians.1

2 Despite the relative culture of tolerance in Renaissance Italy towards its Jewish inhabitants, Jews appeared ugly in art at a time when beauty and virtue were seen as synonymous. Post-Holocaust artists, in particular, spurn the aesthetic tropes of the Renaissance because of its exalted place in the Third Reich.2 Besides, how might artists use the benchmarks of western beauty to render the ugliest century of western civilization? Bak’s resus- citation of Renaissance tropes for atrocity is disturbing if not downright creepy. Artists and scholars incessantly quote Theodor Adorno’s 1949 statement that “After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric” as a call to refrain from the evocation of beauty, the hallmark of the High Renaissance, in representing the Holocaust.3 Whether seeing beauty as offensive in the representation of genocide or pointing to the failure of culture to ultimately curb barbarity, Holocaust artists overwhelmingly turned towards modernism FIG 2. Adam and Eve and The Story That for aesthetic solutions. Non-representational styles seemed even more Has No End appropriate given Hitler’s campaign against the avant-garde as exemplified by his Degenerate Art Show (Entartete Kunst) in 1937, which juxtaposed Aryan ideals with modern art “influenced by the Jews.” Artists—often those born after 1945 such as Anselm Kiefer and Christian Boltanski—embraced abstraction to render the incomprehensibility of history.

Samuel Bak, however, has been indelibly drawn to the cultural heritage of Renaissance painting, particularly to the legacy of Michelangelo, the artist who holds an unrivaled place for his evocation of human beauty. Michelangelo, along with other celebrated quatrocento artists, constructed a unified pictorial program in the Sistine Chapel that shifted the focus from heaven to earth. FIG 3. Donatello Habbukak, 1427-36 Bak amplifies this shift towards the potential of human genius in his Adam and Eve series by also focusing the blame on a God-making man. The selective appropriation of Michelangelo for the representation of a post-genocidal view of the world is not a new technique for Bak, who has integrated elements of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel in his work since the 1960s, including a large-scale reappraisal of Michelangelo’s scene of the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. While artists source the work of other artists by technical necessity, the pointed juxtaposition of Renaissance beauty and Holocaust in Bak’s works stimulates more than a pleasing intellectual recognition of art historical references; it provokes a FIG 4. Adam and Eve Hiding with the FIG 5. Albrecht Dürer moral and psychological response. Dürers Adam and Eve, 1504

3 Identifiable Renaissance motifs crowd Bak’s canvases. In Adam and Eve and the Story that has No End I, Adam confronts the antique marble ruin of a bust with a shorn scalp, presumably a concentration camp inmate, but aesthetically referencing the heroic bald head of Donatello’s Habbakuk sculpture (figures 2 and 3). In Adam and Eve and the Castles of Sand (p.29) and Adam and Eve and the Triptych of Precariousness (p.32), Adam’s twisted poses resemble Michelangelo’s recumbent long-limbed figures, yet Bak’s figures appear vulnerable rather than indomitable. The dual portrait of FIG 6. Adam and Eve and The Boys Adam and Eve beside their infernal Tree of Life in Adam and Eve Hiding with the Dürers is of course a conscious revision of Northern Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer’s 1504 etching Adam and Eve, but Bak’s painting depicts a scene of sexual violence rather than the idealization of the nude (figures 4 and 5). In one of Bak’s rare paintings of Adam and Eve with their two sons Cain and Abel, Eve poses in the three-quarter profile of a typical portrait of an Italian courtier like those immortalized by Hans Memling, Carpaccio, and Raphael, while her son references the single most famous image of the FIG 7. Warsaw Ghetto Holocaust, the Warsaw boy holding his hands up in surrender (Adam and Eve Stroop photo, May 16, 1943 and the Boys, Stroop Photo, figures 6 and 7).4 In this fractured family portrait, Adam signals his wife, estranged by a river that flows between them, with the hand gesture Michelangelo offered to God in the center of the Sistine ceiling. In Adam and Eve and the Story that has No End the embellished Hebrew lettering makes the words “Adam” and “Chava”— painted in the style of Ashkenazi scriptural print in Polish wooden synagogues all destroyed during the Holocaust—function like the lunettes on the ceiling FIG 8. Adam and Eve and The Story That Has No End Diptych of the Sistine Chapel where figures can be identified by name (figure 8). Bak’s working methods include preparatory sketches and figure studies in red chalk and charcoal in which Bak employs a Michelangelo-like graduation of tone, plastic modeling, and pronounced contours diffused with a softly receding glow (Study for Wal l, figure 9).

