Annotated Bibliography
Primary Sources
Facing History and Ourselves. “Illuminations: The Art of Samuel Bak.” Facing History and Ourselves, www.facinghistory.org/illuminations-art-samuel-bak. Accessed 4 April. 2021.
Samuel Bak is a painter with a theme of piecing back together a world that was shattered, repeated imagery of Jewish symbols, with the debris of destroyed homes, towns, and lives as substitution for the people that experienced this destruction. This painter represents a general thread of themes seen in most art regarding the Shoah, that of the destruction witnessed, yet finding meaning afterward, honoring the lives of those that did not survive, and the continuation of their Jewish faith in the face of such horrific human actions.
Lok Cahana, Alice. “Main : Alicelokcahana.Com.” Alice Lok Cahana Main Page, alicelokcahana.com. Accessed 2 Apr. 2021.
A more abstract representation of the experience of the Shoah, Alice Lok Cahana hadn’t created much art during her experience in Auschwitz. Aside from a formative experience when asked by the SS to decorate the barracks for Christmas with other children there at that time, with the only supplies being a broom, the children took pieces of it and choreographed themselves into a human candelabra, mimicking the Jewish Menorah. Originally finding an artistic home among the “color fields” movement in Houston, Texas after the Shoah, she revisited her hometown in 1978, and after not seeing any evidence of memory of what had happened, her art took a turn towards the darker, more abstract art that we know her for today. She says that her art is her “Kaddish”, or Jewish prayer, for those who did not survive.
Florida Center for Instructional Technology. “David Olère.” David Olère Paintings, Drawings, and Bio, 2005, fcit.usf.edu/Holocaust/resource/gallery/olere.htm.
This artist’s representation is particularly important because of the documentary value it holds. Working as a sonderkommando in Auschwitz from March 2, 1943 to January 19, 1945, his proximity to some of the most visceral horrors of the Shoah are depicted in his realistic, yet emotionally moving depictions of what he witnessed in the camp. I have chosen to utilize his work to generalize art regarding the Shoah because of the role this art played in a camp where photographs or documentation of the violence in the gas chambers never occurred. David was originally forced to work as an illustrator for the SS in the camp, decorating letters for them and painting portraits of officers. After his liberation from the camp, he felt compelled to create the art for those that did not survive. An unfortunate aspect of his work is that people are generally repelled by the gruesome images, as opposed to attracted to his art, which I believe is a valuable aspect of the work in and of itself. Art is not always supposed to cater to the beauty in life, it also holds the space of that which repulses us, and the violence that occurs in our history, and in our collective lives and experience.
Peer-Reviewed Academic Sources
Blutinger, Jeffrey C. “Bearing Witness: Teaching the Holocaust from a Victim-Centered Perspective.” The History Teacher, vol. 42, no. 3, 2009, pp. 269–279. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40543535. Accessed 4 Apr. 2021.
This resource will be important to provide a baseline for my inquiry into how the perspective of a survivor translated to visual arts can be important in communicating the events of the Shoah, by talking about the importance of centering the survivors perspective. This research also illustrates some critical problems that may be present in trying to represent such events that may lie outside human comprehension. The paper talks about how the survivors perspect is the “perspective of the exception”, or the perspective of someone who escaped the most horrific aspect of the Shoah, the widespread death of Jews and other populations. Because of this degree of separation from those that actually died, and the memories being translated by these survivors are not explicitly from those who died, there is a challenge in communicating the most incomprehensible aspects of the Shoah. While this specific paper refers to survivor testimony, writing, and other literature regarding the survivors point of view, I hope that my research into the specific representation of these horrors in the visual arts medium will help counter this critique in a sense, illuminating the visual arts as a way to communicate the most incomprehensible aspects of the Shoah through a medium that evokes emotion in a visually visceral way.
Metz, Walter C. “‘Show Me the Shoah!": Generic Experience and Spectatorship in Popular Representations of the Holocaust.” Shofar, vol. 27, no. 1, 2008, pp. 16–35. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42944683. Accessed 4 Apr. 2021.
This article is important in providing context for the most relevant critiques of art representing the Shoah, in that it is near impossible to represent such events outside the scope of comprehension through Art. In analyzing a comedy film, a children’s book, and utilizing a museum as a form of “amusement park”, the article helps expand the ways that these events can be shown through various mediums that were thought to be inappropriate for traumatic and violent events such as the Shoah. It is clear through various mediums explored here that the events thought “incomprehensible” can be communicated effectively through artistic means. My research hopes to expand on this understanding, showing that the various dimensions of the Shoah, the violent and incomprehensible, and the emotional and resilient, can be shown through the visual arts, and understood generations after the events themselves take place.
Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. “The Holocaust and the Shifting Boundaries of Art and History.” History and Memory, vol. 1, no. 2, 1989, pp. 77–97. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25618582. Accessed 4 Apr. 2021.
This article observes how the Shoah as an event that turned the tide of history has changed how we interpret history through art, in this case literature and poetry. The analysis of poetry as a form of art here is relevant to my research in that poetry is a medium that uses allegory and metaphor, and visual arts tend to do the same. The conclusion of this article speaks of memory being reinterpreted, and traumatic events being much more complicated in this manner. More literal representations of the Shoah may be at fault for this, but I hope to show in my research how memory can be more effectively wrestled with in more allegorical forms of visual art, such as is discussed in this article with the analysis of poetry.
Sungju Park-Kang. “Pain as Masquerades/Masquerades as Pain.” Masquerades of War, edited by Christine Sylvester, 1st ed., Routledge, 2016, pp. 154–69.
This chapter in the compilation edited by Christine Sylvester was used in contextualizing the overall theme of pain and suffering found in the Art of the Shoah. The idea of a masquerade typically means to conceal the truth, but in speaking of masquerades, the truth becomes revealed in the process. The art of the Shoah as a process of revealing the truth is present in all the artists I researched.