ith the generous support of Pucker Gallery, three institutions—Wabash College, Drew

University, and DePauw University—are col-laborating to bring to our campuses Samuel

Bak’s artwork. For both liberal arts and theological teaching and learning, the art of Samuel Bak offers a unique oppor-tunity to engage students, faculty, staff, and our institutions’ many publics with the questions rooted in our most basic understandings of what it means to be Jew and Christian, liberally educated citizens, and human beings. Just as Bak’s work unites traditions and themes of artistic production from Michelangelo to Mantegna, so too his paintings invite our three institutions to engage in the shared task of raising the most fundamental questions of academic and religious life lived after the Shoah and the shared search for the elu-sive Tikkun Olam. Over the next eighteen months, different elements of this exhibition will make their way to the Eric Dean Gallery and Lilly Library at Wabash College, to Drew University’s Korn Gallery and University Library, and to The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University. Danna Nolan Fewell, Professor of Hebrew Bible at Drew University; Christine White, Associate Professor of English at DePauw University; and Gary A. Phillips, Dean of the College and Professor of Religion at Wabash College are coordinating the effort. We wish to thank colleagues who have contrib-uted in various ways to make the exhibitions happen:

AT WABASH COLLEGE: Michael Atwell, Director of the Eric Dean Gallery; Doug Calisch, Chair of the Art Depart-ment; John Lamborn, College Librarian and Director of Lilly Library; Dena Pence, Director of the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion; Char-lie Blaich, Director of Inquiries at the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts; Jeana Rogers, Instructional Media Spe-cialist; Todd McDorman, Associate Professor and Chair of the Rhetoric Department; Stan and Nancy Seibel; Henry Knight, Director of the Cohen Center for Holocaust Studies at Keene State College; and the Education Division of Lilly Endowment, Inc.

AT DREW UNIVERSIT Y: Gabriele Hitl-Cohen, Director of the Korn Gallery; Sara Lynn Henry, Professor of Art History, Emerita and former Chair of the Art Department; Maxine Beach and Anne Yardley, Deans of the Drew Theological School; Ann Saltzman, Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies; J. Terry Todd, Director of the Center for Religion, Culture, and Confl ict; Jonathan Golden, Direc-tor of Hillel; Heather Murray Elkins, Chair of Religion and the Arts at Drew; Andrew Scrimgeour, Director, and Ernest Rubinstein, Theological Librarian, of the Drew University Library; and James Hala, NEH Distinguished Professor of the Humanities.

AT DEPAUW UNIVERSIT Y: Janet Prindle; Robert Bottoms, President Emeritus, and Director of The Janet Prindle Insti-tute for Ethics; Beth Hawkins Benedix, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Literature and Coordinator of the Program in Jewish Studies; Michael Mackenzie, Associate Professor of Art; Russell Arnold, Assistant Professor of Re-ligious Studies and Faculty Advisor to DePauw Hillel; Neal Abraham, Executive Vice President and Vice President for Academic Affairs; Linda Clute, Assistant Director of The Prindle Institute; Martha Rainbolt, Professor of English; Douglas Cox, Emergency Management Coordinator and Director of the Nature Park at The Prindle Institute; Mi-chael Atwell, Director of the Eric Dean Gallery; Nicholas Casalbore, Graduate Intern at The Prindle Institute; mem-bers of the Faculty Advisory Board for The Prindle Insti-tute; Josh Goldberg; Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of DePauw University Galleries, Museums and Collections; and Reverend Gretchen Person, Director of Spiritual life.

AT PUCKER GALLERY: Bernie and Sue Pucker, Owners and Directors, who have made this collaboration possible; the Pucker Gallery staff who have overseen the exhibition and catalogue production, in particular Destiny M. Barletta, Jus-tine H. Choi, and David Winkler; and Leslie Anne Feagley, catalogue designer. And fi nally, our enduring thanks to Samuel Bak himself whose life and life’s work teaches us the art of the question. !

