Seeing and Doing, A Meditation on an Afterlife in Art1

It almost doesn't matter what you paint. It is what takes place during the act of painting that matters. (Flack, 1991, p. 10)

Simon describes his father being very open to his children's opinions. “Wait,” his father would say. “Look. Really look. Tell me. What do you see?” Sarah told a story about how a huge crowd followed her and her father as they made their way around a Dali exhibit.

“In this world full of symbols,” Sieg wrote, “seeing and doing go hand in hand. Seeing what the moment has to say and giving the moment form by the deed.” (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, p. 37)

For the artist Sieg Maandag, Audrey Flack's (1991) words are apt: it doesn't matter what he paints, what counts is the act of painting, the seeing and the doing. What is arresting about Sieg's work as it comes to us through the pages of Sieg Maandag: Life and Art in the Aftermath of Bergen-Belsen is the intensity of his drive to experiment, to grow, to change, to explore new territory—to be liberated into his own creativity.

We are struck by the way that visual culture has limned this artist's life. His image became emblematic of the atrocities of Bergen-Belsen in George Rodger's Life magazine photo of May 9, 1945. Rodger's photo records an unnamed little boy walking past hundreds of mangled corpses lying by the side of

the road. He looks away. The photograph was read as a German child turning away from the horrors his countrymen had perpetrated, but that was not the case. Rather, the photograph depicts a scene that was all too familiar to this little Dutch boy who had survived the camp.

Part of what confused those who first saw the image was that, unlike the “starving and filthy children” British troops first saw “walking among the piles of bodies in the camp,” the little boy in this photograph is well-dressed. Sieg had just received these new clothes donated by German citizens from a nearby town (Maandag-Ralph & Skorczewski, 2020, pp. 23, 27). As