Samuel Bak’s Illuminations Audio Tour

Reconstruction. As in so many of Bak's works, Reconstruction offers us a vision of organized chaos. Fragments of a Jewish past abound, but the artist distributes, only sparingly, hints about its possible future. To the right, we see half of the facade of a temple, topped by half of a Jewish star, but the task of restoring unity to what has been damaged or destroyed remains incomplete.

On one side of a pile of tumbling Torahs or books of commentaries on their contents, we find a flat triangle. On the other, a pyramid. If one were inverted on the other, they would form another Star of David. Two towers preside over the scene like twin sentinels, though it is not clear whether there is anything left for them to guard.

The one on the left resembles a synagogue, against which leans a bundle of poles, once used to support scrolls containing the sacred Torah. Its worshippers have vanished from the scene. New ones will have to be recruited from the audience of viewers.

The structure on the right is more difficult to identify. It looks like a stovepipe, with a hint of flame emerging from its opening. But whether this is a token of death or rebirth, we have no way of knowing. The X on its surface compounds the mystery.

The best clue to meaning is the Hebrew word "midrash," imprinted on a piece of giant canvas, pinned to an easel. "Midrashim," plural of "midrash," are parts of rabbinic literature that seek to interpret the meaning of biblical texts. They have two purposes-- to inspire clarity of thought and to apply such thinking to practical action in the world.

Bak's images here-- his multiple volumes, once filled with Jewish lore, his blank manuscript pages, once covered by narratives of faith from Hebrew scripture-- invite us to devise new midrashim that will include the catastrophic injury to the ancient destiny of the Jewish people, and to Jewish traditions and culture, suffered during and after the Holocaust. The blank canvases that form the background of Reconstruction solicit the imagination of the viewer to contemplate the enormity of the challenge. They also remind us of the crucial role of art in carrying out this task.

On the Road. One of the recurring themes in Samuel Bak's paintings is the journey motif. We cannot know whether the title of this work includes an ironic reference to Jack Kerouac's classic fiction about the so-called Beat Generation. But it is unquestionable that the ordeal of European Jewry during the Holocaust tells the story of a Beat Generation of another kind.

The contrast grows even sharper when we consider that Bak's cluttered landscape supports a voyage to nowhere, to a destination ending in annihilation. As so often, the imagery creates the narrative before our eyes. It is not an orderly caravan, and it seems to be leaving behind in the foreground a ruined city of fallen archways and columns, abandoned wheels from absent vehicles, and the vestige of a deserted house. Its empty window staring bleakly at a scene void of individual presence.

Where have all the occupants gone? Where the crowds of confused victims, lined up and wondering about their future fate? Where are the boxcars intended to transport them to their doom? Bak's canvases are very much concerned with what is missing, challenging the power of the imagination to reconstruct the human import of what only appears to be the surreal drama unfolding before us.

Although Bak's images have a distinct metaphorical value, it does not take much effort to link them to a specific historical reality, too. A single roofless ghetto dwelling on wheels is enough to conjure up the loss of an entire community. Fragments of gigantic keys entreat us to unlock the mystery of their departure, but they also remind us that after the end of this journey, they will never be used again to open the doors of the homes where their former owners once lived. The keys to the kingdom where they are going will be of little use.

Ancient memory reminds us that the children of Israel were once on the road for an entirely different purpose, a voyage to a promised land under divine guidance. That narrative endures as a source of consolation to the Jewish people. But the dilemma remains. We are still searching for a key to its solution, of how to reconcile it with the more somber voyage evoked by the artist in this painting.

Camp. Set in a barren and rocky terrain, the ruined structure dominating the landscape of Camp has become a memorial site where we are forced to reconstruct in the imagination what its original purpose might have been. Empty windows peer out at us like blind eyes. The original inmates of this erstwhile concentration camp have long since left to meet their doom. But they are not forgotten.

The abandoned site is now inhabited by memory, the twin candles marking a ritual of remembrance that will rescue the victims from oblivion. Many of Bak's paintings reflect this theme. The absence of human figures forces the viewer to consider the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish life and culture. Such reflection cannot restore the loss, but it revives a sense of living presence, even as it mourns the absence of those who once embodied it.