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE ART of the QUESTION Paintings by SAMUEL BAK

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L AST MOVEMENT, 1996Oil on Linen

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he art of Samuel Bak entrances. It also disquiets. Dismembered fi gures of fl esh, metal, wood, and stone. Broken pottery, rusted keys, petrifi ed teddy bears, discarded shoes, fl oating rocks, uprooted

trees. Splintered chess pieces. Fractured rainbows. Books turned buildings, tablets turned tombstones, memorial can-dles turned crematoria. Mute musical instruments, fl ight-less doves, mechanized, immobile angels, crucifi ed children, ladders leading nowhere. And yet: pears and paradise, new sprouts on severed branches, sunrises in sunsets. The admix-ture of color and catastrophe, Genesis and genocide, Exodus and expulsion, remnant and ruin. Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Mantegna, Dürer, de Chirico echoed and subverted. Para-doxes. Ambiguities. Excesses. Artistic, cultural, religious, and even personal, icons deconstructed, reconstructed, and continuously questioned. Indeed, engaging the art of Samuel Bak demands a high tolerance for quandary. Viewers fi nd no easy meanings here, only questions. In his works intimate worlds, grand land-scapes, symbolic narratives, and personal artifacts have been destroyed, and yet provisionally pieced back together. Although they can never be made whole again, “we can,” Bak says, “still make something that looks as if it was whole and live with it.”1 Scenes of destruction and construction, of tentative survival, of tenuous restoration, of a living on “as if,” ply us with questions of how shattered lives and icons can be imagined of a piece with Tikkun Olam, the Rabbinic concept of “repairing the world.” A child prodigy whose fi rst exhibition was held in the Vil-na ghetto at age nine and whose paintings now span seven de-cades, Bak weaves together personal and cultural history, past and present, to articulate an iconography of his experience of Shoah and his perceptions of a world that lives in the shadow of the crematoria chimneys. His iconographic tapestry is rich with threads of irony and reverse patterns: books burning without being consumed; covenantal tablets standing as head-stones and substituting for crypts; the fruit of the knowledge

of good and evil haunting abandoned tables; handmade rain-bows fashioned from war debris; petrifi ed arks stranded in congealed waters; ghetto children assuming the identities of the biblical heroes Noah, Moses, Isaac, David, and Jesus; Mi-chelangelo’s transcendent father god disappearing into thin air or thick smoke; Dürer’s melancholy angel deported from the edge of the Enlightenment to the brink of apocalypse; Rem-brandt’s angels blindfolded and impotent to stay the slayer’s hand. Exploring, reworking this range of cultural, religious, and personal metaphors, Bak produces a visual grammar and vocabulary that privileges questioning: How does a fragment-ed, murdered world cohere? How should we now interpret the milestones of Western civilization? What can traditional Jewish and Christian symbols, stories, ceremonies, convic-tions possibly mean in a century that has witnessed the Shoah and countless other catastrophes? Why should we, and how do we, now remember the children murdered by Nazi hatred? Why should, how does, facing past atrocity prompt us to con-front present innocent suffering? And how does our involve-ment in political, social, economic, and religious systems im-plicate us in the suffering of so many? Bak’s visual questioning has become a consuming passion; past, present, and future all fall subject to an interrogation intended to interrupt. We detect in Bak’s brushstrokes echoes of Rainer Ma-ria Rilke’s sage advice to a young poet: “...love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language....Live the questions now.”2 Bak lives, loves, indeed obsesses over, the questions, even as, pre-cisely because, they disrupt. Images of keys, key holes, bro-ken locks, blank canvasses, blindfolded, mute and mangled fi gures accentuate the elusiveness of answers, the imposition of interpretation, the failure of artistic, intellectual, religious, and moral imagination to represent the irreparable, to ac-count for the suffering of the innocent. We stand affl icted in consciousness and conscience, on the doorsills of Bak’s locked rooms just within reach of books so foreign that they fl oat without words, burst into fl ame, sprout from trees, and

SAMUEL BAK and theART OF THE QUESTION

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1 Cited in Lawrence Langer, “The Holocaust Theme in the Paintings of Samuel Bak” in Samuel Bak Retrospektive 1946-97 at the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen in 1998. Originally Tape HVT-618 in the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University.

2 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1984), 34.

