There is something ironic, as well as something true, in the frequent description of Samuel Bak as “the Holocaust artist.”

Bak, whose work is on display through April 12 at the University of New Hampshire’s Paul Creative Arts Center, formed his distinctive approach to artistic expression as a Jew in the thick of Nazi-era Europe. He was born in 1933 in Vilna, now Vilnius, a city so embroiled in the gritty politics of the time that it suffered rule by four different nations in fewer than 20 years. Bak’s family lived in the ghetto, in a displaced persons camp and in Munich before finally escaping to Israel in 1948. He nurtured his craft under the guidance of a series of mentors heroically gathered by his mother. Each of Bak’s early teachers championed a different genre as the climax of artistic form: they introduced him, by turns, to classicism, impressionism and expressionism. He now says that their greatest lesson to him was that “there is no one right way to do art.”

Such a childhood clearly left a deep impression on Bak as a painter—hence the partial legitimacy of calling him “the Holocaust artist.” Unfortunately, the term brings to mind an almost Goya-like literalism: one imagines an oeuvre of gore and desolation, imbued with shades of earth and blood, perhaps punctuated on occasion by a dim and teasing vision of a better world. But most of Bak’s imagery is not derived directly from the Holocaust. In many of his paintings, it is true, one can find crematorium chimneys (often disguised as or melded with candles), dilapidated slums reminiscent of the ghettoes, and references to the famous photograph of the Warsaw “ghetto boy” surrendering to German soldiers. However, there are also stacked and abused books, worried angels, broken teddy bears and the pears that have become one of Bak’s most distinctive symbolic motifs.

For many years, Bak downplayed the role of the Holocaust in his work; his message is not so provincial. As he said in a phone interview from his home in Weston, Mass., “It so happens that I was born at a certain moment in history at a certain place and I was exposed to the experience of the Holocaust. It so happens that I am among the lucky ones that survived. And when I produce the art, I produce it with all the basic and important ingredients of what structured me.”

To Bak, his work is neither a propaganda mission nor a journalistic endeavor.

“I am not producing art as a certain program with which I am going to change the universe or the mentality of people who look at it.  I am doing my art because I am compelled to produce art,” he said. “I am trying somehow to speak about my own personal exposure to the horror of the forces that bring havoc and destruction into the world.”

Bak’s work is clearly surrealist in style, and as such, it wears its symbolism on its sleeve. Sometimes the meaning is fairly transparent. “Alone,” an unusually simple composition for Bak, depicts a crumbling island of dilapidated buildings in the shape of a Star of David, surrounded by a vaguely malevolent plane of mostly undifferentiated water and sky. In other works the meaning is more ambiguous. “Searching,” for example, borrows heavily from Michelangelo’s work on the Sistine Chapel. A statue of a shaven-headed man, fractured and chipped, reclines in the familiar pose of Adam. His limp hand stretches out unmet, echoed behind itself by a larger wooden hand propped in the air by sticks. Just behind this scene God’s hand is carved at the peak of a rock, pointing leftward at a stone head possessed of a full head of hair. Far in the background streams of smoke are blown over a hill, reminding the viewer of the crematoriums present in so many of Bak’s other works.

When asked about a particular symbol, Bak often has two stories to tell: one historical, describing how it arose in his own experience, and one analytic, describing how he uses it to express the universal. For example, Bak uses pears as a symbol of life and knowledge. “In Vilna in the 1930s the pears were wonderful,” Bak said at a gallery talk on Feb. 15, “but the apples were sour. When I was told that this silly man Adam had lost Paradise for an apple, I said, no, that must have been a pear.” Even more common in Bak’s work are images of people and objects shattered and put back together imperfectly. On the surface this symbol represents a world dismembered by bombs. More deeply, it reinforces the impression of a world where good and evil are in an awkward balance—a world in which destruction is commonplace, but reconstruction and renewal are unrelenting. It also reflects Bak’s history as an artist: as a child Bak learned to sculpt the human body piecemeal using pieces of discarded plaster mold.
The works displayed at UNH are largely presented in thematic series, each of which is characterized by a holistic development of meaning through the manipulation of iconographical context: series represented are “The Ghetto Boy,” “Genesis,” “Landscapes of Jewish Experience,” “Return to Vilna” and “Pears.”  It is well worth reading the panels to learn a bit about Bak’s intentions, but it is also worth taking the time to examine the paintings for oneself before doing so.

Though Bak’s work is clearly influenced in many ways by 20th-century artistic movements, he is no thoughtless postmodernist. He criticizes many of his contemporaries for “throwing out the bathwater with the baby” with regard to Renaissance art. Much of the fascination of art, he says, used to be the spectacle of the artist’s extraordinary genius for representation.

“For ages and ages the excellence of the artist’s capacity was always a very important factor. Now it so happened that contemporary art has given up many of these techniques. For right reasons or wrong, often people felt that any child could do it. And this has somehow very much diminished the respect that people have for art… I thought it would be a challenge to return, to find the baby of the centuries of Renaissance and Classical art, and try to do something quite contemporary that speaks to our time and age, and do it in a way that seemingly is an evocation of those values,” he said during the interview.

This respect for the masters emerges in Bak’s allusions to and reinterpretations of other artists— Michelangelo in particular—but more, in Bak’s powerful craftsmanship, which he takes to a rare level of excellence. The power of Bak’s work is unfortunately diminished by its constant top-layer metaphors, which, as in many works influenced by surrealism, serve largely to distance the viewer from the meaning of the work. Because the metaphors are so dominant, Bak’s intentions are often vague, and the viewer’s experience can be as much of puzzle-solving as of contemplation. But one finds little to criticize in his manner of presentation; stylistically, his work is superb.

Bak’s work would be striking in any era, but it gains by contrast to the mainstream of contemporary art. Too many local art exhibits turn out to be anything but: one can only take so many tourist-trap quainteries and hollow abstractions before despairing over the prospect of finding meaning in the field that is capable of expressing the height of human thought and feeling. Given his subject matter, the mood of Bak’s work is often surprisingly optimistic. “I have a very strong sense of gratitude,” Bak says, “for the random events that have allowed me to survive. I have absolutely no explanation for that. But it gave me a strong sense of wonderment, and I guess that I am trying in every painting that I do to understand that. So actually, my paintings are all sort of questioning something for an answer that I will probably never find.”