Helen and Sol Krawitz Holocaust Memorial Education Center

Until recently, art produced during the Holocaust has been viewed as a historical and aesthetic curiosity, rather than as a central element in understanding the history of those persecuted by the Nazis. Even today, we are still disconcerted that conditions that barely supported life could result in the creation of works of high aesthetic quality and beauty. The relationship between a flourishing clandestine culture (art, music, theater, and literature) and the brutality of the milieu in which it was produced, has led to two general misconceptions: (1) a pragmatic fear that art could be used as an alibi minimizing the horrors; and (2) a simplistic and vague identification of works of art with so-called “spiritual resistance”. The relationship between art and atrocity, although not yet fully understood, influences our perception of World War II just as at the time it enabled the artists to retain their individuality under conditions of extreme duress. Thus, M. Koscielniak, a Polish inmate artist in Auschwitz, stated: “The desire and aim of the SS was to create a prisoner who submitted to the continuing terror of the camp without thought, without initiative, following every order. We quickly escaped this through jokes, songs, poems, irony, and caricature”[1].

Art of the Holocaust does not refer to a single school, generation, or national style of art. It includes art produced by professionals in certain settings between 1933 and 1945: in concentration camps, ghettos, transit and labor camps, prisons, resistance, and in hiding places throughout Nazi occupied Europe from the Pyrenées to the Urals. The artist and victim were one and the same person; unlike Goya, Daumier, Grosz, or Picasso, the artists trapped in the Holocaust were not simply witnesses or social critics. Artists could not work openly, nor could they exhibit in galleries or museums. The victim artists were their own chroniclers, historians, dealers, archivists, and consumers. They had to improvise materials for clandestine work by filching canvas and color from labor assignments that provided access to paper in SS offices, kitchens, or on the black market that existed in every camp and ghetto. Charcoal, rust, watered ink, food, and vegetable dyes often provided color and line. Drawings were made on the backs of SS circulars, reports and medical forms; on wrapping paper and tissue paper, and even on the perforated blank margins of postage stamps. Drawings were also completed on recycled paper pockmarked with SS bullet holes from target practice. [2,3]

Art survived not only because of conscious planning but also by fortunate accident. A corpus of approximately 30,000 drawings, sketches, oils, watercolors, and sculptures (about 14 percent of the total number of works created) still existed in 1945. While most artists are judged by a selection carefully culled from the finished products of their creative labors, the artists of the Holocaust are frequently judged on preliminary sketches and studies for works that were never completed. Sometimes the works were unsigned and the artist unknown. Surviving art can be divided into five broad categories. The largest single group (nearly 25 percent of the total) were portraits. This is not surprising, since diaries and documents attest to the fact that this was the most common genre. Portraits had a magical meaning in this setting (as also in many native and folk art forms). They gave the subject a sense of permanent presence among the living, extremely important when temporal physical presence was so fragile and tenuous. Occasionally, portraits would also be commissioned by the Nazis as gifts to superiors or their own families, and also for the documentation of medical experiments. For example, Mengele commissioned a Czech Jewish artist, Dinah Gottlievoba, to do portraits of gypsy prisoners as illustrations for a book he had hoped to publish about his medical experiments in Auschwitz.[4] Leo Haas, Halina Olomucki, and Arnold Daghani also reported having received orders to do portraits of their Nazi tormentors, often from photographs of Nazi relatives missing in action. If the resulting work was acceptable, it often helped secure more lenient work assignments or better rations.[5]

After the German Communist artist Karl Schwesig was arrested in July 1933, he was initially beaten and dumped in the basement of the Düsseldorf restaurant Schlegelkeller, literally translated as “cellar of blows”. After being remanded into police custody, he was sentenced to 16 months in jail. In his subsequent autobiographical cycle about his experiences, published in 1935-36, Schwesig noted that “all my fellow inmates received portraits as presents for their wives, who took the sketches, when they brought clean linen and food on visiting days”.[6]

