THE ART OF THE QUESTION:
Paintings by
SAMUEL BAK
PARDES II, 1994
Oil on Linen
51 X 77”
BK311
Front Cover Image:
TIMEPIECE, 1999
Oil on Canvas
32 X 40"
BK735
CREDITS: Design: Leslie Anne Feagley • Editors: Destiny M. Barletta and Justine H. Choi • Photography: Samuel Bak and Keith McWilliams
© 2009, Pucker Art Publications
Printed in China by Cross Blue Overseas Printing Company
THE ART of the QUESTION
Paintings by SAMUEL BAK
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ith 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.
Over the next eighteen months, different elements of this
exhibition will make their way to the Eric Dean Gallery and
Lilly Library at Wabash College, to Drew University’s Korn
Gallery and University Library, and to The Janet Prindle
Institute for Ethics at DePauw University. 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. We wish to thank colleagues who have contributed in various ways to make the exhibitions happen:
AT WABASH COLLEGE: Michael Atwell, Director of the
Eric Dean Gallery; Doug Calisch, Chair of the Art Department; John Lamborn, College Librarian and Director of
Lilly Library; Dena Pence, Director of the Wabash Center
for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion; Charlie Blaich, Director of Inquiries at the Center of Inquiry in
the Liberal Arts; Jeana Rogers, Instructional Media Specialist; Todd McDorman, Associate Professor and Chair of
the Rhetoric Department; Stan and Nancy Seibel; Henry
Knight, Director of the Cohen Center for Holocaust Studies
at Keene State College; and the Education Division of Lilly
Endowment, Inc.
AT DREW UNIVERSIT Y: Gabriele Hitl-Cohen, Director of the
Korn Gallery; Sara Lynn Henry, Professor of Art History,
Emerita and former Chair of the Art Department; Maxine
Beach and Anne Yardley, Deans of the Drew Theological
School; Ann Saltzman, Director of the Center for Holocaust
and Genocide Studies; J. Terry Todd, Director of the Center
for Religion, Culture, and Conflict; Jonathan Golden, Director of Hillel; Heather Murray Elkins, Chair of Religion and
the Arts at Drew; Andrew Scrimgeour, Director, and Ernest
Rubinstein, Theological Librarian, of the Drew University
Library; and James Hala, NEH Distinguished Professor of
the Humanities.
AT DEPAUW UNIVERSIT Y: Janet Prindle; Robert Bottoms,
President Emeritus, and Director of The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics; Beth Hawkins Benedix, Associate Professor
of Religious Studies and Literature and Coordinator of the
Program in Jewish Studies; Michael Mackenzie, Associate
Professor of Art; Russell Arnold, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Faculty Advisor to DePauw Hillel; Neal
Abraham, Executive Vice President and Vice President for
Academic Affairs; Linda Clute, Assistant Director of The
Prindle Institute; Martha Rainbolt, Professor of English;
Douglas Cox, Emergency Management Coordinator and
Director of the Nature Park at The Prindle Institute; Michael Atwell, Director of the Eric Dean Gallery; Nicholas
Casalbore, Graduate Intern at The Prindle Institute; members of the Faculty Advisory Board for The Prindle Institute; Josh Goldberg; Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator
of DePauw University Galleries, Museums and Collections;
and Reverend Gretchen Person, Director of Spiritual life.
AT PUCKER GALLERY: Bernie and Sue Pucker, Owners and
Directors, who have made this collaboration possible; the
Pucker Gallery staff who have overseen the exhibition and
catalogue production, in particular Destiny M. Barletta, Justine H. Choi, and David Winkler; and Leslie Anne Feagley,
catalogue designer.
And finally, our enduring thanks to Samuel Bak himself
whose life and life’s work teaches us the art of the question. ■
PA I N T I N G S BY S A M U E L BA K
3
L AS T MOVEMENT, 1996
Oil on Linen
55 X 63"
BK434
4
THE ART OF THE QUESTION
SAMUEL BAK and the
ART OF THE QUESTION
T
he art of Samuel Bak entrances. It also disquiets.
