The ‘Spirit’ That Endures

In purely physical and material terms, “The Enduring Spirit: Art of the Holocaust” at the Museum of Tolerance is an extremely modest exhibition. It weighed in last week with 245 works--a large number, to be sure, but most of them were executed in pencil, charcoal or ink on small, scrappy sheets of yellowing paper.

Yet if you consider its social, political and national agenda, the show arrived with more baggage than any exhibition since the vastly larger and more robust “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany,” curator Stephanie Barron’s 1991 landmark achievement at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Billed as the first exhibition of artworks actually created in World War II concentration camps, prisons and transit stations, “Enduring Spirit” packs tremendous force in the mere fact of its existence and the nature of its subject matter. A visit by one of the participants, France Hamelin, 78, a French artist with an effervescent personality who talked last week at a related conference about her incarceration, put a poignantly human face on the war and the exhibition.

Hamelin counts herself among the relatively lucky artists. In 1943 she was a Protestant member of the French Resistance when she was arrested by the French police and taken to La Petite Roquette, a women’s prison in Paris. She said the prisoners there were allowed to receive packages from their families every two weeks or so, and that paper and other supplies were shared by inmates.

Using charcoal and a strong sense of emotional turmoil, she drew disturbing portraits of her fellow prisoners and scenes of their depressing existence. Some of her work was destroyed by guards, but she managed to keep a few pieces when she was transferred to Les Tourelles, an even more lenient prison, and then to a hospital, where she gave birth to a son and escaped a few days later in 1944. “We managed in whatever way we could,” she said of her war experience.

Works by Hamelin and other artists in the exhibition include no fantasies about the future or memories of the past, only the harsh reality of the present. “They were absolutely glued to what was going on, and they focused on the more inhuman aspects,” said Jane Ten Brink, curator of the Museum of Tolerance.

One prominent theme is portraiture, but the faces are not idealized. Whether bored, distraught, exhausted or drained of feeling, the subjects appear to be surviving under extremely stressful conditions. “The thing that’s extraordinary is the expressiveness of the faces,” Ten Brink said. “They go beyond what is seen in conventional portraiture.”

Other recurrent themes include “work--and this is work that is intended to kill people, where they work like cattle, pulling very heavy things,” she said. “Also, people in bunk beds, stacked up like animals. And soup. You see people cleaning the soup bins, scraping the soup bins, hauling the soup bins. Soup was a major thing because that’s all they were given to eat.”

The few landscapes depict camp surroundings. One of only two allegorical works in the show, by Maurice de la Pintiere, portrays a crucifixion on a swastika; the other depicts Dora, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, as a death figure.

The unexpectedly fine quality of the artworks--considering the circumstances of their creation--has caused much comment. “One thing that I find extraordinary about this exhibition is it’s not only of great value because of the historical documentation and bearing witness, but what’s amazing is the high level of quality of the art,” Ten Brink said. “One doesn’t expect that, but it’s consistently high. Look at this drawing by Boris Taslitsky. He is really an extraordinary draftsman. He studied with [French sculptor] Jacques Lipchitz.”

Strolling through the show, she pointed out expressionistic figurative works by Anne Garcin-Mayade, who studied with French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and drawings by Jacques Barreau that refer to Old Masters.

“Basically you see very primitive means of execution,” she said. “When you encounter more elaborate works and you ask yourself, ‘How could they do this?,’ the answer is that conditions varied greatly from camp to camp.”

While most artworks were done in secret, some were executed with the tacit approval of guards, or at least without their interference. “Prisons and transit camps were more lenient than concentration camps, and it also depended upon who you were and if the guards liked you,” she said.

The artworks themselves are reason enough to see the show, but it has acquired an additional sense of urgency in its evidence of a nation’s public guilt, moral pride, intellectual freedom and creative energy. And this time the country under scrutiny is France, not Germany. Furthermore, France itself has taken the initiative in dealing with a painful topic.

Organized and first presented last fall at the Musee des Beaux Arts in Reims and followed by a brief run in Paris, the show was intended as a 50-year commemoration of the liberation of European concentration camps in 1945 and the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals in 1945-46. But another significant event that couldn’t have been predicted when the show was in its early planning stages has made it particularly timely.

French President Jacques Chirac, who took office last May, made a public statement in July acknowledging that France was an accomplice to the deportation of 75,000 Jews during World War II. “These dark hours soil forever our history and are an injury to our past and our traditions,” he said, responding to the French Jewish community’s entreaties and becoming the first French president to recognize the nation’s official role in the deportation of Jews. Chirac’s predecessor, Francois Mitterrand, had maintained that the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis, did not represent the French republic and its actions were not those of the state.

By the time “Enduring Spirit” arrived in Los Angeles, accompanied by the conference, it had acquired the imprimatur of the Cultural Services of France in the United States and the support of the Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA, as well as the Museum of Tolerance, the exhibition’s only U.S. venue. Indeed, the opening became a diplomatic event, with Francois Bujon de l’Estang, French ambassador to the United States, seizing the moment to pay his first official visit to Los Angeles.

Works in the original show came from about 20 European collections. The Los Angeles presentation is substantially the same, with a few losses of works that were too fragile to travel and some additions from the collections of the Museum of Tolerance and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Bringing the show to Los Angeles has been a major effort, but worth it, said Gerald Margolis, director of the Museum of Tolerance. “When we think of the basis of Western civilization, we often think of the capability to produce fine art and poetry and music. That’s one face. But this exhibition depicts the other face, the face of violence, brutality, exploitation and death camps. So the two coexist simultaneously and that’s very powerful.”

* “The Enduring Spirit: Art of the Holocaust,” Museum of Tolerance, 9760 W. Pico Blvd., (310) 553-8403. Hours: Monday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m.-3 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission: adults, $8; seniors, $6; students, $5; children under 10, $3. Ends June 16.