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assemble into ghostly makeshift buildings. Passageways into an irretrievable past and an uncertain present and future, Bak’s works are thresholds: They “take us a certain way and then leave us, having shown us a road.”3

The road is strewn with broken bits of personal and cul-tural memory, shards of lives lived and lost, and holes where lives and memories should be, but are not. Everywhere we see evidence of suffering that cannot be adequately explained, cannot be fully represented, cannot be repaired, cannot be made right, cannot be made meaningful. And wherever we step, we trip upon the mark of the interrogative: What is there left for us to do?4 How do we bear witness to the truth of suffer-ing and survival? How do we remember what can never be repaired, those who can never be redeemed? How do we af-fi rm life while at the same time remembering the dead? What work of repair, of tikkun, however tentative and imperfect, is

possible in and for our own wounded worlds? Where do we go from here, and who awaits us along the way? These are the questions Bak poses to himself and to us with his fractured, cobbled-together constructions of life-in-death. Refusing to let us retreat undisturbed into academic or religious answers that render us silent and unresponsive to a broken world, Samuel Bak nudges us over the threshold into a landscape of uncanny, scarred beauty where past and present, pain and possibility confront us and challenge us to learn and to live out the art of the question. !

— DANNA NOLAN FEWELL Drew University

— GARY A. PHILLIPS Wabash College

3 Gabriel Josopovici, discussing Proust and his own experience with the Bible in Jonathan Magonet, A Rabbi Reads the Bible (London: SCM, 1991, 2004), 40.

4 The question of the rebbe in ElieWiesel’s The Gates of the Forest (New York: Schocken, 1982), 199.

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STUDY I , 1995Oil on Linen18 X 21 !”

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broken stone tablet, haphazardly reconstructed, is suspended precariously against a blue sky. On it,

the Hebrew word “Lo”—No—slides off center and to the left. The stone fragments that come togeth-

er to form the word splice it in two. Lamed and aleph cling to one another as the tablet crumbles around them. This paint-ing—Lo, Against Blue Space, 1976—presents a vivid metaphor for Bak’s artistic project. A “no” against all odds, Bak’s work vehemently refuses to provide comforting answers and ada-mantly persists in the space of disturbing questions. There is no closure here, no solace. The questions multiply and mu-tate—in the form of a boy, hands raised and palms forward in surrender; in the form of emaciated musicians, performing for the last time for their captors and murderers; in the form of abandoned teddy bears and building blocks, pitchers and Kiddush cups; in the form of scriptures, metaphorically and literally torn to pieces. For Bak, this “no” must be rendered in Hebrew just as it must be inscribed on the fractured tablet of the Law. Both ac-cusation and indictment, “Lo” voices the grotesque incapacity of this Law to protect against murderous violence, the funda-mental incompatibility of the Word with the all-too-human. Taken together, Bak’s paintings unfl inchingly cast us into the role of witness, but witness of a very particular type. As if forcing us to confront the potentially horrifying implications of a faith that glorifi es—indeed, mandates—sacrifi ce, Bak re-casts and returns to the Akedah (the binding of Isaac) again and again. Drawing our attention to the knife poised at Isaac’s throat by his father, Abraham (who looks away from his terri-fi ed son), Bak asks us to consider why the covenantal narrative is such a violent one, why it needs to be demonstrated in the

betrayal of the son by the father. He forces us to see the con-nection to another extraordinarily—we might say, obscene-ly—violent expression of this narrative in his Crossed Out and Study series. Here, the surrendering boy (mentioned above) is crucifi ed in all manner of ways: sometimes on a simple cross, sometimes impaled between a cross and Star of David, some-times burning while he hangs there, helplessly. As witnesses, we are prodded along a profoundly unsettling path, prompted to question how far the complicity of these narratives extends to the Holocaust, a term (from the Hebrew, “olah,” meaning burnt offering) that Bak confesses he feels uneasy using for its reiteration of a worldview that places sacrifi ce in a redemp-tive light.1

The role of witness assumes an imperative stance: to in-habit the unsettling space that Bak describes and depicts and never pretends to repair. In his stunning and enigmatic seven-volume work, The Book of Questions, Edmond Jabès wrestles with the necessity to speak of and in the aftermath of the Ho-locaust and to fi nd a language suitable to this speaking. Near the conclusion, he declares this, “the essential: in the throes of our crisis, to preserve the question.”2 In paintings that remind us to search out the “hidden question,” Bak pleads with us to do the same. And in this plea reads the starkest glimmer of hope, the tenacity refl ected in the “no” that resounds through-out Bak’s otherwise unforgiving landscape. To pose questions is to resist monologue. It is a communicative gesture that is itself an act of defi ance. It is a tentative wish—quiet, faltering, fragile—that we may yet fi nd a path towards healing. !

