St. Petersburg Times, October 26, 1998
Extraordinary, perhaps life-changing

Mary Ann Marger

From Gabrielle Rossmer's installation in tribute to her lost family to Pier Marton's chalkboard inviting response, the art exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and Educational Center is an emotional and aesthetic heavyweight.

"Witness and Legacy" isn't the prettiest show to see, nor the easiest. But it does have a powerful message: We must never again allow an attempt to wipe out an entire people.

The show examines aspects of the Holocaust by 22 artists, each with a different form of expression. A third are survivors, a third are children of survivors and a third are empathizers, which may apply to most viewers after seeing this show.

There are those who will come up with all sorts of excuses for avoiding this exhibit, just as they would not see Schindler's List. "I'm not Jewish." "I don't like sad stories." "I don't understand contemporary art."

Don't use those excuses. See this show.

It is a sensitivity session that may change your life. Artist Gerda Meyer-Bernstein says in her wall text: "I believe that art has the power to change society."

It poses questions that we alive today and those alive in the future struggle to answer: How do you comprehend 6-million? Where was God? How much heaviness can we bear and not become immune? What must we do so that we never forget?

But it is also good art. Colors may be subdued or bold, scale may be diminutive or oversized, in keeping with the artist's message. The works are narrative, substantive and laden with meaning.

"Witness and Legacy" was conceived by the Minnesota Museum of American Art, in St. Paul, as a means of commemorating the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz from the Nazis. It is curated by Dr. Stephen Feinstein, director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Minneapolis, who asked the artists to contribute works to a traveling show that would be, he says, "an artistic vision of the Holocaust, not historical."

Among the artists are five who have created large, enveloping installations. Each is an exhibit in itself, more concise than Judy Chicago's Holocaust Project, which showed in this space earlier this year.

But works can be modest and effective. There are Robert Barancik's little folded messages, Art Spiegelman's cartoon drawings for Maus II and Netty Vanderpol's fastidious needlepoint. Vanderpol, a survivor and classmate of Anne Frank's, searches the unfathomable depths as if through reduction and perfection her experience can somehow be set right.

Order also rises from ashes in Susan Erony's black and white works. She depicts the crowded Jewish cemetery in Prague, the markers tumbling over each other. Those dead were lucky; they left someone to remember.

Characteristic of Holocaust art, the works usually have the mission to tell the story. Universal symbols appear: A twisted line is barbed wire. A row is the slat of a boxcar. A rounded arch is an oven, or the roof of a house in Jerusalem, or the top of a tablet of the Ten Commandments.

Samuel Bak, best known of the survivor artists, depicts the two stone tablets in oil in Memorial, stacking them to represent a fragmented Decalogue. On the top left stone is "6" for the sixth commandment ("You shall not kill") but also for the 6-million. Two marks on the right form a Hebrew symbol for God; the six points of a Jewish star appear in the stone as if by accident. The sky is red. A thorny twig turns away.

Kitty Klaidman's Hidden Memories: Attic in Sastin can be interpreted as the attic where she and her family were hidden. Its crossbars are an abstract tribute to the Christian family who hid them.

It took almost 40 years before Klaidman, Vanderpol and other survivors could express themselves through art with a Holocaust focus. Klaidman writes that it seems to take that long to come to terms with one's personal Holocaust experiences.

Gerda Meyer-Bernstein's Shrine is one of several effective installations, but you may miss its dark entrance, bordered on one side by photos of Nazi mass murderer Rudolf Hess and focusing on three memorial candles in an Auschwitz oven. The artist, who escaped Germany in a children's emigration in 1939, has worked with other human issues (Vietnam, South Africa) in her career.

Joyce Lyon resurrects her father's memories in Conversations with Rzeszow. He was the only Jew in his town to survive. Her landscapes are barren; in her forest, the trees have no tops. The fence at Birkenau looks like the extension on the walls of the museum balcony.

Edith Altman's Reclaiming the Symbol/The Art of Memory makes an attempt to return the swastika to its ancient aesthetic position. Viewers who remember will find it a futile attempt. Larry Rivers, best known of the artists, touches on the same idea in Erasing the Past II. The memory of yellow stars, required badges for Jews, cannot be erased.

Some works, such as Jerome Witkin's rape scene, suggest a horror that the mind cannot resolve. At the opposite end of the scale are Jeffrey Wolin's photos of survivors, their stories written across their pictures. They appear to be gentle people going about their everyday lives.

You enter Pier Marton's installation, a narrow chalkboard hall, and see at the end three blatant, brassy letters: J E W. For a Jew they engender not pride but discomfort, as if it is something to hide.

Seth Kramer decided to give meaning to the Holocaust through performance art in which he would count out 6-million grains of rice. Friends scoffed, telling him it would take weeks.

It took eight months to reach 1-million. He is still counting.