Since visual art cannot speak, it depends on images to rouse a response to what it signifies. Careful inspection reveals that the outline shape of the stone enclosure is a crumbling Star of David. Lest we miss its significance, the star is duplicated in more recognizable form on stilts above a far wall of the camp, a giant monument to the memory of those who once dwelt there.

Like a watchtower of remembrance, it proclaims to future generations the identity of those who perished in this place. But Bak's paintings do not simply announce meaning. They invite collaboration. They demand an informed audience educated in the basic details of the Holocaust.

Camp should not be mistaken for a surrealistic invasion of the past. Its vacant buildings and disappeared population have nothing to do with dream imagery or fantasy forms, but are rooted in a real history that awaits excavation. The arid landscape with its monotone shading makes one wonder whether a desert sandstorm has washed over its surface, a sufficient hint that some form of catastrophe has occurred here.

The unextinguished candles with their seemingly eternal flame suggest that nothing will or should ever erase the memory of this event.

Commemoration. A higher percentage of Lithuanian Jewry, between 93% and 94%, were murdered during the Holocaust than of any other country in Europe. A large proportion of them came from the capital city of Vilna, whose name is inscribed in Yiddish letters on the stone plaque in the lower right corner of the painting. The Yiddish culture of Vilna was known worldwide for its learned rabbis and scholars, its rich libraries and archives, its variety of religious academies, all of which were pillaged and destroyed by the German policy of confiscation and mass murder.

How does one memorialize a loss of such magnitude? Commemoration can be viewed as a group portrait without the people. Instead, the artist has introduced a cluster of images that he invites his viewers to read with the help of the visual imagination. This is especially important because nature, retaining its vitality, is already encroaching on the site, threatening to overwhelm it and erase it from memory. This makes us the guardians of its future, imposing on us the solemn responsibility of responding to the impact of its monumental implications.

The bright yellow fragment of a Star of David, which inhabitants of the Vilna ghetto were forced to wear, together with the Yiddish plaque confirms the identity of the absent community. In their place, we find a family of candles, some of them covered by drippings as if they were weeping tears of wax and sorrow for the loss they should illuminate.

But as so often in Bak's work, their shape and substance violate our expectations of how they would normally appear. Here, the candles resemble stone carvings or pillars. They are not capped by bright, flickering flames, but only vestiges of their reflection. Like the Jews they are intended to commemorate, they have undergone a metamorphosis, as if to remind us of the painful difference between honoring the memory of a single family member and virtually the entire population of Vilna Jewry.

Yet despite the inanimate nature of these memorial candles, there is a kind of dignified beauty, an almost fortress solidity, to this curious shrine in the woods, standing perhaps on the very space where the remains of Vilna Jewry lie buried. It is a tribute to the power of memory, and a warning that the only alternative to such memory is oblivion.

The Sheen. Like Camp, The Sheen represents a crumbling monument, reflecting the fate of the people of Israel. But its origins long predate the Holocaust, while it addresses a different destiny that was once filled with immeasurable hope.

The foreground is almost entirely occupied by two gigantic stone replicas of the tablets that once contained the Ten Commandments. Like twin guardians of a sacred ancient memory, they prevent the eye of the viewer from escaping into a distant vista of landscape or sky. The spatial arrangement of the canvas forces us to focus on their significance, offering only ambiguous clues to the meaning of their disintegrating state.

The first clue comes from the title. A sheen refers to a gleaming surface, and one can imagine that the initial tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai glowed with a holy light, since they contain the imprint of the divine hand. But now the Hebrew letters that once spelled out the mandates, sealing the covenant between God and his chosen people, are peeling off the surface, collapsing in a heap at the base of the fragmented stone template that once contained them.

The title of the painting thus bears ironic implications. When one considers that the sixth commandment in Hebrew scriptures reads "do not murder" and then reflects on the doom facing European Jewry during the Holocaust, it is no wonder that the sheen has worn off and lost its luster. The Sheen is a classic example of a Bak painting that challenges us with questions without providing us with answers.

Have the people of Israel done something to earn God's displeasure? Or had God simply turned away from a commitment made at the beginning of monotheistic belief? Is it presumptuous to expect God to intervene in history when his creation has gone morally awry? Assuming one could redesign a system of belief to include the events of the Holocaust, what kind of covenant could we imagine that would account for the chaos of mass murder?

The jumbled letters in The Sheen await our intervention without assurance that a damaged faith can be permanently revived.

