Sieg Maandag and Holocaust Art

According to Sarah Gendron, following Terrence Des Pres's notion of “Holocaust etiquette,” there are two forms of art that government-sponsored museums and memorials feel to be “safe” in representing the Holocaust: pure abstraction or direct, realist representation. The former is permissible since, with its “perceived capacity to sidestep misrepresentation,” it “does not seek to portray the event or those involved in a figural way” (Gendron, 2009, p. 416); the latter is acceptable for precisely the opposite reason, because they “present themselves as re-presentations, portraying moments ‘as they were’ without intervention, manipulation, or interpretation.” The artist appears to bear witness to the event, “providing proof of its ‘having definitely been’” (Gendron, 2009, p. 416). Abstraction too, as artists such as R.B. Kitaj (1989) have argued, may well be linked to the Holocaust in the works of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, who, among others, “shared a determination to negotiate memory through the language of abstraction” (Godfrey, 2004, p. 49; Feinstein, 1998, p. 202).

Art that does not fall into these two categories offers more of a challenge to the post-Holocaust world's ability to grapple with the meaning and representation of the genocide of the Jews. One thinks of the photorealism, or blurred “photorealism” of Gerhard Richter; the symbolic art of Józef Szajna, where thumbprints, for example, stand in for human beings at roll call; or the anonymous mass of Menashe Kadishman's shalechet (fallen leaves), each representing a human face, all the same but all different.

What might be thought of as the Holocaust art “canon” certainly questions whether Gendron's two categories are as

dominant as she suggests, although when talking of a canon we are likely to be referring to art that is critically acclaimed rather than government-approved. The oeuvres of Samuel Bak, Ceija Stojka, Shmuel Dresner, Anselm Kiefer, and Christian Boltanski, to name just