By Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak (born 1933), Elegy III, 1997, oil on canvas, 47 1⁄4 × 50 1⁄4 inches (120 × 127 1⁄2 cm), private collection, ©️Samuel Bak. #arthistory #painting #oilpainting #HolocaustRemembrance #holocaustsurvivor
This work hearkens back to the engraving Melencolia I, by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). I will share the print as a comment.
From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: ‘[the] Vilna Ghetto, in Lithuania… in 1941 the artist Samuel Bak, only a child, found himself confined, along with his parents and tens of thousands of other Jews from the city of Vilna, or Vilnius. More than 50,000 perished there. Of his extended family, Bak and his mother survived.
His talent was evident early on. The Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever, who fought in the partisan resistance and rescued Jewish cultural artifacts with the Paper Brigade, met young Bak in the ghetto, saw how gifted he was, and helped exhibit his art. But Bak was more than just a prodigy: even under such hostile conditions he had an irrepressible need to create. Besides food and water, he desperately sought paper and pencils. He drew on whatever he could find. Recalling this yearning, Sutzkever once wrote, “this boy harbored something much stronger than those who set out to exterminate our people.”…
The artist has said his work imparts “a sense of the world that was shattered, of a world that was broken, of a world that exists again through an enormous effort to put everything together, when it is absolutely impossible to put it together because broken things can never become whole again. But,” he continued, “we still can make something that looks as if it was whole and live with it.”’
