The Art of the Question: Paintings by Samuel Bak

The power of Samuel Bak to engage not only our minds but also our spirits comes from the poignancy of his artistic language. Such artistry involves not only the primary elements of space, light, color and composition, but also the artist's engagement with objects, symbols, narratives, and telling oppositions such as nature and culture.

Bak, a child prodigy, whose first exhibition was held in the Vilna ghetto at age nine, and whose paintings now span seven decades, weaves together personal and cultural history, past and present, to articulate an iconography of his experience of the Holocaust and his perceptions of a world that lives in the shadow of continuing genocidal acts.

Samuel Bak is an internationally acclaimed painter who lives in Weston, Massachusetts.

Curators: Sara Lynn Henry and Gabriele Hiltl-Cohen
Opening Reception: October 9, 5:30-8:00 pm

Center for Holocaust/Genocide Studies Annual Conference Commemorating Kristallnacht: November 12, 10:00 am-3:00 pm, Dorothy Young Center for the Arts
Click to download the Kristallnacht Conference Schedule

Extended Exhibition in the University Library Atrium
In Collaboration with Wabash College and De Pauw University

Co-sponsored with support from Drew University Art Department; Drew University Art History Department; Drew Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study; Drew Center on Religion, Culture, and Conflict; Drew Hillel; Drew University Library; Religion and the Arts at Drew; and Drew Theological School

About The Art of the Question: Paintings by Samuel Bak

With the generous support of Pucker Gallery, three institutions—Wabash College, Drew University, and DePauw University—are collaborating to bring to our campuses Samuel Bak’s artwork. For both liberal arts and theological teaching and learning, the art of Samuel Bak offers a unique opportunity to engage students, faculty, staff, and our institutions’ many publics with the questions rooted in our most basic understandings of what it means to be Jew and Christian, liberally educated citizens, and human beings. Just as Bak’s work unites traditions and themes of artistic production from Michelangelo to Mantegna, so too his paintings invite our three institutions to engage in the shared task of raising the most fundamental questions of academic and religious life lived after the Shoah and the shared search for the elusive Tikkun Olam.

Different elements of this exhibition have made their way to the Eric Dean Gallery and Lilly Library at Wabash College, and to The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University. They now come to Drew University’s Korn Gallery and University Library. Danna Nolan Fewell, Professor of Hebrew Bible at Drew University; Christine White, Associate Professor of English at DePauw University; and Gary A. Phillips, Dean of the College and Professor of Religion at Wabash College are coordinating the effort.

Paintings on Exhibit

Creation of Wartime III, 2009, Oil on canvas, 50 x 75" (BK1234) 

The various figures of Adam in soiled uniform, prison coveralls, or refugee garb are contemporary representatives of the one who was banished from Paradise. Like him they must feel that they were dumped into this world, unasked. How can they rise from the rubble where they have landed? Perhaps this explains why they are all in search of God. The most they come up with in my paintings is some mysterious shape, perhaps a hand that signals meaning they must discover themselves.

My imagery derives, of course, from Michelangelo’s Creation of Man, at whose center God's and Adma’s pointing fingers almost touch. What do these fingers mean to me? The hands seem to be of similar size. Is God creating man in his image, or is this man’s creation of God? Could their gestures express any disappointment or accusation?

Samuel Bak, “In a Different Light: Genesis in the art of Samuel Bak”

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Dress Rehearsal, 1999, Oil on canvas, 40 x 32" BK734

Above Moria, the falling off cliffs to God,
there hovers the flag of the sacrificial knife
Abraham’s scream for the son of his heart,
at the great ear of the Bible it lies preserved.

