Home / Online Campus / Lessons & Units / Perspective / On "Self Portrait"
On "Self Portrait"
contributor: Professor Lawrence Langer
Bak's "Self Portrait" is a portrait of the artist as a young boy, though the experiences he has gone through have hastened his journey toward maturity. Among the many crimes the Germans committed against the Jewish future was the murder of more than a million helpless children. This painting is a vivid reminder of the dilemma that is a vexing if paradoxical birthright of that crime: no one's survival can be detached from the loss of someone else. The boy sits in a sack as if emerging from a cocoon of death, though only those aware of the artist's personal ordeal will be able to grasp the visual allusion, which seems allegorical but is not. Sent with his wife and son from the Vilna ghetto to a labor camp nearby, Bak's father first saw his wife escape to a secure hiding place, then hid his son in a sack which he dropped unobserved from a ground floor window of the warehouse where he was working. Through a pre-arranged plan the maid of a relative who was raised and living as a Christian in the city picked up the ten-year-old boy and took him to a safe haven. The memory of that moment helps turn his expression inward in the portrait, making him virtually oblivious to his external surroundings.
The content of this painting thus violates our expectation of what its title usually intends. The boy who grew up in pre-war Vilna with an intact family is not the same as the one who survived the catastrophe of the Holocaust remembering a ruined community that included the murder of his father and four grandparents. That event has shattered the notion of a unified self. Unlike traditional self-portraits, the center of Bak's picture is dominated not by the face of a living boy but by the replica of a dead one, taken from one of the most famous photographs to emerge from the disaster. That photo depicts a frightened child, hands raised, being removed by Germans at gun point together with other Jews from what must have been a hidden bunker in the Warsaw ghetto. His is a "counter-portrait," though the two likenesses are really inseparable, since the fate of the boy who was Bak is intimately linked to the doom of the victim--it might easily have been the young Bak's doom too--whose image is imprinted on a crude assemblage of wooden panels. With his hands raised and one bloody palm pierced by a nail, the patched fragments of a Jewish star on his breast and a cross not far from it, the boy need only extend his arms to assume a cruciform gesture, and indeed Bak has called this image a kind of Jewish crucifixion. There is a certain amount of irony to this implication, since the Jews enjoyed neither salvation nor resurrection from their suffering. The atrocity of the Holocaust unleashed present ambiguities, not future meanings, and the living boy holds in his hand only a paintbrush, an instrument that will led him into the future through art rather than belief.
This is not to say, however, that Bak is immune to the Jewish origins of his subject. By the boy' feet lies a scroll, image of a damaged Torah, the source of Jewish law. Before him lie strewn blank pages of parchment, awaiting inscriptions that will restore the law and at the same time rewrite its history to include the disaster of the Holocaust. The pebbles and small stones that lie on them recall the Jewish custom of placing such tokens on the gravestones of family members when visiting the cemetery as signs of respect for the dead and in indication that they have not been forgotten. In the distance a city in flames and twin smokestacks pouring smoke are further reminders of the annihilation that the boy has survived.
As a counterbalance to this devastation on the other side of the painting looms a giant blank canvas on an easel, a harbinger of the future challenge that the boy artist will confront as he tries to find visual representations for the past now locked in internal memory. Specific hints of that challenge are embodied in the various cutouts of the boy with his hands raised, suggesting that any future "portraiture" of the disaster will require multiple versions, just as the "Self Portrait" we have been examining could not be confined to a single face.
This portrait of a boy vividly aware of the fate of his family as well as the entire Jewish community may profitably be compared with "The Family," whose members have been touched by the threat of violence but are not yet conscious of its details. Similarly, "Beyond the Trees" sweeps away the natural camouflage that protects us from confronting the worst and exposes us to the imagery of death that lies at the heart of what we call the Holocaust. The absence of human figures shifts much of the responsibility for interpreting the scene before us to the viewer, who cannot share this dilemma with the people being portrayed. And finally, the purely symbolic chess painting which banishes concrete historical reference from the scene and substitutes chess pieces for people demands a different kind of response, since it raises the issue of conflict to a more sophisticated level of discourse. Here both artist and viewer enter into a more complex dialogue about meaning and intention, inviting the imagination to take risks while at the same time accepting limits to the adventure of interpretation.
Full-size image
|
|