About Time. We see a rubble-strewn landscape occupied by replicas of human presence rather than actual human beings. Nothing seems vital, yet this gathering of sages is presumably engaged in a learned discussion of important issues. A gigantic tree lies uprooted before them. Its lifeless branches bearing no greenery. Its once-upright stature apparently a victim of the decay of time.

The clock face, imprinted on a sliced segment of tree trunk, confirms this association. Does the upright chimney in the background belching smoke assert some kind of vertical triumph over the fallen tree? Despite the remorseless progression of time, surely the victory of this icon of death was not inevitable.

Are our sages discussing why it could not have been avoided? Or are they still tied to Talmudic disputations about fine points of ancient scriptural lore? Do their gestures signify mourning or warning? Shouldn't they be addressing the subject of a disastrous past or debating what possible meaning it could have for the future of civilization and of world Jewry in particular?

Isn't it about time that they, and we, faced some of these questions and acknowledged how the passage of time influences our response to where they may lead? Developing a point of view toward the event we call the Holocaust is essential for anyone who hopes to achieve a meaningful encounter with the dark vision it embraces. There is a certain aridity to the figures in this painting, sculpted from or imprinted on stone.

Time has turned them into monuments to memory, and we are challenged with the task of converting them back into living flesh and changing their dialogue into an argument about what lies beyond the massive tree that is blocking their view. If we could see that distant vista, would we be gazing at a fading sunset through which nature renews the beauty of an assaulted universe, or at the advancing threat of raging and destructive flames? An eerie light bathes the foreground of the canvas, an invitation to insight, though its source remains a mystery.

That mystery, the journey from sight to insight, is the one that we are asked to unravel.

The Cup Was Full. Although this painting is another version of the boy from the Warsaw ghetto with his hands raised, its title leads into complex associations that reach beyond the boy's literal experience. Why is a cup that was once full now empty? And what has happened to its contents?

The cup is on a table or altar in the foreground. Its detached handle lying next to it in the shape of an inverted question mark. Those familiar with the verses from the well-known Psalm 23 in Hebrew scripture, "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over," may also recall that the Psalms were once attributed to King David. The vague outline of the Star of David appears near the center of the painting, identifying the boy as Jewish.

The lines from Psalm 23 express confidence in God's covenantal promise to protect his people and bestow on them the grace of divine providence. Here, the boy is not a part of a monument, but has a very human face, with a mixed expression of confusion and despair in his eyes. If we could stand behind him and look through those eyes, what might we see? He has been deprived of his cap which together with his worn shoes lie on the table or altar before him, perhaps as a preliminary sign of a sacrifice that is about to take place.

But there is no evidence that his head has been anointed with oil, and with a wry irony, Bak expands this allusion to include the beginnings of Christianity, since the raised palms with their nail holes are a clear reference to the fate of Jesus on the cross. In New Testament Greek, "Christos," Christ, means anointed, as does "mashiach," messiah, in ancient Hebrew scripture. But the doom of the boy, as we foreknow know, will be fulfilled through physical execution, not crucifixion or some other form of spiritual redemption.

Even more ironic, then, in the context of this work are the closing lines of Psalm 23, which immediately follow the ones quoted earlier. "Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever." If the cup of faith was once full, it now lies empty before us, and how to renew its contents remains the intricate question that this ambiguous painting leaves unanswered.

Sanctuary. Imagine the surprise of the explorers who first uncovered the ruins of Machu Picchu, the so-called lost city of the Incas, half-buried beneath tangled undergrowth in the mountainous terrain of Peru. A hundred years later, archaeologists are still arguing about the original usage of its buildings and terraced fields. Bak's, Sanctuary represents a similar dilemma, challenging its audience to interpret the purpose of this ancient stone monument, also partially covered by shrubbery, surrounded by mountains, awaiting some archaeologist of the Holocaust to confront its mysterious presence.

Bak's title offers us some clues. A sanctuary is a sacred site. The destroyed temple of the Hebrews in Jerusalem was such a holy location. But a sanctuary is also a place of refuge, where one seeks protection from a threatening enemy. The painting displays two heads, the face of the lower one having lost its human features, while the one above retains the recognizable visage of a boy, though the flesh of both have long since turned to stone.

