Abstraction and the Holocaust

Abstraction and the Holocaust PDF

Author: Mark Godfrey

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780300126761

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Mark Godfrey looks closely at a series of American art and architectural projects that respond to the memory of the Holocaust. He investigates how abstract artists and architects have negotiated Holocaust memory without representing the Holocaust figuratively or symbolically.

Unstill Life: A Daughter's Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction

Unstill Life: A Daughter's Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction PDF

Author: Gabrielle Selz

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2014-05-05

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0393239179

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"Weaving her family narrative into the larger story of twentieth-century art and culture, Selz paints [a] ... portrait of her charismatic father--the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art and director of his own art museum in California]-- ... the generation of modern artists he championed, and the daughter whose life he shaped"--Dust jacket flap.

Shoah Presence: Architectural Representations of the Holocaust

Shoah Presence: Architectural Representations of the Holocaust PDF

Author: Eran Neuman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1317055241

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Through the analysis of several commemorative acts in space, matter and image, namely museums and memorials, this book reflects on the ways in which architecture as a discipline, a practice and a discourse represents the Holocaust. In doing so, it problematises how one presents an extreme historical case in a contemporary context and integrates the historical into actuality. By examining several cases, the book defines the issues faced by various architects who dealt with this topic and discusses their separate and distinctive approaches. In each case, it analyses the ways in which the cultural and political contexts of commemoration led to a different interpretation of the condition. Focusing on the Ghetto Fighters’ House, the world’s first Holocaust museum; Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem; the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington; and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the book discusses how the representation of history by architecture creates a dialectic process in which architecture mediates the past to the present, while at the same time creating a present saturated with historical contexts. It shows how, together, they are incorporated into one another and create a new reality: past and present intertwined.

Rethinking the Holocaust

Rethinking the Holocaust PDF

Author: Yehuda Bauer

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9780300093001

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Drawing on research from various historians, the author offers opinions on how to define and explain the Holocaust, comparison to other genocides, and the connection between the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel.

Action/abstraction

Action/abstraction PDF

Author: Maurice Berger

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13:

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The abstract paintings of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Lee Krasner, Clyfford Still, Helen Frankenthaler, and others revolutionized the art world in the 1940s and 1950s and continue to inspire passionate arguments to this day. What were these artists trying to achieve? Who were the critical voices of the time that rallied public interest in Abstract Expressionism and sparked rancorous debate? Drawing on recent critical, historical, and biographical work, this lavishly illustrated book offers a sharp new focus on a pivotal art movement. It also presents an extensive commentary on the two most influential critics of postwar American art--Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg--whose powerful views shaped perceptions of Abstract Expressionism and other contemporary art movements. In one essay, Norman L. Kleeblatt traces the influence of Abstract Expressionism into the mid-1970s and examines its connection to subsequent art styles. Other essays range from the literary and intellectual culture of New York during that period and an analysis of sculpture and representation to a discussion of Jewish issues in relation to postwar American Art. In addition, the book features a magisterial essay by eminent critic Irving Sandler and a copiously illustrated cultural timeline by Maurice Berger.

Holocaust Memory Reframed

Holocaust Memory Reframed PDF

Author: Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2014-03-31

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0813571847

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Holocaust memorials and museums face a difficult task as their staffs strive to commemorate and document horror. On the one hand, the events museums represent are beyond most people’s experiences. At the same time they are often portrayed by theologians, artists, and philosophers in ways that are already known by the public. Museum administrators and curators have the challenging role of finding a creative way to present Holocaust exhibits to avoid clichéd or dehumanizing portrayals of victims and their suffering. In Holocaust Memory Reframed, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich examines representations in three museums: Israel’s Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Germany’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She describes a variety of visually striking media, including architecture, photography exhibits, artifact displays, and video installations in order to explain the aesthetic techniques that the museums employ. As she interprets the exhibits, Hansen-Glucklich clarifies how museums communicate Holocaust narratives within the historical and cultural contexts specific to Germany, Israel, and the United States. In Yad Vashem, architect Moshe Safdie developed a narrative suited for Israel, rooted in a redemptive, Zionist story of homecoming to a place of mythic geography and renewal, in contrast to death and suffering in exile. In the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Daniel Libeskind’s architecture, broken lines, and voids emphasize absence. Here exhibits communicate a conflicted ideology, torn between the loss of a Jewish past and the country’s current multicultural ethos. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum presents yet another lens, conveying through its exhibits a sense of sacrifice that is part of the civil values of American democracy, and trying to overcome geographic and temporal distance. One well-know example, the pile of thousands of shoes plundered from concentration camp victims encourages the visitor to bridge the gap between viewer and victim. Hansen-Glucklich explores how each museum’s concept of the sacred shapes the design and choreography of visitors’ experiences within museum spaces. These spaces are sites of pilgrimage that can in turn lead to rites of passage.

Judaism and the Visual Image

Judaism and the Visual Image PDF

Author: Melissa Raphael

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2009-02-19

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1441190562

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The widespread assumption that Jewish religious tradition is mediated through words, not pictures, has left Jewish art with no significant role to play in Jewish theology and ethics. Judaism and the Visual Image argues for a Jewish theology of image that, among other things, helps us re-read the creation story in Genesis 1 and to question why images of Jewish women as religious subjects appear to be doubly suppressed by the Second Commandment, when images of observant male Jews have become legitimate, even iconic, representations of Jewish holiness. Raphael further suggests that 'devout beholding' of images of the Holocaust is a corrective to post-Holocaust theologies of divine absence from suffering that are infused by a sub-theological aesthetic of the sublime. Raphael concludes by proposing that the relationship between God and Israel composes itself into a unitary dance or moving image by which each generation participates in a processive revelation that is itself the ultimate work of Jewish art.

Image and Remembrance

Image and Remembrance PDF

Author: Shelley Hornstein

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780253215697

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The passage of time and the reality of an aging survivor population have made it increasingly urgent to document and give expression to testimony, experience, and memory of the Holocaust. At the same time, artists have struggled to find a language to describe and retell a legacy often considered "unimaginable." Contrary to those who insist that the Holocaust defies representation, Image and Remembrance demonstrates that artistic representations are central to the practice of remembrance and commemoration. Including essays on representations of the Holocaust in film, architecture, painting, photography, memorials, and monuments, this thought-provoking volume considers ways in which visual artists have given form to the experience of the Holocaust and addresses the role that imagination plays in shaping historical memory. Among works discussed are Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, Rachel Whiteread's Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, Morris Louis's series of paintings Charred Journal, photographer Shimon Attie's Writing on the Wall, and Mikael Levin's series Untitled. Image and Remembrance provides a thoughtful site for personal reflection and commemoration as well as a context for reconsidering the processes of art making and the cultural significance of artistic images. Contributors: Ernst van Alphen, Monica Bohm-Duchen, Tim Cole, Rebecca Comay, Mark Godfrey, Reesa Greenberg, Marianne Hirsch, Shelley Hornstein, Florence Jacobowitz, Berel Lang, Daniel Libeskind, Andrea Liss, Leslie Morris, Leo Spitzer, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Janet Wolff, Robin Wood, James Young, and Carol Zemel.