In the face of the inconceivable in the Holocaust, detachment or silence sometimes resonate. For Yishai Jusidman, a Mexican-Jewish painter, silence is not an option. He has devoted many years to developing a visual language to address the great rift from the depths of blue: "The option of silence for me as a painter, and as a Jewish painter, is very problematic. I looked for ways of expression to carry the meaning of portrayal in dealing with the manners of connection to the Holocaust."
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At the Mishkan Museum of Art in Ein Harod, where his exhibition "Prussian Blue", curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, is on display, about 50 moving works dealing with the portrayal of the Holocaust are on display, all painted in this shade. Inside his blue sea, silence speaks. And it is eloquent and an alternative to the order of omission. The exhibition came to the Mishkan after wandering around several major museums abroad, and it is now here – but it is forever enduring because it is unforgettable, washing the viewer in lagoons of blue brush, of what was once the most horrible of horrors.
Horrible symbolism
Jusidman is a contemporary artist who was born and raised in Mexico City, and in recent years has been living and creating in Los Angeles. His many exhibitions have been shown in some of the most important galleries and museums in the world. This is his first exhibition in Israel.
"This series and my interest in the Holocaust involve the question of portrayal, which is not only artistic of course, in that any portrayal is fundamentally false, in its attempt to capture the portrayed. How can such a horrific tragedy be described."
The issue of the portrayal of the Holocaust, both in abstract and realistic ways, evokes a space for discussion concerning ways of commemorating difficult pasts, and in exacerbated tension, according to such an event, its existence is inconceivable and its occurrence cannot be rewritten in any way and language. As Theodor Adorno put it in 1949: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." The idea that the Holocaust could not be portrayed in art was compared to the religious assumption of the inability to portray God.
Jusidman responds to this in his works. "There is a long-standing taboo when it comes to painting the Holocaust. This is true of Holocaust survivor painters, and especially for painters who have not experienced the event but want to deal with the subject. In the series, I examine the challenge of portrayal and the ability to formulate the Holocaust and its related aspects, and the role that art can play in embodying those elements that are difficult to portray."
His search for the pictorial presence of trauma lies in a number of places. First, in reaction to his impressions of the work of the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans: "Gas Chamber" (1986). The painting, which seems to belie its emotional magnitude, muffles, suffocates death.
"I was disturbed by this painting, or rather by the way it was promoted and presented by the curators. A small painting, dedicated with a few lines, when you look at it you can imagine that you're seeing a garage or workshop interior. The only way to know that it is a gas chamber is to read the title of the work. The ambiguity is implied as part of a hint that the Holocaust cannot be portrayed. Tuymans' image of the gas chambers is supposedly paradigmatic in that any attempt to present the horrors of Auschwitz on canvas is doomed to fail. And that failure is Tuymans' artistic success."
Another aspect of his investigation concerns the pigment known as "Prussian Blue", the remnants of which remained on the walls of the gas chambers, as if they were a silent reminder of the sounds of horror: "I came to find that in some of the gas chambers there are blue spots on the walls, which are a product of a reaction between the cyanide present in Cyclone B gas [the deadly substance used by the Nazis to exterminate their prisoners] and the metal in the walls. Over time the substances turn into ferrocyanide which forms blue spots. This particular blue is called Prussian blue. This compound is chemically identical to the pigment that was used by European painters during the 18th century. The color was discovered in Berlin in 1704, and was named after those who would later carry out the extermination. A strange and terrible coincidence.
"My discovery of the Prussian Blue created for me the tangible connection to the question of portrayal as a real interface between what happened in the Holocaust and the act of painting. I, too, as a painter, stain the canvas, thus drowning my work."
"Black milk of dawn, we drink it at dusk, we drink it at noon and at daybreak, we drink it at night," wrote Paul Celan in The Death Fugue at the end of World War II. Like the black milk, which is not metaphorical but taken from the jargon of the death camps, so Jusidman's blue itself is devoid of the DNA of extermination. Jusidman breaks down the metaphor as a signifier in his works. This is due to the direct attachment of the pigment dyes to the pigment in the gas chambers that blend into the work of art. "There is no metaphorical or symbolic discourse here, but a clear connection that does not require interpretation. This is due to the direct attachment of the dyes to the pigment in the gas chambers that blend into the work of art."
The inhuman in the absence
The white space is washed away by the shower of Prussian Blue hues. Its pre-delivered meaning elevates the total use beyond its optical quality. The restraining feeling to which the power of the blue is attached operates its work, a mood of restraint that swallows up impressions of the destruction of horrors.
The mesmerizing paintings are based on still images from the camps. Millions of people, and not one human figure throughout the body of work. The absence casts the viewer into the inhumanity of this chapter in history. Jusidman says: "There are no people in the paintings, these are deliberately empty spaces. After all, in front of a photograph that involves human figures in such a painting, photography will always win. Apart from the Prussian Blue, I used two other dyes: Diatomaceous earth to create a feeling of murky steam, and skin tones that are subtly added to the image as a reminder of the flesh."
Q: What is your biographical relationship to the Holocaust?
"My grandparents emigrated from Russia and Ukraine to Mexico in the early 1920s. Although neither they nor my parents, who were born in Mexico, did not go through the Holocaust, our extended family perished. Only a few of my grandparent's brothers moved to Mexico, the vast majority remained in Europe and were murdered in the first part of the extermination."
He says of his closeness to Israel: "I have a close connection to Israel. I often visit here. I grew up in a Zionist family. After high school I spent a year training in a kibbutz, married an Israeli woman, so I am connected to Israel in many ways. I am happy that the project was appreciated and shown here in Israel, especially in this fantastic architectural structure, which actually contains in its body the promise of the State of Israel and its revival."