They now seem part of some ancient statuary. But the raised palms prompt us to identify them with the famous photograph of the boy in the Warsaw ghetto with its palms raised. He is standing with a group of other Jews who have just been driven by the Germans from the bunker where they have been hiding. In other words, from the underground sanctuary where they have been seeking refuge.

Whatever spiritual solace sanctuaries were once intended to provide, it does little to forestall the physical extinction that will be the fate of the boy and the other Jews rounded up in the Warsaw ghetto. Bak thus introduces a veiled ironic undertone to the implications of his painting. This is reinforced by the image of the upraised palms, each pierced by what appears to be a bullet hole. But one palm is noticeable by its absence, replaced by a nailed piece of wood.

And the association of nail with palm in Bak's iconography summons up the memory of an earlier Jew nailed to the cross at the birth of Christianity. However, as the vines of time wind about this monument in the mountains, we are invited to ask what kind of spiritual salvation is offered to the boy from the Warsaw ghetto. Bak's art provides a different kind of immortality, a sanctuary in the mind of the viewer, though each of us is obliged to decide whether this is sufficient compensation for such an unredeemable loss.

At Rest. Pursuing the journey of interpretation into paintings like At Rest is aided by some background information. How much of it we bring to the encounter helps to shape, and ultimately to enrich, what we take from it. Because his face is partially shadowed, it is hard to tell whether the expression of the seated figure reflects a weary or a wistful disposition.

Since he is at rest, he's obviously been traveling. A bundle containing his meager possessions lies nearby. Is he looking at the uprooted broken tree in his lap that blocks his view or at the intact tree beside him, which rises healthily through the seat of the unoccupied chair? Both will have an impact on his future.

The fragmented tree he carries resembles a crude crucifix, with half a Jewish star affixed to its crest. There is sufficient visual evidence to assume that the reference in this painting is to the legend of the wandering Jew. There are many versions of this legend, which originated in medieval Christian folklore, as there are speculations about the identity of its protagonist.

One of the commonest stories is that a Jew in Jerusalem, possibly a shoemaker, note the prominent empty boot, refused to allow Jesus to rest at his door as he bore his cross to crucifixion on Mount Calvary. In response, Jesus condemned him to wander across the face of the earth, an object of scorn, without possibility of dying, until the messiah returned. In this instance, Jesus himself, on Judgment Day.

Perhaps both Bak and his wanderer are wondering how a messianic message originally designed to bring blessing to mankind was later twisted to include a curse against the Jews. Bak's wandering Jew bears his own cross, but the immortality to which he has been sentenced by Christian folklore carries no promise of salvation or redemption. The question raised by this painting may simply be how to destroy the legend by uprooting it so that eventually the wanderer and his people can escape its harsh sentence and achieve a permanent rest from its malign influence.

The normal tree that flourishes despite its unnatural mooring hints at the chance of restoring an unblemished community, though there is no certain evidence in the imagery of this painting that the injuries caused by the folklore of antisemitism will wither and die in the immediate future.

Under a Blue Sky. Bak's title employs a device found frequently in his work-- the use of irony. Irony appears when language or images encourage us to believe the opposite of what we literally see or hear. The clear and tranquil sky in this painting offers us a peaceful vista of nature, but it is rudely contradicted by the pathos and violence of the scene on the earth below.

We gaze with horror at the spectacle of maimed and headless corpses, but they are the corpses of teddy bears rather than the children who once owned them. Their body parts are strewn across the landscape like fragments of stone, frozen tributes to the memory of the million and a half Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust. Who can appreciate the beauty of nature in the presence of such ruin?

One of Bak's constant themes is the impact of the Holocaust on values we once cherished without question. There was a time when the mention of teddy bears would evoke furry creatures that filled us with nostalgia for the innocent pleasures of childhood. But for these victims, the Holocaust has killed both children and childhood, and somehow we must find a way of reconciling this loss of innocence with any hopes for future growth.

The irony of the painting is reinforced by the tension between what our mind recalls about the time when teddy bears flourished as comforting toys and what our eyes tell us about the inconsolable scene before us. Bak faced a technical difficulty when conceiving this work, one that any author or artist concerned with representing the Holocaust must wrestle with.

Of course, he could have painted the corpses of children, but the result would have been so aesthetically repellent that most members of his audience would have turned away in disgust, mingled with the panic that such a scene might instinctively induce. He found an ingenious compromise by substituting teddy bears for children, leaving us with a monument to an unnamed past. Most of the creature parts have already turned to stone. That challenges the imagination to translate his images into a reflection of historical reality.

