On The Art That Derives From Being Human

Last evening I attended the centennial celebration of the artist Arbit Blatas. He was a Lithuanian Jew who left his native land in 1929 to study in Paris along with Soutine, Picasso, Utrillo, Braque, and Matisse. He was one of those painters who was successful during his life; his work was exhibited in Paris and New York. He fled Nazi-occupied Europe and came to live in New York in 1941.

The exhibition is at the Hebrew Union College--Jewish Institute of Religion Museum at One West 4th Street in Manhattan and will run through June 26, 2009.

Blatas was an Expressionist painter and sculptor. His work is divided in the exhibition between the landscapes and nightscapes of Venice, Paris interiors, Grand Opera works (his wife and muse is Regina Resnik, the opera diva), set designs for Threepenny Opera, and bronze sculptures of actors from various performances. These are beautiful, colorful, and flavored to be almost "lite" except for the thickness of the paint, the intentionality of the intense palette.

Then one enters the second gallery: the Holocaust. First there are the seven bronze bas-relief sculptures that were a gift from the Anti-Defamation League to the Hebrew Union College. Originally they were commissioned for the ADL buiding just next door to the United Nations in New York. But since the ADL moved, the bas-reliefs have been in storage instead of being displayed as a reminder of our fragile nature as humans.

This is only one of several Holocaust memorials that were executed by Blatas. His mother perished in Studthof; his father survived Dachau. He was deeply touched by the Nazi reign of terror. There is a permanent memorial to the Holocaust by Blatas in the Ghetto of Venice (1980, 1993), the Shrine of the Unknown Jewish Martyrs in Paris (1981), and one installed posthumuously in the infamous Fort Nine, in his native Lithuania (2003). In addition to the bas-relief panels, there are four canvases: Babi Yar (1944); The Deportation (1975); The Final Solution/The Quarry (1975); and The Last Train (1990). Despite or perhaps because of the Expressionism of the paint strokes, these paintings are horrifying: the desperate use of color, the piling of paint like the piling of bodies onto the canveses.

Then returning to the theatrical and landscape paintings, one sees the similarity of technique; these paintings were indeed painted by the same artist. But the "lite" goes out of the gayer work, and one realizes that great beauty often comes from the depths of pain.

I attended the opening with my friends Anna and Arlene. Anna is the niece of Arbit's first wife and sat for a portrait with him at the age of sixteen. It was an honor to attend the opening with someone whom I love so much and who knew and loved this famous and illustrious man.

My uncle died this morning at the age of 91. He lived a long and healthy life, and succumbed to lung cancer that ravaged his body quickly and effectively. He died at home, six hours after insisting that he be discharged from the hospital, so that he could die at home. My aunt, my father's sister, is the last remaining member of that generation born just as World War I was ending, finally, mostly because the Flu Epidemic of 1918 had ravaged all sides' armies. They lived through the Great Depression and World War II to raise my generation so that we could accuse them of being hypocrites because they wanted to protect us from the harms that plagued them. They wanted our lives to be pretty and clean.

No one quite knew what Uncle George did for RCA. It had something to do with radar and that shield that ran across the northern border with Canada. He was an engineer who needed to control his life with mathematical precision, and in the end, he wanted to control his death, too. And he did.

When I visited with my aunt and my cousin Ira who had flown in from Israel in time to witness his father's death, my aunt began to cry. She was somewhat disconcerted by her own display of emotion. I held her, she is a tiny woman once again, and told her that these great moments, of birth and death, are what make us human, and that at moments like this, we can understand the utter pain and futility of human existence as well as the joyfulness of knowing there is another generation.

When my own mother was dying, when she would finally fall asleep to escape the pain of lung cancer that had metasticized to her bones, I would listen to Mozart's Requiem Mass through headphones and weep. This is what we share as human beings: birth, life, death.