Sometimes obliquely, sometimes insistently, Alice Lok Cahana articulates her Holocaust experiences in her art.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published March 28, 2004
[Florida Holocaust Museum]
Alice Lok Cahana, Shabbat in Auschwitz, acrylic on canvas.
Alice Lok Cahana, No Names, acrylic on canvas.
Alice Lok Cahana, 1940-1945, triptych, center panel.
Alice Lok Cahana, Jacob’s Ladder, paper and acrylic on canvas.
ST. PETERSBURG - The polyglot of languages came to be, so the story in Genesis goes, because of Babel, the tall tower men built that aspired toward the heavens.
"If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this," God declares in Chapter 11, verses 6 and 7, "then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
It worked, sort of. The world certainly is torn with misunderstandings, even among people who speak the same tongue.
Art for centuries was thought to be the visual Esperanto that could convey human truths in language accessible to everyone.
That changed during the 20th century. Critic Robert Hughes writes, "By 1950 . . . the event which revealed that painting could no longer deal cathartically with modern horrors was the Holocaust. . . . Reality had so far outstripped art that painting was speechless. What could rival the testimony of a photograph?"
Still artists do and should persist in the search for the authentic voice, the archetypal imagery that captures the full arc of experience and transcends it. That search has given rise to some great modern artists. Mark Rothko is as good an example as any, with his color-soaked, reductive canvases that, in the end, became a form of moral void. But many artists, trying to address the specificity of a horror like the Holocaust, are at a loss to translate its iconography into something more than a form of storytelling.
Alice Lok Cahana, a Holocaust survivor who lost most of her family in concentration camps, has an exceptionally powerful story to tell and does so with eloquence and emotion that at times can be harrowing.
"No Kaddish for the Children," a suite of paintings at the Florida Holocaust Museum, is a personal narrative of Cahana's experiences during and after her imprisonment at Auschwitz.
One reason for its success is that she is essentially an abstract artist who treads softly in the area of representation, resorting to collages of old photographs and news clippings - testimonies of reality - rather than images she draws from her mind or memory. She also taps into a symbolist vein with the rows of numbers she scrawls like automatic writing across canvases such as No Names. We know, of course, it's a deliberate list; they are really the final "names" of those who perished, often anonymously. Scratched onto a surface so heavily worked with paint it looks battered, they have a power beyond their representational point.
Dispensable People is another thickly textured collage of literal text - the names of concentration camps - and abstract, monochromatic blocks of color. The resemblance to a suitcase plastered with old tourist destination stickers (Paris! London! . . . Dachau) may not be intentional. Its charred look, as if damaged by fire, must be. That it can be so specific and still resonate with obscure associations speaks to its complexity.
Whirlwind (What is Man? Cosmos) is one of the few nonmixed media works in the exhibition. It's a landscape, a heavily abstracted one, about to be consumed by a howling vortex, biblical in its proportions and threatening a small, almost representational figure. Among the other, denser canvases, it's oddly lightweight.
Anomolous in its vertical rise and pastel colors, Jacob's Ladder also comes across as more decorative than didactic, not a bad thing in an exhibition that is almost unrelievedly mournful. Paper is pleated and paint poured, somewhat in the manner of Morris Louis, an artist Cahana is said to admire, then affixed to canvas. Unlike Louis, though, who stripped his work of any meaning and almost all painterly intervention, Cahana's Ladder wants you to get its point. It's nevertheless an ambiguous one, based on the story in Genesis of Jacob's dream, in which he saw angels ascending and descending a tall ladder, and God standing at the top, promising Jacob and his descendents the land on which he stood.
God and his promises seem absent in paintings that use empty railroad tracks - looking like ladders laid horizontally, which might be coincidence or not - dissolving into darkness as in Passau, My Home Town, Where Have You Been? Cahana has written the name Anna Rosmus between two of the tracks, giving us a nudge in case we miss the importance of the painting's title. Rosmus, you might remember, is the young woman who exposed the collusion between citizens in her hometown of Passau, Germany, and the Nazis to send Jews to camps, and the town's subsequent denial for decades. (Rosmus had to leave Passau. An independent film, Nasty Girl, was based on those events.) Such obvious hints make me occasionally feel as if I'm being allowed to use a concordance during a final exam on the Old Testament. I'm very appreciative, it helps things along, but I'd like to try getting it on my own first.
Difficult for non-Jews might be works with references to the Hebrew language and religion. You don't have to know that the central image in the triptych 1940-1945 is a shin, the Hebrew letter that begins words such as shalom and Shabbat, to appreciate its calligraphic beauty. But without that knowledge, you can't fully understand that as it recedes into a haze of brushstrokes resembling fire and smoke, it's a recessional not just for lives lost but for a way of life that can never be restored.
A beautifully realized work, Shabbat in Auschwitz, can be understood - the ghostly figures lingering at a table - as a deeply poignant work without having to know that Shabbat means the Sabbath (the word is spelled out as stylized hieroglyphs in blood red) and that the table is laid out as if for Passover, the celebration of the Hebrews' deliverence from slavery in Egypt. But its sad irony is lost.
Art that is created as a memorial has two requirements: to represent a specific event as heroic tribute and grief absorber, and to be equally credible as an aesthetic statement. Even if you don't subscribe to the First Commandment, you'll probably agree that trying to serve two such demanding masters is tough.
An alien who suddenly landed on earth and had never heard of the Holocaust could get much from these works on their own artistic terms. But their point is to be about the Holocaust; they demand being seen in that context. That can leave you lost in translation but moved by the experience and better for it, nevertheless.
"No Kaddish for the Children," work by Alice Lok Cahana, is at the Florida Holocaust Museum, 55 Fifth St. S, St. Petersburg, through Aug. 15. The museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Admission is $8 for adults, $7 for seniors and $3 for students. (727) 820-0100.