—from Nellie Sachs, “Landscape of Screams”

Bak’s variation on the Akedah [Sacrifice of Isaac] contains a visual mutation on the original story that casts it in a different and unsettling light. No figure in the painting is looking at its most intrusive and disorienting image. Blinded by its blaze of colors and dramatic action, we are in danger of missing it ourselves. Father and son have their eyes shielded, and the angels turn their back to it, as though acknowledging its anomalous presence would further complicate their already difficult task. But one has its wings pinned to the image's surface, the arrow (if we notice it) drawing our eyes away from Abraham’s menacing weapon to the even more sinister brick chimney rising beyond the upper margin of the canvas. Was the aborted sacrifice of Isaac only a “dress rehearsal” for the vaster killing of the children of Israel in a later age? How is one to construe the covenant that grew out of Abraham’s devotion to God in the unholy light of the subsequent carnage?

 --Lawrence Langer, In a Different Light: The Book of Genesis in the Art of Samuel Bak

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 Under the Trees, 1994, Oil on linen, 20 x 24" BK821

And yet, the dead will still cry midnight prayers—
each corpse, a trickling voice.
Like a tiny candle over each grave,
a cry will burn,
each one for itself.
“I am I”—
thousands of slaughtered I’s
will cry in the night:
“I am dead, unrecognized,
my blood still unredeemed.”

Such a wealth of gravestones—
I have never seen them before.
Day and night I shall mourn the names.

I have never been here before.

—from Jacob Glatstein, “I Have Never Been Here Before”

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Open Horizon, 2003, Oil on canvas, 24 x 18" BK930

The one who carries my word—
Will have no path,
For the land of believing words
Is covered with plague.
In the valley of shadows, it will watch,
Alone and solitary,
Over my bones.

—from Abraham Sutzkever, “Leaves of Ash”

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Soutine Street, 2001, Oil on canvas, 24 x 24" BK838

I am unable to take my eyes from the intricate images of all those bombed sites. A few buildings that have lost their facades look like huge dollhouses. They make me imagine a monstrous god, a gigantic and unruly brat who has amused himself by tearing them apart. Little is left untouched. Single walls, sole remnants of rooms that used to stage dramas of life stand along against the sky. They are like huge theater wings, and they too tell me stories. I look at the different layers of torn wallpaper and see in them pages of a book of former lives.

—Samuel Bak, Painted in Words—A Memoir

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Skies Were the Limit, 2001, Oil on canvas, 36 x 36" BK854

Yesterday Mother still drew
Sleep toward them like a white moon,
There was the doll with cheeks derouged by kisses
In one are,
The stuffed pet, already
Brought to life by love,
In the other—
Now blows the wind of dying,
Blows the shifts over the hair
That no one will comb again.

—from Nellie Sachs, “O the Night of the Weeping Children!”

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 Cornerstones, Oil on canvas, 36 x 29 1/2" BK849

Old, blue pages,
Purple traces on silver hair,
Words on parchment, created
Through thousands of years in despair.

As if protecting a baby
I run, bearing Jewish words,
I grope in every courtyard:
The spirit won’t be murdered by the hordes.

I reach my arm into the bonfire
and am happy: I got it, bravo!
Mine are Amsterdam, Worms,
Livorno, Madrid, and YIVO.

How tormented am I by a page
Carried off by the smoke and winds!
Hidden poems come and choke me:
—Hide us in your labyrinth!

--from Abraham Sutzkever, “Grains of Wheat”

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Testimonials, 2006, Oil on canvas, 40 x 30" BK1138

Violins float in the sky,
and a straw hat. I beg your pardon,
what year is it?
Thirty-nine and a half, still awfully early,
you can turn off the radio.
I would like to introduce you to:
the sea breeze, the life of the party,
terribly mischievous,
whirling in a bell-skirt, slapping down
the worried newspapers: tango! tango!
And the park hums to itself:

I kiss your dainty hand, madame,
your hand as soft and elegant
as a white suede glove. You’ll see, madame,
that everything will be all right,
just heavenly—you wait and see.
No it could never happen here,
don’t worry so—you’ll see it could

--Dan Pagis, “Europe, Late”

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From Generation to Generation III, 1996, Oil on linen, 32 x 26" BK473

[P]rotected by the lingering presence of the larger figure,…[the] middle-sized man has turned his back on the simplistic ancient laws (“an eye for an eye”). He now confidently reaches out to bless the smallest figure. The benediction is being humbly accepted and the little figure will carry forward values that have been purified and sanctified in pass from generation to generation.

