In a Different Light: The Book of Genesis in the Art of Samuel Bak, and: The Holocaust in the Painting of Valentin Lustig (review)

These two art books are different in character even though the artists themselves ostensibly have much in common. Both artists are Surrealists who were touched by the Holocaust—Bak as a survivor of the Vilna ghetto, and Lustig as a son of concentration camp survivors—and each expresses a loss of faith in God because of it. In the works in question, the influence of the Holocaust is largely implicit, but is strongly felt. Moreover, both immigrated to Israel in their youth, served in its army, worked in Italy and Switzerland, and chose to live abroad, Lustig in Zurich and Bak near Boston. The works displayed in these books were all painted at the turn of the century, Lustig's between 1994 and 2001 and Bak's from 1999 and 2000. Yet their styles and their approaches to art are distinct, and so are the styles and contents of the texts that accompany their works.

Bak's virtuoso style is strongly realistic and he renders the minutest details of his scenes in the veristic tradition of Surrealism, a style he adapted in the mid-1960s. His symbolism, although stemming from his personal experiences, has always been complex and intellectually distanced, and it reaches new heights in this series. His philosophical, multilayered exploration of Genesis here is a postmodern and post-Holocaust examination not only of the biblical book but of Jewish religious beliefs in general, and of man's quest for contact with a God he is not sure exists, who seems to have absented himself from modern Jewish history. As he puts it when describing his depictions of guardian angels: "I ask them to carry undecipherable messages from a God-fearing atheist to some superior presence, some silent voice from which like Job I seek adequate answers but receive none" (p. 86). In quest of these answers, Bak turns to those subjects in Genesis that involve man's contact with God and to their representation in art by Michelangelo (whose works had first inspired him in the Vilna ghetto during the war) as well as by other artists. He remakes these works according to his understanding of modern man's tribulations in a violent world whose roots lie in the Holocaust, symbolized by the almost constant inclusion here of smoking crematorium chimneys. To these subjects, he adds three related themes. The first questions the entire concept of time, history, and tradition. The second represents angels as divine intercessors and guardians who do not succeed in their attempts to save or instruct man. The last investigates the concept of a repair (tikun) of the world after the creation in Genesis has proved itself faulty and after the covenant God made to protect his chosen people in that book was abrogated by the Holocaust.

Lawrence Langer, a well-known authority on Holocaust-related literature, explains Bak's approach in an informative essay. He offers an excellent analysis of the way Bak infuses his paintings with deconstructed texts and images, all of which have multiple variations. Langer explains most of the paintings in depth, down to their smallest details—which can be clearly seen in the well-rendered and richly colored reproductions—exploring their many layers of meaning. He shows, for instance, why in Bak's variations on Michelangelo's Creation of Man, the hands of God and Adam do not make contact, why God is represented by a vacant silhouette, a cut-out shape whose void stresses his absence, and why Bak concluded that man must recreate himself in his own image. In like manner, Langer elucidates the paintings in which Bak states that while tikun is necessary, it can never return the world or faith to its original state. Langer's illuminating...