Art in a Disrupted World: Poland, 1939–1949 ebook

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on Translation

Introduction

Chapter 1. Feats of Material Resistance: Portraiture in the Concentration Camps

Material Resistance

Drawing Faces

The Face and Facelessness in the Portraits of Xawery Dunikowski

Gestures of Resistance: Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz’s Sketchbook

The (Self-)portraits of Józef Szajna

Chapter 2. The Dialectics of Ruins and Rubble in Postwar Representations of Warsaw

Ruins and Rubble

Warsaw Accuses: Ruins on Display

Affective Chronicles of a Place and Time

In a Heap of Rubble

Chapter 3. Homelessness, Homecoming, and the “Joy of New Constructions”

The Destruction of Homes and the Politics of Homelessness

Imagining Homes for the Homeless

Art as a Home for All

Programmatic Lack of Program

Modernism Against Itself

(Un)doing Modernism

From Friction to Faction

Social Fabric and the Canvas Surface

Bibliography

List of Works

Acknowledgments

This book was originally written as a dissertation titled “Art in Crisis: Artistic Practice from Poland in the Decade of 1939–1949,” which I began in 2012 and defended five years later at the Freie Universität in Berlin under the supervision of Prof. Gregor Stemmrich. I would like first and foremost to thank him for his generous support of my research throughout the years and for his salient critical engagement in the project. I would also like to express my gratitude to my second supervisor, Prof. Noit Banai, for her invaluable advice and open engagement both at the time of finalizing the dissertation and beyond. My research was also made possible through the generous support of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Turning my dissertation into a book was a steep learning curve so I hugely appreciated the guidance that I found in the review process, especially from Dr. Klara Kemp-Welch, whom I would like to thank sincerely for her valuable feedback and encouraging me to realize greater ambitions for the project. I will carry many of these valuable insights into my future work as the engagement in the art and exhibitions of the 1940s remains an ongoing interest for me.

The process of working on the book manuscript would have been an incomparably more arduous task without the support and experience of the amazing editors and copy editors I had the pleasure to work with: Meagan Down, Aleksandra Kędziorek, and Alan Lockwood. Here I would also like to thank Joanna Mytkowska, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, and Prof. Błażej Ostoja Lniski, the rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, for creating such a supportive and professional working environment for their authors. I further thank the Academic Board of the New Histories of Art series, as well as the Editorial Board, for making this publication possible.

Many aspects of my writing were developed during discussions and exchange with colleagues on many formal and informal occasions. I would like to thank Piotr Słodkowski for our collaborations, which greatly enriched my perspective, Michal B. Ron for the thrilling discussions during and after our doctoral colloquiums, and Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu for her inspiring support and thoughtful advice. My interest in the artistic practices of the wartime period was invigorated many years ago through the remarkable opportunity to work together with many talented colleagues as part of a curatorial team headed by Anda Rottenberg, whom I would also like to thank for sharing so generously her knowledge and experience with us.

Last but not least I would like to thank my family for supporting my persevering first with my dissertation and later on with this book. My husband, Daniel, is the first reader of all my writing and I would like to thank him for his love, patience, and support in the moments of crisis, joy, and excitement that were brought through the research and writing. My sister Paula, my parents, Andrzej and Majka, and my grandmother Marianna, I must thank for always encouraging me to follow my dreams.

A Note on Translation

In this book non-English titles for journals or magazines have been preserved in the text; however, titles of articles or publications have been provided in English translation to encourage readability. The original title of all cited print material is supplied in notes, following usual scholarly norms.

English is used for exhibition titles, works of art, and organizations, in keeping with well-known usage, or official attribution from the collecting body or institution associated with the cited material. Original titles of works of art reproduced in this book can be found in the dedicated list of works.

Unless attributed in notes, all translations are by the author.

Introduction

In the Malmö Art Museum collection, there is a small drawing on paper by Maja Berezowska. It was made in 1942 when the Polish artist was a prisoner in the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women, near a village north of Berlin. Berezowska had been arrested earlier that year in her Warsaw flat and interned by the Gestapo in the Pawiak prison, before being transported to Ravensbrück in May.1 Berezow­ska’s arrest was connected to her caricatures of Hitler, published in 1934 in the French journal ICI Paris.2 Those drawings had accompanied a satirical article and mocked the Führer as a failed lover, depicting him in compromising poses. The drawings’ publication had caused an international scandal, and though Berezowska avoided retaliation at that time, she paid the price years later.

The drawing from the Art Museum collection is a watercolor, depicting two women sitting next to each other, looking sideways in the same direction [fig.1]. At first glance, the work is a classic portrait, made to express affection for the women it depicts and to commemorate their friendship. Their names are written in the upper left corner and a French phrase below states: les deux amies (the two friends). Yet the more closely one looks at the portrayed women’s faces, the more dissonance one feels between the drawing’s form and the context in which it was made. Both women look beautiful, pensive, and monumental with their long hair and pronounced, red lips. The image contrasts with what is known about harsh conditions women had to endure in the camp, from the violence of forced labor to medical experimentation, which Berezowska was subjected to around the time the drawing was made.3

Berezowska was not a keen commentator on her work and revealed very little about her wartime practice. In one of her few statements, however, she referred to that dissonance between her work’s form and its topic:

When we sat around the table, I hid a piece of paper on my lap and made quick drawings, scenes full of joy, cheerful and loving, which then went from hand to hand, giving the tormented women a moment of forgetfulness, evoking laughter and hope. I drew their portraits. Often those sheets endured better than young bodies that fire turned to ashes.4

Here, drawing is conceptualized as a dual act of imagination, rather than of documentation: the artist imagines her subjects as if they were not in the camp, and the portrayed women recognize themselves in the altered representations. In her commentary, Berezowska avoided any heroization of her artistic practice, choosing not to mention dangers entailed in any clandestine artistic or intellectual activity and not to frame it as an act of political resistance. Her striking analogy between sheets of paper and murdered women’s bodies calls for recognizing the drawing as that which remains, a material trace of impermanent bodies. From this perspective, resistance is connected not so much with political or armed struggle as with persistence or survival, and the drawings on paper are a place of resistance not only of the spirit, but also of matter resisting entropy.