Do the weary expressions on the faces of these old Jews speak of such concerns? Perhaps. But the men may also be reflecting on the twentieth-century tragedy that wiped out millions of their kind.

--Samuel Bak, Between Worlds: The Paintings and Drawings of Samuel Bak from 1946 to 2001

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Figure with Flight Assistant, 1984, Oil on linen, 27 1/2 x 19 3/4" BK021

The angel takes a different form in Figure with Flight Assistant, being simultaneously angel, airplane, and Icarus, whose inventor father Daedalus may or may not be the character with the breathing apparatus whose hose is in Icarus’s hand. Whatever their identity beneath their respective half-masks (between one’s goggles and the other's mask they expose a single complete face) their destinies are intertwined: they have begun together to seek the means of human flight and eventual freedom.

--Paul T. Nagano, Samuel Bak: The Past Continues

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Yizkor Theme, 1992, Oil on linen, 21 1/4 x 25 1/2" BK202

Night, night,
that you may not shatter in fragments
now when time sinks with the ravenous suns
of martyrdom
in your sea-covered depths—
the moons of death
drag the falling roof of earth
into the congealed blood of your silence.

Night, night,
once you were the bride of mysteries
adorned with lilies of shadow—
in your dark glass sparkled
the mirage of all who yearn
and love had set its morning rose
to blossom before you—
You were once the oracular mouth
of dream painting and mirrored the beyond.

Night, night,
now you are the graveyard
for the terrible shipwreck of a star—
time sinks speechless in you
with its sign:
The falling stone
and the flag of smoke.

--Nellie Sachs, “Night, Night”

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Pardes II, 1994, Oil on linen,  51 x 77" BK311

“Pardes” literally means paradise, and thus raises the question of Eden and origins; but it also signifies in rabbinic tradition a heavenly garden of perfection, and thus points to the end of earthly labor and hope. For Judaism, the path from expulsion from pardes to its re-entry leads through Scripture and Interpretation. For this is the rabbinic way of wisdom. It is therefore significant that the letters of PaRDeS also spell out the acronym for the levels of scriptural interpretation: Peshat, being the literal and contextual sense; Remez, being the allegorical (philosophical and moral) sense; Derash, being the legal and theological (midrashic) sense; and Sod, being the mystical sense.  While each sense has its own rules of reading, and exists on its own, the levels move from Peshat to Derash to Remez to Sod in an ascending series. One may enter the Pardes of Scripture, then, and through it to every heavenly possibility, through this exegetical rite of passage. The letters of Torah are thus shapes into which human questions may be fitted and through which meaning may be found.

Bak’s Pardes images take the shape of the Ancient Tablets of Moses, set on a vast mountainous landscape …. the base of the Tablets holds four doors—leading into four distinct areas. Each entry is appropriately marked by the initial Hebrew letters PaRDeS. Within the quadrants are appropriate symbols. The door of Peshat is most accessible, and leads to a tree (of knowledge or life). The next two doors (Remez and Derash) are increasingly closed; and within are labyrinthine patterns through which the seeker must move to more recessed tablets and labyrinths.

By contrast, all access to Sod is barred….Within this ultimate quadrant lies a flaming altar—perhaps the symbol of consuming mystical passions or even the fires of martyrdom (Isaac is a “martyr” on the altar in Jewish tradition; and the smoking flames rising off the altar recall the chimney smoke of other, more devilish immolations). On other occasions the altar is aflame with a book; or it is deformed into a flaming oven. A ladder at the far end of the realm of Sod may connote ascension—or is it escape? But to where? The monumental Tablets are all there on the horizon, being both the visual and spatial center of the painting. The outer landscape is thus no escape. But we wonder: Are the accessible doors for entry, or for flight (like the ladder)? Are the Tablets a new or abandoned Sinai?

