Confronting the Holocaust in Midcentury American Art. Presentation by Jennifer McComas, Bloomington (Indiana)
November 12, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
| FreeThe Holocaust’s profound impact on midcentury American art has been underrecognized and understudied. Jennifer McComas, curator of the current exhibition Remembrance and Renewal: American Artists and the Holocaust, 1940-1970 at Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art and primary author of the accompanying catalogue, explores the ways that American artists—American-born, immigrants, refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, and Holocaust survivors—confronted the Holocaust in their work during the war and in the decades just after.
Image above: Anna Walinska (American, born England, 1906-1997), Survivors – Exodus, 1958. Oil on canvas, 60 x 84 in. (152.4 x 213.4 cm). Gift of Rosina Rubin, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, 2023.29. © Atelier Anna Walinska. Photo: Shanti Knight.
If you are interested but can’t attend the event, please register anyways and you will receive the link to the recording.
Participating in the event enables you to ask questions and be part of the discussion following the talk.
Abraham Rattner (American, 1893-1978), Place of Darkness, 1943. Oil on canvas, 38 5/8 x 58 1/1 in. (98.1 x 148.6 cm). Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Henry R. Hope, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, 58.42. © Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, St. Petersburg College, Tarpon Springs, Florida. Photo: Shanti Knight.
Ruth Weisberg (American, born 1942), Journey I, from The Shtetl: A Journey and a Memorial, 1971. Aquatint and etching in black on white wove paper, sheet: 15 5/8 x 18 in. (39.7 x 45.7 cm). Edition 7 of 55. Museum purchase with funds from Paula W. Sunderman, PhD, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, 2024.250.6. Photo: Courtesy Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Pasadena, California
, 1971. Aquatint and etching in black on white wove paper, sheet: 15 5/8 x 18 in. (39.7 x 45.7 cm). Edition 7 of 55. Museum purchase with funds from Paula W. Sunderman, PhD, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, 2024.250.6. Photo: Courtesy Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Pasadena, California
In this talk, McComas will describe how midcentury artists—employing a wide range of aesthetic and stylistic approaches—often alluded to the atrocities indirectly, through symbolism, abstraction, references to Jewish texts and ideas, or simply through titles. Some made private work not meant for sale or exhibition, while others proposed designs for publicly sited Holocaust memorials. Some memorialized family members who had fallen victim to the Nazis, while others grappled with how to visualize more abstract concepts: evil, memory, or renewal. Her talk will provide new insight into modernist art history and Jewish American history.
Jennifer McComas is Curator of European and American Art at the Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, and is also an affiliated faculty member with the university’s Jewish Studies Program. She established and manages the museum’s World War II-Era Provenance Research Project and is now working on projects exploring experience and identity in the twentieth century. Dr. McComas has lectured widely and contributed to a range of academic publications. Her research has received support from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
This event is part of the online series “Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression.”
Installation view, Remembrance and Renewal: American Artists and the Holocaust, 1940-1970, Eskenazi Museum of Art, fall 2025. Photo: Shanti Knight.
Installation view, Remembrance and Renewal: American Artists and the Holocaust, 1940-1970, Eskenazi Museum of Art, fall 2025. Photo: Shanti Knight.
The exhibition Remembrance and Renewal: American Artists and the Holocaust, 1940-1970 is on view at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, until December 14, 2025.
Remembrance and Renewal is the first exhibition to examine the impact of the Holocaust on the development of midcentury American art. It brings together 74 works of art from collections nationwide, featuring a wide range of aesthetic approaches by artists both canonical and little known.
An accompanying catalogue was published by Yale University Press.
