Painting the Nazi Gas Chambers with Defiant Realism

Art that deals with the Holocaust isn’t supposed to be abstract, says Mexican-Jewish artist Yishai Jusidman, whose exhibition opens this week in Manhattan.

New York − Among the best-known works in Belgian painter Luc Tuymans’ first retrospective in the United States was “Gaskamer” ‏(“Gas Chamber”‏), from 1986, an oil paining of an empty room whose architecture is based on photographs of the gas chambers in Nazi death camps….

A new exhibition of Jusidman’s works is due to open tomorrow in the gallery of Americas Society on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It is called “Prussian Blue: Memory after Representation − Yishai Jusidman.” In an interview in advance of the opening, Jusidman again tackled the way Tuymans’ approach is understood.

“The curatorial approach to his works, which I doubt faithfully represents Tuymans himself, echoes the closing proposition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.’ That is,” Jusidman continued, “the Holocaust belongs to the category of what cannot be represented, and therefore it can only be addressed, if at all, in metaphoric or abstract terms.….”

The response of Jusidman, who was born and raised in Mexico City’s Jewish community and has lived for the past few decades with his Israeli wife and their two daughters, was to begin work on the series of paintings that is being shown to the public for the first time this week. The exhibition is scheduled to run until the end of March. Curated by Gabriela Rangel, it consists of 14 paintings of varied size, all but two of which are based on photographs of the gas chambers in the Auschwitz, Dachau and Majdanek concentration camps....

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