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Art In Auschwitz 1940-1945 Exhibition Opens in Berlin

Can “Holocaust art,” like works by Auschwitz prisoners for instance, be shown outside the camp in a typical art gallery? Can it be understood outside the Auschwitz context?

Today, it is hard for many people to grasp the fact that imposing works of art were created in Auschwitz. It was a bold undertaking for the Centrum Judaicum to show the Art in Auschwitz 1940-1945 exhibition in Germany for the first time. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder opened the show in the exhibition rooms of the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse in Berlin on May 23, 2005.

The illustrated letters, idyllic landscapes, hunting scenes, nudes, harvest scenes, illustrations of the expansion of the camp and the industrial plants and, above all the portraits—in oil, watercolor, or pencil—created by Auschwitz prisoners, [mostly] Polish artists, art students, and amateurs, forfeit none of their impact at the Berlin venue. Visitors need only remember the circumstances under which these often joyous or romantic—but also shocking—images of Auschwitz life came into existence. They are the prisoners’ desperate attempt to salvage even a scrap of their dignity.

The works on show in Berlin, loaned by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and slated to be shown later in Osnabrueck and Łódź, are memorable proofs of human cruelty on an unprecedented scale. “Auschwitz is a symbol of the mass slaughter of the European Jews,” as the exhibit organizers state, but it also “aesthetically self-sufficient works of art.” In the coming years and decades, these works will bear witness to Auschwitz when there are no longer any eyewitnesses of those events.

The works on display arose legally, covertly, or semi-legally. Thus, for example, the notorious camp physician Josef Mengele ordered that portraits of Gypsy prisoners be painted for his medical experiments. Other SS men ordered imprisoned artists to paint cheerful pictures, although camp commandant Rudolf Hoess banned such “second-rate, kitschy works” because he feared they would weaken the prisoners’ productive capacity. “My father had to paint SS men with their families and dogs, because that represented a chance for him to survive,” said the daughter of one of the former prisoners while visiting the Berlin exhibition.

Aside from portraits and other works of art, such as small sculptures and rings, made on official commission for the camp museum or semi-officially on orders from SS men, there are many other works created covertly. These include portraits, self-portraits, and scenes illustrating prisoners being beaten savagely or overseers brandishing their clubs. The works of art were created in order to remember, and above all, to survive. As one surviving prisoner said: “You didn’t do it for the sake of art. You did it to avoid going nuts.”

The Art in Auschwitz 1940-1945 exhibition is the result of cooperation between the Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin - Centrum Judaicum and MD Berlin with the support of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim.

The exhibition of 140 works will be shown

• at the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin from May 25 to August 14, 2005
• at the Museum of the History of Culture in Osnabrueck from September 4 to October 16, 2005
• at the Museum of the Independence Tradition in Łódź from November 2005 to July 2006.

There is a catalogue almost 400 pages long.

The Art in Auschwitz 1940-1945 Exhibition

Art Created in Auschwitz

The works of art from the collections of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum are proofs of the way in which the SS reduced prisoners to the role of objects, and did so on a large scale. Beyond that, and above all, these works manifest the fundamental values of art: they are proof that the prisoners who created this art were standing up against dehumanization, and that art had vital significance for their survival. These pictures bear direct testimony to the dissonance between art and the reality of Auschwitz, and also show the individual emotions of the prisoners. Nevertheless, these pictures are also works of art in their own right, full of their own terrifying beauty.

The Aims of the Exhibition

The exhibition has been put together exclusively within the context of art history, without any formal or factual limitations to the presentation of the artists and their work. It acknowledges the artistic independence of the work. Many questions could be asked about the exhibition and the accompanying studies—for instance, about the “occasional” nature or intended audience of the works. We cannot offer any answers to these questions. On the other hand, we would like this exhibition to contribute to the works on show being included within the context of the academic development of art in the 1930s and 1940s, and to their finding their place within the history of art ( . . .).

Thematic Divisions of the Exhibition

[...] Our exhibition is divided into three parts:

• Prisoners
• Art As Escape
• Faces

The individual parts of the exhibition are constructed as monographs. The works of a given artist in the thematic groups are not divided on merit, but presented as a single bloc.