1. Maja Berezowska, The Two Friends, 1942

At the same time, this work by Berezowska raises questions that reach beyond its interpretation. For example: For what reason did a Swedish museum purchase a drawing by a Polish artist in 1946? The answer is related to displaced artists during and just after the Second World War. Berezowska was liberated from Ravensbrück in April 1945 during the White Buses operation organized largely through the efforts of Folke Bernadotte, vice president of the Swedish Red Cross, who negotiated the release of camp prisoners with Heinrich Himmler shortly before the end of the war.5 Berezowska was among the prisoners rescued from Ravensbrück; as a refugee first in Malmö and then Jönköping, she continued her artistic activity,6 organizing exhibitions of works created in the camp while making new works. In 1946, her camp drawings were shown in the exhibition Polish Art from Ravensbrück in Sweden: Maja Berezowska, Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz in Stockholm, then in Ravensbrück: Pictures from the Years of Captivity in Copenhagen.7

As shown in the case of Berezowska, the study of artistic practices of Polish artists in this period involves dealing with different geographies before, after, and during the Second World War. Numerous of the practices analyzed in the present book, undertaken during the war, were developed in Nazi concentration camps located in the territory of the Third Reich or in parts of German-occupied Polish lands, and numerous of the artists became displaced persons in the war’s aftermath.

I have begun by introducing the work of Berezowska because it brings together threads present through the chapters to come, such as the significance of art during the Second World War, the question of form employed by artists to represent their experiences, and their activities in the aftermath of the war including efforts to reestablish cultural life by organizing exhibitions or setting up new institutions. I will reflect on these issues by studying artistic practices that were developed during the turbulent and cataclysmic period between 1939 and 1949, a decade framed by the beginning of the Second World War and the introduction of socialist realism in Poland shortly after the war by the newly formed, Soviet-backed Communist government. The changes that took place during that decade were dramatic: during the war, Poland was occupied by both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union; the country witnessed tremendous destruction and became a site of genocide; in the aftermath of the Holocaust and forced re­settlements, the population of the country became almost entirely ethnically Polish; the borders, redrawn as a consequence of postwar treaties, were shifted westward; and a new political regime was installed.

Western twentieth-century art history often employs notions of “pre­­­war” and “postwar” art, yet artistic practices such as Berezow­ska’s traverse that split and introduce a third temporality: “wartime” practices situating art neither before nor after but in the middle of those historical changes.8 Studying trajectories of such artists allows us to conceptualize the wartime period and its immediate aftermath not as a break in modern artistic historiography but as a constitutive part, one that remained tied to certain important aspects of prewar art history while becoming foundational to artistic discourse in the postwar period—and being of its time, singular as that was. To focus on this specific period of art history calls for consideration of the experience of the Second World War as a distinct moment in history and, equally importantly, to register its ongoing consequences for artistic and cultural life in Poland, while reflecting on this within a broader theoretical context. This perspective also allows questions to be posed about possible continuities and legacies, in particular the legacies of the avant-garde and of modernism, recognizing ways in which these were actualized in the immediate postwar years.

Focusing on this period requires consideration of those artists, practices, and events that are little known or completely obscure, in certain cases. Maja Berezowska’s camp drawings, for instance, were exhibited in the late 1940s during the two Scandinavian exhibitions, and in Salon Nike in Warsaw in 1950.9 Yet after that brief period of exposure, Berezowska’s wartime work became less visible. It has reappeared only recently, included in two exhibitions: Never Again: Art against War and Fascism in the 20th and 21st Centuries at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2019) and Migration: Traces in anArt Collection at the Malmö Art Museum (2019/2020). Similarly, the artistic practice of the Polish artist Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz fell into oblivion; she had been a fellow prisoner of Berezowska in Ravensbrück, creating remarkable drawings of women in the camp, then attempting from 1948 to reinterpret socialist realism in her own way until her untimely death in 1955. The wartime practices of established Polish artists including Marian Bogusz have also been perceived as marginal, yet once these are taken into consideration, the understanding of better­-known parts of such artists’ oeuvres is enhanced.10

For several decades following the Second World War, wartime artistic practices were considered under a very specific framework, dominated by notions of heroism and resistance. Early and seminal examples of studies devoted to artistic practice during the war years in Poland are found in two books by the art historian Janina Jaworska, published in the 1970s: “IShall Not Wholly Die…” andFighting Art of Poland. Both bookspresent valuable, rare accounts of oral history collected by Jaworska, along with selected visual material. Both publications, even in their titles, bring to the fore a connection between artistic practice and resistance, even framing art of that period as part of the national struggle against German fascism.11

Rather than attempting to refute this connection, I propose rethinking relations between art and resistance outside of a national­-heroic framework. Many artworks discussed here, therefore, are also recognized primarily as testimony, rather than as works of art per se, which also raises the question of how art history can apprehend artworks that challenge established categories of “art,” not through avant-garde negations of established cultural norms, but as a consequence of their proximity to traumatic experiences.

Artistic practices undertaken in the extreme situation of war by artists caught in the most difficult of circumstances, who were refugees or imprisoned in concentration camps or ghettos yet who sustained those practices, have grounded an understanding of art as a fundamental human activity, an activity that was instrumental in many ways in their survival.12 To use Giorgio Agamben’s phrase, art considered in this manner becomes “the essential measure of men’s dwelling on earth,” rather than a subsidiary activity undertaken only after basic needs are met.13 Art is a means through which people in the most extreme, hostile, and dehumanizing circumstances could recognize themselves as human beings. It was this intensity of engagement in art, and art’s fundamental role in defining human status in the world, that was retained, and then was struggled over both politically and aesthetically in the period immediately after the war. I propose to historically reconstruct that perspective in order to readdress debates about politically engaged art and the culture of memory generated during the postwar period. Therefore, it has also been necessary to bring the complexity of relations between ethics and aesthetics to bear on my research.

A particular challenge in writing a history of art of this period stems from the question: To what extent can art history reflect on social and political history? Comprehensive historical studies of Poland in the 1940s have recognized the unprecedented degree of nationwide terror and violence, in which anti-Semitic crimes of the occupation years also included local pogroms and theft of Jewish property after the war.14 The historian Marcin Zaremba described the collective psychological and moral devastation caused by manifold terror during the war and violence inflicted while establishing Communist rule in Poland as “the great fear.”15

Today, the narrative of the history of art and visual culture in 1940s Poland shifts constantly, with the field of research growing vigorously and, as a consequence, tackling this artistic, sociopolitical, and historical entanglement from multiple perspectives.16 Some artworks discussed in this book engage in representing the social reality of that decade directly, while others indirectly allude to the violence of the time, and still others actively anticipate and project different futures that dwell outside a given “here and now,” forging elective affinities with ideals from the prewar avant-garde. Thus, my analysis reflects on how each artwork was enmeshed in its sociopolitical context, as well as registering when it broke away from that context.