While indelibly drawing on the rhetoric of Renaissance art to mediate modern history, Bak simultaneously rejects the assuring iconographic programming and overarching narrative structure of the Sistine Chapel devised with persuasive tromp l’oeil for viewers 60 feet below. Upon visiting the Sistine Chapel in 1787, the German thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe described the visual panoply created by the Sistine ceiling in his travel diary as setting the standard for Human ambition and beauty: “Until you have seen the Sistine Chapel, you have no adequate conception of what FIG 9. Study for Wal l man is capable of accomplishing. One hears and reads of so many great and

4 worthy people, but here, above one’s head and before one’s eyes, is living evidence of what one man has done.”5 In light of Bak’s contextualization of Michelangelo’s heroic Adam and Eve in the aftermath of the Holocaust, one can only read these words and the humanist masterpiece that it describes as a grand indictment of human genius. Bak uses the awe of human achievement inspired by Michelangelo to deconstruct the assurance afforded by programmatic schema in order to show that man is indeed capable of accomplishing anything, including genocide, including deicide. If Michelangelo’s ceiling constitutes the greatest singlehanded effort to convey the story of heroic man from creation, death, resurrection, and salvation, then Bak finds new implications in Michelangelo’s overwhelming unity and comprehensive vision, which assume an altogether different posture in light of the Holocaust.

Once Adam and Eve escape the insufferable provincialism of their FIG 10. Adam and Eve and The Faltering pear/paradise, they are exhaustibly burdened by constantly morphing pears, Secret at times the central object of a composition and at times interwoven into a mélange of disorienting clutter. The pear takes on an architectural monumentalism and also appears as the slightest of accessories. Bak displaces Michelangelo’s appealing nudes on the fleshiness of the pear, which evolves into a wide variety of materials: soft green skin, oxidized iron, leather, tarnished armor, and dense towers of masonry (Adam and FIG 11. Adam and Eve and The Meaning of Life Triptych Eve and the Faltering Secret, and Adam and Eve and the Meaning of Life, figures 10 and 11). The pictorial persistence of the pear in the composition lays bare fundamental questions—what Goethe called Urphänomen—the questions that frame all others. After exiting the devoured pear, Adam and Eve find everything in disrepair: books, trees, sidewalks, and predictably more pears. The things with which Adam and Eve are preoccupied are prosaically utilitarian; they constantly fix, save, organize, and recycle the bits and pieces of their inchoate universe. There is an element of whimsy in their outlandish attempts to persevere; Adam and Eve wear bottomless dinghies around their waists, holding up a sail and disregarding the oars at their feet (Adam and Eve and Dissent, figure 12). These ill-conceived repairs may be commonplace, but hardly banal. Among their various home improvement projects, Adam and Eve construct a wide-open eye from roughly hewn wooden planks and rusted nails to watch over them. Eve sews, as if for a bride’s trousseau, the tattered FIG 12. Adam and Eve and Dissent

5 remains of concentration camp uniforms and Adam integrates these same fabrics into his uninhabitable shelters. Bak’s careful crafting of the ever-evolving objects invites a growing sense of immanent enlightenment, but ultimately offers only a cosmology of knowledge in what Bak sees as “a world without explanations.”6 Perhaps the pear is the biblical fruit of knowledge; perhaps it is a caricature of the French slang for a naïve, easily deceived imbecile (une poire).

