THE ART of the QUESTION Paintings by SAMUEL BAK

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ith the generous support of Pucker Gallery, three institutionsWabash College, Drew University, and DePauw Universityare collaborating to bring to our campuses Samuel Baks 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 Baks 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 Universitys 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 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 Conict; 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,

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.

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 nally, our enduring thanks to Samuel Bak himself whose life and lifes work teaches us the art of the question. !

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L A S T MOVEMEN T, 1996 Oil on Linen 55 X 63" BK434

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SAMUEL BAK and the ART OF THE QUESTION

he art of Samuel Bak entrances. It also disquiets. Dismembered gures of esh, metal, wood, and stone. Broken pottery, rusted keys, petried teddy bears, discarded shoes, oating rocks, uprooted trees. Splintered chess pieces. Fractured rainbows. Books turned buildings, tablets turned tombstones, memorial candles turned crematoria. Mute musical instruments, ightless doves, mechanized, immobile angels, crucied 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, Drer, 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 nd 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 rst 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; petried arks stranded in congealed waters; ghetto children assuming the identities of the biblical heroes Noah, Moses, Isaac, David, and Jesus; Michelangelos transcendent father god disappearing into thin air or thick smoke; Drers melancholy angel deported from the edge of the Enlightenment to the brink of apocalypse; Rembrandts angels blindfolded and impotent to stay the slayers 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? Baks visual questioning has become a consuming passion; past, present, and future all fall subject to an interrogation intended to interrupt. We detect in Baks brushstrokes echoes of Rainer Maria Rilkes 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 gures 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 aficted in consciousness and conscience, on the doorsills of Baks locked rooms just within reach of books so foreign that they oat without words, burst into ame, sprout from trees, and

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. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1984), 34.

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MOYS HE LE , 2008 Oil on Canvas 48 X 24 BK1219

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assemble into ghostly makeshift buildings. Passageways into an irretrievable past and an uncertain present and future, Baks 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 afrm 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 4

Gabriel Josopovici, discussing Proust and his own experience with the Bible in Jonathan Magonet, A Rabbi Reads the Bible (London: SCM, 1991, 2004), 40. The question of the rebbe in ElieWiesels The Gates of the Forest (New York: Schocken, 1982), 199.

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C ROSS E D O UT I I, 2007 Oil on Canvas 18 X 14 BK1171

S TU DY I , 1995 Oil on Linen 18 X 21 BK418

CRO SS ED O UT I, 2007 Oil on Canvas 14 X 11 BK1208

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A RESOUNDING NO: PRESERVING the QUESTION in the ART of SAMUEL BAK

broken stone tablet, haphazardly reconstructed, is suspended precariously against a blue sky. On it, the Hebrew word LoNoslides 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 paintingLo, Against Blue Space, 1976presents a vivid metaphor for Baks artistic project. A no against all odds, Baks 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 mutatein 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, Baks paintings uninchingly 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 gloriesindeed, mandatessacrice, Bak recasts and returns to the Akedah (the binding of Isaac) again and again. Drawing our attention to the knife poised at Isaacs throat by his father, Abraham (who looks away from his terried 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 extraordinarilywe might say, obscenelyviolent expression of this narrative in his Crossed Out and Study series. Here, the surrendering boy (mentioned above) is crucied 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 sacrice 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 Jabs wrestles with the necessity to speak of and in the aftermath of the Holocaust and to nd 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 reected in the no that resounds throughout Baks otherwise unforgiving landscape. To pose questions is to resist monologue. It is a communicative gesture that is itself an act of deance. It is a tentative wishquiet, faltering, fragilethat we may yet nd a path towards healing. !
BETH HAWKINS BENEDIX

DePauw University

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. Edmond Jabs. The Book of Questions. Vol. 2. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991), 442.

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FAMI LY T RE E I I I, 1994 Oil on Linen 26 X 22" BK392

U N DE R THE T R E E S, 1994 Oil on Linen 20 X 24" BK821

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VISUAL ORDER and DISORDER in the ART of SAMUEL BAK

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 artists 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 nds 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 recongured scenes, or in Baks words, to see freshly those painful matters that have been dulled by habits of denial. 3

Though Bak has directly engaged Drer, Michelangelo, Mantegna, and Rembrandt in his gural 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 Baks Soutine Street, 2001 and Bruegels Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1564-1567 render nature as a seeming continuity in the face of violent acts. Bruegel graphically displays Herods decreed slayings of the innocents as narrated in Matthews 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, Baks view, close-up and personal, depicts an actual place and the fallout of a real contemporary event. No Biblical allegory, no masses of peopleonly 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 Baks 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 upheavalshifting houses sheer apart, capricious roofs do not t, windows open onto empty air, arched passageways fail to connect, housing materials oat in the air, whole streets become piles of shards. Captured here are the

1 2

Renaissance through the 19th century. Samuel Bak, Painted in Wordsa 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. Bak, 479. 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). The astute suggestion of such a connection was made by art historian friend Greta Berman, private communication, July 2008. 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 Bruegels 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.