The decade in question, indelibly marked by the crisis brought by war, was a period characterized by multiple disruptions; it often isolated individual artists and brutally interrupted or ended the trajectories of their individual practices. At the same time, these disruptive conditions resulted in the establishment of new friendships and alliances. The period’s fragmentary nature is reflected in this book’s structure. Rather than creating a broad narrative encompassing the whole decade, the focus will be on selected case studies, which are nevertheless inscribed into common frameworks of questioning, and seeks to emphasize the relations of artworks to their larger sociopolitical context, thus presenting relevant visual works alongside selected contemporaneous excerpts from literature, art criticism, and memoirs. This strategy, based on juxtaposing differing, previously disconnected sources to create a gestalt in montage form, is pertinent structurally and has precedence in the practice of art-historical inquiry as pioneered to lasting effect by Aby Warburg.17

Each of the book’s chapters addresses a different question by making use of numerous intersections to construct a multifaceted approach to the production of artwork in that period. “Feats of Material Resistance: Portraiture in the Concentration Camps,” the first chapter, focuses on the practices of artists who were camp inmates, while rethinking the notion of resistance. The second chapter, “The Dialectics of Ruins and Rubble in Postwar Representations of Warsaw,” considers the first exhibition mounted in liberated Warsaw and examines the role of art institutions in both the material and the symbolic rebuilding of the country. “Homelessness, Homecoming, and the ‘Joy of New ­Constructions,’” the third and final chapter,provides closure, bringing together these questions of artistic practices in camps and art’s role in rebuilding Poland in the war’s aftermath, including a study of Marian Bogusz’s early practice, as an inmate in Mauthausen then as a young artist in liberated Warsaw, active in the newly reconfigured art scene in Poland under changing political circumstances.

Following Walter Benjamin’s renowned dictum that “there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” the chapter “Feats of Material Resistance” dwells on moments when formal concerns become ethical issues.18 The question of the limits of representation of the Holocaust in both history and the arts constitutes one of the most debated issues of the second half of the twentieth century.19 This debate, addressing fundamental ethical and aesthetic concerns, was reflected in the visual arts: facing the impossible task of representing the irrepresentable, different forms of abstraction or voided forms were often employed.20 At the same time, the discursive frame, which referred back to Theodor Adorno’s fundamental question about poetry “after Auschwitz,” complicated the reception of artworks and images that had been created during the Holocaust.21 Georges Didi-Huberman, in his seminal book addressing clandestine photographs depicting mass killing that had been taken by Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, proposed another perspective, which pleaded for imagination, grasping for and describing its lacunar character, rather than emphasizing its inadequacy.22 The present book’s first chapter, following the line of Didi-Huberman’s proposed investigation and questioning how to apprehend images that were made and have remained “in spite of all,”23 is entirely devoted to artworks made by camp prisoners.

The first chapter brings together artists of different backgrounds who, even when they were imprisoned in the same camp, faced different circumstances. For example, Xawery Dunikowski, who was already a prominent sculptor when he was sent to Auschwitz, survived the camp thanks to the help and support of other Polish inmates. The Polish-Jewish artist Halina Olomucki, then a young woman, was first imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto, then in Majdanek concentration camp and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her mother was murdered in Majdanek; Olomucki was on her own and miraculously survived gas-chamber selections—as a Jew, she was targeted in the Holocaust.

For both artists, drawing became a means of recording their experience. In this chapter, questions are posed about the role of that medium, a predominant means of expression available to artists in the camps, and seeks to interpret their drawings both as testimonies or documents and also as artworks. The interpretation of these works reconsiders the often-applied framework of “art as resistance” through the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s question: “What is this mysterious relationship between a work of art and an act of resistance […]?”24 The works are considered as spaces of resistance against the oppression inflicted by fascism, and as feats of material resistance, standing against entropy and also against interpretation.

The performative and gestural aspect of drawing is further problematized in the sketchbook of Ravensbrück survivor Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz. This sketchbook, not analyzed in any detail to date, depicts a series of specific gestures Simon-Pietkiewicz observed among her fellow inmates which she later described as forms of protection from the cruel reality of the camp. This reading of Simon-­Pietkiewicz’s drawings combines visual and textual sources by including and accounting for the artist’s unpublished memoirs, deposited in the Ossolineum Library in Wrocław.

While the first chapter focuses on personal trajectories of artists and close readings of their works, the second focuses on the immediate postwar years and the role of Warsaw’s art institutions in rebuilding the country. This and the following chapter offer a particular perspective focused on Warsaw in the second half of the 1940s. Art historians including Józef Chrobak, Marcin Lachowski, and Maria Zientara have described the activities of artists based in Kraków in great detail, especially those united in Grupa Krakowska, both during the war and in its immediate aftermath, while bringing to the fore how their art had been impacted by the Holocaust.25 There, the First Exhibition of Modern Art, held between 1948 and 1949 in Pałac Sztuki, has been seen as a pivotal moment in Polish art history: a high point of postwar modernism and at the same time its twilight, for utopian dreams of progressive artists were about to be shattered with socialist realism’s implementation as artistic doctrine.26 This book, in highlighting artists based in Warsaw, emphasizes the diversity of ideas that emerged around this period and considers the rich possibilities there had been for actualizing avant-garde postulates.

The significance of museums as spaces of community building is exemplified by the Warsaw Accuses exhibition, organized by the National Museum in Warsaw in 1945, which employed radical exhibition design utilizing ruined objects to create an environment resembling the shattered capital outside the exhibition’s walls. Drawing on canonical writings by Alois Riegl and Georg Simmel and the recent work of Gastón R. Gordillo, a distinction is made between ruin and rubble, with ruin considered an aesthetically pleasing form in which certain historical aspects and meanings are preserved, and with rubble understood as delegitimated ruin, an abject space obstructing signification. Warsaw Accuses is consequently reconstructed here and analyzed as a cultural juncture where rubble came to be interpreted as ruin, eventually allowing the museum to create a space for the reinvention of an “imagined community” of nation.27

The chapter’s subsequent section explores specific depictions of Warsaw’s ruins and rubble, articulated in artistic practices from the mid 1940s and later exhibited by the National Museum, and seeks to establish how distinctions between differing embodiments of destruction were rendered visible in drawing. Analyzed examples include works by Tadeusz Kulisiewicz and Antoni Suchanek, artists who were acclaimed for their representations of the widespread destruction throughout the capital. The chapter’s concluding part is devoted to lesser-known drawings, including works by Henryk Hechtkopf that depict the razed district of the former Warsaw ghetto, with aesthetics that set them apart from earlier renderings of ruins and within the framework of rubble.