Like classic tragedy, Bak’s paintings are replete with omens. Not just the constantly morphing pear, but the rainbow (God’s sign that he would never destroy the world again after the flood), the knowing silences of marble ruins, and an ever-present eye reminiscent of the Masonic imagery best known from the US dollar. Adam and Eve exhaust themselves addressing this God that they painstakingly manufacture at every pastoral stop and carry FIG 13. Adam and Eve and The Castles around with them on their nomadic journey as displaced persons. If these of Sand symbols have been associated with omens in other sources, they offer no such revelations here. Ultimately, the awesome and ubiquitous presence of the pear is grounded in psychology rather than in religion. Despite all the signs pointing to a readable future, the work remains frustratingly opaque, a complex tangle of associations. Rather than offering stable readings of his symbol system, Bak insists on rendering one more transfiguration, assembling one more analogy, making one more seemingly meaningful observation in a series that ultimately does not add up. All denouements and no climax. Viewers cannot help but solemnly wonder. Of course, Holocaust witnesses are always pathologized by their audience; the witness produces images as alien as the hallucinations of psychotics, and observers cannot help but see their distorted sign systems as oscillating wildly between a rational cosmology and sheer nonsense, between overconfidence and utter despair. In resisting stable iconographic interpretations, Bak exposes all schemas as FIG 14. Adam and Eve and The Good Old Times aesthetic fictions.

It is easy to accept the non-sensical representation of Holocaust. It seems “appropriate,” after all. Yet, Bak does not only refute redemptive images following tragedy or the imposition of order and meaning-making in the grand themes of Jewish-Christian or Divine-Human relationships, but also in the pursuit of bourgeois aspirations in ordinary life. After a nude Adam and Eve crawl out of their sinfully consumed pear—the smallest and the only perfectly square canvas in the series—the biblical couple covers themselves up with a wide assortment of once-fashionable costumes for life in hell. Bak occasionally wraps Eve in a classic drape, referencing the idealized Renaissance nude (Adam and Eve and the Castles of Sand, figure 13), although more often Bak designs a wide assortment of clothes and accessories to FIG 15. Adam and Eve and express his figures’ humiliated humanity. In his first painting in the series, The Dangerous Fruit the risk-averse couple, in their respective hats, leather gloves, and finely-

