Samuel Bak (; born 12 August 1933) is a Jewish Lithuanian-American painter and writer who survived the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel in 1948. Since 1993, he has lived in the United States.
Biography
Samuel Bak was born in Wilno (Vilnius), Second Polish Republic, on August 12, 1933. Bak was recognized from an early age as having artistic talent. He describes his family as secular, but proud of their Jewish identity.
By 1939, when Bak was six years old, World War II began, and the city of Vilnius was transferred from Poland to Lithuania. When Vilnius was occupied by the Germans on June 24, 1941, Bak and his family were forced to move into the ghetto. At the age of nine, he held his first exhibition inside the ghetto. Bak and his mother sought refuge in a Benedictine convent where a Catholic nun named Maria Mikulska tried to help them. After returning to the ghetto, they were deported to a forced labour camp, but took shelter again in the convent where they remained in hiding until the end of the war.
By the end of the war, Samuel and his mother were the only members of his extensive family to survive. in July 1944, his father, Jonas, was shot by the Germans, only a few days before Samuel's own liberation. As Bak described the situation, "when in 1944 the Soviets liberated us, we were two among two hundred of Vilna's survivors—from a community that had counted 70 or 80 thousand." Bak and his mother, as pre-war Polish citizens, were allowed to leave Soviet-occupied Vilnius and travel to central Poland, at first settling briefly in Łódź. They soon left Poland and traveled into the American-occupied zone of Germany.
From 1945 to 1948, he and his mother lived in displaced persons camps in Germany. He spent most of this period at the Landsberg am Lech DP camp in Germany. It was there he painted a self-portrait shortly before repudiating his Bar Mitzvah ceremony. Bak also studied painting in Munich during this period, and painted A Mother and Son, 1947, which evokes some of his dark memories of the Holocaust and escape from Soviet-occupied Poland.
In 1948, Bak and his mother immigrated to Israel. In 1952, he studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces, he continued his studies in Paris from 1956 at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts He spent various periods of time in Rome, Paris, Switzerland and Israel.
In 1993, he and his wife Josee moved to Boston, where they have been settling permanently.
In 2001, Bak returned to Vilnius for the first time since his youth and has visited his hometown several times since then.
Artistic style and influences
Samuel Bak's art has elements of post-modernism, as he employs different styles and visual vernaculars, i.e. surrealism (Salvador Dali, René Magritte), analytical cubism (Picasso), pop art (Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein) and quotations from the old masters. The artist never paints direct scenes of mass death. Instead, he employs allegory, metaphor and certain artistic devices such as substitution: toys instead of the murdered children who played with them, books, instead of the people who read them. Further devices are quotations of iconographical prototypes, i.e. Michelangelo's Creation of Adam (1511/12) on the Sistine Ceiling or Albrecht Dürer's famous engraving entitled Melancholia (1516). In the late 1980s, Bak opened up about his paintings, stating they convey "a sense of a world that was shattered."
In his piece entitled Trains, Bak creates a vast grey landscape with large mounts creating the structure of a train. Massive taper candles burn in the distance further down the train tracks, surrounding an eruption. The smoke from the candles and volcano pour into a sky of dark ominous clouds that lurk over the landscape. Here Bak has created a whole new meaning for "trains". Many of Bak’s pieces incorporate aspects of Jewish culture and the holocaust with a dark and creative twist, such as Shema Yisrael, Alone, and Ghetto.