EARLY ISRAELI AND AMERICAN ARTISTS:
RE-VISIONING THE HOLOCAUST.
Talk by Ori Z Soltes, Georgetown University, Washington DC

In honor of Yom HaShoah, this talk by Georgetown University professor Ori Z Soltes focuses on three Israeli and three American familiar and unfamiliar artists working in very diverse styles and not typically thought of as focusing on the Holocaust. Each of them, however, has offered powerful reflections on the defining catastrophe of the twentieth century.

Barnett Newman, the foremost verbal spokesman for the chromatic side of the abstract expressionist movement redefining American painting in the early 1950s, offers an unexpectedly intense reflection on the question of theodicy. Mordecai Ardon, in the process of assuming leadership of the Bezalel school in Jerusalem at around the same time, balances between abstraction and figuration in depicting the Nazi-engendered chaos. Yigal Tumarkin’s sculpture turns Holocaust chaos into upside-down order and Mauricio Lasansky’s drawings turn stridently to Nazi malfeasance to ask how evil can be envisioned. Micha Ullman’s installation addresses the void after the aftermath of Nazi destruction—and Geoffrey Laurence questions how we can and must shape the post-Holocaust future.

Each of these artists contributes to the endlessly complex dialogue—between Jews and Christians, humans and humans, and humans and God—that is the ongoing legacy of the Holocaust.

Image above: Micha Ullman, The Empty Library, 1995. Monument to the May 10, 1933 book burning, visible below the pavement of Bebelplatz in Berlin (Germany)

Micha Ullman’s The Empty Library (1995) is a public memorial dedicated to the remembrance of the Nazi book burnings that took place in the Bebelplatz in Berlin, Germany on May 10, 1933. The memorial consists of a 530 x 706 x 706 cm (209 × 278 × 278 in.) subterranean room lined with empty white bookshelves, beneath a glass plate in the cobblestones of the plaza. In this location, students of the National Socialist Student Union and many professors of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität burnt over 20,000 books from many, mainly Jewish, communist, liberal and social-critical authors, under the musical accompaniment of SA- and SS-Kapellen, and before a large audience.