6 stitched wool overcoats—indeed overdressed for the occasion of their fall from Paradise—step confidently off a precipice (Adam and Eve and the Good Old Times, figure 14). In doggedly maintaining a theatrical pose of middle- class propriety, Bak’s tightly-wound Adam and Eve become decorous period pieces hopelessly dated by their pre-war wardrobes. Throughout the series, Eve models an impressive inventory of veils and modish hats, including a flat- brim straw hat, a blue and cream floppy hat, a felt hat dressed with two feathers, a bell-shaped cloche hat, and a beret. Seen through a bull’s eye in Adam and Eve and the Dangerous Fruit, Eve wears a delicate string of pearls and a fresh coat of lipstick on her weathered face (figure 15). Elsewhere, Eve models a delicate lingerie ensemble, provocative high heeled boots, simple studs, garish painted fingernails, and a wool coat trimmed with fur collar and fur sleeves. Adam’s hats oscillate between a working-class cap, expressing his burden of eternal labor after expulsion, and the more upwardly mobile fedoras, designating a level of success in the business world. Perhaps the most obvious iteration of full-costume bourgeois dress appears in the full-length FIG 16. Adam and Eve and The Family Tree double portrait Adam and Eve and the Family Tree in which Adam and Eve assume a pose familiar from Van Eyck’s so-called Arnolfini Wedding (1434). Adopting the classic pictorial gesture of dextranum iunctio immortalized by Van Eyck for the purpose of betrothal vows, Bak’s couple solemnly lock hands to await the demise of their family tree (figures 16 and 17). If Adam and Eve’s detachment is the psychological consequence of their expulsion from paradise, it is also the most palpable expression associated with the social status of affluent portrait sitters in the quatrocento. The debonair urbanity of Bak’s protagonists emphasizes their futile quest to attain the trappings of sophistication, lodged as they are in the nondescript margins of destroyed cities. FIG 17. (detail) Jan van Eyck Arnolfini Portrait, 1434 Even if we accept the incomprehensibility of a post-genocidal world and the absurd chasing for bourgeois social standing, it is harder to swallow the representation of love and family building as senseless. When Bak turned to the archetypes of lovers—whether we identify them as biblical or pedestrian—he honed in on the place where people impose meaning and shared experience on the vast landscape of suffering and desire. In drawing Adam and Eve in joint portraits linked by the reciprocal orientation of the heads, Bak drew upon the Renaissance tradition of preparing such portraits as part of dynastic alliances, as in the celebrated dual portraits of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza (c. 1472) by Piero della Francesca. This well- groomed pair, visited by Bak in the early 1970s in Descendant, renders a panoramic landscape across the two panels, joined by a common horizon of a well-governed and cultivated region. Bak takes this reciprocal arrangement in the composition to another level. To draw a comparison with writer Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, where the reader rearranges the chapters to his own FIG 17. Jan van Eyck aesthetic preferences, Bak’s pair of lovers are independent portraits Arnolfini Portrait, 1434

7 interchangeable in orientation.7 These reassembled diptychs and triptychs certainly demonstrate Bak’s artistic virtuosity, but they also show the randomness of composition/history. Their landscape is unkempt, wild, uncultivated, yet nonetheless sweeping, absorbing, and enlightening. There is something of the sweep of early American paintings of manifest destiny when Adam and Eve sit with their back to us overlooking the pastoral landscape of the sins of others. In the mini-series Adam and Eve Facing Up, and I would add facing up “to the pear,” the reciprocal profiles of the couple gradually become assimilated into the ever-malleable pear (figures 18 and 19).

A final analogy. The twelfth-century Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides maintained that Divine literature contains no contradiction and therefore FIG 18. Adam and Eve Facing Up, I dismissed the fantastic tales of aggadah. Maimonides’ curt attitude towards aggadah encouraged its later treatment as a folkloristic Jewish literature. In his letters to Rabbi Pinchos Wechsler, the modernist Neo-Orthodox German thinker Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) acknowledged the limitations of aggadah, while simultaneously emphasizing their preciousness.8 Hirsch offered a way out of Maimonides’ distaste for irrational tales by claiming that while aggadah does not find its roots in the transmission of Divine text9 and forms no basis of the “Na’aseh venishma” covenant between the Jewish people and God, it reveals something of reality nonetheless. For Hirsch, there is no system for determining the literalness of aggadah or analyzing its perplexing analogies, yet it forms the basis of communicating an unruly reality. In a strikingly similar letter composed on the eve of the Holocaust, the German historian Gershom Scholem wrote his FIG 19. Adam and Eve Facing Up, II

1 On the persecution of Jews in Renaissance art, see Dana E. Katz, The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 85. On the use of the Jewish badge in Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel, see Barbara Wisch, “Vested Interest: Redressing Jews on Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling,” Arbitus et Historiae 48 (2003): 143-72; Benjamin Braude, “Michelangelo and the Curse of Ham: From a Typology of Jew-Hatred to a Geneology of Racism,” Writing Race across the Atlantic World: Medieval to Modern, ed. Philip D. Beidler and Gray Taylor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 79-92.