Dismembered figures of flesh, metal, wood, and
stone. Broken pottery, rusted keys, petrified teddy
bears, discarded shoes, floating rocks, uprooted
trees. Splintered chess pieces. Fractured rainbows. Books
turned buildings, tablets turned tombstones, memorial candles turned crematoria. Mute musical instruments, flightless doves, mechanized, immobile angels, crucified children,
ladders leading nowhere. And yet: pears and paradise, new
sprouts on severed branches, sunrises in sunsets. The admixture of color and catastrophe, Genesis and genocide, Exodus
and expulsion, remnant and ruin. Michelangelo, Rembrandt,
Mantegna, Dürer, de Chirico echoed and subverted. Paradoxes. Ambiguities. Excesses. Artistic, cultural, religious,
and even personal, icons deconstructed, reconstructed, and
continuously questioned.
Indeed, engaging the art of Samuel Bak demands a high
tolerance for quandary. Viewers find no easy meanings here,
only questions. In his works intimate worlds, grand landscapes, symbolic narratives, and personal artifacts have
been destroyed, and yet provisionally pieced back together.
Although they can never be made whole again, “we can,”
Bak says, “still make something that looks as if it was whole
and live with it.” 1 Scenes of destruction and construction, of
tentative survival, of tenuous restoration, of a living on “as
if,” ply us with questions of how shattered lives and icons
can be imagined of a piece with Tikkun Olam, the Rabbinic
concept of “repairing the world.”
A child prodigy whose first exhibition was held in the Vilna ghetto at age nine and whose paintings now span seven decades, Bak weaves together personal and cultural history, past
and present, to articulate an iconography of his experience of
Shoah and his perceptions of a world that lives in the shadow
of the crematoria chimneys. His iconographic tapestry is rich
with threads of irony and reverse patterns: books burning
without being consumed; covenantal tablets standing as headstones and substituting for crypts; the fruit of the knowledge
of good and evil haunting abandoned tables; handmade rainbows fashioned from war debris; petrified arks stranded in
congealed waters; ghetto children assuming the identities of
the biblical heroes Noah, Moses, Isaac, David, and Jesus; Michelangelo’s transcendent father god disappearing into thin air
or thick smoke; Dürer’s melancholy angel deported from the
edge of the Enlightenment to the brink of apocalypse; Rembrandt’s angels blindfolded and impotent to stay the slayer’s
hand. Exploring, reworking this range of cultural, religious,
and personal metaphors, Bak produces a visual grammar and
vocabulary that privileges questioning: How does a fragmented, murdered world cohere? How should we now interpret
the milestones of Western civilization? What can traditional
Jewish and Christian symbols, stories, ceremonies, convictions possibly mean in a century that has witnessed the Shoah
and countless other catastrophes? Why should we, and how do
we, now remember the children murdered by Nazi hatred?
Why should, how does, facing past atrocity prompt us to confront present innocent suffering? And how does our involvement in political, social, economic, and religious systems implicate us in the suffering of so many? Bak’s visual questioning
has become a consuming passion; past, present, and future all
fall subject to an interrogation intended to interrupt.
We detect in Bak’s brushstrokes echoes of Rainer Maria Rilke’s sage advice to a young poet: “...love the questions
themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written
in a very foreign language....Live the questions now.”2 Bak
lives, loves, indeed obsesses over, the questions, even as, precisely because, they disrupt. Images of keys, key holes, broken locks, blank canvasses, blindfolded, mute and mangled
figures accentuate the elusiveness of answers, the imposition
of interpretation, the failure of artistic, intellectual, religious,
and moral imagination to represent the irreparable, to account for the suffering of the innocent. We stand afflicted
in consciousness and conscience, on the doorsills of Bak’s
locked rooms just within reach of books so foreign that they
float without words, burst into flame, sprout from trees, and
1
Cited in Lawrence Langer, “The Holocaust Theme in the Paintings of Samuel Bak” in Samuel Bak Retrospektive 1946-97 at the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen
in 1998. Originally Tape HVT-618 in the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University.
2
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1984), 34.