“Homelessness, Homecoming, and the ‘Joy of New Constructions,’” the final chapter, connects the prewar utopian avant-garde with issues of wartime artistic practices as means of resistance and of survival in camps, then with postwar dilemmas of rebuilding the aesthetic and the political orders. It describes the early practice of Marian Bogusz, who would become known mostly for his seminal engagement in propagating modern art from the mid 1950s through the 1970s. Here, Bogusz’s wartime artistic formation is considered as an instance of fidelity to modernist aims in the darkest of historic moments. The idea of home is employed as an umbrella term unifying the plethora of Bogusz’s activities—understood as architectural and cultural form but also, emblematically, as a site of human dwelling, beginning with the artist’s architectural project developed in and intended for the Mauthausen concentration camp. Along with a fellow inmate, Emmanuel Muñoz, Bogusz planned an International Artists’ Settlement, which they imagined being built one day on the site of the camp. The utopian project revived modernist architectural forms while proposing a radical approach to commemoration.

The chapter’s second part is devoted to Bogusz’s activities after Mauthausen was liberated and he returned to Warsaw, in specific to the cultural undertakings of the Club of Young Artists and Scientists, which he and others established in the capital in 1947. The club’s dynamic activities can be seen as a continuation of Bogusz’s wartime practice, showing the depth of his engagement in modernism, and their many initiatives can be grasped as attempts at rethinking modern art in the war’s aftermath and in the face of regime change in Poland. The last section of “Homelessness, Homecoming, and the ‘Joy of New Constructions,’” bridges the wartime context and that of the postwar period, and returns to the praxis of Ravensbrück survivor Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz. In her exhibition at the Club of Young Artists and Scientists in 1948, Simon-Pietkiewicz presented socialist-realist paintings devoted to workers and factories in Silesia in southwest Poland.

The three chapters open different perspectives from which artistic practices of the 1940s can be apprehended. Each of the practices considered here provides a case in point for ways in which wartime art and that of the immediate postwar period grounded later formations of artistic practice. Yet rather than being isolated case studies, they remain knit together in presenting the endeavor, potential, and importance of art in disruptive times.

1 See Małgorzata Czyńska, Berezowska: Nagość dla wszystkich (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2018), e-book, chap. “Pawiak.”

2 Jean Mezerette, “Hitler intime et les amours du süsse Adolf,”il. Maja Berezowska, ICIParis, no. 4 (1934).

3 The drawing is dated November 8, 1942. According to the testimonies of Berezowska’s friends, the artist was among a group of women subjected to medical experimentation in August 1942. The artist suffered from the consequences of those experiments for the rest of her life. See Czyńska, Berezowska, chap. “Eksperyment.”

4 Quoted in Maja Berezowska, Piórkiem przez stulecia (Warsaw: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1985), 5.

5 Martin Wikberg, ed., TheWhite Buses: TheSwedish Red Cross Rescue Action in Germany During the Second World War (Stockholm: The Swedish Red Cross, 2000).

6 Czyńska, Berezowska, chap. “List z raju.”

7Polsk konst från Ravensbrück och Sverige: Jadwiga Simon, Maja Berezowska,ex. cat. (Stockholm: Aeta, 1946); Ravensbrück, billeder fra fangenskabsaarene, ex. cat. (Copenhagen: Berlingske tidende og Vecko-journalen, 1945).

8 Importantly, these terms’ stability is subject to frequent revisions in art history. For example, the exhibition Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 offered a comprehensive way of rethinking that term from a global perspective. See Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, and Ulrich Wilmes, eds., Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 2016). See also Hannah Feldman, From aNation Torn: Decolonizing Artand Representation in France, 1945–1962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 1–16. For a critical definition of the term “postwar,” see Mark Mazower, “Postwar: The Melancholy History of a Term,”in Enwezor, Siegel, and Wilmes, Postwar, 68–74.

9Wystawa prac malarskich Maji Berezowskiej: 28.XII.1949–10.I.1950, ex. cat. (Warsaw: Salon “Nike,” 1950).

10 This issue was also explored in a recent exhibition at the Zachęta—National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. See Joanna Kordjak, ed., Radość nowych konstrukcji: (po)wojenne utopie Mariana Bogusza, ex. cat. (Warsaw: Zachęta—Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, 2017).

11 Janina Jaworska, “Nie wszystek umrę…”: Twórczość plastyczna Polaków whitlerowskich więzieniach iobozach koncentracyjnych 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1975); Jaworska, Polska sztuka walcząca: 1939–1945, 1st ed. (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1976).

12 See Brett Ashley Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

13 Giorgio Agamben, TheMan Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 33.

14 See Jan Grabowski and Dariusz Libionka, eds., Klucze ikasa: Omieniu żydowskim wPolsce pod okupacją niemiecką iwewczesnych latach powojennych 1939–1950 (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2014); Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: TheDestruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

15 Marcin Zaremba, Wielka trwoga: Polska 1944–1947; Ludowa reakcja nakryzys (Kraków: Znak; Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN, 2012).

16 For recent contributions, see Luiza Nader, Afekt Strzemińskiego: “Teoria widzenia,” rysunki wojenne, Pamięci przyjaciół—Żydów (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN / Akademia Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie; Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, 2018); Piotr Słodkowski, Modernizm żydowsko-polski: Henryk Streng / Marek Włodarski ahistoria sztuki (Warsaw: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych / Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2019); Agata Zborowska, Życie rzeczy wpowojennej Polsce (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2019); Grzegorz Piątek, Najlepsze miasto świata: Warszawa wodbudowie 1944–1949 (Warsaw: WAB, 2020); Aleksandra Sumorok and Tomasz Załuski, eds., Socrealizmy imodernizacje (Łódź: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych im. Władysława Strzemińskiego, 2017).

