Seeing and Doing A Meditation on an Afterlife in Art

Abstract

This two part meditation begins with a reading of Sieg Maandag's life and work, and then moves to a sustained exploration of a doubled portrait of the artist in a painting and a photograph. We explore how Skorczewski and Maandag-Ralph become witnesses to the witness as they locate Sieg Maandag's art on the "aching dark terrain of life after trauma and violence" (Levitt, 2020, 9).

It almost doesn't matter what you paint. It is what takes place during the act of painting that matters.

(Flack, 1991, p. 10)

Simon describes his father being very open to his children's opinions. "Wait," his father would say. "Look. Really look. Tell me. What do you see?" Sarah told a story about how a huge crowd followed her and her father as they made their way around a Dali exhibit.

"In this world full of symbols," Sieg wrote, "seeing and doing go hand in hand. Seeing what the moment has to say and giving the moment form by the deed."

(Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 37)

PART ONE: Seeing and Doing: The Artist's Life

For the artist Sieg Maandag, Audrey Flack's (1991) words are apt: it doesn't matter what he paints, what counts is the act of painting, the seeing and the doing. What is arresting about Sieg's work as it comes to us through the pages of Sieg Maandag: Life and Art in the Aftermath of Bergen-Belsen is the intensity of his drive to experiment, to grow, to change, to explore new territory—to be liberated into his own creativity.

We are struck by the way that visual culture has limned this artist's life. His image became emblematic of the atrocities of Bergen-Belsen in George Rodger's Life magazine photo of May 9, 1945. Rodger's photo records an unnamed little boy walking past hundreds of mangled corpses lying by the side of the road. He looks away. The photograph was read as a German child turning away from the horrors his countrymen had perpetrated, but that was not the case. Rather, the photograph depicts a scene that was all too familiar to this little Dutch boy who had survived the camp.

Part of what confused those who first saw the image was that, unlike the "starving and filthy children" British troops first saw "walking among the piles of bodies in the camp," the little boy in this photograph is well-dressed. Sieg had just received these new clothes donated by German citizens from a nearby town (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, pp. 23, 27). As Dawn relayed, he found these clothes in a pile of such donations (The Wiener Holocaust Library, 2021).

In the text, Rodger's original photo is paired with the version that appeared in Life. The published version is on the left and the original on the right of what we are calling the first diptych, a form we will return to as we sharpen our focus on what we will call the second diptych where, instead of two photographs juxtaposed to each other, Karen and Dawn pair a photograph of the adult artist and one of his paintings. But in both instances, "pairs of portraits, images or themed pictures are used together to complement one another" (Zecchinelli, 2014).

In this first diptych, the two photographic images differ: the most gruesome details in the foreground were retouched lest the readers of Life look away. But here, readers are asked to reconsider that decision and see both what was altered and what had originally been there, side by side. We see what was hidden, the horror, and cannot look away.

But there is more seeing and doing to this story. In New York, Sieg's uncle, Nico, saw the image and recognized this unidentified little boy, his nephew. He bought eight copies of the issue and sent them to whatever addresses he could find for Sieg's parents (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 27); the iconic image united the before and after of Sieg's life: "Sieg's mother used the photo to prove to the Red Cross that her children were still alive" (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 27).

In many ways, becoming an artist and looking closely was one of the ways Sieg learned to live with the horrors of his childhood. Even then, he had taken in all that was happening around him. And yet, when he remade his life, he continued to come back to those losses, reclaiming them. It became a part of his life after. This is very much in keeping with the ways that Laura writes about the afterlives of trauma, the ways that these legacies shift and change as we return to them over and over again (Levitt, 2020). We do justice to these pasts by carrying them with us. Turning away is not an option. Sieg taught his own children that the important thing is to look, to take the time and really see. This book is evidence of how much he saw, inwardly and outwardly, and what he made of it. Seeing and doing go hand in hand; the allure of doing justice to what he sees seems to drive Sieg Maandag's work, and this is what it means to live on after trauma and loss.