PA I N T I N G S BY S A M U E L BA K
5
MOYSHE LE , 2008
Oil on Canvas
48 X 24”
BK1219
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THE ART OF THE QUESTION
assemble into ghostly makeshift buildings. Passageways into
an irretrievable past and an uncertain present and future,
Bak’s works are thresholds: They “take us a certain way and
then leave us, having shown us a road.”3
The road is strewn with broken bits of personal and cultural memory, shards of lives lived and lost, and holes where
lives and memories should be, but are not. Everywhere we
see evidence of suffering that cannot be adequately explained,
cannot be fully represented, cannot be repaired, cannot be
made right, cannot be made meaningful. And wherever we
step, we trip upon the mark of the interrogative: What is there
left for us to do? 4 How do we bear witness to the truth of suffering and survival? How do we remember what can never be
repaired, those who can never be redeemed? How do we affirm life while at the same time remembering the dead? What
work of repair, of tikkun, however tentative and imperfect, is
possible in and for our own wounded worlds? Where do we
go from here, and who awaits us along the way?
These are the questions Bak poses to himself and to us
with his fractured, cobbled-together constructions of life-indeath. Refusing to let us retreat undisturbed into academic
or religious answers that render us silent and unresponsive
to a broken world, Samuel Bak nudges us over the threshold
into a landscape of uncanny, scarred beauty where past and
present, pain and possibility confront us and challenge us to
learn and to live out the art of the question. ■
— DANNA NOL AN FEWELL
Drew University
— GARY A. PHILLIPS
Wabash College
3
Gabriel Josopovici, discussing Proust and his own experience with the Bible in Jonathan Magonet, A Rabbi Reads the Bible (London: SCM, 1991, 2004), 40.
4
The question of the rebbe in ElieWiesel’s The Gates of the Forest (New York: Schocken, 1982), 199.
PA I N T I N G S BY S A M U E L BA K
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C ROSS ED OUT II, 2007
Oil on Canvas
18 X 14”
BK1171
S T UDY I , 1995
Oil on Linen
18 X 21 ¾”
BK418
CROS S ED OUT I, 2007
Oil on Canvas
14 X 11”
BK1208
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THE ART OF THE QUESTION
A RESOUNDING “NO”:
PRESERVING the QUESTION in the ART of SAMUEL BAK
A
broken stone tablet, haphazardly reconstructed, is
suspended precariously against a blue sky. On it,
the Hebrew word “Lo”—No—slides off center and
to the left. The stone fragments that come together to form the word splice it in two. Lamed and aleph cling to
one another as the tablet crumbles around them. This painting—Lo, Against Blue Space, 1976—presents a vivid metaphor
for Bak’s artistic project. A “no” against all odds, Bak’s work
vehemently refuses to provide comforting answers and adamantly persists in the space of disturbing questions. There is
no closure here, no solace. The questions multiply and mutate—in the form of a boy, hands raised and palms forward
in surrender; in the form of emaciated musicians, performing
for the last time for their captors and murderers; in the form
of abandoned teddy bears and building blocks, pitchers and
Kiddush cups; in the form of scriptures, metaphorically and
literally torn to pieces.
For Bak, this “no” must be rendered in Hebrew just as it
must be inscribed on the fractured tablet of the Law. Both accusation and indictment, “Lo” voices the grotesque incapacity
of this Law to protect against murderous violence, the fundamental incompatibility of the Word with the all-too-human.
