EXHIBITION A TRIBUTE TO WALLENBERG

An exhibition of work by Alice Lok Cahana, titled “From Ashes to the Rainbow: A Tribute to Raoul Wallenberg,” reminds us of an episode in recent history that must not be forgotten.

On view through Aug. 9 at Hebrew Union College’s Skirball Museum, the show is a visual chronicle of Cahana’s attempt to heal the wounds she suffered as a victim of the Holocaust. In light of all she endured, the fact that she manages to conclude the show with a note of forgiveness is an extraordinary testament to the resilience of the human spirit. As she comments in a video included in the exhibit, “If I hate, then the Nazis have succeeded. I have been contaminated.”

Presently living in Houston, Cahana was trained as a lyric abstractionist but radically changed her style after a 1978 visit to her native Hungary.

Just 15 when she was snatched from her home in Savar and deported to a sequence of three concentration camps where she lived for 18 months, Cahana spent many years gathering the strength to face that experience and to attempt to put it to rest. This work is the fruit of those labors and is appropriately dedicated to Swedish resistance hero Raoul Wallenberg, who saved the lives of more than 100,000 Hungarian Jews during the war. Cahana’s father was among those rescued by Wallenberg, who mysteriously vanished into Russian “protective custody” in 1945.

The horror of the Holocaust is so unimaginably vast that to apply the usual criteria employed in evaluating art to such a subject seems shallow at best. It must be said, however, that Cahana has the technique and intuitive sense of how to tell a story in images. Collaging photographs, singed fragments of her mother’s prayer book and false passports of the sort Wallenberg procured for Hungarian Jews into loosely painted figurative images, Cahana conveys a palpable sense of the filth and mortal exhaustion she experienced as a girl.

We see the ovens, the railway tracks that led to death and the all-consuming fire that extinguished the life she knew as a child. Numbers symbolizing the Nazis’ obsessive head-counting and tallying recur in many of the images, as do the charred remains of letters and children’s drawings. The images are often paired with poetry or prose describing the various psychological stages experienced by Holocaust victims, whose confusion gave way to disbelief, followed by terror and resignation.

The final gallery chamber is given over to a series of paintings based on the theme of Jacob’s Ladder. Long, vertical images exploding with color, the paintings are essentially metaphors for the rebirth of hope that became Cahana’s ladder out of the hell of her past.

This is an unusually moving art exhibition and a very productive one, too. After seeing this show, the subtle, insidious forms of racism that permeate our--and every--culture become disturbingly apparent.