2 For an album of reproductions of Hitler’s private collection, including Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Cupid Complaining to Venus under a tree hanging with fruit, see Katalog der Privat-Gallerie Adolf Hitlers at the Library of Congress, loc. no. 2004676971. See Hitler’s Speeches in George L. Mosse, ed., Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich, 7-16; Jonathan Petropoulos, “Degenerate Art and State Interventionism, 1936-1938,” Art as Politics in the Third Reich, 51-74; Stephanie Barron, ed. “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: Harry Abrams; and Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991).

3 Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Prisms, trans. Samuel Eber and Sherry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 34. On the politics of representation of the Holocaust in light of Adorno’s statement, see Lisa Saltzman, “To Figure or Not to Figure: The Iconoclastic Prescription and Its Theoretical Legacy,” Jewish Identity in Modern Art History (Berkley: University of California Press), 67-84. A measure of Adorno’s influence on representations of the Holocaust, see the meaningfully

8 friend Zalman Schocken on October 29, 1937 that “Certainly, history may seem to be fundamentally an illusion, but an illusion without which in temporal reality no insight into the essence of things is possible.”10 I quote these statements not only to situate the representation of Holocaust in paradox as many writers have done before me, but to demonstrate the place of paradoxical images in Jewish thought. Like aggadah, one cannot cite Bakian tragedy as a refutation of the Divine covenant nor can one seek to unilaterally refute the questions his paintings raise.11 Bak remains bound, through relentless re-readings and repudiations, to the central text of the Jewish people and the shared cultural legacy of the Christian west. Despite the series’ skepticism towards Divine providence and redemptive historiography, Bak’s work elicits no cynicism on the part of the viewer. Rather, this human tapestry of a failed Divine protector invites a personal response. These unresolved recriminations of both Bible and Beauty leads to an assimilation of the self into an “inconceivable” history of ugliness.

Maya Balakirsky Katz Touro College New York, 6 Shvat 5771

Maya Balakirsky Katz is Associate Professor of Art History at Touro College and on faculty at Touro's Graduate School of Jewish Studies. She specializes in the intersection of religious identity and media, particularly surrounding public protest, such as the Dreyfus Affair and the Soviet Jewry movement. She is also the Book Review Editor for Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture.

titled museum catalog by Monica Bohm-Duchen, ed., After Auschwitz: Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art (Great Britain: Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, 1995).

4 Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A. Philllips, “Bak’s Impossible Memorials: Giving Face to the Children,” Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak (Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2008), 93-124.

5 Goethe, The Italian Journey, Aug. 23, 1787.

6 Samuel Bak, Painted in Words—A Memoir (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 481.

7 Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, trans. Gregory Rabassa (Pantheon Books, 1966).

8 Samson Raphael Hirsch to Pinchas Wechsler, trans. Yehoshua Leiman, HaMa’ayan (1976).

9 As suggested by Talmud Bavli, Gittin 60a.

10 For the original letter in German, see David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and History (), 155-156; I quote here Biale’s translation on p. 32.

11 See Alicia Ostiker, “Bak’s Dreams: Painting as Midrash,” Representing the Irreparable, 43-58.

9 Adam and Eve and The Inevitable Oil on canvas 12 x 12", each BK1358

Adam and Eve and The Story That Has No End Oil on canvas 12 x 12", each BK1357

10 Adam and Eve and The Dangerous Fruit Oil on canvas 24 x 20" BK1381

11 Adam and Eve and The Sweat and The Pain Oil on canvas 40 x 30" BK1372

12 Adam and Eve and Awareness Oil on canvas 12 x 12" BK1359

Adam and Eve Looking Forward and Backward Oil on canvas 24 x 20" BK1349

Adam and Eve and The Sheltering Tree Oil on canvas 16 x 12" BK1343

13 Adam and Eve and The Memory of Smoke, II Oil on canvas 30 x 40" BK1364

Adam and Eve and The Memory of Smoke, III Oil on canvas 30 x 40" BK1375 14 Adam and Eve and The Memory of Smoke, I Oil on canvas 30 x 40" BK1369

