Art, Beauty and the Shoah
Art, Beauty and the Shoah
The Jewish Week describes artist Yishai Jusidman’s attempt to “tackle the ongoing issue of describing the indescribable through art” in Prussian Blue: Memory after Representation showing at the Americas Society until March 23.
Yishai Jusidman’s color palette is limited to materials connected to the Nazi gas chambers: Prussian Blue, a pigment that appeared on the chamber walls as a by-product of the Zyklon B Gas; a silicon dioxide power used for pellets that delivered the gas to the sealed chambers; and flesh-tone colored paints, referring to the murdered millions.
In his exhibit, “Prussian Blue: Memory after Representation,” at the Americas Society, Jusidman tackles the ongoing issue of describing the indescribable ‒ the Shoah ‒ through art. In his series of paintings based on photographs of the Nazi gas chambers, Jusidman creates an anthology of ominously serene and perversely beautiful still lifes. How to reconcile the beauty and artfulness of the paintings with the horror of their subject matter is a question that any viewer must wrestle with.
As we walked through the gallery together, Jusidman made clear that his paintings are, foremost, about art. “We cannot replicate the holocaust through art. The challenge is how to make the interest of art and the interest of remembering come together.” There are no people in the paintings, no bodies, no piles of shoes or eyeglasses, just the bare space and architecture of the chambers. “Depicting suffering can only banalize it or make it into caricature,“ he added….