— BETH HAWKINS BENEDIX DePauw University

A RESOUNDING “NO”: PRESERVING the QUESTION in the ART of SAMUEL BAK

A

1 Samuel Bak. “What, How, and When: On My Art and Myself” in Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak. Ed. Danna Nolan Fewell, Gary A. Phillips, and Yvonne Sherwood (Boston: Pucker Art Publications and Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 9.

2 Edmond Jabès. The Book of Questions. Vol. 2. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991), 442.

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FAMILY TREE I I I , 1994Oil on Linen

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UNDER THE TREES, 1994Oil on Linen

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The power of Samuel Bak to engage not only our minds but also our spirits comes from the poignancy of his artistic language. Such artistry involves not only the primary elements of space, light, color, and

composition, but also the artist’s engagement with objects, symbols, narratives, and telling oppositions such as nature and culture. Although a 20th century artist, Bak turns to the visual forms of the Old Masters1 to render his images acutely and realistically. Choosing tradition over radical modernism, he fi nds a way to speak about tradition itself, especially his Jewish cultural tradition, which has been shattered and nearly destroyed. Effectively, the decorum of traditional art shapes his work; yet Bak transmutes these means by using the irra-tionalities of modern art modalities. Bak speaks of wanting to achieve in his painting “a sense of both immediacy and estrangement.”2 “Immediacy” is af-fected through the rendering of believable times, places, and narratives in sharp verisimilitude: his objects seem to live, breath, act, or not act, constructing a place and sense of seeming truth and reality. Details such as the hardness of stone, the texture of light on plaster walls, and the movement of weather across the sky are all palpable elements that pro-vide a setting for the remnants of a fractured culture. Yet, as Bak himself notes, introducing this antiquated means of ex-pression into the context of modern art creates a sharp sense of “estrangement.” Rather than presenting the raw, brutal immediacy of the Holocaust events, the older mode of ex-pression creates a visual space one can more safely enter to explore the wrenching enigmas of the more universal ques-tions layered into his reconfi gured scenes, or in Bak’s words, “to see freshly those painful matters that have been dulled by habits of denial.” 3

Though Bak has directly engaged Dürer, Michelangelo, Mantegna, and Rembrandt in his fi gural and biblically-based works,4 an equally telling connection can be made between his landscape works and the Northern Renaissance tradition of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) and Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525?-1569). 5 These artists also emerged from times of persecution and upheaval regarding issues of identity and belief. 6 They share with Bak an unadorned realism and a non-idealized view of human nature. Consider how Bak and Bruegel present the relationship between nature and culture. Both Bak’s Soutine Street, 2001 and Bruegel’s Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1564-1567 render nature as a seeming continuity in the face of violent acts. Bruegel graphically displays Herod’s decreed slayings of the innocents as narrated in Matthew’s gospel. The peace-ful Flemish snow-covered village allows the heinous acts to be subsumed into a tranquil natural sweep. Similarly, Bak brings us into a modern town, his boyhood home of Vilna, Poland, just after the Liberation. Yet, Bak’s view, close-up and personal, depicts an actual place and the fallout of a real contemporary event. No Biblical allegory, no masses of people—only the empty streets, the brutal aftermath. All is askew, shattered, and empty of all human presence, both place and society destroyed. The scene is barely grounded in a distant tiny landscape vista. Of the 80,000 Jews of the young Bak’s Vilna (a world center of Jewish culture and learning), only about 200 survived the Holocaust. Although rendered in a recognizable mode, the spaces of Soutine Street are in upheaval—shifting houses sheer apart, capricious roofs do not fi t, windows open onto empty air, arched pas-sageways fail to connect, housing materials fl oat in the air, whole streets become piles of shards. Captured here are the