--Michael Fishbane, “Myth, Midrash, and Mysticism: The Painting of Samuel Bak”

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Ruakh, Oil on canvas, 18 x 24" BK 1189

Your image will remain with us
And grow and grow
To immense proportions,
To haunt the callous world,
To accuse it, with ever stronger voice,
In the name of the million youngsters
Who lie, pitiful rag-dolls,
Their eyes forever closed.

--from Yala Korwin, “The Little Boy With His Hands Up”

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Crossed Out II, 2007, Oil on canvas, 18 x 14" BK1171

I liked the sense of fulfillment that the Christian faith ascribed to suffering. The various representations of Jesus’ figure on the cross moved me greatly. Painted crucifixions abounded, but I preferred the sculpture. His muscular body, in stone or wood, evoked a sense of yearning. At times the statues were painted with colors that seemed natural, and his blood looked real. His ordeal was like Isaac’s; he too was sacrificed by a powerful and determined father. In some ways I felt luckier than Jesus. My dead father, a miserable prisoner of a Nazi camp, never pretended to be all-powerful. He was no master capable of creating worlds! Yet he saved me in the direst of circumstances from certain death, whereas Jesus’ father, willing to see his son suffer, ignored the plea “Why have you forsaken me?” and let him die on the cross.

--Samuel Bak, Painted in Words—A Memoir

Crossed shadows, crossed timbers, crossed ropes, crossed bodies, crossed faces, crossed ground—crosses mark, mark out, mark targets, mark destinations, mark places where there are no markers. These X’s comprise an ironic signature: The boy was here, but he is no longer. The boy was here, but we do not know his name. The boy was here, he made his mark, but someone has marked him out. The signed “X” requires a witness. Bak has signed his name, numerous times, testifying to the mark: BAK, an acronym, he was once told, of Beney-Kedoshim, Children of Martyrs  “Could I have invented a more appropriate sign to leave on each of my paintings?” Bak asks in his memoir. “Wasn’t my signature a variant of those small stones that every Jew deposits on the tombs he visits, a memorial to the dead?” And we must ask ourselves, Who else is willing to sign, to leave a stone in memorium? Who else will serve as notary so that the boy can continue to leave his mark, not forgotten but remembered, not erased but witnessed?

--Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A Phillips, Icon of Loss: The Haunting Child of Samuel Bak

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 Holding a Promise, 2008, Oil on canvas, 36 x 24" BK1181

 [A] downcast young Noah stands ready to launch a tiny skiff. A tattered rainbow provides its rigging. Has the promise of heavenly protection been restored? Or has the boy cobbled together his own means of escape, crafting a refugee boat that will set sail under his direction and power? He carries no cargo besides himself and a bundle of sticks. Is this kindling intended for a thanksgiving sacrifice to God once the flood has been safely navigated? Or has this little Noah become Isaac, carrying wood for another burnt offering orchestrated under false pretenses? Exactly what promise does he portend? And what is its price?

--Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A Phillips, Icon of Loss: The Haunting Child of Samuel Bak

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Auspicious Moon, 2001, Oil on canvas, 40 x 50" BK760

….
the night’s a sliver serenade,
the tree of heaven is unfurled;
the moon stares on a crippled world.

—from Miklós Radnóti, “Floral Song”
Nagyvarad, Military Hospital, August 25, 1942

[C]hess in Bak’s paintings operates as a metaphor for life. Just as humans inhabit symbolic worlds that provide stability and rational structures to the chaotic and overwhelming masses of information and sense perceptions of daily life, so also chess suggests a whole symbolic world—one that organizes reality into conceptual zones. The symbolic world of chess represents life's rational symbolic worlds with their rules of conduct, ethical standards, social norms, and so on. The world of chess is the symbolic world of human existence.