Taken together, Bak’s paintings unflinchingly cast us into the
role of witness, but witness of a very particular type. As if
forcing us to confront the potentially horrifying implications
of a faith that glorifies—indeed, mandates—sacrifice, Bak recasts and returns to the Akedah (the binding of Isaac) again
and again. Drawing our attention to the knife poised at Isaac’s
throat by his father, Abraham (who looks away from his terrified son), Bak asks us to consider why the covenantal narrative
is such a violent one, why it needs to be demonstrated in the
betrayal of the son by the father. He forces us to see the connection to another extraordinarily—we might say, obscenely—violent expression of this narrative in his Crossed Out and
Study series. Here, the surrendering boy (mentioned above) is
crucified in all manner of ways: sometimes on a simple cross,
sometimes impaled between a cross and Star of David, sometimes burning while he hangs there, helplessly. As witnesses,
we are prodded along a profoundly unsettling path, prompted
to question how far the complicity of these narratives extends
to the Holocaust, a term (from the Hebrew, “olah,” meaning
burnt offering) that Bak confesses he feels uneasy using for its
reiteration of a worldview that places sacrifice in a redemptive light.1
The role of witness assumes an imperative stance: to inhabit the unsettling space that Bak describes and depicts and
never pretends to repair. In his stunning and enigmatic sevenvolume work, The Book of Questions, Edmond Jabès wrestles
with the necessity to speak of and in the aftermath of the Holocaust and to find a language suitable to this speaking. Near
the conclusion, he declares this, “the essential: in the throes of
our crisis, to preserve the question.”2 In paintings that remind
us to search out the “hidden question,” Bak pleads with us to
do the same. And in this plea reads the starkest glimmer of
hope, the tenacity reflected in the “no” that resounds throughout Bak’s otherwise unforgiving landscape. To pose questions
is to resist monologue. It is a communicative gesture that is
itself an act of defiance. It is a tentative wish—quiet, faltering,
fragile—that we may yet find a path towards healing. ■
— BETH HAWKINS BENEDIX
DePauw University
1
Samuel Bak. “What, How, and When: On My Art and Myself” in Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak. Ed. Danna Nolan Fewell,
Gary A. Phillips, and Yvonne Sherwood (Boston: Pucker Art Publications and Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 9.
2
Edmond Jabès. The Book of Questions. Vol. 2. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991), 442.
PA I N T I N G S BY S A M U E L BA K
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FAMI LY T R E E I I I , 1994
Oil on Linen
26 X 22"
BK392
U N D E R T H E T R E ES, 1994
Oil on Linen
20 X 24"
BK821
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THE ART OF THE QUESTION
VISUAL ORDER and DISORDER
in the ART of SAMUEL BAK
T
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. Although a 20th century artist, Bak turns to the
visual forms of the Old Masters1 to render his images acutely
and realistically. Choosing tradition over radical modernism,
he finds a way to speak about tradition itself, especially his
Jewish cultural tradition, which has been shattered and nearly
destroyed. Effectively, the decorum of traditional art shapes
his work; yet Bak transmutes these means by using the irrationalities of modern art modalities.
Bak speaks of wanting to achieve in his painting “a sense
of both immediacy and estrangement.”2 “Immediacy” is affected through the rendering of believable times, places,
and narratives in sharp verisimilitude: his objects seem to
live, breath, act, or not act, constructing a place and sense
of seeming truth and reality. Details such as the hardness of
stone, the texture of light on plaster walls, and the movement
of weather across the sky are all palpable elements that provide a setting for the remnants of a fractured culture. Yet, as
Bak himself notes, introducing this antiquated means of expression into the context of modern art creates a sharp sense
of “estrangement.” Rather than presenting the raw, brutal
immediacy of the Holocaust events, the older mode of expression creates a visual space one can more safely enter to
explore the wrenching enigmas of the more universal questions layered into his reconfigured scenes, or in Bak’s words,
“to see freshly those painful matters that have been dulled by
habits of denial.” 3
Though Bak has directly engaged Dürer, Michelangelo,
Mantegna, and Rembrandt in his figural and biblically-based
works,4 an equally telling connection can be made between
his landscape works and the Northern Renaissance tradition
of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) and Pieter Bruegel the
Elder (c. 1525?-1569). 5 These artists also emerged from times
of persecution and upheaval regarding issues of identity and
belief. 6 They share with Bak an unadorned realism and a nonidealized view of human nature.
Consider how Bak and Bruegel present the relationship
between nature and culture. Both Bak’s Soutine Street, 2001
and Bruegel’s Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1564-1567 render
nature as a seeming continuity in the face of violent acts.
Bruegel graphically displays Herod’s decreed slayings of
the innocents as narrated in Matthew’s gospel. The peaceful Flemish snow-covered village allows the heinous acts to
be subsumed into a tranquil natural sweep. Similarly, Bak
brings us into a modern town, his boyhood home of Vilna,
Poland, just after the Liberation. Yet, Bak’s view, close-up
and personal, depicts an actual place and the fallout of a
real contemporary event. No Biblical allegory, no masses
of people—only the empty streets, the brutal aftermath. All
is askew, shattered, and empty of all human presence, both
place and society destroyed. The scene is barely grounded
in a distant tiny landscape vista. Of the 80,000 Jews of the
young Bak’s Vilna (a world center of Jewish culture and
learning), only about 200 survived the Holocaust. Although
rendered in a recognizable mode, the spaces of Soutine Street
are in upheaval—shifting houses sheer apart, capricious
roofs do not fit, windows open onto empty air, arched passageways fail to connect, housing materials float in the air,
whole streets become piles of shards. Captured here are the
1
Renaissance through the 19th century.