17 See Georges Didi-Huberman, “Knowledge: Movement (The Man Who Spoke to Butterflies),” in Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, ed. Philippe-Alain Michaud (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 7–21.

18 Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2005), 47.

19 For a summary of those discussions, see Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Barbie Zelizer, ed., Visual Culture and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: TheDemands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

20 As observed by Dora Apel: “Paradoxically, Adorno’s refusal of aesthetics, which began as a refusal of art altogether, became the conventionalized, dominant aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic, although the negative and allusive Holocaust-related artwork that met this mandate took a wide variety of forms.” Apel, “Art,” in TheOxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, ed. Peter Hayes and John K. Roth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 461–78, doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/ 9780199211869.003.0031. See also Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); James E. Young, AtMemory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

21 Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,”in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 34.

22 “Should we not treat the impurities, the lacunae of the image, as we have to treat the silences of speech, which is to unravel them, struggle with them?” Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 124.

23 Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 124.

24 Gilles Deleuze, “What Is the Creative Act?” in Two Regimes of Madness, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), 323.

25 Marcin Lachowski, Nowocześni pokatastrofie: Sztuka wPolsce wlatach 1945–1960 (Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2013); Tadeusz Kantor, Metamorfozy: Teksty olatach 1938–1974, ed. Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka / Ośrodek Dokumentacji Sztuk Tadeusza Kantora “Cricoteka,” 2000); Józef Chrobak and Magdalena Wilk, eds., Tadeusz Kantor iWSSP wKrakowie 1947–1950 (Kraków: Galeria Krzysztofory, 2007); Józef Chrobak and Justyna Michalik, eds., Tadeusz Kantor ilata czterdzieste (Kraków: Ośrodek Dokumentacji Sztuk Tadeusza Kantora “Cricoteka,” 2013); Józef Chrobak, ed., Grupa Krakowska: (dokumenty imateriały) (Kraków: Stowarzyszenie Artystyczne “Grupa Krakowska,” 1993); Lech Stangret, Tadeusz Kantor: Drawing (Kraków: Tadeusz Kantor Foundation, 2015); Maria Zientara, Krakowscy artyści iich sztuka wlatach 1939–1945 (Kraków: Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa, 2013).

26 On the history of the exhibition, see Piotr Słodkowski, “Partykularne znaczenia nowoczesności: Wizualność I Wystawy Sztuki Nowoczesnej (1948) w świetle ‘Exposition internationale du surrealisme’ (1947),” Artium Quaestiones 22 (2011): 237–71; Marek Świca and Józef Chrobak, eds., Nowocześni asocrealizm, vol. 1 (Kraków: Fundacja Nowosielskich, 2000).

27 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 5–7.

Chapter 1Feats of Material Resistance: Portraiture in the Concentration Camps

On the front page of the literary and arts magazine Odrodzenie in 1948, a poem was published dedicated to the memory of those who were murdered in the Holocaust.28 The author was Stanisław Wygodzki,29 an important Polish-Jewish writer, and a former prisoner in the Auschwitz, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Oranienburg camps, who lost his daughter, wife, and parents in the Holocaust. Importantly, the poem was accompanied by a small photograph.30 The black-and-white photo, placed just above the verses, depicts three young women standing in a row. Two of the women, whose faces we can clearly see, stand with their arms hanging down, looking away, avoiding direct contact with the camera, aiming their resigned gazes sideways. The moment captured by the camera is dramatic: it seems that the women have just been rounded up, perhaps they await execution.

Though the photo as it was reprinted in Odrodzenie lacks a caption, the picture is instantly recognizable: it was originally published as a part of the Stroop Report, a book-length document officially titled TheJewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!, made by SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop for his superior, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, to record the brutal German suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in spring 194331[fig.2]. Stroop was in charge of crushing the uprising, which started on April 19. The report begins by listing dead and wounded German soldiers and naming the military units that were involved; that section is followed by an introduction signed by Stroop and daily reports of military actions, which recount in detail how the district was destroyed building by building and how the surviving Jews were murdered or deported to camps. The report has an appendix consisting of fifty-three photographs, which became the most publicly known part of the document.32

2. Photograph of Ghetto Fighters Rachela Wyszogrodzka, Bluma Wyszogrodzka, and Małka Zdrojewicz (right), as reproduced in the Stroop Report, 1943

These photos were taken by the Germans; however, it remains unclear exactly who took them.33 They were later used as evidence during the Nuremberg Trials and circulated widely in the press in both Poland and abroad.34 Among the images from the report’s appendix is the iconic photo depicting a small boy marching with his hands up in a gesture of surrender; he came to be known as “the boy from the Warsaw ghetto” and is a symbol of the Holocaust, signifying in particular the tragic fate of children.35 As such, the use of the images from the appendix transformed completely over time, and rather than documenting German triumph over their helpless victims, they became powerful symbols of fascist oppression and terror.

The photo of the three women in the report was captioned “Female Hehalutz members captured with weapons.” The woman on the right was identified as Małka Zdrojewicz, who survived the war and later named her two comrades as the sisters Rachela and Bluma Wyszogrodzka. According to Zdrojewicz’s testimony, the women were resistance fighters during the uprising:

We went to a neutral place in the ghetto area and climbed down into the underground sewers. Through them, we girls used to carry arms into the ghetto; we hid them in our boots. During the ghetto uprising, we hurled Molotov cocktails at the Germans. […] After the suppression of the ­uprising, we went into hiding, taking refuge in an underground shelter where a large quantity of arms was piled up. But the Germans detected us and forced us out.36

After their capture, Zdrojewicz and Rachela Wyszogrodzka were taken to the Majdanek concentration camp, while Bluma was executed by firing squad.37

The photo of the three women would appear on the cover of an annotated 1948 edition of the Stroop Report, prepared by Stanisław Piotrowski as the first Polish edition.38 For the Odrodzenie issue the same year, Wygodzki’s poem and the photo were paired purposefully, as his writing relates directly to the depiction of the three fighters and, in addressing the image, questions different modes of looking at it, modes embodied by the figures of the photographer and of the contemporaneous viewer of the photo:

