Auschwitz was a killing center. Auschwitz was a cultural center. Between 1939 and 1945, hundreds of thousands of prisoners were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. And during the same time and at the same places, prisoners produced thousands of works of art. Gas chambers, incinerators, barracks, and barbed wire defined the Auschwitz landscape. But so did a museum, a printing press, and painting studios. How could a place designed specifically for the production of death have resulted in the production of art?
It’s exactly that question, says David Mickenberg, director of the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College and curator of the exhibition "The Last Expression: Art and Auschwitz," that’s kept art historians from approaching art produced in concentration camps. "One of the reasons," says Mickenberg, "that art historians had a fear of working with this material was a misconception that the very notion of artistic production in a concentration camp would run counter to the horror or the perception of horror." With "The Last Expression," which opens this Tuesday at the Davis Museum, Mickenberg hopes to demonstrate "the multifaceted role that art plays during times of duress."
In 220 works of art created by prisoners of Auschwitz, one expects to see images of grim scenes, sunken cheeks, and sad eyes. And "The Last Expression" certainly has its share. Karel Fleischmann’s "At the Showers," for example, depicts a group of grotesque figures, naked flesh loose and quivering, ribs and knees poking through skin at vicious angles. And in Waldemar Nowakowski’s "Unsuccessful Escape of a Czech," two gleeful guards look on as another holds the collar of a slumped figure. Blood drips from the prisoner’s head and the guard wears an expression of terrifying disgust, as though he’s carrying out a bag of garbage.
"Art at the camps," says Mickenberg, "was a means of documentation, a means of catharsis, a means of solidifying your identity and your value as a human being in an environment specifically designed to deny you that." The role art played for the victims was manifold, but that comes as no surprise.
What proves unexpected in "The Last Expression" is the way Mickenberg presents the role art played, not only for the prisoners, but for the perpetrators. "From the perpetrator’s standpoint, from a basic standpoint of humanity," suggests Mickenberg, "there were things that [art] did that relieved the stress of the everyday." Guards commissioned prisoners to produce works of art to place in the troops’ barracks. Art made "the environment more habitable for the SS troops," says Mickenberg. Jan Komski’s "Sunflowers" is a painting you might see in a dentist’s office: a bunch of sunflowers raise their faces to a brilliant sky. And Antoni Suchanek’s "Seascape" offers an equally idyllic image: a yellow sailboat leans into the breeze on a blue-green sea.
"The Last Expression" is as much about context as it is about art, as much about function as it is about form. In the Holocaust and historically, says Mickenberg, "the act of doing art relates to the maintenance of the basic act of being a human being."
"The Last Expression: Art and Auschwitz" opens January 7 and runs through February 14 at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center. That’s at 106 Central Street, Wellesley. Call (781) 283-2051, or visit http://lastexpression.northwestern.edu