[Bak depicts] a world whose rules no longer apply. It is the collapse of a world of meaning that leaves its inhabitants seemingly lost and without recourse. It is a depiction of the collapse of meaning and the experience of the impossible.

—Dan Mathewson, “Survival and the Impossible in the Artwork of Samuel Bak and the Book of Job”

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 Interpretation, 2003, Oil on canvas, 18 x 24" BK937

In Yiddish a key is called a shlissl, which means something used to close or shut. And in Hebrew it is a mafteach, “an opener.” Closing and opening, opening and closing. Searching for answers, giving out information, revealing secrets. Hiding, denying, whitewashing, conserving, safeguarding. The key as question, and the keyhole a possible way to reach the keeper of answers. …The accumulating years of my life should by now have given me detachment and serenity. But they have not in fact liberated me from a teenagelike quest for answers. What is wrong with this world? Why does evil overpower goodness? Why death? Is there an afterlife? And where is God in all this?

--Samuel Bak, Between Worlds: The Paintings and Drawings of Samuel Bak from 1946 to 2001

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 Inner Fire C, 2003, Oil on canvas, 18 x 24" BK935

He told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel and moving story; because so are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all different and all full of a tragic, disturbing necessity. We tell them to each other in the evening, and they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, the Ukraine, and are simple and incomprehensible like the stories in the Bible. But are they not themselves stories of a new Bible?

--Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

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Memorial, 1986, Oil on linen, 39 1/4 x 31 7/8" BK054

[T]he fractured, pieced together tablets of the Ten Commandments stand simultaneously as a metaphor of the Sinai covenant that has been broken by both humanity and God and as a headstone memorializing the six million Jewish martyrs of the Shoah. The monument stands as though to mark “Here lie the dead.” But the bodies are not to be found nor is the god who once brought the people out of the land of Egypt. The tablets stand in, mark a place, for an absent deity and a missing people. Rusting double yods, letters signifying the divine name, have been manually riveted to the top of one of the tablets, a seemingly desperate and wishful imposition of divine presence. The people themselves are present only in traces: A dismembered and roughly re-membered Star of David becomes the central picture of the tablets’ puzzle, its form a sad example of the stone cutter’s and iron worker’s arts. Here the identity of a people is pieced back together after historical rupture, the rupture now integral to the identity of those who are lost and those who remain, an insistent but uneasy cohesion in an unstable and damaged structure. The people are also engraved in the number 6, which alludes doubly to the six million who perished in the Shoah and to the sixth commandment “Thou shall not kill.” The number 6 both grieves and accuses. Implicated in this cipher, as well as in the barbed wire, the prison-striped salvage, the metal stays, and the bullet holes, are both the victims and the perpetrators. Unspeakable suffering and the violence that has caused it are inextricably bound together.

--Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A. Phillips, “From Bak to the Bible: Imagination, Interpretation, and Tikkun Olam”

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The Last Movement, 2000, Oil on Canvas, 18 x 24" BK778

We, the rescued,
From whose hollow bones death had begun to whittle his flutes,
And whose sinews he had already stroked his bow—
Our bodies continue to lament
With their mutilated music.

--from Nelly Sachs, “Chorus of the Rescued”

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Guardian of Sleep, 2006, Oil on canvas, 40 x 30" BK1123

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice—no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightning.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draws near
another one
do what you can.