2
Samuel Bak, Painted in Words—a Memoir (Bloomington: Indiana University Press and Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2001), 477-82. In these pages Bak makes a nuanced
statement about his choice of visual language and his dilemmas in relation to approaching Holocaust content.
3
Bak, 479.
4
See the rich range of articles in Danna Nolan Fewell, Gary A. Phillips, and Yvonne Sherwood, editors, Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak
(Boston: Pucker Art Publications and Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008).
5
The astute suggestion of such a connection was made by art historian friend Greta Berman, private communication, July 2008.
6
In the 15th and 16th centuries the authority of the church was questioned. Witchcraft was declared a heresy in 1484, and more than 100,000 women, some men and children and
one rooster were put to death for witchery over the next 200 years. The turmoil and the outbreak of the Reformation were taking place. In 1566, two summers before Bruegel’s
death, Calvinists sacked 400 Catholic churches in three weeks, assaulted nunneries, and beat up monks. This, of course, does not compare to the murder of six million Jews by
the Nazis during World War II.
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11
SOUT I NE S TR E E T, 2001
Oil on Canvas
24 X 24”
BK838
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENT S
c. 1564
Oil on Canvas
43 ¾ X 63”
Kunsthistorisches Museum
Vienna, Austria
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THE ART OF THE QUESTION
impressions of the child Bak when he first walked through
Vilna with his mother on Liberation day:
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 alone against the sky. 7
The language of modern art gives Bak the visual freedoms to set
asunder traditional modes of rendering. With the permissions
of Cubism and Expressionism, Bak sets time and space askew.
Light also plays a capricious and dramatic role when one
compares Bak to Bruegel. Bruegel’s light typically reflects a
natural source, consistently shaping the three dimensions, presenting a rational sweep. When Bosch or Bruegel do use light
for an exaggerated drama, it is generally in service of imaginative scenes of death and the fires of hell (such as Bruegel’s Triumph of Death, c. 1562). No hell fires are necessary for Bak—
the disturbing aftermath of real events suffices. The light of
Soutine Street is strangely arbitrary, simultaneously tragic and
beautiful. Our focus abruptly shifts from the pink light in the
exposed emptiness of a building to the mottled light of deteriorating walls to the shocking brilliance of floating debris, contrasted to dead black darkness. Bak’s light speaks subtly, but
shockingly, of the irrationality of place and acts.
As in the works of Bosch and Bruegel, everyday objects
can become symbolic for Bak. It is not uncommon to find in
Northern Renaissance art “hidden symbolism.” In Bruegel’s
Massacre of the Innocents, two overturned barrels and severed
branches in a foregrounded ice pond signal the upheaval of the
killing of the children in the background. Less subtle in Bosch
are the invented symbols of his Garden of Earthly Delights, c.