Yaniv Shapira, chief curator of the Mishkan Museum of Art in Ein Harod, adds: "We have a sense of responsibility and obligation to address the traumatic memory of the Holocaust. There is no place better than the Mishkan in Ein Harod to house this exhibition, also architecturally thanks to the characteristics of the building [like the natural light penetrating and spilling from the blue sky on to the Prussian Blue], also as the museum collection includes many painters associated with the Holocaust. The showing of the exhibition in Israel, in the Mishkan in particular, loads it with added meanings and values."
The exhibition manages to create a pendulum feeling between the syntax of aesthetics and ethics, underlying the movement between the pleasure of the beauty of the image and the shock of its essence: between the almost dreamy blue landscapes and the intensity of the bluish annihilation. The journey shifts from the abstract to the figurative, to the realistic, to the hyper-realistic, dominating in all ways of expression. From one room to another, the visual narrative grows, and at the same time the hidden rhythm of the Prussian Blue is woven.
Topography of destruction
A portico of rags covered in bluish stains is the entry gate. The rag is what is left, what remains, the leftover. The rags, like the images of people in the camps, do not bear names. The titles of the works give them only a number. Rag 15, 16. Unclothed and unidentified pieces of cloth.
"The Prussian Blue series was created in the years 2010-2017," Jusidman recalls. "The rags that open it are the last part of the work. These are the rags I cleaned the pallet, the brushes and the studio floor with during work. Stretched on wooden boards, they are now evidence of what was done in my studio. Introspectively to the inanimate walls of the gas chambers, they themselves absorbed the Prussian Blue spots."
From the small rags, viewers are thrown into the Haus der Kunst, a multidimensional painting of the building of an art gallery inaugurated in Munich in 1937. The gallery was inspired by Hitler as a showy spectacle in the service of Nazi propaganda, and was intended to display "the treasures of sublime pure German art, in contrast to the degenerate modern style."
Here the examination of the connection between the memory of the Holocaust and its presence in art is consciously evident. The painting is exemplary in its aesthetic formality. Despite its blue frigidity, it has movement that takes place in perspective, in-depth, in the arrangement of proportions. It is possible that in front of us is the building of the museum, or possibly a crematorium. This painting is almost the only one that does not deal with the extermination camps, and yet death dominates it.
Doors, pipes, damp concrete, vents, drainage openings - bluish, almost relaxed monochromatic close-ups, a mass destruction line matrix. The banality of brutality. In this space, the paintings are mimetic, doubtless photographic, perhaps a mix of both. There is little mention of cyanotype (a printing technique developed in the 19th century that produces cyan-blue glazed photography).
In the next room the suffocation increases, the details fill in the spaces: the gas chambers, portable gas trucks. The feeling of choking is the driving force. It is doubtful whether the next room will provide any air: a transition from inside to out, from the architecture of death to desolate nature. The naturalistic descriptions: bluish mounds, a mound of stones, a clear sky, coniferous tops in a bluish chill. Here the viewer observes tree trunks like udders, beautiful landscapes like meticulous rocks. Topography of destruction told by the titles of the works: Treblinka, Dachau, Sobibor, Mauthausen.
Among them is also "Birkenau", the marvelous painting with the chilling treetops. The painting is based on one of four surviving photographs. In 1944, the Sonderkommando prisoners in Birkenau obtained a camera because they desperately wanted to document the criminal acts they were forced to commit: "Two photographs were taken of prisoners piling corpses in the fire pit. From there the photographer turned to the depths of the forest and documented a group of naked women waiting to die. Moving under the tree canopy and hiding, he took another picture. But because he was afraid of being discovered, he aimed the lens too high, and what was captured was only the treetops. The painting I chose to paint is based on authentic photography, precisely the one that was accidental. The photograph captured nothing, no significant image. The prisoners took pictures so that there would be evidence of atrocities, while this is a picturesque photograph [with a picturesque look], it looks like a Monet painting, like a reflection of trees in water."
Jusidman chooses to commemorate the vague image, in a painting of a truly mystical quality, he gives presence to the extinct testimony, restores life to the memory that has been emitted.
Huge and completely abstract paintings close the exhibition and leave the viewer in awe. Layers of paint, endless work to get to the nothing. It takes your breath away.
The room where the exhibition ends is an archive, which includes explanations and photographs: "All the paintings in the series are based on pictures of the camp grounds: Dachau, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka. Some were period photographs taken at the end of the war; Some of them were photographed after the camps were opened to visitors and turned into death monuments, some which I photographed during my visits."
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Jusidman explains the decision to place the archive only at the end and thus detach the image from his interpretation: "For me the painting must speak for itself. Of course, it cannot bear everything, but what it tells must be said in high volume. The main issue is how the viewer experiences a painting, evaluates and understands the image within its operating parameters: material, criteria, presence, light. If the works produce an emotional response, it is not because they have images of horror or manipulations of compassion.
"There is no intention here to try to make the viewer 'experience the Holocaust' or to make the visitor feel as if inside the gas chambers. If we were to place the detailing text or the authentic image next to the painting, then these would overshadow the image. The idea was to give the viewer a minimal set of information at the entrance to the exhibition, and to allow him to feel and understand alone, in the hope that when he reaches the end of the exhibition and goes through the archive, he will have the desire to start the whole journey from the beginning."
Q: This moving exhibition enshrines the series as one of the founding ones on the subject.
"For me, the important thing, apart from making the series of paintings, was to visit the camps. I visited them alone, unaccompanied. Even in Birkenau, although there was nothing left, it was enough to witness the endlessness of the extermination camp to overwhelm the soul. Of course, the moral challenge for my generation - as a culture, as a nation, as human beings - is how to preserve this memory, as until now we have had the advantage of living testimonies from the survivors, but these are fading away. All that is left, then, are the remains. And what we create."