Artists also conveyed their own plight through self-portraiture. During his internment in St. Cyprien, and throughout his subsequent three and one-half years in hiding in Brussels, the German Jewish artist Felix Nussbaum completed numerous self-portraits that conveyed his terror and isolation. Two works from 1943 are especially relevant for showing the role of portraiture in resisting depersonalization. One self-portrait showed Nussbaum with yellow star and Belgian Jewish identity card containing his photograph, although in reality he never registered and never wore a yellow star. These symbols of oppression and segregation showed Nussbaum’s total identification with the fate of his Jewish coreligionists. The second selfportrait showed an unclothed Nussbaum at his easel; in the foreground are four paint flasks. Three are labeled “humor, nostalgia, and suffering”; the fourth is marked poison.[7] Unlike the first self-portrait, Nussbaum wears neither a shabby coat nor a Jewish star; he presents himself in his essence: an artist. The depiction of one’s own or another person’s likeness, without abstraction of symbolization, was a cohesive metaphor for the value of individual life juxtaposed to be depersonalized mass terror of Nazi-occupied Europe. All art functioned as a bond and common language, and portraits, in particular, created a means of communicationand a sense of community among the victims as well as a language of visual communication and a means of understanding for posterity.

The second category of Holocaust art consists of drawings of inanimate objects, including landscapes showing the bucolic country-side outside Theresienstadt or the snowcapped Pyrenées mountains behind Gurs. Landscapes tended to reinforce the artists’ memories and strengthened connections to a world outside the concentration camp universe. Thus, Karl Schwesig wrote in his memoirs of the southern French transit camps: “All pain and suffering could have been forgotten in the southern French landscape of vineyards and mountains, had I brought watercolors, pencils, and paper”.[8] Among the drawings containing inanimate objects are numerous still lives produced in ghettos and in hiding, showing vacant attics crammed with abandoned property and windows overlooking courtyards and streets where raids and deportations were taking place. There were also architectural sketches showing the similar physical layout of virtually every camp, always surrounded by barbed wire, watch towers, and closed gates. These works formed nearly 20 percent of the surviving art.[9]

The third type of art was evidentiary art. Thus Karl Schwesig’s miniatures show the daily life of internees in Gurs and Noé and sketches by the Austrian artist Kurt Conrad Loew showed the meticulous weighing of portions of bread in St. Cyprien. Furthermore, Felix Nussbaum drew the ramshackle hut that served as the synagogue in St. Cyprien during 1940. Other drawings portrayed conditions and scenes in camps about whose history we know very little, as for example, Compiègne in occupied northern France, Fossoli in northern Italy, and Falkensee, a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen in Germany. Evidentiary art ranged from generic pictures depicting camp life (roll calls, selections, tortures, food distribution, and forced labor) to specific, albeit universalized, images of extreme deprivation, such as the single skeletal corpse tattooed with his inmate registration number by Leon Delarbre in Buchenwald or Zoran Music in Dachau. This number served as a means of identification. This type of thematic art is found in about 20 percent of the surviving works.  

The fourth and fifth types of surviving art, caricatures (20 percent) and abstracts (15 percent), show the artists’ ability to distance themselves from their surroundings and even to mock it with vitriolic humor. Most of these works were relatively small in size (usually 6×9 inches or less) and drawn in pencil, ink, or primary colors. Bertalan Göndör drew pencil cartoons on the blank sides of censored postcards mailed to his wife from the labor camps in eastern Hungary and the Czech artist Cisar filled a small notebook with blue-ink satirical sketches of daily life in Dachau. Hans Reichel produced 42 abstracts in watercolors in his notebook (later published under the title Cahier de Gurs) during the summer of 1942.[10] The diary accompanying these drawings correlates conditions to color selections and the abstractions of flora and fauna found near the transit camp.

Other art works included stage sets for cabaret and theater performances in Theresienstadt and illustrations for song books produced in Buchenwald and the Moor camps. Sculpture produced in Buchenwald, Hinzert, and Maidanek also survived. Moreover, many artists, like Adolf Frankl in Vienna, began to paint only after the war ended; other repainted their lost drawings from memory. A few artists like Leo Haas, Herbert Sandberg, and Zoran Music returned to camp themes in their postwar painting cycles; for example, the series Nous ne sommes pas les derniers By Zoran Music combined themes of atomic annihilation with subjects from Dachau reflecting the incorporation of his memories of extreme suffering with contemporary concerns.

Illegal art as well as officially commissioned art even came to the attention of the Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Hoess, who complained that “prisoners are to be used for useful labor, since art leads to an irresponsible and wasteful use of materials that are difficult to get. I also prohibit all black market work, all senseless pieces of kitsch, irrespective of the rank of the SS personnel who order such work”. [Order No. 24 of 8 July 1942]. Obviously compulsory work produced by inmate artists was meticulously executed and technically excellent, since the interned artists’ fate depended on compliance with SS orders and whims. It is probable that assigned art did not result in any significant aesthetic works, although the portraits of the perpetrators were occasionally used for purposes of identification in postwar criminal prosecutions.

The surviving art shows no geographical distinctions in themes between eastern ghettos and concentration camps and western transit camps. However, it does show several iconographic distinctions based on gender. Women artists seem to have painted a substantially larger number of children’s portraits and collective scenes in camp infirmaries, showing small groups of women helping each other. These thematic distinctions are not accidental. Recent research about women and the Holocaust indicates that art reflected reality; thus, mothers and small children were usually treated together during the deportations and selections, and women were usually assigned to care for those children who survived in the camps. Moreover, patterns of survival reveal that women provided mutual help and support in small groups of non-biological families, increasing their chances of survival.[11] Women also painted fewer satiric and abstract drawings, reflecting their subordinate position and late appearance in most twentieth century avant-garde art movements.

Clandestine art that survived reflected the conditions of daily terror across continental Europe between 1939 and 1945. It is presumptuous to assume that any work of art could change the course of history or prevent future genocides, yet the enduring humanism of Holocaust art restores our sense of balance in confronting the official war art and stereotypes that prevailed in Nazi propaganda. It also fills the gap in twentieth century art history for the decades of the 1930s and 1940s. The surviving documentation is not anonymous and offers us the possibility of a direct understanding of the conditions and setting in which individual artists worked. Holocaust art as a pedagogical tool enables us to study all aspects of Holocaust history: the persecution of Jews, clandestine resistance, the mixture of nationalities and prisoner types in every European concentration camp, and the nature of life in hiding. With the passage of time and the creation of postwar artistic traditions, the art of the Holocaust has joined art about the Holocaust in forming a new socially critical contemporary artistic tradition.

Sybil Milton, “Art of the Holocaust: A Summary”, Randolph L. Braham (Ed.), Reflections of the Holocaust in Art and Literature, New York, 1990, pp.147-152.

[1] M. Koscielniak, Bilder von Auschwitz. Frankfurt, Nov. 1982, unpaginated exhibit catalog. [2] Herbert Remmert and Peter Barth, Karl Schwesig: Leben und Werk. Berlin and Dusseldorf, 1984, pp. 91-92 and 96. [3] See the works of Boris Taslitzky, discussed in Janet Blatter and Sybil Milton, Art of the Holocaust.New York, 1981, p. 266. [4] Blatter and Milton, Art of the Holocaust, p. 249. [5] Mary Costanza, The Living Witness: Art in the Concentration Camps and Ghettos.New York and London, 1982, pp. 21-51. [6] See Karl Schwesig, Schlegelkeller, Berlin and Dusseldorf: Remmert and Barth Gallery, 1983. [7] Peter Junk and Wendelin Zimmer, Felix Nussbaum: Leben und Werk. Cologne and Bramsche, 1982, p. 253 (Illus. # 277 and 278). [8] Remmert and Barth, Karl Schwesig, p. 89. [9] Blatter and Milton, Art of the Holocaust, passim. [10] Hans Reichel, Cahier de Gurs, Geneva, 1974. [11] Sybil Milton, “Women and the Holocaust: The Case of German and German-Jewish Women”, When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, eds. New York, 1984, pp. 297-333.