Adam Eve - Pucker Gallery

Adam & Eve
Recent Paintings by SAMUEL BAK
P U C K E R
G A L L E R Y
I
B O S T O N
Samuel Bak’s Adam & Eve:
On Holocaust and Beauty
O
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
often described as “inconceivable.” After a brief period of abstract expressionist 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
2
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
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 resuscitation 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
for aesthetic solutions. Non-representational styles seemed even more
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.
FIG 2. Adam and Eve and The Story That
Has No End
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 5. Albrecht Dürer
FIG 4. Adam and Eve Hiding with the
Adam and Eve, 1504
Dürers
moral and psychological response.
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
Holocaust, the Warsaw boy holding his hands up in surrender (Adam and Eve
FIG 7. Warsaw Ghetto
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
of the Sistine Chapel where figures can be identified
FIG 8. Adam and Eve and The Story That Has No End Diptych
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 Wall,
figure 9).
FIG 9. Study for Wall
4
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
man is capable of accomplishing. One hears and reads of so many great and
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
pear/paradise, they are exhaustibly burdened by constantly morphing pears,
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
FIG 11. Adam and Eve and The Meaning of Life
dense towers of masonry (Adam and
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 10. Adam and Eve and The Faltering
Secret
Triptych
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).
FIG 14. Adam and Eve and The Good
Old Times
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
around with them on their nomadic journey as displaced persons. If these
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
aesthetic fictions.
FIG 15. Adam and Eve and
The Dangerous Fruit
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
express his figures’ humiliated humanity. In his first painting in the series,
the risk-averse couple, in their respective hats, leather gloves, and finely-
FIG 13. Adam and Eve and The Castles
of Sand
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 middleclass 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 flatbrim 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
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.
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 wellgroomed 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
aesthetic preferences, Bak’s pair of lovers are independent portraits
FIG 16. Adam and Eve and The Family Tree
FIG 17. (detail) Jan van Eyck
Arnolfini Portrait, 1434
FIG 17. Jan van Eyck
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).
FIG 18. Adam and Eve Facing Up, I
A final analogy. The twelfth-century Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides
maintained that Divine literature contains no contradiction and therefore
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
24 x 20"
BK1350
Oil on canvas
24 x 20"
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
16 x 12"
BK1356
Oil on canvas
24 x 20"
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
16 x 12"
BK1362
Oil on canvas
14 x 11"
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
Study for Wall
Mixed media
14 1/2 x 20 1/2"
BK1335
Mixed media
15 x 11"
BK1332
37
38
Study for Good Time
Study for Both
Mixed media
19 3/4 x 15 3/4"
BK1341
Mixed media
19 x 13 1/2"
BK1334
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
11 x 8 1/2"
BK1328
Mixed media
13 x 11 1/4"
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; Kunstmuseum, 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
16 x 20"
BK1367
Adam and Eve and The Celebration of Promise
© 2011, Pucker Gallery
Printed in China by Cross Blue Overseas Printing Company
Oil on canvas
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.
Address Services Requested.