Artists and the Holocaust - new exhibition in London (Feature)

By Anna Tomforde Sep 6, 2008, 3:06 GMT

London - Paintings capturing the impact of the Holocaust on artists who survived Nazi concentration camps and others who reflected on the subject in the decades since World War II are at the centre of a new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London.

The exhibition, titled Unspeakable: The Artist as Witness to the Holocaust, presents works ranging from eyewitness records of those directly affected to reflections produced decades later and responses from temporary artists to the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

At its centre are haunting images of contorted ashen faces and dark eyeless stares of paintings by Holocaust survivors Alicia Melamed Adams and Roman Halter, who were both orphaned and settled in Britain after the war.

'I painted them for myself, I wanted to get the sorrow from my soul but you don't get over such experiences really. You feel guilty that you have survived and others did not,' Adams said at the press opening.

Adams, whose painting The Parting is on display, survived the war by working for the son of a Gestapo tailor after her parents were killed in Poland in 1943. She arrived in Britain in 1950 and started painting in 1963.

'Painting provided the only solace I knew. It helped me heal my wounds,' she said.

Fellow artist Edith Birkin was sent to the Lodz ghetto in Nazi- occupied Poland in 1941.

Her parents died a year later and her painting A Camp Of Twins shows rows of impassive faces, suggesting the loneliness of living in a camp of strangers.

'I wanted to show what it felt like to be a human being in the starved, emaciated, strange looking body, forever being separated from loved ones,' she said.

Halter, who was sent to Auschwitz as a child, survived the Holocaust by becoming a metalworker and later trained as an architect.

His oil painting Transport is an image of the Madonna and Child reminiscent of a stained glass window, while Schlomo 1 is a homage to his brother, who was hanged in a concentration camp.

Halter, now 81, said: 'I made a promise to my grandfather when he was dying of starvation. He called me over and said, 'When you survive, speak clearly, tell the world that we Jews are being murdered'.'

Halter, whose series of seven paintings is entitled Memories of the Holocaust said he could not start painting until the 1970s. 'I had no voice to paint until then.'

The exhibition includes works from contemporary artist Jenny Stolzenberg, whose father was a Dachau survivor, and British war artist Eric Taylor, who was one of the first British soldiers to enter Belsen camp in Germany in April 1945.

Unspeakable, which is due to run until August 31, 2009, is an attempt to examine the artistic responses to the Holocaust and its resonance today, curator Ulrike Smalley explained.