VISUAL ORDER and DISORDERin the ART of SAMUEL BAK

1 Renaissance through the 19th century.2 Samuel Bak, Painted in Words—a Memoir (Bloomington: Indiana University Press and Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2001), 477-82. In these pages Bak makes a nuanced

statement about his choice of visual language and his dilemmas in relation to approaching Holocaust content. 3 Bak, 479.4 See the rich range of articles in Danna Nolan Fewell, Gary A. Phillips, and Yvonne Sherwood, editors, Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak

(Boston: Pucker Art Publications and Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008).5 The astute suggestion of such a connection was made by art historian friend Greta Berman, private communication, July 2008. 6 In the 15th and 16th centuries the authority of the church was questioned. Witchcraft was declared a heresy in 1484, and more than 100,000 women, some men and children and

one rooster were put to death for witchery over the next 200 years. The turmoil and the outbreak of the Reformation were taking place. In 1566, two summers before Bruegel’s death, Calvinists sacked 400 Catholic churches in three weeks, assaulted nunneries, and beat up monks. This, of course, does not compare to the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis during World War II.

T

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c. 1564Oil on Canvas

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Vienna, Austria

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SOUTINE STREET, 2001Oil on Canvas

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impressions of the child Bak when he fi rst walked through Vilna with his mother on Liberation day:

A few buildings that have lost their facades look like huge dollhouses. They make me imagine a monstrous god, a gigantic and unruly brat who has amused himself by tearing them apart. Little is left untouched. Single walls, sole remnants of rooms that used to stage dramas of life stand alone against the sky. 7

The language of modern art gives Bak the visual freedoms to set asunder traditional modes of rendering. With the permissions of Cubism and Expressionism, Bak sets time and space askew. Light also plays a capricious and dramatic role when one compares Bak to Bruegel. Bruegel’s light typically refl ects a natural source, consistently shaping the three dimensions, pre-senting a rational sweep. When Bosch or Bruegel do use light for an exaggerated drama, it is generally in service of imagina-tive scenes of death and the fi res of hell (such as Bruegel’s Tri-umph of Death, c. 1562). No hell fi res are necessary for Bak—the disturbing aftermath of real events suffi ces. The light of Soutine Street is strangely arbitrary, simultaneously tragic and beautiful. Our focus abruptly shifts from the pink light in the exposed emptiness of a building to the mottled light of deterio-rating walls to the shocking brilliance of fl oating debris, con-trasted to dead black darkness. Bak’s light speaks subtly, but shockingly, of the irrationality of place and acts. As in the works of Bosch and Bruegel, everyday objects can become symbolic for Bak. It is not uncommon to fi nd in Northern Renaissance art “hidden symbolism.” In Bruegel’s Massacre of the Innocents, two overturned barrels and severed branches in a foregrounded ice pond signal the upheaval of the killing of the children in the background. Less subtle in Bosch are the invented symbols of his Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1500 where, in his Hell scene, a hybrid birdman with a kettle on his head devours gluttons and voids them from his other end as punishment for their sin. Bosch’s symbols, derived from conventional sources—maxims, tarot cards, alchemy, etc.—are distanced into his imagined hell. Bak has no need to invent a visual hell; instead he uses personal, everyday experi-

ence to fi nd symbols that convey the existential horror of loss: the poignant presence of a storey-high white cup with spoon abandoned on his cobbled street, the user and the domicile of the cup irrevocably gone. The scene recalls Bak’s childhood visit to the studio of a ghetto artist where he found a drawing of a sad-eyed boy with a clean cup on the table before him—the artist had already been taken away.8 Bak also has his own quiet hidden symbolism, as in the three shard crosses on a dis-tant hill beyond Soutine Street.9

