By THIRSTY
Bruce Gendelman is
a very thoughtful, private artist who for the past four decades has created a
very large body of work that represents a statement about his life, his family
and his perspective on the world. Although he works out of a cavernous studio
in West Palm Beach, Florida, few have had the privilege of viewing his entire
collection.
Recently, Stay Thirsty Magazine had the
opportunity to sit down with him to talk about his most recent work that deals
with the Holocaust. It is nearly impossible to convey the intensity of emotions
that well-up standing in the presence of his very large, elegiac paintings and
his tour de force installation entitled Birkenau
Bunks Diorama as he discusses the family members he lost in the Holocaust
and his personal journey to walk through the ashes of history.
STAY THIRSTY: What sparked your
desire to devote so much of your time and artistic energy to the Holocaust?
BRUCE GENDELMAN: I became extremely
moved during a trip to Eastern Europe with my sister Nina and her husband,
sculptor, Richard Edelman. Richard was
dedicating “Shofar Krakow,” an 18-feet
tall stainless steel working shofar made from broken stars of David, installed next
to the new JCC in Krakow, Poland. The trip extended into a broader “roots
journey” to massacre sites with Father Patrick DesBois, then to Auschwitz II-Birkenau,
and then into Ukraine to see what happened to my mother’s father’s family, who
was exterminated in the Holocaust.
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| Bruce Gendelman |
STAY THIRSTY: Which of the
mediums that you work in brings you the most satisfaction in expressing your
feelings about what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust? What is it about
that medium that is so compelling to you?
BRUCE GENDELMAN: This is a question
that is difficult to answer. For me, the photography sets the current record
and then provides a starting point for my expression through painting and the
epic-scale “Bunks” installation sculpture. In my studio, I spend the greatest
amount of my time painting. This subject matter is extremely emotionally difficult
for me. The scale of the work is extremely large – 8 feet high by 5 feet wide –
in very heavy oil paint impasto. I do my best to feel and then convey the
anguish and darkness of the evil that the Nazis perpetrated.
The entire
painting series has as its premise to paint the landscapes, or as I call them
Deathscapes, of the horrors of Birkenau. The “Chimney” works are a permanent
remembrance of those nameless leagues of men who died as slave laborers
constructing and living in agony in the barracks. All that now remain are the
ruins of the chimneys – standing as lone soldiers, monuments to the lives and
their suffering. The paintings are made with trowels, the same way that the
chimneys were built, brick by brick, rising up into a dark sky of despair.
There are three works that I “saw” in my dreams (nightmares), that depict in a
more abstract emotional way, my interpretation of the despair and chaos of the
camp.
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| Birkenau Barracks Memorial 2 (2015) |
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| Birkenau Barracks Memorial 3 (2015) |
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| Birkenau Barracks Memorial 4 (2015) |
The final work is in progress. It is an 8-feet high x 12-feet wide bird's-eye view landscape of a Birkenau sunset that has over 500 lbs of oil paint on it. It's a sunset that competes with the fire and ash of the crematorium. It intends to show in an offsetting way the German precision of the industrial design of the death and labor camp and the hopelessness of those who lived in the barracks.
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| (Work in Progress - 2017) |
STAY THIRSTY: Where did the idea
for your installation entitled Birkenau
Bunks Diorama come from? How did you go about designing it and what
motivated you to have your face appear as the face of each prisoner?
BRUCE GENDELMAN: The concept also came
to me in a dream. I was haunted by the many images of the faces of the men in
their bunks, in several famous photographs. I sought to create an artist's
version of that despair and anguish. In touring the camps, there, of course, are
no people – it's only through these few historical photos and first hand
written accounts that we can begin to “see” their state of starvation and how
they clung to life.
I had been
thinking about the concept for about six months before I realized how I could
create an impactful image. The installation sculpture is 22-feet wide, 20-feet
deep, and 9-feet high. It is a foreshortened three-point perspective “diorama.”
