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June 11, 2010
As testimony and document
Long-running Yad Vashem art exhibit features work by survivors.
PNINA GRANIRER
Established in 1953 as the world centre for documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Holocaust, Israel’s Yad Vashem safeguards the memory of the past and works to impart meaning for future generations.
I have recently returned from Israel after attending the opening of Virtues of Memory: Sixty Decades of Holocaust Survivors’ Creativity, an exhibit that opened on April 12, the commemoration day of the Holocaust. I was honored to have my work, “Out of the Flames,” included in this exhibition, which is the first of its kind to be shown from the collection of 10,000 artworks at Yad Vashem. These works by artists who survived the Nazi inferno and whose personal testimony in graphic form will last forever is a powerful way to fulfil the Passover Haggadah’s instruction, “And you shall tell it to your children.”
In curator Yehudit Shendar’s words, “Virtues of Memory opens up this collection of artistic expression, enabling those who were not there to touch upon a reality from its visual aspects. It presents a powerful language of signs and symbols stemming from the necessity that pushes those who seek to remember to delve into the depths of memory, unvarnished and unadorned. It is not an effort to recreate reality, rather, it is reality itself, both external and internal, daubed in the hues of personal experience.”
Having my work included in this exhibit is one of the most meaningful events of my career as an artist, and so it was with great trepidation and emotion that I arrived at the museum. I was welcomed by and met with Shendar and Orly Nachmani, the assistant curator with whom I had been corresponding and who made sure I received an exhibition catalogue. What an impressive document it is. A well-researched, heavy book of 660 pages, curatorial statements and two pages each for the 300 artists.
As we entered the large exhibition hall, I was stunned to notice that “Out of the Flames” was almost the first painting a visitor would see, and had been placed in the section titled The Need to Document. Other works in this section recount the story of the Holocaust from a personal vantage point, stemming from a wish to document the historical events.
I had barely entered the hall when I found myself surrounded by my cousins, who came all the way from Haifa, and by friends from Tel Aviv and other parts of Israel, some of whom I had not seen for as many as 20, or even 50, years!
I was moved to tears to see them all there, having come from afar to celebrate with me. Here, I would like to share a meaningful detail about my painting. The last panel is centred on a transfer photograph of my cousin, Gabi, three friends and me, all of us who came “out of the flames” of war to Israel. Gabi was there that day, at my side, during the opening of the exhibition.
Over the last six decades, Yad Vashem has steadily collected works of art relating to the experience of victims and survivors of the Holocaust, culminating in the establishment of an art museum that cares for and exhibits works from the collection. However, the museum has never attempted an exhibition of such magnitude.
In the introduction to the catalogue, Avner Shalev, chairman of the directorate of Yad Vashem, wrote: “The compelling intellectual issue, which has been the impetus for numerous deliberations regarding the ostensible absence of the moral right to create artwork after Auschwitz, is ineffective for these artists.... For these survivors-artists, driven by the need to create, repression and silence are impossible. Creation is their means to exist.”
Virtues of Memory is a very large exhibition, divided into 11 sections. It would take too much space to list them here, but I will mention that this division adds an important narrative and cohesion to a display of this size.
As people began to arrive, I noticed that many were looking for the artists and asking questions, sharing their own experiences and having conversations about the works. By the reactions of the visitors, I could sense a general feeling of personal involvement made real through the art on the walls.
After awhile, there were speeches, photographers, television crews and journalists. People approached me asking questions and someone even interviewed me for some television show that I will probably never see. There was a distinct feeling in the air that this exhibition was special, that it had deep meaning for the artists and the viewers alike.
According to the rigid curatorship rules of today, Virtues of Memory might be considered an “uneven” exhibit. However, it exudes elements that are rarely seen: a baring of the soul, deep emotion and a raw, honest and direct truth of life experience. Not all of the artists featured experienced the horror of the camps, but they all fit Yad Vashem’s definition of survivor – any Jew who came out alive from Europe after Kristallnacht, the pogrom of the Night of the Broken Glass.
At the end of the war, the survivors who found themselves in displaced persons camps in Europe began to draw and paint almost frenetically, wanting to put down on paper not just words but images of what they had witnessed. Fearing that their stories about the hellish camps they had just left would not be believed, they were compelled to depict in visual form what they had seen.
One of those survivors was Yehuda Bacon, who later became my teacher at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem. At age 13, he was sent with his family to the Terezin ghetto near Prague and, later, to Auschwitz, where he was charged with transferring corpses and ashes. He was liberated on May 6, 1945, after a death march to Mauthausen. He immediately began drawing sketches of the crematoria in Auschwitz, some of which were later submitted as evidence in the Adolf Eichmann trial. Bacon went to Israel in 1946 with the Youth Aliyah, studied at the Bezalel Academy and later became a teacher there. We – his students – knew vaguely about his past, but he never spoke of it. His work in the exhibition is dated 1948 and depicts a muselmann, as the emaciated inmates of the camps were called. His work is included in the section entitled Granting the Body an Image.
In contrast, Jacob Pins, who taught me woodblock prints, belongs to those who managed to leave Europe before the outbreak of the war. His parents, who stayed in Germany, were murdered by the Nazis in the Riga ghetto. Pins gave me the knowledge that made possible many of the woodblock prints I have produced as an artist, some of which are now in collections of public galleries and museums in Canada. His woodblock print in the Virtues of Memory exhibition is dated 1946.
The echoes of the Holocaust still reverberate across the decades, as seen in the works in Virtues of Memory, stretching over a time span from the end of the war in 1945 and up until 2008. Many of the artists have passed away and the others are not young anymore. In the not too distant future, none will be left to talk about their experiences, but their art will continue to speak loud and clear. This is what makes Virtues of Memory an important and timely exhibition.
When it was time to leave, I realized that I had not really been able to see everything, since I had been too busy talking with all the friends and relatives who honored me with their presence. We returned to Yad Vashem the next day and spent a long time in the exhibition space. After that, we went into the amazing building designed by Moshe Safdie that houses the historical Museum of the Holocaust, one of the most overwhelming, difficult and horrific documents of the Shoah. Now, having seen it again, I had a much better understanding of the importance and lasting value of the exhibit.
Virtues of Memory will be on display at the art museum of Yad Vashem until April 2011. Visit yadvashem.org and click on the exhibitions navigation link to view information on the exhibit.
Pnina Granirer is an artist living in Vancouver.
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