These are my sisters. Take a close look at them,

that’s how they looked just before they were shot,

but don’t look the way the photographer was looking

when in the foreground

stood my sisters from Chłodna and Śliska.39

Chłodna and Śliska were Warsaw streets with historical importance to the Jewish community. Early in the German occupation of Poland, Śliska Street became a part of the Warsaw ghetto, the area closed off from the rest of the city by a brick wall eighteen kilometers in circumference and three meters high. The Jewish inhabitants of Warsaw as well as Jews from surrounding villages were moved there. By 1941, the 460,000 Jews living in the ghetto faced starvation, diseases such as typhus that spread rapidly due to vast overcrowding, and eventual deportation to extermination camps.40 Chłodna Street remained in the “Aryan” part of town and separated the two sectors of the ghetto. A wooden pedestrian bridge was constructed over Chłodna in 1942, connecting the two sectors.41 Thus in the opening stanzas of his poem, Wygodzki points to specific sites related both to the Stroop Report photo and the history of Jewish Warsaw. In his insistence upon looking at the image differently than the photographer had, the poet further acknowledges the difficulty of facing images of victims that have been produced by their assailants. In the subsequent part of the poem, Wygodzki considers alternate ways of looking at the image, which aim, while rooted in specific personal experience, toward universalism while expressing solidarity with human struggle all over the world:

Don’t look as the lens does before a fresco

aiming a moment more, a centimeter, a millimeter,

here are my sisters, Jewish, Polish,

Czech,

French women as they stood the final time in front of a Metro

and of those aiming.

They wore my shoes with a bum heel

and my shabby coat and my old flat cap

me a Jew and a Pole, a Russian and a Frenchman

wishing to see Madrid and free Athens

I am free of fear but feign to sing

as long

as I know

how my sisters looked a moment before execution.

Don’t look as the camera I note did

as it watched more exactly than the barrel,

for I must hate those who shot my sisters,

Polish, Russian, Jewish, French women,

I hate those who need to guess,

as they strip them of my hat, my coat,

of blouses,

who on our tarmac

in my dead sisters

may see an Amazon

or Nike.

I give them back my fear for brothers,

and Nike knows no fear,

I give them back worry for sisters,

an Amazon knows no fear,

I give them back common human names

as many names as sisters can have,

this one who loves freedom and life,

this one who kept an image of the living—

as near as a breath,

as near as a death,

I won’t change their names

as I can’t change their deaths.42

Wygodzki avoids equating the camera lens with the perpetrator’s gaze, as it watches “more exactly than the barrel,” capable of registering more than the photographer intended. Later in the poem, he also firmly rejects the objectifying gaze of a viewer who would scrutinize the image in pursuit of universal metaphors, comparing the specific women to ancient figures like Nike while depriving them of their own stories.

Yet the image and the poem are not entirely compatible, with the text and the photo together constituting an incomplete constellation, forming what Georges Didi-Huberman terms a “reciprocal lacunae.”43 To look at the photograph differently is to see the image through the words of the poem and to be caught, as viewer and reader, in a moment of questioning both words and image. The poet proposes an empathetic reading of the image, as he includes the affects of fear and worry. He establishes a context-specific yet inclusive framework that strongly opposes any attempts at both essentialism and obliterating universalism. Thus, his sisters are no ancient heroines, yet while they stand on Warsaw’s pavement, they stand for all those who suffer: Polish, Jewish, French, Russian, Czech…

In this same period, the second half of the 1940s, a crucial pioneer from the earlier avant-garde era, Władysław Strzemiński, was immersed in an artistic undertaking analogous to the one posited by Wygodzki in “These Are My Sisters,” attempting through his works to make it possible for a different kind of gaze to emerge, and employing drawing, photography, and poetry to reach this goal. Strzemiński’s ToMy Friends, the Jews, a collage cycle created between 1945 and 1947, comprises ten works, each a discrete combination of altered photographs documenting German wartime atrocities with drawing, each of which is captioned with a lengthy and poetic title.44 To complexify the interrelations further, each drawn component is a repetition of a different form the artist used in earlier wartime cycles, including Cheap as Mud (1943–44) and Faces (1942).45 One collage, IAccuse the Crime of Cain and the Sin of Ham, consists of a cut-out photo of an older Jewish man wearing a yellow Star of David juxtaposed with a drawing of a skull-like face, which repeats a form from Strzemiński’s Faces series46[fig.3]. Here, photography and drawing are positioned alongside one another, embodying two different modes of looking: an archival, documentary mode beside a subjective, gestural one, and then the title’s poetic use of language further estranges the full composition.47 In the space that opens between these two opposing modes, the face materialize as a trace (but not only), or as an “afterimage,” in Strzemiński’s terminology.

3. Władysław Strzemiński, I Accuse the Crime of Cain and the Sin of Ham, from the series To My Friends, the Jews, 1945–47

Today, these works by Wygodzki and Strzemiński confront their readers and viewers with a discursive entanglement of photographs, drawings, words, and affects, indicating how the consideration of wartime images and artworks needs to engage with differing types of sources, both visual and textual. The analysis that follows, in a similar spirit and in an attempt to practice Wygodzki’s methodology, focuses on drawings made in concentration camps, which are mainly portraits, yet the analysis of them involves photographs and oral testimonies, while mapping and taking into careful consideration their interrelations, for the works discussed are located within intersecting categories of artwork, documentation, and testimony.

Material Resistance

After the end of the war, Strzemiński taught at the Higher School of Arts in Łódź, a newly established state school initially seeking to revive prewar formal experiments of the avant-garde in functional design, bringing them to bear in industrial and everyday objects, thus creating new forms of applied arts.48 Among the young artists who came to study under Strzemiński was Halina Olomucki, the Polish-­Jewish artist and a survivor of Majdanek, Auschwitz-­Birkenau, and Ravensbrück, and its subcamp Neustadt-Glewe. Olomucki arrived in Łódź in 1945 in order to pursue her dream of becoming a professional artist.49

Her teacher’s emphatic drawing style, his signature “biological line” developed from the 1930s onwards and utilized in his wartime drawings, visibly influenced some of Olomucki’s postwar work.50 However, in Olomucki’s own wartime drawings, predating the outset of her official artistic education, she employed an expressive and vibrant line, which shaped forms through repetition of trembling marks.