Giving the Moment Form by the Deed

Sieg Maandag: Life and Art in the Aftermath of Bergen-Belsen is not a coffee table gallery of Sieg's art, a chronological history of his work, though that would make a great pair to what we have. Instead, this book is a weaving together of a life and life's work. It invites the reader to move back and forth with Sieg in a zigzag that performs like memories work. The book moves across time, startlingly. We see how things that seem random make sense creatively if not chronologically—how juxtapositions, a staple of art (if art has a cabinet of staples), can and do illuminate. Dawn and Karen make use of chronology, sometimes embracing, sometimes eluding it, to let us see what they are looking at when they turn toward Sieg's life and work.

This book, in Dutch and English, is Dawn and Karen's telling of Sieg's life, and this meditation is our telling of their telling. The book opens with Sieg in conversation with Roos Elkerbout, an interviewer with the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation. But what follows is not a replay of that interview nor a text "'explaining' the survivor to the audience" (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 9). Instead, the biographers keep us close in, witnessing Sieg in his creative if wounded wholeness. Sieg's life and art, told through images and quotes, offers the personal and historical context that makes this such a compelling read. These are nested enactments, layered one on top of the other. The movement is syncopated, not unlike Sieg's art.

We are thinking of this book as a long overdue artist's retrospective held in our hands. We are imagining it on the walls, with benches provided so the viewer is invited to sit down, to contemplate the work, and to take in what are (or are not) obligatory captions. These are quotes, the artist's and others, not so much about the work but what lies behind it, experiences, and what one makes of them. We shift our attention back and forth between the paintings and the text, between the canvasses and the quotes. We are interested in engaging with what we look at and read as homage, not recapitulation—as lived, not historical. This retrospective enacts what it wants us to see and appreciate about Sieg's life and work; Dawn and Karen at once draw on yet contradict a linear narrative of who Sieg became. The book is divided into periods of time, for example, "Growing Up in Amsterdam, 1937–1943" (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 46), but using pictures, photos, and text, and not obligating themselves to a tidy chronology—any more than one's life is tidy—Dawn and Karen show us who he became.

The Telling

Sieg explains,

As a child I already had an irresistible need to draw and paint. Maybe it was an unconscious denial of myself to choose other professions. My career before I began to paint was a restless one, from diamond polisher [the diamond trade had been his family's business] to clothes designer and businessman, always in the margins of creativity.

(Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 127)

He was never quite himself, not where he needed to be. How could one notice, let alone permit, desire after Bergen-Belsen? It was only after he had gone away and traveled the world where he met the love of his life and his muse that he could return home to Amsterdam and himself. As he writes, "As I got closer to finding myself and who I really was, I began to paint" (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 145). As the book makes vivid, much of Sieg's work, his paintings and his ceramics, depicts faces. Many of these are versions of himself and speak to his desire to find his face. This work spoke to both of us as it echoes the many faces of Irving Levitt, Laura's self-trained artist father (Levitt, 2003).

Early on, we read a three-page meditation included in the section "Luba Cares for the Abandoned Diamond Children in Bergen-Belsen, December 5, 1944–April 15, 1945," in which we witness Sieg recalling an eidetic memory amid the horrors of the camp—a visual memory, as if a nugget he carries with him. Here the sequence begins. Accompanied by a stark, disturbing 1983 painting titled A Sign from the Greatest (Figure 1), the caption reads:

Once I walked through that camp bouncing a ball, and I turned a corner, and there stood a barrel with the last bits of food, and men were gathering around it and elbowing each other, fighting over food. They were trying to get ahold of the scraps from the barrel. But a meter, one and a half meters away, one man, with a smile on his lips and a pan in front of him, was waiting alone to get the very last scraps in that barrel. He stood quietly waiting for his turn; he didn't participate in the fight.

(Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 97)

Then we turn the page and find an untitled and undated painting, a bouquet of intensely red, untidy poppies with dark centers against a pale-yellow background, held in a squat old, brown jar with a yellowed label whose text is long gone (Figure 2). It sits far forward, as if on edge, on a white table, blurred with gray. Karen tells us that Sieg was well aware of what was going on in the art world. It's clear from the range of his paintings that he did much experimenting, not imitating others or himself. In fact, when you look at the variety of his work, you see someone who can't seem to get enough of trying out his ideas in color, light, line, and space. We know he took his children to a Dali exhibit. The authors comment that "he often repeated Picasso's statement that 'painting is therapy'" (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 9). This painting

Figure 1.

