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.