Olomucki was born in Warsaw in 1919, where she lived with her mother, brother, and two sisters until 1943.51 Olomucki had been interested in art from an early age and her ambition was to be an artist.52 During the German occupation of Poland, the family was forced to leave their house and move to the Warsaw ghetto. In the ghetto, she embarked on drawing scenes she witnessed and on depicting people’s daily struggle to survive. She drew a small boy selling Star of David armbands, an old man whose beard has just been shorn, hungry children in the ghetto, and made numerous portraits.53 The artist later stated that drawing was for her a means of surviving but also a duty:

I do not have time to think about the handicaps and the horror of our everyday life: I am burned by an internal fire, a constant desire to draw. […] Drawing is my main defense, it is my weapon for survival. When I draw, I have the impression that I am not beaten. Nothing escapes my attention, it cannot be forgotten, it will never be forgotten.54

Olomucki managed to smuggle out some of her artworks during her work detail, which took place outside the ghetto, then recovered them after the war.55

In 1943, she and her mother were deported from the Umschlagplatz in the Warsaw ghetto to the Majdanek concentration camp, where her mother was murdered immediately after arrival. Due to her artistic skills, she was employed to paint signage and decorate interior walls of her camp block.56 Several months later, she was transferred to Ausch­witz-­Birkenau, where initially she was a slave laborer in an ammunition factory. Eventually she was also assigned to draw up signs in the barracks. Due to this work, Olomucki received some extra food rations. In this way, she also procured materials for her covert work, which consisted mainly of portraits of other inmates and scenes from the camp, drawing what her captors intended to obliterate. She drew secretly on found paper such as tissue or cigarette paper, or scraps of discarded documents.57 On January 18, 1945, when the Germans began evacuating the camp, Olomucki had to join the death march to Ravensbrück and then was marched to Neustadt-Glewe, where she was liberated by Allied forces.

The artworks created by Olomucki during her imprisonment in the ghetto and the camps are characterized by a striking formal and emotional intensity. She had to either hide drawings in different locations of the camp or destroy them to avoid harsh punishment.58 However, despite the severe privations she endured, the line in her drawings is intense, expressive, sometimes thick, dark, and often smudged, which at first sight gives an impression of chaos and disorder, allowing shapes to emerge only gradually. The marks betray the rapid, decisive hand movement of the artist.

These qualities are visible in a small drawing made in pencil on a rectangular scrap of paper, Resistance Fighter in Auschwitz[fig.4]. The work depicts a man in striped uniform seen in profile. The contours of his face and body are outlined by multiple, fluctuating, thin black lines, the volumes of his face and the stripes of his uniform are rendered by smudged, rubbed marks. There is a sense of movement suggested by a multiplication of lines in the fighter’s arm, which is reinforced by the direction of his gaze, focused straight ahead with an evident intent. The background is left blank. Nothing is known of this man, other than the fact indicated in the title, that he was a resistance fighter. The drawing has been dated to 1945 and its topic could be connected to an important event from the camp’s history: the prisoners’ revolt in Auschwitz-Birkenau on October 7, 1944. That revolt was carried out by members of the Sonderkommandos, the “special command units” consisting of Jewish prisoners who were forced to “perform a variety of duties in the gas chambers and crematoria.”59 The uprising, the only revolt in Auschwitz-Birkenau, lasted only twelve hours and resulted in the deaths of 452 insurgents.60 Olomucki also experienced the repercussions in the aftermath of the uprising, witnessing the deaths of friends during punitive roll calls that were organized then.61 The portrait of the anonymous resistance fighter may thus be seen as a trace of that event, and emblematically brings up a theme central to the wartime practices of Olomucki and many others: the relations between artistic practice in the camp and the practice of resistance.

4. Halina Olomucki, Resistance Fighter inAuschwitz, 1945

In Olomucki’s memoir, quoted above and published in the form of a pamphlet-length poem accompanied by her artworks, she specified that drawing enabled her to persevere and to survive the tragic period in the camps: “Drawing is my main defense, it is my weapon for survival,” she wrote.62 In keeping with this statement, as well as similar testimonies given by other survivors, art made in concentration camps is described as a form of “spiritual resistance,” and as such is aligned with the armed struggle against the Germans. That term provided the exhibition title Spiritual Resistance in 1981 to a presentation in New York City of works from different concentration camps that was at once pioneering and substantial.63

In a similar vein, one book by the art historian Janina Jaworska devoted to the Second World War period was titled Fighting Art of Poland.64 This distinction was scrutinized by the art historian Janet Blatter when she expressed concern that the notion of “resistance art” may restrict understandings of artistic practices to direct, political, anti-fascist agendas; therefore, Blatter rightfully pointed out, the term can and should be applied to all artistic practice undertaken by people confined in ghettos and concentration camps, as their praxis is a monument to the struggle to retain their humanity.65 Such an understanding of spiritual resistance goes hand in hand with Olomucki’s testimony: artistic activity was comprehended by her as a weapon, in the sense that it was intended as part of the struggle against German oppression, and as an act of compassion, a service performed for fellow inmates, those whom she recalled would ask her “if you live to leave this hell, make your drawings and tell the world about us. We want to remain among the living, at least on paper.”66

What are the implicit consequences of such a conceptual pairing? The analogy, though compelling, still places two incompatible practices on a single plane: those of artistic practice and of armed (as well as mortal) struggle. The discrepancy between the symbolic status of these two discourses can be demonstrated in the context of commemorative policies in Europe in the immediate postwar period. The historian Jonathan Huener, analyzing the establishment of the museum at the former camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and differing modes of remembrance engendered within that institution, has pointed out how, through state-organized commemorative practices, the notion of the victim was gradually replaced by that of the resistance hero.67 Anti-fascism was, after all, one of the main Communist platforms throughout the Cold War.

Given the fact that Party members including former Auschwitz prisoner and five-term Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz had been active in Polish resistance organizations, it is perhaps unsurprising that the figure of the political prisoner dominated postwar public discourse about concentration camps. A central element of the monument dedicated to Auschwitz-Birkenau victims that Cyran­kie­wicz unveiled in 1967 was a plaque announcing that an important military decoration, the Order of the Cross of Grunwald, had been awarded to all the “heroes of Auschwitz.”68 The plaque certified the expanded discourse on political resistance: now even those murdered in the camp on racial grounds, as Jewish or Roma, were symbolically subsumed by the anti-fascist platform being propagated by Communist regimes of Eastern Europe during the Cold War.69 Nevertheless, this apparent inclusion within a universal narrative of anti-fascist struggle was an act of exclusion—in particular, it facilitated an erasure of Jewish wartime experience.70

This discourse of armed political resistance, as opposed to the multitude of discourses generated by art, is maintained in collective memory through numerous public commemorations of victories and defeats, monuments, and other forms of remembrance. A peril in pursuing the idea of “spiritual resistance” without adequately acknowledging differences in the symbolic status between political struggle and artistic practice is that implicit power relations present in understanding art as a form of anti-fascist resistance may be ignored. As a consequence, the pathetic-heroic language used in writing about organized armed resistance may be used to address the field of artistic practice, obscuring important distinctions between the issues at stake.

