Representing the Irreparable

by Fewell, Danna Nolan

• ISBN13: 9781879985186
• ISBN10: 1879985187
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-31
• Publisher: Pucker Gallery

Summary

"The art of Samuel Bak entrances. It also disquiets. The subject matter of Bak's painting is anything but easy. Bak weaves together personal history and Jewish history to articulate an iconography of his Holocaust experience. Across nearly seven decades of artistic production Samuel Bak has explored and reworked a set of metaphors, a visual grammar, and a vocabulary that ultimately privileges questions. His revisions of Genesis stories, as well as of New Testament motifs of crucifixion and apocalypse, defamiliarize these texts and our conventional ways of reading them. For readers of the Bible, whether scholar or lay, the juxtaposition of ancient sacred story with modern suffering story challenges us to see the biblical text in a different light, illumined both by the light of reason and the glow of crematoria furnaces. Samuel Bak preserves memory of the twentieth century ruination of Jewish life and culture by way of an artistic passion and precision that stubbornly announces the creativity of the human spirit."--BOOK JACKET.

Table of Contents

List of Images
Introduction
Where there is Still Life: Sketching the Life of Samuel Bak	p. 1
What, How, and When: On My Art and Myself	p. 5
Myth, Midrash, and Mysticism: The Painting of Samuel Bak	p. 15
Skeptical Visions and Scriptural Truths: Bak's Genesis Paintings	p. 33
Bak's Dreams: Painting as Midrash	p. 43
Seeing Words, Reading Images: Allegory and Interpretation in Bak and Benjamin	p. 59
Genesis, Genocide, and the Art of Samuel Bak: "Unseamly" Reading After the Holocaust	p. 75
Bak's Impossible Memorials: Giving Face to the Children	p. 93
Iconoclash and Akedah: Holocaust and Sacrifice in the Art of Samuel Bak	p. 125
Images of Disaster: Survival and the Impossible in the Artwork of Samuel Bak and the Book of Job	p. 151
The End of Time: Bak's Art, Messiaen's Music, and Levinas's Ethics	p. 165
Labyrinths: A Response	p. 185
Samuel Bak: Biography	p. 189
Author Biographies	p. 194
Bibliography	p. 197
Indices	p. 206
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