3 4

5 6

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S OU TI NE S TRE 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 X 63 Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Austria

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impressions of the child Bak when he rst 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. Bruegels light typically reects 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 res of hell (such as Bruegels Triumph of Death, c. 1562). No hell res are necessary for Bak the disturbing aftermath of real events sufces. 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 oating debris, contrasted to dead black darkness. Baks 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 nd in Northern Renaissance art hidden symbolism. In Bruegels 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. Boschs symbols, derived from conventional sourcesmaxims, tarot cards, alchemy, etc.are distanced into his imagined hell. Bak has no need to invent a visual hell; instead he uses personal, everyday experi7 8 9

ence to nd 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 Baks 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, Baks 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 oating over cemeteries (Under the Trees, 2001). Culture also ossies into stony nature, as do the shattered teddy bears in a mountainous heap Under the Blue Sky, 2001, and the solidied 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, Baks 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

Bak, 43. Bak, 32. Baks use of objects does, however, stand in contrast to that of the Surrealists. Baks objects reect poignant personal experiences as opposed to the Surrealists more histrionic indulgence of the libidinal unconscious (e.g., Dalis Illumined Pleasures, 1929).

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H ID DE N QUE S TION II , 1994 Oil on Linen 25 X 32 BK318

H OLDI NG A PROM ISE, 2008 Oil on Canvas 36 X 24 BK1181

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AUS PI C IO US MOO N, 2001 Oil on Canvas 40 X 50 BK760

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CR E AT IO N, 1999 Oil on Canvas 40 X 50 BK738

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TH E L A S T MOVE ME NT, 2000 Oil on Canvas 18 X 24 BK778

R E MNA NT S , 2002 Oil on Canvas 36 X 36 BK850

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TES TI MO NI AL S , 2006 Oil on Canvas 40 X 30" BK1138

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IN THEIR OWN IMAGE, 2007 Oil on Canvas 30 X 24 BK1184

YIZKO R THE ME, 1992 Oil on Linen 21 X 25 BK202

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DRESS REHEARSAL, 1999 Oil on Canvas 40 X 32 BK734

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WI TH A BL U E THR E AD, 2008 Oil on Canvas 30 X 24 BK1197

S IX W I NGS F OR ON E, 2008 Oil on Canvas 30 X 24 BK1191

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DAMAGE , 2002 Oil on Canvas 36 X 36 BK851

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F ROM G EN ER ATION TO GEN ER ATI ON I II , 1996 Oil on Linen 32 X 26 BK473

UN D ER A BL UE S KY, 2002 Oil on Canvas 18 X 24 BK807

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PER SI S T ENC E, 2002 Oil on Canvas 30 X 24 BK840

S TU DY FO R AKE DAH, 2000 Pencil and Oil on Paper 19 X 24 BK690

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WA LL ED IN , 2008 Oil on Canvas 30 X 24 BK1196

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S OLO, 1996 Oil on Canvas 50 X 34 BK432

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BANI SHM EN T, 1999 Oil on Canvas 32 X 26 BK725

IN N EED OF A TI KKUN, 1999 Oil on Canvas 22 X 26 BK710

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INN E R F I RE C , 2003 Oil on Canvas 18 X 24 BK935

THE NATU RE OF ROOT S , 1999 Oil on Canvas 32 X 18 BK723

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FI GUR E WI TH FLI GH T A SS IS TAN T, 1984 Oil on Linen 27 X 19 021

I NTE R PRE TATI ON, 2003 Oil on Canvas 18 X 24 BK937

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GI VE AND TAKE , 2005 Oil on Canvas 22 X 28 BK1049

ALL OF A SU DDEN , 2005 Oil on Canvas 22 X 28 BK1036

H APP I N ES S , 2005 Oil on Canvas 22 X 28 BK1050

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UNKNOWN, 2007 Oil on Canvas 24 X 18 BK1195

COL LE CTI VE, 2007 Oil on Canvas 18 X 24 BK1170

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F OR THE M A NY DAVIDS , 2008 Oil on Canvas 18 X 24 BK1177

ME MOR I AL , 1986 Oil on Linen 39 X 32 054

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SAMUEL BAK Biography

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, Dsseldorf, Germany 1978 Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn, Germany 1978 Kunstmuseum, Wiesbaden, Germany 1979 Stadtgalerie Bamberg, Villa Dessauer, Germany 1988 Kofer Gallery, Toronto, Canada 1990 Drer Museum, Nuremberg, Germany 1991 Temple Judea Museum, Philadelphia, PA 1991 Jdisches 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 Bloomeld, MI 1994 National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, Seton Hall College, Greensburg, PA 1995 Spertus Museum, Chicago, IL 1995 BNai BRith 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

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 LAngle 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

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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, Stdtische Kunsthalle, Dsseldorf, 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 Drer 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 Jdisches 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 PhilipsExeter 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 Springeld Museum of Fine Art, Springeld, MA

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 WordsA 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.

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ART OF THE QUESTION