The Jewish Museum is hosting a focused exhibition, “Theaters of Memory: Art and the Holocaust,” through February 1. This exhibition offers a selection of works including a full-scale study of George Segal’s sculpture “The Holocaust,” 1982, which won a competition for an official Holocaust memorial in San Francisco, where the bronze version is in Lincoln Park.
Exhibited with Segal’s monument are a select group of works drawn from the museum’s collection †painting, sculpture and video †by Eleanor Antin, Tadeusz Kantor, Christian Boltanski, Anselm Kiefer, Frederic Matys Thursz and Fabio Mauri. Together with the loan of a recent video installation, Everything I Need by Matthew Buckingham, the exhibition presents key contemporary artistic responses to the tragic history of World War II and the Holocaust.
Making art about the Holocaust has long been considered problematic. The first three decades after World War II witnessed only rare and usually modest artistic attempts. But the 1978 appearance in the United States of the television miniseries Holocaust catapulted the subject into public consciousness. Taken together, the art on display in “Theaters of Memory” grapples with the histories surrounding World War II: the atrocities of genocide and their attendant mass destruction and moral devastation.
The works in the exhibition, made between 1975 and 2007, often take highly theatrical approaches toward holocaust histories. In “The Holocaust,” Segal transformed a photograph of corpses in a concentration camp into a three-dimensional monument that resembles a stage set. Matthew Buckingham’s two-screen projection is a cinematic backdrop for the personal recollections of a refugee from Nazi Germany. Through their theatrical nature and performance aesthetics, these works engage historical tragedy with dramatic immediacy and visceral impact.
The art of Fabio Mauri (b 1926) fuses minimalist aesthetics with theatrical gesture. Mauri’s “Ebrea” was created to remind Italians of their fascist past, a history he felt was quickly being forgotten; it was performed at the 1993 Venice Biennale.
Christian Boltanski (b 1944) enlarges and manipulates found photographs to grainy, dramatic effect, creating distance between the new images and the original photographic documents of anonymous sitters.
Tadeusz Kantor (1915‱990) was primarily a theatrical impresario, and his sculpture is related to his theatrical work. Born in Wielopole in eastern Poland, a town with a sizable Jewish community, Kantor kept his Jewish roots purposefully ambiguous.
The paintings of Anselm Kiefer (b 1945) often employ grand gestures of historical and mythic subjects in combination with a mixture of tactile materials and opulently worked surfaces.
“Ashes and Dust,” 1986‸9, is part of Frederic Matys Thursz’s series, “Elegia Judaica,” and serves as a memorial to his uncle Jakob Gutglas, who died in Dachau, and to other victims. Despite its monochromatic nature, the painting features the artist’s complex palette and his method of glazing, scraping and sometimes burning his medium.
The exhibition has been organized by Norman L. Kleeblatt, Susan and Elihu Rose chief curator at The Jewish Museum.
The Jewish Museum is at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street. For more information, www.thejewishmuseum.org or 212-423-3200.
