(The brilliance, vision, and virtuosity that Bak brings to...)
The brilliance, vision, and virtuosity that Bak brings to his painting are equally in evidence in his writing. This deeply touching work is an important contribution to Holocaust literature and art history.
(The journey home has been a serious motif in literature s...)
The journey home has been a serious motif in literature since ancient times, and Samuel Bak's most recent series of paintings on this theme, Return to Vilna, provides us with two paradoxical truths. Samuel Bak has escaped the nightmare of history that consumed his family and the rest of Vilna Jewry during World War II - and he has not. His work invites us to share his twin legacy, and to acknowledge its parallels - different in origin and extent, but equally brutal - in the place names we have grown so familiar with from the register of subsequent atrocities: Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur and many others.
Samuel Bak is an American painter and writer who survived the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel in 1948. Since 1993, he has lived in the United States.
Depicting images of war and contemporary culture, Bak is known as a conceptual artist with elements of post-modernism. A collection of Samuel Bak's works are on permanent display at Pucker Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts.
Background
Ethnicity:
Samuel Bak describes his family as secular, but proud of their Jewish identity.
Samuel Bak was born on August 12, 1933 in Vilnius, Lithuania (formerly Wilno, Poland). The son of Jonas Bak and Mitzia Bak.
His early childhood is marked by Soviet, then Nazi, occupation of his hometown. Bak and his family were forced to move into the Vilna ghetto. He began painting while still a child and, prompted by the well-known Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, held his first exhibition inside the ghetto in 1942 at the age of nine. From the ghetto the family was sent to a labour camp on the outskirts of the city. Bak's father managed to save his son by dropping him in a sack out of a ground floor window of the warehouse where he was working; he was met by a maid and brought to the house where his mother was hiding.
By the end of the war, Samuel and his mother were the only members of his extensive family to survive. His father was shot by the Germans in July 1944, a few days before Soviet troops liberated the city. His four grandparents had earlier been executed at the killing site outside Vilna called Ponary.
Just after Soviet liberation in 1944, he and his mother were allowed to flee Vilna for Lodz, Poland. They soon left Poland and travelled into the American occupied zone of Germany. From 1945 to 1948, Samuel and his mother lived in Displaced Persons camps in Germany.
Education
At the end of World War II, Samuel Bak fled with his mother to the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp in Germany. There he painted a self-portrait shortly before repudiating his Bar Mitzvah ceremony. Bak enrolled in painting lessons at the Blocherer School in Munich during this period and painted "A Mother and Son" in 1947.
In 1948, Bak and his mother immigrated to Israel. In 1952, he studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces, he continued his studies in Paris from 1956 to 1959 at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts.
Career
Samuel Bak moved to Rome in 1959 where his first exhibition of abstract paintings was met with considerable success. While in Rome, he was invited to exhibit at the "Carnegie International" in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, followed by solo exhibitions at the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Museums in 1963. He lived in Rome until 1966, then returned to Israel in 1966-1974, and lived for a time in New York City between 1974 and 1977. There followed further years in Israel from 1977 to 1980 and Paris from 1980 to 1984, then a long stay in Switzerland from 1984 to 1993. In 1993, he settled outside Boston, in Weston, Massachusetts and became an American citizen.
Samuel Bak is a conceptual artist with elements of post-modernism as he employs different styles and visual vernaculars, that is surrealism, analytical cubism, pop art and quotations from the old masters. Bak never paints direct scenes of mass death. Instead, he employs allegory, metaphor and certain artistic devices such as substitution: toys instead of the murdered children who played with them, books, instead of the people who read them. The examples of such works are "A Life Experience", "A Pear in the Landscape" and "Pardes Revisited".
Bak's paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries and hang in public collections in England, the United States, Israel, Germany, and Switzerland. Many later works may be viewed at the Pucker Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts.
In 2001, Bak returned to Vilnius for the first time and has since visited his hometown several times. The same year he published a detailed autobiography "Painted in Words: A Memoir".
He currently lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts.
Samuel Bak is known as an American contemporary painter who has had numerous exhibitions in major museums, galleries, and universities throughout Europe, Israel, and the United States including retrospectives at Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, and the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town. Besides, his works have been exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum, the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, and the Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem.
Bak has been the subject of numerous articles, scholarly works, and books, most notably a 400-page monograph entitled "Between Worlds".
He has also been the subject of two documentary films and was the recipient of the 2002 German Herkomer Cultural Prize.
Samuel Bak has also received honorary doctorate degrees from the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire, Seton Hill University in Greenburg, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Massachusetts.
(The brilliance, vision, and virtuosity that Bak brings to...)
painting
Eternal Return
Stone Age
Time has Come to a Stop
Mauve Passage
Surrealist Landscape
A Pear in the Landscape
King
Targets Revisited
The Family
A Life Experience
Memorabilia II
Pardes Revisited
Houses in an Imaginary Landscape
Transcribed
Jewish Landscape
Warrior
Temple of Learning
Views
Quotations:
"I am a perfect wandering Jew, who always carries with him his roots, travels always with books that break his back, and has all those languages, and none of them perfectly well. Impossible!"
"This is what made me who I am. This is why I never really think what am I going to paint now. My idea is to let out this thing - which is the self - that wells up in me. Because I had those parents, I had those grandparents, I had that war.…This is one of the reasons why I thought that it was very important to write this book because it gives, I think, the best key to what I am trying to paint."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Irene Tayler and Alicia Craig Faxon: "Bak's life has inevitably influenced his choice of images and themes. The particulars of Vilna and the Holocaust, of surviving and being a wandering Jew, are part of his individual biography; but all are also aspects of our shared human condition. Bak has always sought to find the universal in the specific. His ongoing dialogues with the long-dead members of his family, with his early teachers, with the great masters of all epochs, with contemporary culture, and with the Bible and the diverse host of Jewish traditions - all come from his desire to represent the universality of loss and the endurance of man's hope for a tikkun."
Avrom Sutzkever: "The painter Samuel Bak is baked into my heart."
Interests
Artists
Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo
Connections
Samuel Bak and his wife Josée have spent the last 16 years in Weston, near Boston, Massachusetts - the longest either of them has been in one place.