—Czeslaw Milosz,  “On Angels”

If, in Melencolia I, Dürer’s angel had fancied the future and its inviting destinations and destinies, had in fact annunciated a new age, she is now in Bak’s landscapes grounded, held captive, and sentenced to bear witness to a present shattered by the past. Flight is impossible, escape not an option. Her wings are tattered, patched up, disassembled, partially or wholly removed, in process of repair, affixed to trees, or cast in stone. Metallic stays and drooping straps signal a mechanistic artificiality and ineffectiveness, a sad and ironic remainder of the Classical and Enlightenment myths of human potency and potential….These remodeled, re-membered figures take on sobering new purposes: messengers of a post-Shoah age, guardians of a savaged earth, protectors of remembered innocents, belated heralds of warning, custodians of memory, impaired repairers of a broken world. They annunciate, commemorate, and confront a world where traditional religious verities may no longer be counted upon.

--Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A. Phillips, “Remembering Angels: The Memory Work of Samuel Bak”

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Walled In, 2008, Oil on canvas, 30 x 24" BK1196 

[Here w]e see shades of the film Hitler loved so well: Fritz Lang’s futuristic silent film Metropolis where workers’ bodies are ground into dust and made into cement to build and operate the city that enslaves them. Future fantasy becomes past fact as we witness children becoming the fungible raw materials needed for fuel and defense in the Nazi extermination campaign. 

--Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A Phillips, Icon of Loss: The Haunting Child of Samuel Bak

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 In Need of a Tikkun, 1999, Oil on canvas, 32 x 40" BK710

The paradoxical link between creation and destruction is reinforced by certain spatial relations built into In Need of a Tikkun, forcing the viewer to advance from visual to mental perception.   The forearm of one angel is parallel to but pointing in the opposite direction from the drifting crematorium smoke, while the forearm of the other angel is parallel to the brick chimney but angled upward as the smoke floats down.   Not to be dismissed is the semblance of a finger at the smoke cloud’s tip.  Does it signify a mute reprimand from the victims who are no longer able to speak for themselves, to say nothing of joining in the necessary act of repair?  Or is it perhaps a cautious reminder that creative revival cannot cancel but must coexist with the memory of destructive force?   Maybe the tear should remain, as it does in this painting, as a fixed reminder of a loss that can never be retrieved.  If angels cannot smother the smoke of mass murder, who can?

--Lawrence Langer, “Skeptical Visions and Scriptural Truths: Bak’s Genesis Paintings”

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 Timepiece, 1999, Oil on canvas, 32 x 40" BK735

[T]ime, for Bak, manifests disturbing, disruptive properties. Broken hourglasses, defaced clocks, clocks with no hands or pendulums, hands with no clock faces, compasses that double as clock hands, grinding wheels turned clock faces, clocks and bells that fail to sound their alarms—all underscore different senses of time and how time matters. A time of safety and innocence has been forever disrupted, while a time of danger and death carries on with fearful constancy. The positive valence of time’s dependability, once posited by an Enlightenment view of science and cultural progress, has been recast as scattered instances of survival contingent upon the capricious, accidental timing of help from others. Bak’s various rescues by his father, his mother, his aunt, Sister Maria, and other angels fell, like dice, on an ironic timetable, where both the hands of time and of human protection were unpredictable.

--Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A. Phillips, Remembering Angels: Paintings by Samuel Bak

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Banishment III, 1999-2008, Oil on canvas, 50 x 75" BK1244

 Michelangelo’s [Adam and Eve] are driven from a luxuriant Eden by a colorfully-robed angel with a sword; Bak’s surrogate angels, with distinctly human features, seem sorrowful themselves. Their metallic wings bind them to earth rather than heave and their faces are turned away from the supposed objects of God’s anger. The background of Michelangelo’s panel is open landscape and a boundless sky. Bak’s artistic paraphrases offer cramped spaces backed by brick and stone….[W]e must concede that we are dealing here with a different kind of expulsion, banishment as deportation, a violence that violates the physical integrity of the human couple. In the Book of Genesis Adam and Eve leave Eden to enter time and face their mortality. In Bak they enter history to face their potential annihilation.

--Lawrence Langer, In a Different Light: The Book of Genesis in the Art of Samuel Bak

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