1500 where, in his Hell scene, a hybrid birdman with a kettle
on his head devours gluttons and voids them from his other
end as punishment for their sin. Bosch’s symbols, derived
from conventional sources—maxims, tarot cards, alchemy,
etc.—are distanced into his imagined hell. Bak has no need to
invent a visual hell; instead he uses personal, everyday experi-
ence to find symbols that convey the existential horror of loss:
the poignant presence of a storey-high white cup with spoon
abandoned on his cobbled street, the user and the domicile of
the cup irrevocably gone. The scene recalls Bak’s childhood
visit to the studio of a ghetto artist where he found a drawing
of a sad-eyed boy with a clean cup on the table before him—
the artist had already been taken away.8 Bak also has his own
quiet hidden symbolism, as in the three shard crosses on a distant hill beyond Soutine Street.9
Bak shares with Northern Renaissance imagery the use
of nature as a ground and seeming continuity. Large sweeps
of a natural setting, some with strong mountains and sky,
provide the backdrop for his scenes of loss (e.g., Auspicious
Moon, 2001; Pardes II, 1994; and Creation, 1999). Yet weather
is turbulent; storms and obscuring mists abound with only
the barest light on the horizon. Unlike the Flemish works
where the relationship of culture to the natural setting offers
a reassuring balance and stability, Bak’s nature/culture relationship tends to be asymmetrical. The Flemish works signal
that, no matter the human folly and violence, there is a reliable
natural order. Bak disrupts this order: the sky, besmirched
by bellows of smoke from trains and factories, suggests the
progress of industrialization as well as the death transport
and Nazi crematoria. Equally disturbing is his fracturing of
natural objects, such as the dismembered family trees (Family Tree III, 1995) or cut arbors floating over cemeteries (Under the Trees, 2001). Culture also ossifies into stony nature, as
do the shattered teddy bears in a mountainous heap Under the
Blue Sky, 2001, and the solidified brick ship of remembrance
frozen in a sea of stone chunks in Yizkor Theme, 1992.
While the Old Master paintings generally incorporate irrational human actions within the rational sweep of a natural
order, Bak’s images suggest that the cosmic order has nearly
been overcome by the irrationalities of human culture. Bak
challenges order with disorder, providing a sharp voice in a
world forever fractured by the Holocaust. ■
— SAR A LYNN HENRY
Drew University
7
Bak, 43.
8
Bak, 32.
9
Bak’s use of objects does, however, stand in contrast to that of the Surrealists. Bak’s objects reflect poignant personal experiences as opposed to the Surrealists’ more
histrionic indulgence of the libidinal unconscious (e.g., Dali’s Illumined Pleasures, 1929).
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H I D D E N QUE S T I ON I I , 1994
Oil on Linen
25 ½ X 32”
BK318
HOLD I NG A PROMIS E, 2008
Oil on Canvas
36 X 24”
BK1181
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THE ART OF THE QUESTION
AUS PICIOUS MOON, 2001
Oil on Canvas
40 X 50”
BK760
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15
CREATION, 1999
Oil on Canvas
40 X 50”
BK738
16
THE ART OF THE QUESTION
TH E L AS T MOVEMENT, 2000
Oil on Canvas
18 X 24”
BK778
REMNANT S , 2002
Oil on Canvas
36 X 36”
BK850
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T ES T I M ON I A L S , 2006
Oil on Canvas
40 X 30"
BK1138
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THE ART OF THE QUESTION
IN THEIR OWN IMAGE, 2007
Oil on Canvas
30 X 24”
BK1184
YIZKOR TH EME, 1992
Oil on Linen
21 ¼ X 25 ½”
BK202
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DRESS REHEARSAL,1999
Oil on Canvas
40 X 32”
BK734
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THE ART OF THE QUESTION
WITH A B L UE TH READ, 2008
Oil on Canvas
30 X 24”
BK1197
S IX WINGS FOR ONE, 2008
Oil on Canvas
30 X 24”
BK1191
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DAMAGE , 2002
Oil on Canvas
36 X 36”
BK851
22
THE ART OF THE QUESTION
FROM GENER ATION TO GENER ATION III, 1996
Oil on Linen
32 X 26”
BK473
UNDER A B L UE S KY, 2002
Oil on Canvas
18 X 24”
BK807
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P E R SI S TENCE, 2002
Oil on Canvas
30 X 24”
BK840
S TUDY F OR AK E DAH , 2000
Pencil and Oil on Paper
19 X 24 ½”
BK690
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THE ART OF THE QUESTION
WA L L ED IN , 2008
Oil on Canvas
30 X 24”
BK1196
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25