Unexpected Visitors. Despite the dazzling rainbow of colors spread across the surface of this painting, we can hardly regard it as a celebration of natural beauty or harmonious forms. Instead of a landscape of birds chirping amidst leafy branches or swooping on graceful wings against a background of luminous sky, we are offered a gathering of monstrous bird-like shapes, wooden or metallic, each graced with a threatening eye. Though nothing hints at a reason for their alarming presence.

But clearly, the time is out of joint. A broken clock face no longer registers the hours because its hands lie useless on a stone slab, pointing in opposite directions. There is a warrior quality to some of the bird creatures, as if they were helmeted for conflict, having already invaded the supposed serenity of artistic representation. An unaccountable ominous atmosphere pervades the scene.

Vacant eye sockets, some of them resembling bullet holes, stare at us with a silent message of dread. Such visitors are always unexpected in a universe that prefers to pay homage to natural harmony, but once they appear, they exert a hypnotic power over their audience. How do we solve the secret of their appeal?

Bak has an uncanny ability to harness the psychological intensity of visual images and to use it to engage the attention of his viewers. But he is shrewd enough to resist the temptation to add a didactic moral to his story. Whatever impact this bizarre scenario may have on our consciousness, he leaves for us to decide. And how do we do that? By asking questions.

What is the one natural bird doing there, pecking vainly at a branch, its gentle identity virtually canceled by the warlike creatures that ignore it? When unexpected visitors like these intrude on the plains of history, we are obliged to recognize the threat they bear with them and acknowledge the consequences of failing to do so. If we allow the monstrous to inhabit our reality, then the identity of the ultimate unexpected visitor becomes clear. We call him death.

When the flow of time reverses direction and reverts to barbarism, his reign may seem invincible. Is it easier to resist once we learn to expect the unexpected? As we know, Bak is expert at raising such questions. The answers lie beyond the province of his art.

Falling Memorial. The undamaged pear in the foreground, insulated from earth, presides over a landscape in flames. Pink-tinged clouds reflecting the blazing inferno below obscure the last vestiges of natural sky. Twin plumes of smoke rising in the distance evoke the sinister image of crematorium chimneys that appear in so many of Bak's paintings.

Some disaster has occurred, but the artist refuses to specify, compelling his audience instead to examine this unpopulated terrain and search for a human connection. Why pears? Bak himself provides some clues. Early on, he has written, he saw quote, "something vulnerable, almost human about their form," end quote. Later, he said, quote, "They became thoughts in search of thinkers, coded messages, questions without answers, parables of our human condition," end quote.

As usual, Bak avoids didactic, meaning offering us a variety of possibilities, leaving interpretation open to the imagination of the viewer. In the beginning, we might say, there was a pure pear, its beauty and dignity highlighted by the white fabric on which it rests. Civilization has rewarded its promise by erecting a gigantic monument to celebrate its stature.

But time has shown that such tributes may be based on the illusion of invulnerability. Cultures rise and fall and disappear, and this seems to be the fate of the falling memorial before us. The solitary survivor at its base, once a worshipper and now a mourner, is forced to admit the fragility of what was once thought to be indestructible. Who would have believed that such colossal sculpted pears, solidly supported on an altar of stone, would one day crumble in ruin, losing the splendor of their original form?

In the face of such violence, how do we mend our identity? Have we worshiped false gods of power who in the end betray our esteem? Was this memorial ill-conceived from the start? As Bak says, his pears raise questions without answers, but they need not reduce us to silence. A response may not be a solution, and pears are not people.

To the artist, they are merely thoughts without thinkers, bidding their audience to undertake the mental journey they are incapable of. As in the Garden of Eden, an apple led to the loss of innocence, so here, a pear serves a similar function. The attitude of the solitary ripened fruit is both assertive and sad, bearing into the future its burden of catastrophe, a somber survivor left with the responsibility of renewal.

Stronghold. Unlike in The Cup Was Full, where the title leads us toward an understanding of the content, in this painting the images shed light on the significance of the title. Without a basic familiarity with the game of chess, the viewer will have difficulty assessing the implications of the work. But this is no more than to say that responding to almost any work of art requires collaboration between the colors and composition of forms on the canvas, and the depth of consciousness that the viewer brings to the encounter.

