Art and the Holocaust

Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology by Lawrence L. Langer In "Art from the Ashes," Lawrence L. Langer shows how, over the last fifty years, artists and writers have tried to come to grips with this monumental horror. "Art from the Ashes" provides a far-reaching collection of art, drama, poetry, and prose about the Holocaust ever presented in a single volume. Through the works of men and women, Jews and non-Jews, figures famous and unknown, those who were there and those separated from the ordeal by time and space, this anthology offers a vision of the human reality of the catastrophe.

Art of the Holocaust by Janet Blatter and Sybil Milton The horrors of the Holocaust and the Jews' indomitable struggle to survive is reflected in art work created in or depicting ghettos and transit, POW, and concentration camps.

Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts by Ziva Amighai-Maisels This work attempts to define the extent to which the Holocaust, as a major historical event, influenced Western art as a whole. The author's study shows how different groups of artists set out to answer the question How does one deal with the Holocaust in art? Among the many artists discussed and illustrated are Picasso, Chagall, Grosz, Kiefer, Matta, Steinhardt, Tumarkin, Rothko, Fautrier, Grundig, Beckmann and Kitaj.

Holocaust Representation:Art Within the Limits of History and Ethics by Berel Lang Since Theodor Adorno's attack on the writing of poetry "after Auschwitz," artists and theorists have faced the problem of reconciling the moral enormity of the Nazi genocide with the artist's search for creative freedom. In Holocaust Representation, Berel Lang addresses the relation between ethics and art in the context of contemporary discussions of the Holocaust. Are certain aesthetic means or genres "out of bounds" for the Holocaust? To what extent should artists be constrained by the "actuality" of history--and is the Holocaust unique in raising these problems of representation? The dynamics between artistic form and content generally hold even more intensely, Lang argues, when art's subject has the moral weight of an event like the Holocaust. As authors reach beyond the standard conventions for more adequate means of representation, Holocaust writings frequently display a blurring of genres. The same impulse manifests itself in repeated claims of historical as well as artistic authenticity. Informing Lang's discussion are the recent conflicts about the truth-status of Benjamin Wilkomirski's "memoir" Fragments and the comic fantasy of Roberto Benigni's film Life Is Beautiful. Lang views Holocaust representation as limited by a combination of ethical and historical constraints. As art that violates such constraints often lapses into sentimentality or melodrama, cliché or kitsch, this becomes all the more objectionable when its subject is moral enormity. At an extreme, all Holocaust representation must face the test of whether its referent would not be more authentically expressed by silence--that is, by the absence of representation.

The Last Expression: Art and Auschwitz by David Mickenberg (Editor); Corinne Granof (Editor); Peter Hayes (Editor) The catalog includes reproductions of some 300 artworks; each tells a piece of an incredible history. Each remnant of these personal journeys and individual travails contributes to our understanding of the victims of the Holocaust, their experiences, the nature and function of the camps, the strategies of the perpetrators, as well as the will and need to create art.

Legacies of Silence: The Visual Arts and Holocaust Memory by Glenn Sujo This book, which accompanied an exhibition at the Barbican Gallery, London, examines the contribution of artist-witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust to post-war culture, music, literature, theatre and the visual arts. A selection of the graphic works produced in internment, in ghettos, transit and concentration camps between 1939 and 1945 makes up the exhibition's core. The majority of these come from collections in Eastern Europe and Israel.

The Living Witness: Art in the Concentration Camps and Ghettos by Mary S. Costanza Gathers drawings and sculptures by those in the Jewish ghettos and Nazi concentration camps and includes interviews with surviving artists.

The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture by Samantha Baskind On the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto staged a now legendary revolt against their Nazi oppressors. Since that day, the deprivation and despair of life in the ghetto and the dramatic uprising of its inhabitants have captured the American cultural imagination. "The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture" looks at how this place and its story have been remembered in fine art, film, television, radio, theater, fiction, poetry, and comics. Samantha Baskind explores seventy years' worth of artistic representations of the ghetto and revolt to understand why they became and remain touchstones in the American mind. Her study includes iconic works such as Leon Uris's best-selling novel Mila 18, Roman Polanski's Academy Award-winning film The Pianist, and Rod Serling's teleplay In the Presence of Mine Enemies, as well as accounts in the American Jewish Yearbook and the New York Times, the art of Samuel Bak and Arthur Szyk, and the poetry of Yala Korwin and Charles Reznikoff.