S OLO, 1996
Oil on Canvas
50 X 34”
BK432
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THE ART OF THE QUESTION
BANIS H MENT, 1999
Oil on Canvas
32 X 26”
BK725
IN NEED OF A TIKKUN, 1999
Oil on Canvas
22 X 26”
BK710
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I NNE R F I R E C , 2003
Oil on Canvas
18 X 24”
BK935
THE NATURE OF ROOT S , 1999
Oil on Canvas
32 X 18”
BK723
28
THE ART OF THE QUESTION
FIGURE WITH FL IGH T AS S IS TANT, 1984
Oil on Linen
27 ½ X 19 ¾”
021
INTERPRETATION, 2003
Oil on Canvas
18 X 24”
BK937
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GI V E AND TAKE, 2005
Oil on Canvas
22 X 28”
BK1049
ALL OF A SUD DEN, 2005
Oil on Canvas
22 X 28”
BK1036
HAP P I NES S , 2005
Oil on Canvas
22 X 28”
BK1050
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THE ART OF THE QUESTION
UNKNOWN, 2007
Oil on Canvas
24 X 18”
BK1195
COL L ECTIVE, 2007
Oil on Canvas
18 X 24”
BK1170
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31
F OR THE M ANY DAVIDS , 2008
Oil on Canvas
18 X 24”
BK1177
ME MOR I AL, 1986
Oil on Linen
39 ¼ X 32”
054
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THE ART OF THE QUESTION
SAMUEL BAK
Biography
1933
Born 12 August in Vilna, Poland
1940-41 Under Soviet occupation
1941-44 Under German occupation: ghetto,
work-camp, refuge in a monastery
1942
First exhibition of drawings in the
ghetto Vilna
1945-48 Displaced Persons camps in Germany;
studied painting in Munich
1948
Emigrated to Israel
1952
Studied at the Bezalel Art School in
Jerusalem
1953-56 Israeli army service
1956
Received the First Prize of the American-Israeli Cultural
Foundation
1956-59 Lived in Paris and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
1959-93 1959-66 lived in Rome; 1966-74 in Israel; 1974-77 in New York
City; 1977-80 in Israel; 1980-84 in Paris; 1984-93 in Switzerland
1993
Moved to Weston, Massachusetts
SELECTED SOLO GALLERY EXHIBITIONS
Galleria Schneider, Rome, Italy – 1959, 1961, 1965, 1966
Alwin Gallery, London, United Kingdom – 1965
L’Angle Aigu, Brussels, Belgium – 1965
Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel – 1966
Roma Gallery, Chicago, IL – 1967
Pucker Safrai Gallery, Boston, MA – 1969, 1972, 1975, 1979, 1985, 1987,
1989, 1991
Hadassah “K” Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel – 1971, 1973, 1978
Aberbach Fine Art, New York, NY – 1974, 1975, 1978
Ketterer Gallery, Munich, Germany – 1977
Amstutz Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland – 1978
Goldman Gallery, Haifa, Israel – 1978
Vonderbank Gallery, Frankfurt, Germany – 1978
DeBel Gallery, Jerusalem, Israel – 1978, 1980
Thorens Fine Art, Basel, Switzerland – 1981
Kallenbach Fine Art, Munich, Germany – 1981, 1983, 1984, 1987
Soufer Gallery, New York, NY – 1986, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1997, 2006
Galerie Ludwig Lange, Berlin, Germany – 1987
Galerie Carpentier, Paris, France – 1988
Galerie Marc Richard, Zurich, Switzerland – 1990
Galerie de la Cathedrale, Fribourg, Switzerland – 1991, 1992
Galerie Picpus, Montreux, Switzerland – 1991, 1992
Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA – 1993, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2003,
2004, 2006, 2008
George Krevsky Fine Art, San Francisco, CA – 1998
Beaver Country Day School, Chestnut Hill, MA – 2004
Finegood Gallery, Milken Jewish Center, Los Angeles, CA – 2004
St. Botolph Club, Boston, MA – 2004
Laurie M. Tisch Gallery, Jewish Community Center, Manhattan, NY –
2006
SELECTED MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS
Bezalel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel – 1963
Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel – 1963
Rose Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA – 1976
Germanisches National Museum, Nuremberg, Germany – 1977
Heidelberg Museum, Heidelberg, Germany – 1977
Haifa University, Haifa, Israel – 1978
Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf, Germany – 1978
Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn, Germany – 1978
Kunstmuseum, Wiesbaden, Germany – 1979
Stadtgalerie Bamberg, Villa Dessauer, Germany – 1988
Koffler Gallery, Toronto, Canada – 1990
Dürer Museum, Nuremberg, Germany – 1991
Temple Judea Museum, Philadelphia, PA – 1991
Jüdisches Museum, Stadt Frankfurt am Main, Germany – 1993
Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, NY –
1994
Janice Charach Epstein Museum and Gallery, West Bloomfield, MI –
1994
National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, Seton Hall College,