As their preface stated in the exhibition catalog TheLast Expression, in 2002, to its authors, art made in concentration camps was not only a matter of resistance but also of survival: “[it] was also an expedient for victims, a means of survival in both the physical and psychological senses and these works of art must be considered beyond the realm of l’art pourl’art and in the service of the actual and tangible objectives.”71 Testimonies given by former inmates expose the complexity of their circumstances, in which making art was an act of subsistence as much as of resistance, a means of securing an extra ration of food, a way of going on for another day. The artist Józef Szajna, who survived the Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps, stated:

Yes, I was lucky that an SS man knew that I drew a little… it was the boss of the kitchen. And there I started… As long as I painted I always received a bowl of soup… Altogether it was 6 or 5 (bowls of) soup for these flowers. That’s how cheaply I sold my “art.”72

Prisoners with artistic skills had considerable chances of work in camp administrative sectors. In Auschwitz, a museum was even set up and artists working there were commissioned by the SS to produce official works such as paintings depicting the camp and portraits of high-ranking officials, or to build architectural maquettes presenting phases of the camp’s development.73 The distinction between survival and resistance was fluid, however, as is demonstrated in the testimony of Alfred Kantor, a Czech-Jewish artist, who maintained his practice of drawing and documenting in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Kantor declared that his commitment to art was in fact a matter of survival, and arose from “a deep instinct for self-preservation […]. By taking the role of observer, I could at least for a few moments detach myself from what was going on… and was therefore better able to hold together the threads of my sanity.”74

The practice of drawing allowed Kantor to position himself both as a victim and a witness. Alain Badiou theorized precisely this connection between artistic practice, resistance or subsistence, and witnessing, when he discussed the writings of Varlam Shalamov, a survivor of the Soviet gulag. For Badiou, resistance enacted in such extreme situations as concentration camps and the gulag is an impenetrable phenomenon, which is possible when part of a subject is still located outside the identity of a victim. From this place, Badiou repeats after Shalamov, the human animal can affirm him- or herself as “something other than being-for-death, and thus: something other than amortal being.”75

The above testimonies present the vitality of connection between art and resistance and at the same time open up the field of inquiry to ambiguities that were often obscured. In a famous discussion concerning the nature of creative acts, Gilles Deleuze emphasized the existence of a particular intimate bond connecting artworks and acts of resistance, and posed the following question: “What is this mysterious relationship between a work of art and an act of resistance when the men and women who resist neither have the time nor sometimes the culture necessary to have the slightest connection with art?”76 In an attempt to think through this relationship, Deleuze importantly differentiated art-as-such as separate from means of communication—which he understood as the transmission of information, performing an important role in sustaining a given power structure. At the same time, art cannot simply be categorized as the opposite of communication, since for Deleuze such an antithesis—“counter-information”—is in itself powerless and becomes efficacious only when enacted as an act of resistance. Eventually, he addressed the intangible relations between art and resistance indirectly by recalling a definition once coined by André Malraux: that art is the only thing that resists death.77 Consequently, it is art’s capacity to resist death which locates artistic practice at the foundation of the human condition, and in doing so bonds it to acts of resistance—understood here as efforts undertaken to emancipate people from oppressive power structures.

Seen in this framework, the act of making art is rooted both in the realms of aesthetics and ethics and in politics; artistic practice, like acts of resistance, works as a wedge which creates a space exempt from determinism and from “being-for-death.” This is the “potential space” of art of which Brigitte Schoch-Joswig wrote in her essay about abstract painting created in concentration camps, which she suggests constituted a break within the prisoner’s own temporality marked with the never-ending routine of extreme cruelty.78 Under the framework elaborated by Deleuze, the multifaceted artistic practice within the camps—its prohibition in the face of law imposed by the Nazis, its utility as a means of survival, and its power to restore a sense of humanity—can in fact be seen as aspects of one act, the resistance to death, on the most profane and profound levels at the same time. The resistance fighter’s portrait drawn by Halina Olomucki in Auschwitz-Birkenau represents the weaving together of works of art and acts of resistance, though the thread connecting the two is by no means easy to grasp.

An artwork’s resistance to death ought to be comprehended as art’s ability to transcend its own time and context, as well. In the latter part of Deleuze’s lecture, he refers to this capacity of art by recalling a famous statement by Paul Klee.79 In a rare public appearance, in Jena in 1924, Klee closed his remarks with a moving statement: “We still lack the ultimate power, for: the people are not with us. But we seek a people!”80 Klee’s declaration that “a people” are missing is understood by Deleuze beyond its immediate historical context, in which the artist’s avant-garde was isolated from the rest of contemporaneous German society. Instead, the fact that art lacks a people is a positive, as it means that “There is no work of art that does not call on a people who does not yet exist.”81 That is, the work of art is always evoking people and realities not yet in existence, just as acts of resistance are often undertaken in the name of a similar gamble: in the name of people to come.

The lack of “a people” may be seen as a limitation but also as a trace of art’s potential to be meaningful not just within its own time and circumstances. From such a perspective, art’s untimeliness constitutes the fullness of its capacity to resist. The actions of those imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps who continued or began making art in spite of their perilous position created a space which constituted a space of resistance, even if limited to a scrap of paper. It is necessary, therefore, to both consider the action of making art as an act of resistance and to study more closely the actual works, to think about the space of resistance in a metaphorical and also in a concrete way, and to consider the idea of material resistance alongside that of spiritual resistance.

The framework of material resistance can be understood at the most basic level as addressing the actual substance of artworks, which resists decay and entropy. This requires us to consider the fragile yet astonishingly durable material used for artworks produced in secret by prisoners, only some of whom were already professional artists. The materiality of the artworks, often made on creased and stained paper the artists were forced to hide from guards, demonstrates in a self-evident manner the conditions of their practice. Boris Taslitzky, a French painter of Russian-Jewish descent and a prisoner in Buchen­wald, recounted that the paper he used to draw on was of the lowest quality: