'The Last Expression: Art and Auschwitz'

NEW YORK, April 29 (UPI) -- The first exhibition of art by prisoners of the Nazis is a chilling visual record of the Holocaust.

The show, now on display at the Brooklyn Museum, is made up of more than 200 works by both professional and amateur artists -- created openly or in secret -- in concentration camps and ghettos. It includes watercolors by Felix Nussbaum, the most celebrated of the professional artists, who was arrested by the Gestapo after hiding out in a basement. He was killed at Auschwitz. A museum dedicated to his work, designed by designated Ground Zero architect Daniel Libeskind, was opened in Nussbaum's home city of Osnabrück, Germany, in 1999.

One of Nussbaum's paintings, a gouache on brown paper that has an 18th-century formality, depicts an orchestra of skeleton musicians and is a study for a larger oil titled "The Triumph of Death." It may have been inspired by the music concerts, cabaret, and theatrical shows organized in several death camps by their Nazi commandants to maintain a perverse semblance of "life as usual" in happy communities at work and play.

These camp leaders and guards, most of them SS officers, also permitted art studios and commissioned talented inmates to paint portraits, landscapes, and still lifes for their offices and homes, paying artists in extra rations and cigarettes and freeing them from hard labor. The sealed Czech ghetto of Theresienstadt was particularly active in producing artwork, as was the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland with its painting and graphics studios and a camp museum.

Commissioned studio work was more likely to survive World War II, but some art was produced in secret and smuggled out by camp employees, such as laundresses, or hidden away beneath floorboards and behind wallboards and retrieved after the war, often by former prisoners who survived the Holocaust. These have found their way into mainly Polish and Israeli collections, the show's chief lenders.

Prisoner art with camp and ghetto subject matter takes various forms, including self-portraits and portraits of other prisoners, caricatures, illustrated letters, and drawings of everyday life, including its dehumanizing aspects and even executions. Art materials were difficult to come by, and work in ink, charcoal, and pencil is more common than oils and watercolors.

The show is titled "The Last Expression: Art and Auschwitz" and was exhibited in Evanston, Ill., and Wellesley, Mass., before coming to Brooklyn, where it will be on exhibit through June 15. It was organized by the Block Museum of Art in Evanston with the support of the Federal Republic of Germany and several other donors. Among the lenders are a few survivors of the death camps, including artist Jozef Szajna, who now lives in Poland.

Szajna's ink and pencil drawing titled "Our Biographies" is the cover art for the exhibition guide, one of the few abstract works of art depicting the concentration camp experience.

The artist evoked a multitude of faceless, nameless prisoners using his ink-smudged thumbprint to represent heads rising above a band of stripes suggesting prison uniforms. He saved this and 20 other drawings by hiding them under his mattress in the camp infirmary in the last year of the war. Szajna said he sought to convey the loss of individuality among camp inmates.

Another artist, Halina Olomucki, said her purpose in continuing to paint was a more personal one –- as a means of survival. One of her sketches on view is of a sad young boy with a vendor's tray full of yellow Star of David patches, which Jewish prisoners had to buy and wear on their sleeves.

"This need to document became an extraordinary force that carried me to survival," Olomucki recalled. "My sole purpose in life was to live so I could be able to testify before the world about the most terrible atrocities and the courage of all the inmates of Auschwitz."

Jan Komski, an artist who died in Virginia only last year, had said his reason for painting landscapes from memory, such as "View of Krakow from the Bank of the Vistula River" in the show, was that he forgot "the reality of my enslavement when standing at the easel" in the Auschwitz art studio after a day at forced labor.

"Being able to practice one's profession meant a promise of distant freedom," he said.

Humor and satire were also a means of survival and "saving ourselves from deep depression," according to artist Rachella Velt Meekocs, an Auschwitz survivor. There is plenty of prison humor in the art on view, even though anti-Nazi jokes were outlawed and treasonable.

One prisoner, Horst Rosenthal, produced a crude comic book titled "Mickey at the Camp of Gurs" (a prisoner-in-transit camp in the French Pyrenees). It tells of Mickey Mouse being sent to Gurs because he didn't have proper identification papers.

"This has been published without the authorization of Walt Disney," notes the book, which can be viewed on a video screen.

Also on display is the documentary film edited by director George Stevens at the order of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, "Nazi Concentration Camps," taken in 1945 as the camps were liberated by the Allied armies. It is the show's worst horror, lacking the filter of art in its depiction of reality.