15 Adam and Eve and The Open Secrets Oil on canvas 24 x 36" BK1346

Adam and Eve and The Burning Bush, I Oil on canvas 12 x 16" BK1342

16 Adam and Eve and The Akedah Oil on canvas 40 x 30" BK1377

17 Adam and Eve Facing Up, IV Adam and Eve Facing Up, I Oil on canvas Oil on canvas 24 x 20" 24 x 20" BK1350 BK1347

Adam and Eve and Facing Up, III Oil on canvas 24 x 20" BK1382

18 Adam and Eve Facing Up, II Oil on canvas 24 x 20" BK1348

19 Adam and Eve and The Sign of Farewell Adam and Eve and The Road Taken Oil on canvas Oil on canvas 16 x 12" 24 x 20" BK1356 BK1351

Adam and Eve and The Blue One Oil on canvas 16 x 12" BK1355

20 Adam and Eve and The Upside Down Question Mark Oil on canvas 40 x 30" BK1373

21 Adam and Eve and The Passports Oil on canvas 36 x 24" BK1344

22 Adam and Eve and The Search for Each Other Oil on canvas 20 x 24" BK1345

Adam and Eve and The Sins of The Others Oil on canvas 20 x 16" BK1353

23 Adam and Eve and The Right Angle Oil on canvas 40 x 30" BK1380

24 Adam and Eve and Dissent Oil on canvas 40 x 30" BK1354

25 26 Adam and Eve and The Meaning of Life Oil on canvas 20 x 16", each BK1365

27 Adam and Eve Where The World Ends Oil on canvas 24 x 30" BK1361

Adam and Eve and The Covenant Oil on canvas 20 x 24" BK1352 28 Adam and Eve and The Castles of Sand Adam and Eve and The Forbidden Way Oil on canvas Oil on canvas 16 x 12" 14 x 11" BK1362 BK1366

Adam and Eve and The Good Old Times Oil on canvas 16 x 20" BK1368

29 Adam and Eve and The Time of Difficult Choices Oil on canvas 30 x 24" BK1363

30 Adam and Eve and The Faltering Secret Oil on canvas 36 x 24" BK1379

31 Adam and Eve and The Triptych of Precariousness Oil on canvas 16 x 12", each BK1370

32 33 Adam and Eve and The Family Tree Oil on canvas 36 x 24" BK1374

34 Adam and Eve Hiding with The Dürers Oil on canvas 36 x 24" BK1371

35 Adam and Eve and The Loss of The Sheltering Wing Oil on canvas 36 x 24" BK1378

36 Study for Closure Mixed media 19 3/4 x 25 1/2" BK1339

Study for Sacred Fire Mixed media 14 1/2 x 20 1/2" BK1335 Study for Wal l Mixed media 15 x 11" BK1332