Bak shares with Northern Renaissance imagery the use of nature as a ground and seeming continuity. Large sweeps of a natural setting, some with strong mountains and sky, provide the backdrop for his scenes of loss (e.g., Auspicious Moon, 2001; Pardes II, 1994; and Creation, 1999). Yet weather is turbulent; storms and obscuring mists abound with only the barest light on the horizon. Unlike the Flemish works where the relationship of culture to the natural setting offers a reassuring balance and stability, Bak’s nature/culture rela-tionship tends to be asymmetrical. The Flemish works signal that, no matter the human folly and violence, there is a reliable natural order. Bak disrupts this order: the sky, besmirched by bellows of smoke from trains and factories, suggests the progress of industrialization as well as the death transport and Nazi crematoria. Equally disturbing is his fracturing of natural objects, such as the dismembered family trees (Fam-ily Tree III, 1995) or cut arbors fl oating over cemeteries (Un-der the Trees, 2001). Culture also ossifi es into stony nature, as do the shattered teddy bears in a mountainous heap Under the Blue Sky, 2001, and the solidifi ed brick ship of remembrance frozen in a sea of stone chunks in Yizkor Theme, 1992. While the Old Master paintings generally incorporate ir-rational human actions within the rational sweep of a natural order, Bak’s images suggest that the cosmic order has nearly been overcome by the irrationalities of human culture. Bak challenges order with disorder, providing a sharp voice in a world forever fractured by the Holocaust. ! — SARA LYNN HENRY Drew University

7 Bak, 43.8 Bak, 32.9 Bak’s use of objects does, however, stand in contrast to that of the Surrealists. Bak’s objects refl ect poignant personal experiences as opposed to the Surrealists’ more histrionic indulgence of the libidinal unconscious (e.g., Dali’s Illumined Pleasures, 1929).

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HIDDEN QUESTION II , 1994Oil on Linen25 " X 32”

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HOLDING A PROMISE, 2008Oil on Canvas

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CREATION, 1999Oil on Canvas

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THE L AST MOVEMENT, 2000Oil on Canvas

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TESTIMONIALS, 2006Oil on Canvas

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IN THEIR OWN IMAGE, 2007Oil on Canvas

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YIZKOR THEME, 1992Oil on Linen21 # X 25 "”

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DRESS REHEARSAL,1999Oil on Canvas

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WITH A BLUE THREAD, 2008Oil on Canvas

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SIX WINGS FOR ONE, 2008Oil on Canvas

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DAMAGE, 2002Oil on Canvas

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FROM GENER ATION TO GENER ATION II I , 1996Oil on Linen

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UNDER A BLUE SKY, 2002Oil on Canvas

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STUDY FOR AKEDAH, 2000Pencil and Oil on Paper

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WALLED IN, 2008Oil on Canvas

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SOLO, 1996Oil on Canvas

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BANISHMENT, 1999Oil on Canvas

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THE NATURE OF ROOTS, 1999Oil on Canvas

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INNER FIRE C, 2003Oil on Canvas

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FIGURE WITH FLIGHT ASSISTANT, 1984Oil on Linen27 " X 19 !”

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INTERPRETATION, 2003Oil on Canvas

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ALL OF A SUDDEN, 2005Oil on Canvas

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GIVE AND TAKE, 2005Oil on Canvas

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HAPPINESS, 2005Oil on Canvas

22 X 28” BK1050

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COLLECTIVE, 2007Oil on Canvas

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UNKNOWN, 2007Oil on Canvas

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MEMORIAL, 1986Oil on Linen39 # X 32”

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FOR THE MANY DAVIDS, 2008Oil on Canvas

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1933 Born 12 August in Vilna, Poland

1940-41 Under Soviet occupation

1941-44 Under German occupation: ghetto, work-camp, refuge in a monastery

1942 First exhibition of drawings in the ghetto Vilna

1945-48 Displaced Persons camps in Germany; studied painting in Munich

1948 Emigrated to Israel

1952 Studied at the Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem

1953-56 Israeli army service

1956 Received the First Prize of the American-Israeli Cultural Foundation

1956-59 Lived in Paris and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts

1959-93 1959-66 lived in Rome; 1966-74 in Israel; 1974-77 in New York City; 1977-80 in Israel; 1980-84 in Paris; 1984-93 in Switzerland

1993 Moved to Weston, Massachusetts

SELECTED SOLO GALLERY EXHIBITIONSGalleria Schneider, Rome, Italy – 1959, 1961, 1965, 1966

