Photo Albums

"The art of Samuel Bak entrances. It also disquiets." So write Wabash College Dean of the College Gary Phillips and Drew University Theological School Professor Danna Fewell in their introduction to the catalog for "The Art of the Question: The Paintings of Samuel Bak," which opens Monday, March 2 in the Eric Dean Gallery at the College's Fine Arts Center. In this album you'll find a sampling from the many works in the exhibition, along with some of the teaching material Professors Phillips and Fewell, have prepared for the show.

"Creation of Wartime III" The various figures of Adam in soiled uniform, prison coveralls, or refugee garb are contemporary representatives of the one who was banished from Paradise. Like him they must feel that they were dumped into this world, unasked. How can they rise from the rubble where they have landed? Perhaps this explains why they are all in search of God. The most they come up with in my paintings is some mysterious shape, perhaps a hand that signals meaning they must discover themselves. My imagery derives, of course, from Michelangelo’s Creation of Man, at whose center Gods and Adam’s pointing fingers almost touch. What do these fingers mean to me? The hands seem to be of similar size. Is God creating man in his image, or is this man’s creation of God? Could their gestures express any disappointment or accusation? —Samuel Bak

"Figure with Flight Assistant" The angel takes a different form in "Figure with Flight Assistant," being simultaneously angel, airplane, and Icarus, whose inventor father Daedalus may or may not be the character with the breathing apparatus whose hose is in Icarus’s hand. Whatever their identity beneath their respective half-masks (between one’s goggles and the other’s mask they expose a single complete face) their destinies are intertwined: they have begun together to seek the means of human flight and eventual freedom. —Paul T. Nagano, Samuel Bak: The Past Continues

"The Nature of Roots" The spiritually complex and perilous journey from ruin to restoration is embodied in the difficulty of the transit, a process vividly dramatized by a painting like "The Nature of Roots," where Bak’s fondness for fusing disparate materials results in a ladder with tree roots for a base. Here many roles have been transformed. Once it was the nature of roots to plunge deeper into the earth in quest of life-giving moisture. The Jewish equivalent of that pursuit has been brutally severed by Nazi expulsions – a favorite German euphemism for extermination was ausrotten, to uproot. But since the putting down of physical roots in a Jewish homeland always implied a spiritual yearning for a heavenly connection, Bak’s torn up roots become a ladder raised toward the sky. The damage done below, however, has its parallel in the rent above, a far more portentous injury, since roots are portable, if salvaged in time, in a way that spirit is not. An anonymous angel gestures with the ever-present hand, but who can read accurately its enigmatic signal – if signal it is, and not a hopeless wave of frustration? —Lawrence Langer, In a Different Light: The Book of Genesis in the Art of Samuel Bak

"For the Many Davids" The young biblical David takes up unconventional arms to defend the name of God. Indeed he claims his victory will be proof “that there is a God in Israel.” But while the David of biblical tradition triumphs, other Davids do not. And we are led to wonder, yet again, how the survival or demise of children and the presence of God are possibly related, and why we tell stories in which children must defend God rather than the other way around. —Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A Phillips, Icon of Loss: The Haunting Child of Samuel Bak

"Holding a Promise" A downcast young Noah stands ready to launch a tiny skiff. A tattered rainbow provides its rigging. Has the promise of heavenly protection been restored? Or has the boy cobbled together his own means of escape, crafting a refugee boat that will set sail under his direction and power? He carries no cargo besides himself and a bundle of sticks. Is this kindling intended for a thanksgiving sacrifice to God once the flood has been safely navigated? Or has this little Noah become Isaac, carrying wood for another burnt offering orchestrated under false pretenses? Exactly what promise does he portend? And what is its price? —Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A Phillips, Icon of Loss: The Haunting Child of Samuel Bak

"Still Life with Smoke" Through crematorium chimneys
a Jew curls toward the God of his fathers.
As soon as the smoke is gone,
upward cluster his wife and son. Upward, toward the heavens,
sacred smoke weeps, yearns.
God – where You are –
we all disappear.

—Jacob Glatsein, “Smoke”

"Solo" Do Bak’s musicians frozen in a world of disrepair—suggesting a performance but not actually playing—raise the question of whether or not art has been trumped by the atrocities of the Shoah, or whether hearing the music we once knew, or any music at all, is simply too much of an indulgence given what we have we have seen? Has the time for music-making ended? —Charles Rix, “The End of Time: Bak’s Art, Messiaen’s Music, and Levinas’s Ethics”

"Walled In", 2008 Here we see shades of the film Hitler loved so well: Fritz Lang’s futuristic silent film Metropolis where workers’ bodies are ground into dust and made into cement to build and operate the city that enslaves them. Future fantasy becomes past fact as we witness children becoming the fungible raw materials needed for fuel and defense in the Nazi extermination campaign. —Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A Phillips, Icon of Loss: The Haunting Child of Samuel Bak

"Persistence" Old, blue pages,
Purple traces on silver hair,
Words on parchment, created
Through thousands of years in despair.
As if protecting a baby
I run, bearing Jewish words,
I grope in every courtyard:
The spirit won’t be murdered by the hordes.
I reach my arm into the bonfire and am happy:
I got it, bravo! Mine are Amsterdam,
Worms, Livorno, Madrid, and YIVO.
How tormented am I by a page
Carried off by the smoke and winds!
Hidden poems come and choke me:
– Hide us in your labyrinth! —from Abraham Sutzkever, “Grains of Wheat”

"Memorial" The fractured, pieced together tablets of the Ten Commandments stand simultaneously as a metaphor of the Sinai covenant that has been broken by both humanity and God and as a headstone memorializing the six million Jewish martyrs of the Shoah. The monument stands as though to mark “Here lie the dead.” But the bodies are not to be found nor is the god who once brought the people out of the land of Egypt. The tablets stand in, mark a place, for an absent deity and a missing people. Rusting double yods, letters signifying the divine name, have been manually riveted to the top of one of the tablets, a seemingly desperate and wishful imposition of divine presence. The people themselves are present only in traces: A dismembered and roughly re-membered Star of David becomes the central picture of the tablets’ puzzle, its form a sad example of the stone cutter’s and iron worker’s arts. Here the identity of a people is pieced back together after historical rupture, the rupture now integral to the identity of those who are lost and those who remain, an insistent but uneasy cohesion in an unstable and damaged structure. The people are also engraved in the number 6, which alludes doubly to the six million who perished in the Shoah and to the sixth commandment “Thou shall not kill.” The number 6 both grieves and accuses. Implicated in this cipher, as well as in the barbed wire, the prison-striped salvage, the metal stays, and the bullet holes, are both the victims and the perpetrators. Unspeakable suffering and the violence that has caused it are inextricably bound together. —Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A. Phillips, “From Bak to the Bible: Imagination, Interpretation, and Tikkun Olam”

"Under a Blue Sky" High in the wind and sun was my dwelling-place,
motherland, now you chain in the valley of
shadow your broken son; no comfort
now are the heavenly games of evening. Over the cliffs the skyscape is shining; I
dwelling in the depths, and stones are my company,
speechless; should I then be as they are?
Why do you write? Is it death? Who asks you?— Asks of your life a reckoning, asks of this
fragment of poem how it remains but a
fragment? Know this: unmourned, unburied,
I shall lie graveless, no vale shall rock me. Winds shall disperse my leavings; but listen, the
cliff shall re-echo – today, or tomorrow – the
song I am singing; boys and girls are
growing up now who will hear its meaning.

—Miklós Radnóti, “In a Troubled Hour”
January 10, 1939