An exhibition of 77 paintings and drawings by 35 Jewish artists during their internment in Nazi concentration camps and ghettos will be on display at The Jewish Museum beginning today to Nov. 12. These works, which testify to the spirit and determination of the European Jewish community under extraordinary circumstances, illustrate the daily life in the camps–the oppression, the starvation, the forced labor, the hopelessness, the remarkable ability to recognize beauty amidst agony, the valiant effort to retain a semblance of dignity and culture. They represent a spiritual resistance against Nazi barbarism.
The exhibition is from the Holocaust Museum at Kibbutz Lochamei HaGhettoat (Ghetto Fighter’s Kibbutz). It was brought to this country for display at The Jewish Museum under the sponsorship of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. Among the artists represented are David Olere, a survivor of Auschwitz; Charlotte Buresova, who now resides in Prague; Aizik Feder, who died in Auschwitz; Halina Oloumucki; and Malvina Schalkova.
ARTISTS DEVOID OF SELF-PITY
Tom L. Freudenheim, director of The Baltimore Museum of Art, who selected the works on view, writes that “Amazingly, many of these artists apparently were devoid of self-pity….Few of the depictions are conventionally sentimental or maudlin….Much of the art appears to be dispassionate recording of people and places, sometimes even expressing a sense of physical beauty in surroundings that must have been brutal.”
Kibbutz Lochamei HaGhettaot was founded in 1949, by Polish and Lithuanian Jews who had escaped from the ghettos and concentration camps of Eastern Europe. In addition to archives, library and publishing house, the Holocaust Museum presents changing exhibitions concerned with the Holocaust and Jewish resistance. The art collection consists of 2000 works, gathered by Miriam Novitch, curator of the art section, herself a survivor of Auschwitz, who has spent years locating and researching these examples.
The illustrated catalogue was written by Tom L. Freudenheim, and incorporates profiles on each of the artists in the exhibition. Also included is an essay by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, eminent authority on the Holocaust, who currently holds the Eli and Diana Zborowski Chair in Interdisciplinary Holocaust Studies at Yeshiva University. Allon Schoener is responsible for the exhibition design, a difficult task in view of the variety of unconventional materials on which the works were executed–paper, cardboard, scraps–whatever was available in a given circumstance.
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