Alwin Gallery, London, United Kingdom – 1965

L’Angle Aigu, Brussels, Belgium – 1965

Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel – 1966

Roma Gallery, Chicago, IL – 1967

Pucker Safrai Gallery, Boston, MA – 1969, 1972, 1975, 1979, 1985, 1987, 1989, 1991

Hadassah “K” Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel – 1971, 1973, 1978

Aberbach Fine Art, New York, NY – 1974, 1975, 1978

Ketterer Gallery, Munich, Germany – 1977

Amstutz Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland – 1978

Goldman Gallery, Haifa, Israel – 1978

Vonderbank Gallery, Frankfurt, Germany – 1978

DeBel Gallery, Jerusalem, Israel – 1978, 1980

Thorens Fine Art, Basel, Switzerland – 1981

Kallenbach Fine Art, Munich, Germany – 1981, 1983, 1984, 1987

Soufer Gallery, New York, NY – 1986, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1997, 2006

Galerie Ludwig Lange, Berlin, Germany – 1987

Galerie Carpentier, Paris, France – 1988

Galerie Marc Richard, Zurich, Switzerland – 1990

Galerie de la Cathedrale, Fribourg, Switzerland – 1991, 1992

Galerie Picpus, Montreux, Switzerland – 1991, 1992

Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA – 1993, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2008

George Krevsky Fine Art, San Francisco, CA – 1998

Beaver Country Day School, Chestnut Hill, MA – 2004

Finegood Gallery, Milken Jewish Center, Los Angeles, CA – 2004

St. Botolph Club, Boston, MA – 2004

Laurie M. Tisch Gallery, Jewish Community Center, Manhattan, NY – 2006

SELECTED MUSEUM EXHIBITIONSBezalel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel – 1963

Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel – 1963

Rose Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA – 1976

Germanisches National Museum, Nuremberg, Germany – 1977

Heidelberg Museum, Heidelberg, Germany – 1977

Haifa University, Haifa, Israel – 1978

Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf, Germany – 1978

Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn, Germany – 1978

Kunstmuseum, Wiesbaden, Germany – 1979

Stadtgalerie Bamberg, Villa Dessauer, Germany – 1988

Koffl er Gallery, Toronto, Canada – 1990

Dürer Museum, Nuremberg, Germany – 1991

Temple Judea Museum, Philadelphia, PA – 1991

Jüdisches Museum, Stadt Frankfurt am Main, Germany – 1993

Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, NY – 1994

Janice Charach Epstein Museum and Gallery, West Bloomfi eld, MI – 1994

National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, Seton Hall College, Greensburg, PA – 1995

Spertus Museum, Chicago, IL – 1995

B’Nai B’Rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, Washington, DC – 1997

Holocaust Museum Houston, Houston, TX – 1997

Lamont Gallery, Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH – 1997

Panorama Museum, Bad Frankenhausen, Germany – 1998

National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius, Lithuania – 2001

Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame University, Notre Dame, IN – 2001

Florida Holocaust Museum, Saint Petersburg, FL – 2001, 2007, 2009

Canton Museum of Art, Canton, OH – 2002

Clark University, Worcester, MA – 2002

Neues Stadtmuseum, Landsberg am Lech, Germany – 2002

92nd Street Y, New York, NY – 2002

Jewish Community Center, Memphis, TN – 2003

University of Scranton, Scranton, PA – 2003

City Hall Gallery, Orlando, FL – 2004

Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX – 2004

Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota, Duluth, MN – 2004

Felix Nussbaum Haus, Osnabrueck, Germany – 2006

University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH – 2006

Yad Vashem Museum, Jerusalem, Israel – 2006

Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL – 2008

Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art, Tulsa, OK – 2008

Cohen Holocaust Center, Keene State College, Keene, NH – 2008

Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL - 2008

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Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel

Tweed Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Duluth, MN

Haifa University, Haifa, Israel

University of Scranton, Scranton, PA

Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA

Yad Vashem Museum, Jerusalem, Israel

PUBLICATIONS AND FILMSSamuel Bak, Paintings of the Last Decade, A. Kaufman and Paul T. Nagano. Aberbach, New York, 1974.

Samuel Bak, Monuments to Our Dreams, Rolf Kallenbach. Limes Verlag, Weisbaden and Munich, 1977.