37 Study for Good Time Study for Both Mixed media Mixed media 19 3/4 x 15 3/4" 19 x 13 1/2" BK1341 BK1334

38 Study for Ayin for an Eye Mixed media 25 1/2 x 19 3/4" BK1340

39 Study for Micro and Macro Mixed media 25 1/2 x 19 3/4" BK1337

40 Study for Heavy Burden Mixed media 19 1/2 x 25 1/2" BK1338

Study for Game Pencil on paper 11 x 13" BK1333

41 Study for Balance Study for Sin Mixed media Mixed media 11 x 8 1/2" 13 x 11 1/4" BK1328 BK1331

Study for Burden Mixed media 11 x 8 1/2" BK1330

42 Study for Sins of The Others Pencil on paper 15 x 20 1/2" BK1336

Study for Armour Mixed media 8 1/2 x 11" BK1329

43 Adam and Eve and The Arduous Road Oil on canvas 18 x 24" BK1376

44 Samuel Bak Biography

Samuel Bak was born on August 12, 1933, in Vilna, Poland, at a crucial moment in modern history. From 1940 to 1944, Vilna was under first Soviet, then German occupation. Bak's artistic talent was first recognized during an exhibition of his work in the Ghetto of Vilna when he was nine. While both he and his mother survived, his father and four grandparents all perished at the hands of the Nazis. At the end of World War II, he and his mother fled to the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp. Here, he was enrolled in painting lessons at the Blocherer School, Munich. In 1948 they immigrated to the newly established state of Israel. He studied at the Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem and completed his mandatory service in the Israeli army. In 1956 he went to Paris where he continued his studies at the École des Beaux Arts. He received a grant from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation to pursue his studies. In 1959, he moved to Rome where his first exhibition of abstract paintings met with considerable success. In 1961, he was invited to exhibit at the “Carnegie International” in Pittsburgh. And, in 1963 two solo exhibitions were held at the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Museums. It was subsequent to these exhibitions, during the years 1963-1964, that a major change in his art occurred. There was a distinct shift from abstract forms to a metaphysical, figurative means of expression. Ultimately, this transformation crystallized into his present pictorial language. In 1966 he returned to Israel. He lived in New York City (1974-1977), Paris (1980-1984), Switzerland (1984-1993), and in 1993, moved to Weston, Massachusetts. Since 1959, Samuel Bak has had solo exhibitions at private galleries in New York, Boston, London, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Zurich, Rome and other cities around the world. Numerous large retrospective exhibitions have been held in major museums, universities and public institutions internationally. Included among them are: Bezalel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel; Bronfman Center, Montreal, Canada; Heidelberg Museum, Heidelberg, Germany; Germanisches National Museum, Nuremberg, Germany; Kunst- museum, Düsseldorf, Germany; University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel; Temple Judea Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Dürer Museum, Nuremberg, Germany; Jüdisches Museum, Stadt Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Jewish Institute of Religion, Hebrew Union College, New York, NY; Spertus Museum, Chicago, IL; Mizel Museum of Judaica, Denver, CO; Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Los Angeles, CA; National Catholic Center For Holocaust Education, Seton Hall College, Greensburg, PA; Holocaust Museum of Houston, Houston, TX; B’Nai B’Rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, Washington, DC; Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH; Panorama Museum, Bad Frankenhausen, Germany; Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame University, Notre Dame, IN; Florida Holocaust Museum, Saint Petersburg, FL; National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius, Lithuania; University of Scranton, Scranton, PA; Neues Stadtmuseum, Landsberg am Lech, Germany, Canton Museum of Art, Canton OH; Clark University, Worcester, MA; 92nd Street Y, New York, NY; Jewish Cultural Center, Memphis College of Art, Memphis, TN; City Hall Gallery, Orlando, FL; Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX; Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota, Duluth, MN and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.

45 PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Aidekman Arts Center, Tufts University, Medford, MA Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY Ben Uri Gallery, London, United Kingdom Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brookline, MA Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL Boston Public Library, Boston, MA Constitutional Court of South Africa, Braamfontein, South Africa Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA Drew University, Madison, NJ Dürer House, Nuremberg, Germany Felix Nussbaum Haus, Osnabrück, Germany Facing History and Ourselves, Boston, MA Florida Holocaust Museum, Saint Petersburg, FL Germanisches National Museum, Nuremberg, Germany German Parliament, Bonn, Germany Hillel Foundation, Washington, DC Hobart and William Smith College, Geneva, NY Holocaust Memorial Center, Farmington Hills, MI Holocaust Museum Houston, Houston, TX Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH Imperial War Museum, London, United Kingdom Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel Jewish Museum, New York, NY Jüdisches Museum, Stadt Frankfurt am Main, Germany Keene State College, Cohen Holocaust Center, Keene, NH Kunstmuseum, Bamberg, Germany McMullen Museum, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA Municipality of Nuremberg, Nuremberg, Germany Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius, Lithuania Panorama Museum, Bad Frankenhausen, Germany Philips–Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH Rose Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art, Tulsa, OK Simmons College, Boston, MA Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame University, South Bend, IN Springfield Museum of Fine Art, Springfield, MA Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA

46 Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel Tweed Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Duluth, MN Haifa University, Haifa, Israel University of Scranton, Scranton, PA Wabash College, Crawfordsville, IN Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA Yad Vashem Museum, Jerusalem, Israel

PUBLICATIONS AND FILMS Samuel Bak, Paintings of the Last Decade, A. Kaufman and Paul T. Nagano. Aberbach, New York, 1974. Samuel Bak, Monuments to Our Dreams, Rolf Kallenbach. Limes Verlag, Weisbaden & Munich, 1977. Samuel Bak, The Past Continues, Samuel Bak and Paul T. Nagano. David R. Godine, Boston, 1988. Chess as Metaphor in the Art of Samuel Bak, Jean Louis Cornuz. Pucker Art Publications, Boston & C.A. Olsommer, Montreux, 1991. Ewiges Licht (Landsberg: A Memoir 1944-1948), Samuel Bak. Jewish Museum, Frankfurt, Germany, 1996. Landscapes of Jewish Experience, Lawrence Langer. Pucker Art Publications, Boston & University Press of New England, Hanover, 1997. Samuel Bak – Retrospective, Bad Frankenhausen Museum, Bad Frankenhausen, Germany, 1998. The Game Continues: Chess in the Art of Samuel Bak, Pucker Art Publications, Boston & Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2000. In A Different Light: The Book of Genesis in the Art of Samuel Bak, Lawrence Langer. Pucker Art Publications, Boston & University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2001. The Art of Speaking About the Unspeakable, TV Film by Rob Cooper and Pucker Art Publications, Boston, 2001. Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings by Samuel Bak from 1946-2001, Pucker Art Publications, Boston, 2002. Painted in Words—A Memoir, Samuel Bak. Pucker Art Publications, Boston & Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2002. Samuel Bak: Painter of Questions, TV Film by Christa Singer, Toronto, Canada, 2003. New Perceptions of Old Appearances in the Art of Samuel Bak, Lawrence Langer. Pucker Art Publications, Boston & Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 2005. Samuel Bak: Leben danach, Life Thereafter, Eva Atlan and Peter Junk. Felix Nussbaum Haus & Rasch, Verlag, Bramsche, Osnabrueck, Germany, 2006. Return to Vilna in the Art of Samuel Bak, Lawrence Langer. Pucker Art Publications, Boston & Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 2007. Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak, Danna Nolan Fewell, Gary A. Phillips and Yvonne Sherwood, Eds. Pucker Art Publications, Boston, and Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 2008. Icon of Loss: The Haunting Child of Samuel Bak, Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A. Phillips, Pucker Art Publications, Boston, and Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 2009.

47 Adam & Eve Recent Paintings by SAMUEL BAK

Dates: 23 July 2011 to 12 September 2011 Opening Reception: 23 July 2011, 3:00 to 6:00 PM

The public is invited to attend. The artist will be present.

CREDITS: Design: Maritza Medina and Samuel Bak Editors: Destiny M. Barletta and Justine H. Choi Photography: Keith McWilliams

Adam and Eve and The Boys COVER IMAGE: Oil on canvas Adam and Eve and The Celebration of Promise 16 x 20" Oil on canvas BK1367 14 x 11" BK1360

Pucker Gallery 171 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Phone: 617.267.9473 Fax: 617.424.9759 E-mail: [email protected]

To view this catalogue and other Gallery publications and to experience an audio tour of the exhibition, please visit www.puckergallery.com. Gallery Hours: Monday through Saturday 10:00 AM to 5:30 PM Sunday 10:30 AM to 5:00 PM Member of the Boston Art Dealers Association. We offer one free hour of validated parking at the 200 Newbury Street Garage. The garage driving entrance is located on Exeter Street between Newbury and Boylston Streets.

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