SAMUEL BAK: "RETURNING HOME" 
Exhibition of works 1942-2001
(23 September, 2001 - 30 January, 2002, Vilnius Picture Gallery)

• To my Friends in Vilnius
• Samuel as Seen by a of Todays Vilnius
• Virtual Exhibition "Samuel Bak: RETURNING HOME" 

I HALL   II HALL  III HALL   IV HALL

To my Friends in Vilnius

Vilnius is the city in which I was born 68 years ago.
Vilnius is the place in which I discovered the pleasures of a child's paradise: a loving family, a protected, perhaps overprotected existence.
Vilnius is the stage on which I discovered the evils of War, man's capacity for hatred, his bestiality, as well as his capacity for goodness and self-sacrifice. It is in the gruesome reality of the Nazi ghetto that at nine I had my first show. The Vilnius of 1944 gave me my first lessons in painting, a profession that was to fill my life. Soviet Vilnius is the place from which I fed when I was eleven, carrying with me a wealth of mental images and an inconsolable
feeling of loss. Both have nurtured my art. In it I speak about a world, that had been destroyed, and I try to depict man's everlasting but vain struggle to rebuild it as it was. I guess that in a larger sense I have tried to refect on our human condition.
It is to the Vilnius of today that I humbly bring the fruit of my work.
It is a pleasure to present it to an open-minded public, and an honor to dedicate it to all my new friends in Vilnius, men and women of good will, people who believe that only the watchful preservation of a painful memory can shield us from repeating past mistakes. Pondering the lessons of history is a never-ending school for the living.
Yet this exhibition is also an imaginary offering to my private ghosts, my assassinated father, grandparents, and the many members and friends of my family, an occasion to show them what their boy, so "full of promise," has accomplished. Their memory accompanies me wherever I go. But their scattered ashes lie here, in the woods of Paneriai, on the outskirts of a city that is uniquely enshrined in my soul - my beloved birth-town Vilnius.

Samuel Bak
Boston, Fall 2001

Samuel as Seen by a of Todays Vilnius

Many years ago, when I was leafing through Samuel Bak's pictures at the Jewish Museum, pictures that are juvenile yet attest to early maturity, and found out that he had survived - when his older colleagues from the Kaunas and Vilnius ghettoes perished in the Holocaust - I more than once imagined this: what would it be like if Samuel Bak, carrying his pictures and experience, were to appear on the streets of Vilnius today? In a city from which he once fled, persecuted by the shadows of the ghetto.
How would that city appear to him? And how would he appear to that city?
On the occasion of the publication of this catalog in Vilnius and of the presentation of this painter's works urb'i et orb'i, I cannot but share my joy with the public. Dreams have become reality. The verdict of the Holocaust has been commuted for Vilnius: here, a retrospective exhibition of Samuel Bak's; works has been opened.
From the very beginning, this painter living in the United States has amazed me on several accounts. On how purely European he is in his experience and language of artistic expression. On how deeply he draws on his childhood for creative impulses. On how understandable one of the leitmotifs of his works is for me: man futilely strives to recreate the past while things
and even the spirit in landscapes are decaying and yet in no way decay completely. To me, someone who avoided the war and was born in postwar Lithuania, in a closed communist ghetto, it has also always seemed that the essence of everything surrounding me is stale or forgotten, locked away in the past, and that I am surrounded by ruins and the vestiges of a past life.
The creation of a canvas is a contradictory process of many meanings, but a rainbow, nailed together from painted boards and depicted in one of Samuel Bak's latest American works, is for me a completely intelligible and almost tangible attribute of the surrealistic environment of our youth during the Soviet period. It seems that all of us hopelessly tried to recreate the past, to capture its spirit.
And at the same time, for us who have remained in this country and are living at the turn of the century, do his pictures not strike a chord in our experience? For example: Departure (1978/1998), in which an elegant couple recedes along a street obstructed by ruins or perhaps by builders or renovators while masks gaze into the past; To One of the Shtetfs (1998), in which a Jewish town is covered with canvas like furniture not in use or perhaps about to be moved; flight from Berlin (1990), in which an attempt is made to fly on a mechanical dove as a brick wall cracks. Samuel Bak's wooden horses and doves remind me of things that were once widespread in Lithuania but have since been broken and thrown into the trash. Like his chessmen. All of them participate in a curiously serious action reminiscent of meaningless rituals performed by characters in an absurdist drama. And his still life figures remind me of things that, seemingly, have always quietly gathered dust in artists' studios until the thoughtful gaze of a creator is fixed on them.
Last spring I saw the painter for the first time as he disembarked from a plane at Vilnius Airport. His soft velvet jacket absorbed the bright May light. At first glance, he did not at all look like an American to me but like a genuine product of the Old World. And the plastic language of his painting confirms his European roots. Even the chessmen in Samuel Bak's land of chess from his famous series are never black and white; his chessboard is multicolored like the sleeve of a character in the commedio deti'orte. The creator of the chess series surely must have imagined how a rationally organized, "serious" society would appear after a cataclysm, Is that not a wonderful creative discovery, even though for us, living in old Europe, the
roots-historical roots-of such thinking are clear? And what about the Biblical Hebrew letters - part of the landscapes and still lifes of Samuel Bak's Genesis - that have come, erratically from the scrolls of the Torah? The artist's landscapes do not usually have an address, but their atmosphere and their creator's view of time and eternity recall the poem Vilnius, by Moshe Kulbak, who died before the war Samuel Bak is both Jewish and universally human. With exactly the same questions with which we approach his canvases we could, I think - even if it sounds somewhat sentimental - approach the books of the Old Testament: is that Jewish experience, or is it universal human experience?
Humankind, as we know, answered these questions in its own way The creations of artists who survived the Holocaust and later worked in the West - both Samuel Bak's canvases and the books by the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer who incidentally also wrote about Bak's painting - presented the fate of the Jews as a model of existence for all humanity
However sometimes life surpasses the imagination of an artist and even of a child. And it seems that we, too, are figures on a chessboard, with whom higher forces are playing. Could a twelve-year-old boy who lost his father in the ghetto, fled from the postwar Soviet Union with his mother and dreamed of becoming an artist indeed imagine that one day he would return to that same Vilnius, free from dictatorships, terror and hatred, and exhibit to people in its wide-open halls his harvest of works that have won international recognition?
Thus, I am happy to inform the people of Vilnius that the National Museum of Art and the Jewish Museum are exhibiting over a hundred of Samuel Bak's works. This exhibition was organized through close cooperation with the Pucker Gallery of Boston. The artist will leave some of his works at the Jewish Museum.
I hope that thousands of people will see his paintings in Vilnius; Samuel Bak has something to tell them. His memoirs, Pointed in Words, will also soon be published in Lithuania. This book will reveal to readers that Samuel Bak is a master not only of the paintbrush but also of the word: when writing about his feelings, this artist creates an episode as vividly as if he were working with a brush rounding out a still life figure. I wish him success upon his spiritual return to his birthplace.

Emanuelis Zingeris
Director of the Vilna Gaon State Museum
Chairman of the Jewish Cultural Support Fund of Lithuania

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