Samuel Bak, The Past Continues, Samuel Bak and Paul T. Nagano. David R. Godine, Boston, 1988.

Chess as Metaphor in the Art of Samuel Bak, Jean Louis Cornuz. Pucker Art Publications, Boston and C.A. Olsommer, Montreux, 1991.

Ewiges Licht (Landsberg: A Memoir 1944-1948), Samuel Bak. Jewish Mu-seum, Frankfurt, Germany, 1996.

Landscapes of Jewish Experience, Lawrence Langer. Pucker Art Publications, Boston and University Press of New England, Hanover, 1997.

Samuel Bak – Retrospective, Bad Frankenhausen Museum, Bad Franken-hausen, Germany, 1998.

The Game Continues: Chess in the Art of Samuel Bak, Pucker Art Publications, Boston and Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2000.

In A Different Light: The Book of Genesis in the Art of Samuel Bak, Lawrence Langer. Pucker Art Publications, Boston and University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2001.

The Art of Speaking About the Unspeakable, TV Film by Rob Cooper and Pucker Art Publications, Boston, 2001.

Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings by Samuel Bak from 1946-2001, Pucker Art Publications, Boston, 2002.

Painted in Words—A Memoir, Samuel Bak. Pucker Art Publications, Boston and Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2002.

Samuel Bak: Painter of Questions, TV Film by Christa Singer, Toronto, Canada, 2003.

New Perceptions of Old Appearances in the Art of Samuel Bak, Lawrence Langer. Pucker Art Publications, Boston and Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 2005.

Samuel Bak: Leben danach, Life Thereafter, Eva Atlan and Peter Junk. Felix Nussbaum Haus and Rasch, Verlag, Bramsche, Osnabrueck, Germany, 2006.

Return to Vilna in the Art of Samuel Bak, Lawrence Langer. Pucker Art Publications, Boston and Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 2007.

Remembering Angels: Paintings by Samuel Bak, A Calendar, January 2008-June 2009, Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A. Phillips. Pucker Art Publications, Boston, 2008.

Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak, Danna Nolan Fewell, Gary A. Phillips, and Yvonne Sherwood, Eds. Pucker Art Publications, Boston and Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 2008.

Icon of Loss: Recent Paintings by Samuel Bak, Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A. Phillips. Pucker Art Publications, Boston, 2009.

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONSImage and Imagination, Tel Aviv Museum, Israel – 1967

Jewish Experience in the Art of the 20th Century, Jewish Museum, New York, NY – 1975

International Art Fair, Basel, Switzerland – 1979, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1986

Nachbilder, Kunsthalle, Hannover, Germany – 1979

Bilder Sind Nicht Verboten, Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, Germany – 1982

Still Life, Tel Aviv Museum, Israel – 1984

Chagall to Kitaj, Barbican Art Center, London, United Kingdom – 1990

Witness and Legacy, Traveling Group Exhibition in North America – 1995

PUBLIC COLLECTIONSAidekman Arts Center, Tufts University, Medford, MA

Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Ben Uri Gallery, London, United Kingdom

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brookline, MA

Boston Public Library, Boston, MA

Constitutional Court of South Africa, Braamfontein, South Africa

Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA

DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA

Dürer House, Nuremberg, Germany

Felix Nussbaum Haus, Osnabrueck, Germany

Facing History and Ourselves, Boston, MA

Florida Holocaust Museum, Saint Petersburg, FL

Germanisches National Museum, Nuremberg, Germany

German Parliament, Bonn, Germany

Hillel Foundation, Washington, DC

Hobart and William Smith College, Geneva, NY

Holocaust Museum Houston, Houston, TX

Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH

Imperial War Museum, London, United Kingdom

Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel

Jewish Museum, New York, NY

Jüdisches Museum, Stadt Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Kunstmuseum, Bamberg, Germany

McMullen Museum, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA

Municipality of Nuremberg, Nuremberg, Germany

Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada

National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius, Lithuania

Panorama Museum, Bad Frankenhausen, Germany

Philips–Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH

Rose Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada

Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art, Tulsa, OK

Simmons College, Boston, MA

Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame University, South Bend, IN

Springfi eld Museum of Fine Art, Springfi eld, MA

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