BY QUITTERIE GOUNOT

In print | Published October 21, 2010

When he was just a child, Samuel Bak’s best friend was shot before horrified neighbors, his body left to rot in the street as an example to the rest of the town. Bak has had a personal relationship with tragedy from quite a young age. His experiences growing up in a Jewish ghetto in Poland have left indelible scars on his psyche and dramatically shaped his understanding of his own identity and that of the Jewish people. Rather than let the trauma consume him, however, he has always turned to art as his witness in atrocity. Through painting, he has transformed pain into a powerful expression of human persistence.

A selection of Bak’s work will be on display in the List Gallery exhibit, “The Paintings of Samuel Bak: Holocaust History and Memory,” opens today and continues until Dec. 12. Today, to open the exhibit, the artist will give a joint lecture with long time fan and Emeritus Professor of English at Simmons College Lawrence Langer.

Samuel Bak was born in 1933 in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania). When he was seven years old, in 1941, the city fell under Soviet rule, only to be occupied by the Germans a year later. From a historically prominent cultural and intellectual center, this city, known as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” became a Jewish ghetto under Nazi rule. Its population of approximately 70,000 was decimated through executions, deportations, disease and starvation. When the city was taken over by the Soviets in 1944, there were only about 200 survivors.

During World War II, Bak lost nearly of all of his previously extensive family. Both of his grandparents were shot to death along with other Jews during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. His father was shot just days before the liberation of the ghetto. At the end of the war, Bak’s only living relative was his mother. They had survived by taking refuge in a Benedictine convent when the Nazis liquidated the ghetto in 1943, and again the following year, when the Nazis forced children into a labor camp and Bak’s father devised his son’s escape. In 1948, after several years in Displaced Persons camps in Germany, Bak and his mother managed to emigrate to Israel. There, he studied art at the Belazel School in Jerusalem. Since then, Bak, a self-described “wandering Jewish,” has lived in Israel, France, Italy, Switzerland and the United States. He currently resides in Weston, MA. His work has been internationally displayed and acclaimed.

History Professor Robert Weinberg, whose research focuses on revolution and antisemitism in Russia, suggested Samuel Bak to the List Gallery. He first came across Bak’s art at a conference in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and has great interest in Bak’s work and life. “I hope the exhibition, lectures and symposium will expose the College to the work of an outstanding artist who blends history and personal experience as well as provide insight into the world of East European Jewish culture and society that no longer exists,” Weinberg said.

Bak is an incredibly prolific artist who paints every day. At the time this article was written, the List Gallery staff was still in the process of carefully examining a large number of paintings in order to make a final selection. “I was looking for the images that had that universal kind of quality, that were rooted in Bak’s specific experience, but that could also have many meanings,” Andrea Packard, director of the List Gallery, said.

Bak indeed offers the viewer many layers not just of paint, but also of meaning. Drawing upon surrealism, his paintings feature many odd juxtapositions and physical impossibilities. One painting, for instance, shows a tree trunk that is ruptured yet still upright. In another, a man is practically smothered by a giant pear closing in on either side of him as he peels a pear of his own. In yet another, two men attempt to play chess, but they are waist deep in water, helplessly drifting off. Betsy Lee, volunteer outreach coordinator of the List Gallery, commented on the plurality of interpretations that can arise from looking at Bak’s paintings. “These are truly objects of questions,” Lee said.

Bak’s painting style, unlike his combination of images, is rather traditional and reminiscent of 19th century techniques. His palette includes more bright colors than one might expect in art that often depicts scenes inspired by the Holocaust or other genocides. Still, it often sticks closely to earth tones and frequently calls upon colors that Packard describes as “burnt sienna” and “greenish blue.” Packard explained that, by restricting his use of color in a sense, the artist was able to unify what otherwise often looked like a very disjointed world. An excess of unusual color choices might have been a distraction from a major appeal of Bak’s work: his “inventive recombination of images.”
Bak himself has insisted on the fact that he is not just a “Holocaust painter,” and he is indeed much more than such a label might suggest. The trauma of the Holocaust does serve as the backdrop for much of his work. In a sense, even when it is not directly addressed, it is always haunting the canvas.
However, the questions and claims that are identifiable in Bak’s work have profound universal implications that anyone can engage with regardless of his or her personal background and even beyond the historical context of the Holocaust. “Bak’s paintings exhort us to persist in our commitment to create a world based on knowledge and ethics,” Weinberg said.

“There is a call to witness his experience, to understand and inquire into history…to recognize that just because the imagination itself is inventive does not mean that it makes up reality. Rather, it gives form to real things,” Packard said.

Juxtaposing destruction and order, somewhere between despair and hope, Bak’s work paradoxically invites us to simultaneously gasp at the ever open wound of trauma and contemplate that pain sublimed. The exhibit will run until Dec. 12. Bak and Langer’s joint lecture will happen today at 4:30 p.m. in Lang Performing Arts Cinema, and will be followed by a reception. Bak will also participate in a symposium moderated by Robert Weinberg, “Vilna: Jerusalem of the North,” on Oct. 22.

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