A Sign from the Greatest 1983

suggests that he was aware of German expressionism; it brings to mind Emile Nolde's Sunflowers. While word of Nolde's Nazi leanings was well known, we don't know what Sieg knew, but we note this resonance (Dege, 2019). The caption reads, "I was chosen to see that image. I was the only one, Nobody stood next to me. I was chosen to see that image and I saw that as a gift" (p. 98).

This incongruity, the memory from Bergen-Belsen, that singular story remembered from his childhood, captioning the raucous vitality of the poppies—a gift of beauty—leaves us

Figure 2.

Untitled [Flowers], Undated

tense, like the jar at the table's edge. Karen and Dawn keep us close to Sieg as he navigates past and present.

Facing this bouquet on the opposite page is a shrouded figure, skeins of that poppy-red wrapping around—as if tying up—what looks like a standing corpse (Figure 3). This 1984 painting, To Be (Movement Series) 1984, takes us back to the darkness and fear of Bergen-Belsen (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020):

Figure 3.

To Be (Movement series) 1984

In front of our fence, across a dirt road, there was a little house, and that was the morgue. In the beginning, it filled up steadily, but eventually the corpses couldn't fit in anymore, and were stacked on the side of the house and then along the road. It was littered with corpses, so I knew what was going on. Some of the people were still half alive. People lying there were raising their hands up to us, we children, asking for food. They could no longer move.

(Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 99)

In these words and these paintings, powerfully brought together by the editors of this book, we see Sieg doing justice to the memory of what he saw. The designated one, chosen to see the image, he recognizes seeing as a gift. The pages move from the camp to the poppies and back to the camp, between that small boy and the man, an artist in Amsterdam.

Later in the collection, in a section devoted to his career as an artist, "Back in Amsterdam: The Artist at Work, 1976–1999," we see Sieg having come back to himself, no longer living on the "margins of creativity" (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 127). In this period, his looking is yearning. What is it that Sieg most wants to capture? What is it that keeps eluding him? What cannot really be pinned down once and for all? As an artist, Sieg writes, "There isn't anything else to paint but faces. I see them as a reflection of my own face. Perhaps the search for my original face. My authentic face, my face as a boy" (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 154).

But there is not just one face, there are many, and the complex play of all these renditions of all these faces offer us a semblance of the artist as a vital and living presence. The painting that accompanies these words is not a single face but a trio of figures and a dog, The People and Dog, from 1996. Facing them on the opposite page is a trickster figure, perhaps a Greek god with a crown, Homage (undated). The caption for this work returns us to Sieg's method, his commitment to seeing—really seeing—and doing, and the sacred covenant that Flack (1991) describes. Sieg writes: "It is important to be as aware as possible during daily activities that man is accountable for his actions and nonactions. The ultimate goal is to achieve total consciousness, returning to the primal source, the origin of all life" (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 155).

Like Karen and Dawn, we worked back and forth. Like them we thought about Sieg and about how they juxtaposed quotes and images in the book. We too were interested in the interplay of texts and images. We found that they gave us a sense of who Sieg was—and who they were as his curators. What was it about Sieg that we too could see as we looked at him through their kaleidoscopic turns?

PART TWO: Portrait of an Artist, a Photograph and a Painting, a Diptych

The solid presence of art demands from us significant effort, an effort anathema to popular culture. Effort of time, effort of money, effort of study, effort of humility, effort of imagination have each been packed by the artist into the art.

(Winterson, 1997, p. 16).

In the penultimate section of the book, we come across what we are calling a second diptych, a pair of images that face each other, and together, we believe, reflect powerfully on the work of the book. Sieg is back in Amsterdam, living his life as an artist between 1976 and 1999. The section opens with a painting, aptly titled Artist (Figure 4), from 1983, a portrait of the artist at work, captioned, "As I got closer to finding myself and who I really was, I began to paint" (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 145).

We again read three pages together, noticing a conversation among them. The first image (Figure 5) names the locale and subject: Amsterdam: The Artist at Work, 1976–1999, the title of this section of the book. The opening painting is Schilder Artist, a portrait of an artist painting, brush in hand. Turning the page, we see a photograph of the artist in his studio, working on an unfinished canvas. Opposite is the finished work: The Chess Game, 1979 (Figure 6). The pair, before and after, works like a diptych, the crevice between the pages like the hinge of an old altarpiece. In our imagined diptych, the photographer has not caught Sieg off guard. There is a sense of awareness in his pose, as if he held it long enough for the photographer to make the case: this is the artist most at home with himself, immersed in his art. With the photographer, we catch him "in thoughts that fly away," thinking and "living in memories" (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 146). We see two paintings: one in progress but not far along; the other is the focus, almost finished: The Chess Game, 1979, a painting we call Self-Portrait with Karen.