Greensburg, PA – 1995
Spertus Museum, Chicago, IL – 1995
B’Nai B’Rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, Washington, DC –
1997
Holocaust Museum Houston, Houston, TX – 1997
Lamont Gallery, Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH – 1997
Panorama Museum, Bad Frankenhausen, Germany – 1998
National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius, Lithuania – 2001
Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame University, Notre Dame, IN – 2001
Florida Holocaust Museum, Saint Petersburg, FL – 2001,
2007, 2009
Canton Museum of Art, Canton, OH – 2002
Clark University, Worcester, MA – 2002
Neues Stadtmuseum, Landsberg am Lech, Germany – 2002
92nd Street Y, New York, NY – 2002
Jewish Community Center, Memphis, TN – 2003
University of Scranton, Scranton, PA – 2003
City Hall Gallery, Orlando, FL – 2004
Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX – 2004
Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota, Duluth, MN – 2004
Felix Nussbaum Haus, Osnabrueck, Germany – 2006
University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH – 2006
Yad Vashem Museum, Jerusalem, Israel – 2006
Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University,
Evanston, IL – 2008
Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art, Tulsa, OK – 2008
Cohen Holocaust Center, Keene State College, Keene, NH – 2008
Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL - 2008
PA I N T I N G S BY S A M U E L BA K
33
SAMUEL BAK
Biography
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
Image and Imagination, Tel Aviv Museum, Israel – 1967
Jewish Experience in the Art of the 20th Century, Jewish Museum,
New York, NY – 1975
International Art Fair, Basel, Switzerland – 1979, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1986
Nachbilder, Kunsthalle, Hannover, Germany – 1979
Bilder Sind Nicht Verboten, Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf,
Germany – 1982
Still Life, Tel Aviv Museum, Israel – 1984
Chagall to Kitaj, Barbican Art Center, London, United Kingdom – 1990
Witness and Legacy, Traveling Group Exhibition in North America – 1995
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
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
Dürer House, Nuremberg, Germany
Felix Nussbaum Haus, Osnabrueck, 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 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
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
34
THE ART OF THE QUESTION
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
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 and 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 and 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 and 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 and 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 and 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
and 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 and Syracuse University Press,
Syracuse, 2005.
Samuel Bak: Leben danach, Life Thereafter, Eva Atlan and Peter Junk. Felix
Nussbaum Haus and Rasch, Verlag, Bramsche, Osnabrueck, Germany,
2006.
Return to Vilna in the Art of Samuel Bak, Lawrence Langer. Pucker Art
Publications, Boston and Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 2007.
Remembering Angels: Paintings by Samuel Bak, A Calendar, January 2008June 2009, Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A. Phillips. Pucker Art
Publications, Boston, 2008.
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: Recent Paintings by Samuel Bak, Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary
A. Phillips. Pucker Art Publications, Boston, 2009.
S T IL L L IFE WITH S MOKE, 2004
Oil on Canvas
24 X 36"
BK1069
THE ART OF THE QUESTION:
Paintings by
SAMUEL BAK
WABASH COLLEGE
Eric Dean Gallery
P.O. Box 352
Crawfordsville, IN 47933
Phone: 765.361.6392
Web: www.wabash.edu
DATES: 2 March 2009 through 12 April 2009
(closed 7 March through 15 March 2009)
DEPAUW UNIVERSIT Y
The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics
2961 West County Road, 225 South
P.O. Box 37
Greencastle, IN 46135-0037
Phone: 765.658.4075
Web: prindleinstitute.depauw.edu
DATES: 13 April 2009 through 8 May 2009
DREW UNIVERSIT YREW UNIVERSIT Y
Korn Gallery and University Library
36 Madison Avenue
Madison, NJ 07940
Phone: 973.408.3000
Web: www.drew.edu
DATES: 9 October 2009 through
24 November 2009
IN CONJUNCTION WITH:
PUCKER GALLERY
171 Newbury Street
Boston, MA 02116
Phone: 617.267.9473
Web: www.puckergallery.com