Art from Fort Marion: The Silberman Collection (review)

Eighteen days after the May 10, 1940, attack, neutral Belgium surrendered to the Nazis, beginning an occupation of that county until liberation by Allied Forces on September 4, 1944. An eleven-year-old Jewish boy, Arthur Silberman, witnessed the start of this occupation from his home in Antwerp, the second largest city and home of the largest and most observant Jewish community in Belgium. Within a few months Nazi soldiers, aided by anti-Semitic Belgians, began the persecution of Jews of Antwerp by restricting their rights, confiscating their properties and businesses, and deporting three thousand of them to Auschwitz to be used as forced laborers or to be murdered in the gas chambers. Of the tens of thousands of Jews from Antwerp ultimately sent to Auschwitz, only an estimated eight hundred survived.

Arthur Silberman was extremely lucky. His family managed to negotiate the severe U.S. policies limiting European Jewish immigration (especially those speaking German) and escaped to live in New York City in 1941. There he graduated from the College of the City of New York with degrees in economics and history. After serving in the U.S. army in Germany from 1953 to 1955, he settled in Oklahoma City, successfully running his own business, called A. and M. Silberman Oil, with his brother. Both of his sons were Bar Mitzvahs, and Arthur Silberman continued to be involved in his Jewish faith his whole life.

Joyce Szabo, a professor of art history at the University of New Mexico, did not include information on the background of Mr. Silberman in an otherwise interesting and beautifully illustrated book on the artwork he passionately collected from 1960 to his death in 1995. The Fort Marion drawings were created by Southern Plains Native American POWs who were incarcerated from 1875 to 1878 after their surrender at Fort Reno at the end of the Red River War. Sixty leaders or potential leaders from the Cheyenne and Kiowa tribes and another twelve men from the Arapaho, Comanche, and Caddo tribes were identified and deported to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida—as far away from the southwestern plains as possible. Identifying and deporting potential leaders was a tactic also used by the Nazis when they began their occupation of Belgium, but the Native men were not killed, as were the European Jews. Instead, their hair was cut, they were dressed in military uniforms, and they were encouraged by their commander, Richard Pratt, to convert and assimilate. To get assistance and to earn money from the rich tourists vacationing in St. Augustine (one of the few southern coastal cities not destroyed by the battles of the Civil War), Pratt encouraged the Native men to perform, pose for photographs, and make artwork to sell. As part of necessary prison supplies, Pratt procured drawing pads, pencils, pen and ink, and crayons and gave them to the Native POWs to record their trip and their prior lives on the plains. Graphic representation was part of the Cheyenne and Kiowa culture, and some of the younger men from these tribes easily took to this form of expression, creating a great deal of work while at the fort. Few if any of the men continued to draw after their release.

The author explains that in response to Native American activism of the 1970s, U.S. museums began to collect work by Native artists, but this work consisted of artifacts such as clothing, decorated weapons, or pottery. Drawings and paintings like the ones created by the POWs of Fort Marion were thought to be tainted by non-Native materials and techniques. Arthur Silberman and his wife, Shifra, thought otherwise and in 1975 founded the Native American Painting Reference Library in Okalahoma City, now part of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. Arthur Silberman was considered an expert in Native American two-dimensional work and curated art exhibits such as From Pictographs to Jerome Tiger and the traveling show of artwork entitled American Indian...