Part 1 - Prisoners

The works shown in the first part of the exhibition reflect the reality of Auschwitz: on the one hand, there are works executed on SS commission to serve as decoration in the offices known as the Lagerbauleitung; on the other hand, there are works—illegal art, resistance art—intended to record the brutal reality of Auschwitz for people on the outside and for future generations. The atrocities committed in Auschwitz and the stories recounted in these pictures are more powerful than the pictures themselves. Art pales in the face of the reality that it conveys. In the Prisoners section, neither man in Auschwitz, nor art, is free. Nevertheless, neither the works commissioned by the SS nor those executed illegally in the camp are mere historical sources. The predominant nature of the pictures shown here may indeed be one of witness, just as in the case of other works originating in the death camps, ghettos, and hiding places, in which the artists made an effort to mimic reality. Nevertheless, an artistic conception can often be discerned in the pictures presenting the reality of the time. These pictures suggest authenticity. They contain the vision of the artist from Auschwitz, and reveal themselves to the beholder as a real part of the awfulness of that place. Only when viewed from today’s perspective do they become what they should be: an attempt at representing the truth.

Part 2 - Art As Escape

In the various phases of the development of the concept of the exhibition, the name of part 2 was changed from “Internal Asylum” to “Art as Escape.” The works presented here represent a reality that did not exist in Auschwitz. For the artists and the percipients, these objects contained within themselves the possibility of spiritual escape. In art, it was possible to imagine the world outside the barbed-wire fence. The realization within a picture of the dream of freedom and a normal life made it possible for a prisoner to draw a tiny bit closer to that life outside. Even if today these pictures strike us as something on the order of curiosities, the motifs of their creation are nevertheless highly human. The artists could create the illusion of normality and it is a matter of indifference whether they created these objects in secret exclusively for their own use, or, perhaps, in hope of some sort of tangible reward—if they attempted to come up with a treacly theme to match the tastes of some SS functionary. Or they may have created these works on SS commission, as decoration. These works are characterized by the greatest distance from the place in which they came into being.

Part 3 - Faces

The third part of the exhibition presents portraits. From the artistic point of view, this is the most expressive part of the exhibition, and it makes the most powerful impression. The portraits were most often executed in the oppressively overcrowded barracks, in which there was no place for privacy. Nor was there any distance between artist and subject. Both of them found themselves in that same life-threatening situation; both of them put their lives at risk during the sitting. These conditions led to works of special intensity, which are more than mere likenesses. They are a self-sufficient part of a reality in which the people seem to be directly “present.” These portraits go more than halfway to meet the beholder. The particular way in which the portraits are mounted at the exhibition forces the beholder to draw nearer in order to be able to appreciate their shocking directness (. . . ).

Auschwitz Art Shown Outside the Museum

Previously, Auschwitz art had been shown in Germany only twice. From August 1979 to June 1980 the Survive and Resist: Drawings by Auschwitz Concentration Camp Prisoners 1940-1946 (Überleben und Widerstehen. Zeichnungen von Häftlingen des Konzentrationslagers Auschwitz 1940-1946) exhibition concentrated on pictures illustrating everyday brutality in the camp. In October 1989, there was an exhibition titled The Art of Resistance: Sketched in Auschwitz (Kunst zum Uberleben. Gezeichnet in Auschwitz), which was, above all, about the misuse of medicine in Auschwitz.

Three years ago, the Błock Museum in Chicago presented part of the collections of the Auschwiz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim in its The Last Expression: Art and Auschwitz exhibition together with items from the art collections of Beit Lohamei Haghetaot (The Ghetto Fighters’ House) in Israel and the Yad Vashem Memorial Institute in Jerusalem. The main purpose of the exhibition was to present the artists’ “last words”—presenting not so much the work of art itself, as the history connected with it.

(from Jürgen Kaumkötter’s article “Wąska ścieżka” (The Narrow Passage) in the exhibition catalogue. Abridged by jarmen)