Review by Mark Jenkins
March 20, 2024 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
Dalya Luttwak, “From his immediate family, the only one who survived and was not murdered in the death factory of Auschwitz was my father,” 2023, site-responsive installation, painted steel. (Dalya Luttwak/American University Museum/Katzen Arts Center)
The colors in “Art and the Demands of Memory: Works by Second-Generation Holocaust Survivors” are mostly muted or dark, evoking loss and devastation. But the multimedia works by 10 local Jewish artists, curated by Aneta Georgievska-Shine, are brightened by glimmers of color and light, often signifying hope or gratitude.
Color struggles to assert itself in pieces by Mindy Weisel, who was born in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany to parents who were Auschwitz survivors. She covers a canvas and a 1940s-vintage suitcase with bright hues that she then largely submerges beneath black pigment. Scrawled on the suitcase is “A3146,” which was tattooed on her father’s arm. The number, like the colors visible through the black, is a testament to disaster but also endurance.
In Dalya Luttwak’s site-responsive installation, a root structure made of painted steel radiates from a building pillar. All the roots are black save one, whose glimmering gold represents the artist’s father, the only member of his immediate family not to be killed by the Nazis.
Luttwak was born in the British mandate for Palestine, the daughter of refugees from Czechoslovakia, on the eve of World War II. She has long made steel models of roots, and “I always knew that roots had to do with family,” she allowed in February at a group artists’ talk. But this piece is more specific and her “most personal” artwork ever, she said.
Kitty Klaidman, “The Attic in Humence,” 1991, triptych, acrylic on paper/mounted on aluminum. (Kitty Klaidman/American University Museum/Katzen Arts Center)
Even more directly autobiographical is a triptych painting by Kitty Klaidman, the only one of the artists who’s a first-generation survivor. Her moodily realistic picture depicts the attic in Czechoslovakia where she, her brother and their parents were hidden by a Catholic family.
The 1991 painting was the result of a trip back to the places where she lived as a young girl, a visit that yielded work that Klaidman at the artists’ talk called “the greatest catharsis of my life.” The light that filters through two slitted windows is a hint of the outside world forbidden to the cloistered family, but Klaidman said the illumination also symbolizes the people who harbored them.
Coos Hamburger, “Theresienstadt Remembered: Still Life-Pot and Spoon, Baltimore,” 2022, photographic print. (Coos Hamburger/American University Museum/Katzen Arts Center)
The most explicitly documentary works are monochromatic photographs by Michael Steiner Borek and Coos Hamburger, who were born after the war in Prague and Amsterdam, respectively. Hamburger’s images are mostly of Israel, although they include a picture of a pot used by his mother and grandmother while imprisoned at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Borek’s photos depict everyday scenes in the hometown of his father, who survived Auschwitz as a youth. The pictures have an aching emptiness that evokes the many Jews who were deported and did not return.
Chaya Schapiro, “Memory Gela,” 2020, mixed media on paper. (Chaya Schapiro/American University Museum/Katzen Arts Center)
Stories of those who died persist as fragments and vestiges in the work of Trudy Babchak, Chaya Schapiro and Miriam Mörsel Nathan. Babchak, who was born to two Polish survivors just after the war, makes drawing-paintings that position ghostly figures in nearly abstract settings. Schapiro, whose parents were Poles who barely survived the war as exiles in Siberia, paints intricate abstractions that seem to be constructed of tiny stones; these recall the pebbles traditionally left on Jewish gravestones.
Nathan recounts a tale that’s both collective and individual in “Zdenka,” named for her mother. While her father found refuge in the Dominican Republic, where Nathan was ultimately born, her mother-to-be was sent to Theresienstadt. Although it was not an extermination camp, many people died there, and often were cremated. Nathan’s mother was among the inmates ordered to transport human remains in paper urns to the river, where they were dumped. The artist memorializes this sorrowful process with an assemblage of cardboard boxes, jumbled on the floor as if abandoned suddenly when the Soviet Army arrived in 1945.
Mindy Weisel, “The Suitcase,” 1979, mixed media assemblage. (John Woo/Mindy Weisel/American University Museum/Katzen Arts Center)
Miriam Mörsel Nathan, “Zdenka,” 2019, 21 painted cardboard boxes. (Miriam Mörsel Nathan/American University Museum/Katzen Arts Center)
Two of the artists, Micheline Klagsbrun and Margot Neuhaus, join Luttwak in making effective use of the premises. Klagsbrun presents another of her “night boats,” inspired by her father’s 1941 voyage from Portugal to Britain, where the artist was born. These sculptures are made of torn and battered materials, suggesting the fragility of her parents’ fates as they fled Poland. But this rendition is much larger than its predecessors and is suspended high above the gallery, giving it an epic quality. The journey is perilous but triumphant.
Also overhead is Neuhaus’s “Rays,” a fluttering series of yellow and gold paper banners. The artist, born to Polish refugees in Mexico, has often executed minimalist gestures, but usually in the martial hues of red and black. Here she turns to cheerful colors, inspired by Chilean singer and composer Violeta Parra’s song “Gracias a la Vida” — thanks for life. Amid all the shadows and mourning, the exhibition offers a place for sunlight and gratitude.