Figure 4.

Schilder Artist 1983

The Second Diptych

In many ways, Sieg's life was framed by a photograph; here we offer a reframing at the heart of our meditation. This time the photographer focuses on the artist working in his studio, keeping company with his unfinished painting. Following their practice, we veer from Karen and Dawn's pairing of texts and images in this diptych. We ask instead how these two images are in conversation. We do not see Sieg as "living with thoughts that fly away" or only "liv[ing] in memories" (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 146).

Figure 5.

Amsterdam: The Artist at Work, 1976–1999

Figure 6.

The Chess Game, 1979

Instead, for us, the painting suggests that there is a future. The finished painting is the other side of the diptych. And in this moment, we see how the book works, how Karen and Dawn tell Sieg's story.

The pairing of these images brings us into his studio and his process. But unlike the earlier account of that moment in Bergen-Belsen (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, pp. 97–99), this time, we see the promise of a life in art fulfilled, not defined or delimited by Bergen-Belsen.

The children ask me sometimes, "Pop, how was it in the war?" And you know what they see then? They see a living father, and that is that. The most important gift I can give my children is that I develop myself into something beautiful. Goodness, becoming good. That is what I would like to give them.

(Telegraaf, March 18, 1995; Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 166)

As we have seen, the book reads as a kind of graphic biography in pictures and words. This is another overt moment where Karen and Dawn reconstruct some semblance of how Sieg worked, the nonlinear, associative manner of his artistic practice. Sieg supplies most of the text and all of the images; the editors do their work from the margins, juxtaposing artistic works from different periods. We see the process and honor their role as curators of this textual exhibition as we home in on this particularly fertile moment in the work, in the book, and in Sieg's life.

A Closer Look: We Must Not Look Away

The photograph, Sieg in his studio, is evidence that he found his way, making room for his own creative life. It captures but one moment in that ongoing process. It does not stand in for all of what he did in that studio. This is not that iconic photograph shot by George Rodger in 1945 that left that 7-year-old boy frozen in time in Bergen-Belsen.

Unlike the correction that Karen and Dawn insist that we see by juxtaposing the two versions of that Life photograph, this pairing does something else. In the first diptych, the published version (the doctored original) faces the restored original. In the second diptych, we find a photograph paired with a painting, a painting caught in process in the photograph. Here, now, we see the unfinished work alongside the finished painting. Completion is not a reversal but rather an artistic accomplishment, addition and not subtraction. Instead of moving from the covered to the uncovered image, we have the unfinished painting in a photograph that stands alongside the completed painting.

We are struck by Sieg's relaxed posture in this photograph, his comfort and ease in the spacious intimacy of his studio, room to contemplate the canvas he is working. Looking away from the easel, he is caught in a moment of reflection, paintbrush held in his mouth: what more needs to be done? The before.

The Chess Game, the after, hinged to the right, holds out promise of a future as it honors the past. As Dawn explained, she and Karen see this painting very differently. In the book, they talk about stillness and silence, but in her presentation at The Wiener Holocaust Library, Dawn describes The Chess Game, 1979 as a way to show that the children in Bergen-Belsen played games outside and between the barracks. In fact, she commented that Sieg and the children played among the bodies. There was no way to avoid seeing them (The Wiener Holocaust Library, 2021). And here too we get a glimpse of the fluid nature of Karen and Dawn's engagement with Sieg's work. There are multiple interpretations and so we add our own.

We know that the woman in this painting is not Karen, but we think of this painting as homage to love: Sieg's relationship with Karen, his wife and his muse.

Sieg was in Afghanistan in 1974 when he met a beautiful cultured American girl named Karen Ralph. She was traveling with her friends, who were staying in the same hostel as Sieg. The group ate meals together at a nearby restaurant. The restaurant featured a giant chessboard in a large garden in the courtyard. Sieg played there almost every day. The tables were arranged around the courtyard, so Sieg often joined in conversations with Karen and her friends. Karen had captured his attention, although she didn't know it at the time. He told himself that he had found the woman with whom he wanted to spend his life.

(Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, pp. 31, 33)

Chess marks the site where Sieg first met Karen. Here is a couple playing chess, but the mood is more about play, perhaps their shared chess gambit. For a serious chess player like Sieg (and we don't hear that he played chess with Karen), the board would look different. For example, that the white piece isn't properly on its square—this would be unacceptable. As Jon Nyquist, chess player and colleague, explained to Ruth, the artist was taking considerable liberties with the game of chess. Nyquist pointed out how the off-centering of the chess piece would have called for "J'adoube," permission to realign the piece without having to put it in play. He also pointed out that, for the game to end, two kings would have to be on the board, along with a rook or queen. And what might be the two kings would have to look alike if from the same set—and they do not (Nyquist, personal communication, March 25, 2021).

Further, it's hard to tell what the pieces are (we long to see the painting itself), but if anything, it looks like the match is a draw. If he were winning, he would not be handing over the piece: tradition would have him toppling it over. The ambiguity in a painting with otherwise such precision, such clarity of line, suggests that chess signals the context of their relationship, the game a place (and excuse!) to meet, to spend time together, if at the edge of the board (recalling the jar of poppies), and to imagine a future.

Whether it is win, lose, or draw, the game is coming to an end. Behind the woman is a wide window. Looking out, we see a road that curves its way into the horizon. The line leading to the road begins with the cut of her jacket. The eye follows the path as the gray line of sight moves up her sleeve, continuing beyond and through the window into the long, winding road that implies the future.

We look back at the unfinished canvas. The wall is bare. What did he think it needed? In the finished canvas we see a small framed piece. We long to see it up close. It has the look of something almost kitsch-like, a Dutch proverb painted on a tray? What does it add? What does it signify? It serves to make the interior space more homelike, a gesture toward cozy in an otherwise austere interior. There is no softness—not in the curtains, not in their clothes.

Here we differ in our reading of the painting from both Dawn and Karen. They seem to pick up on the sober nature of the interior depicted, as they cite Sieg saying, "Be still, absolutely still. Ask nothing. Totally nothing. Keep the silence. I do that too" (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 147). It seems that their reading focuses on the woman and not on the artist. He is beseeching, moving, acting, and she is still as he figures out the next move. His thoughts and hers, the two facing pages, come together.

Conclusion

We cannot look away, those of us inhabiting the fullness of our lives. And yet, for those who have suffered, who have experienced trauma, there is life after, and the possibility of art and beauty but it is always accompanied by those other memories (see Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, pp. 97–99). That original face cannot be touched or reconstructed. It is always elusive. As Sieg himself explains, "In penetrating the ugliness of dark colors, an unseen beauty emerges. Painting acts as a support for the climb upward" (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 156).

Sieg made a path forward. He painted his way out. He had to go away before he could return home to Amsterdam and his art. And he could not do it alone.

The artist begins to study the art of subtraction.

Turns out the real reason for growing upwas to learn what to do with suffering.Not being surprised was the answer.What else do you want to know?

(Hoagland, 2010, p. 80)

Postscript: "Take a Moment"

Returning to the George Rodger Photo

For Sieg Maandag, the few details of those desecrated bodies—bodies so haunting, what could possibly have made them more horrific?—that disappeared in the Life version of that iconic Bergen-Belsen photo could never be retouched (Bakker, 2020). For him it was not about retouching the past, now so easily photoshopped; it was about making something of it, reclaiming his life through his art and his loves: "we too make and remake ourselves over time, figuring out again and again what we need to hold on to more or less tightly, and what we can let go. This is how we continue to inhabit our afterlives" (Levitt, 2020, p. 136). And for Sieg, this meant taking a moment. He would instruct his children: "Look. Really look. Tell me. What do you see?" (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 37).

Evidence of Sieg Maandag's remaking of his life after are evident in his art. But along the way, he has had companionship in those re-makings. This legacy of love and friendship is borne out in Sieg Maandag: Life and Art in the Aftermath of Bergen-Belsen; it too is a canvas of re-makings, this time in Dawn and Karen's hands.