I built a matrix of string site lines in my studio, and from that, I was able
to determine the correct measurements and angles for each piece of wood. I
created over 60 men, slave laborers, in decreasing size to compliment the
illusion of depth.
I wanted to show
the bunks with human forms. As I was making the men I had several choices as to
how to portray them. I could have realistically painted the actual faces of the
men from the historical photos, or I could have imagined men and painted those.
I quickly dismissed these as disrespectful. On the other hand, I wanted, as an
artist, to do my best to have viewers of my work try to feel the horror, in
effect to put themselves in the inmate's place, three generations later. I
decided there was no better way to do that than to put my image, with various
expressive views, on each man. The idea is the artist wants you, the viewer, to
imagine yourself there – he has attempted to do it, “you” can also. As
unrealistic as it is, the message is: If everyone could feel the human agony,
they would never hurt others.
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| Birkenau Bunks Diorama |
STAY THIRSTY: In addition to
creating your art, you hold lectures in your studio about your family’s
experience in the Nazi extermination system and its impact on your work. How do
audiences react to your talk and your art? What moves them the most? What
surprises you about how a contemporary audience reacts to events that happened
over 70 years ago?
BRUCE GENDELMAN: I have been very
honored and moved that, through word of mouth, various people and groups call
and come to the studio after previous attendees tell them “you must see this.”
Then they see it, and call their friends and family and tell them to come. It’s
been a steady stream of visitors.
I have had
Holocaust survivors, scholars, Rabbis and school groups. Almost unanimously,
the reactions have been quite overwhelming. I have developed a 30-45 minute presentation
that starts with my photographic images and Bob Miller's brilliant poetry, then
moves on to my description of how and why I created the large scale oil
painting series, then moves on to a short video presentation of historical
clips – Hitler's words, which lead to the burning of books, which leads to the
death camps… and then I unveil the “Bunks” installation. When the unveiling
happens – there are always audible gasps, sighs, tears and outright sobbing. For
the school groups, I weave a case study of how political philosophy of words
through propaganda can lead to genocide.
STAY THIRSTY: You have also
written a book about your journey, Sifting
Through
Ashes, Words & Images,
co-authored by Robert Miller. The book memorializes your
photography and oil
paintings on the Holocaust and includes poems written by your co-author. At the
end of the book’s Preface, you quote
Auschwitz survivor, Viktor E.
Frankl: “What matters, therefore, is not the
meaning of life in general, but, rather, the specific meaning of a person’s
life at a given moment.” How do you feel in your life at this moment about its
meaning and about what you are doing with your art?
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| Robert Miller |
BRUCE GENDELMAN: That answer
requires a great deal of introspection. Briefly, I view life as fragile and
short, even if one lives to an old age. The extermination of six million of my
fellow Jews, by men in power in a civilized society, a society not unlike ours
today, is unspeakable in its depravity. I feel compelled to convey to the best
of my ability, to anyone who will listen, complicated multiple threads that
brought this about, not only to emote the horror through art, but to teach
young people how to critically understand the influences around them.
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As a special
addition to this interview, Poet Robert Miller has contributed the following
poem from Sifting Through Ashes
(2016, Gefen Publishing House Ltd.):
Smell
You would no
sooner deny the sense of what is present here
than you would the
odor of flesh rotting in a room,
although nothing
is here now of what was, not really.
No shrunken
ghosts, no torturers strutting among diseased and decaying bodies,
gone the fear, the
hunger, the endless hunger,
the fences electrified
while victims sagged with the deadness of despair.
Yet, in another
sense, all that happened is here, right now,
you cannot ignore
this presence, this fog of lingering evil.
A shrine now
sterile, yet the past’s depravity surrounds you like the air itself.
How can we
still perceive in place what is lost forever in time?
The earth,
patient, swallows the stench of our worst deeds,
proof that we and
it are made of the same stuff,
water and magma,
tied to each other as we hurtle through space,
away from, or
towards, the pungent past.