Chess is a contest, a struggle, demanding a carefully wrought plan of attack and retreat, designed to defeat one's opponent by capturing his pieces and trapping his king, the presiding monarch of the chessboard. In Stronghold, the only visible pieces are the pawns, the least mobile of all, unless they can penetrate to the rear echelons of the enemy and transform themselves into more valuable instruments of assault. But at the outset, they form the rank and file of the opposing forces, protecting the kings, queens, and bishops behind them. Their role at the outset of the battle is thus not trivial, as is confirmed by the appearance of shallow bullet wounds in the heads of the pawns in the left and right foreground.

We see how easily the language of chess can be converted into a military idiom. This is a universe committed to total victory. It thrives on rivalry and shuns treaties, except for an occasional stalemate or draw. The squares of the original chessboard hang in fragments. This is no longer a game, but a war fraught with danger. Contending troops, their battle flags visible, face each other, one brigade marching forward while the other waits in disarray. The royal defender is present, like the chessboard, only as an image of a crown imprinted on a square and nailed to a wall.

Bak has commented that "Painting is like a game of chess. You have to foresee things, but you can't foresee everything." He might have been speaking of the human condition. It sometimes seems as if civilization, like the game of chess, cannot exist without armed conflict, despite its commitment to peaceful community. In a game, this is permissible. But in life, it becomes a paradox, forcing one to wonder why, despite our foresight, we fail to prevent the destructive consequences of strongholds.

Study After Nocturnal A. The innocent title of this painting offers little guidance to its significance, except to identify the time of day. A brightly lighted but solitary chess pawn stands as mute nocturnal witness to a cosmic catastrophe. Its knob-like head resembles the globe of the Earth, but it is misplaced amidst this windswept terrain, as if to suggest that a simple board game has suddenly escalated into a conflict of far more sinister implications.

Instead of a romantic landscape celebrating the communion of natural and heavenly beauty, we are greeted by an exploding moon. Its rock-like fragments drifting slowly toward outer space. We might like to believe that below it lingers the glow of a fading sunset, but this would be inconsistent with the nighttime scenario on display.

More likely, the pawn, in its solitude, is the anxious spectator to an avalanche of advancing flames, a conflagration whose origin remains a mystery and whose potential destructive effect we are left to envision. Bak's art often introduces us to the beginning of a narrative. Its arrested motion awaiting our intervention to advance, if not to complete, its tale. It does not take much imagination to transform the pawn into a human figure contemplating a universe gone awry. Such a scenario has repeatedly assaulted modern consciousness during the past century, and to seek a way of absorbing it into the possibility of a meaningful future.

If the game continues, what will be its result? Illumination rather than darkness controls the surface of the picture. The pawn is bathed in a luminous radiance, cloaking it in a mysterious dignity despite the chaos it beholds. A heavenly body may be in disarray, but so far, the Earth, the pawn's head, retains its integrity.

In the absence of moonlight, which seems to have suffered a crushing defeat, the creative impulse of the artist provides an alternative source from outside the frame of the picture. Within that frame, the light of the flames approach, and the rivalry between the two leaves open the question of, Which will triumph? The study itself is an initial step in the journey toward enlightenment.

Envelope. The title of this work does not disclose its meaning, but it leads us toward a means of approaching its implications. An envelope is a kind of container. It encloses, among many possibilities, a message, a surprise, an invitation. Bak's mixed-media composition of a gigantic pear seems to be floating on a cloud, adrift in a space that shares its coloration and offers no contrasting shades to help define the import of its shape.

It urges us to explore not its surroundings, but its contents. Bulging with numerous smaller but intact pears, it appears to be about to give birth to replicas of its collapsing self. As God is said to have created Adam and Eve in his own image, so here, Bak's image is about to heed the advice of the divine voice to the first human pair to be fruitful in multiplying.

Although we are viewing the work of a more humble and fallible kind of creator, Bak duplicates the gesture of something being created in its own image. We are the midwives to this process, peeling away the cover of conventional looking in an attempt to reveal what lies beneath or within. Legend tells us that Adam and Eve lost the innocence of Eden by eating an apple, long-known as the forbidden fruit.

Unwilling to adopt a worn-out image full of associations with sin, Bak adapts the old story to a new narrative. After all, Adam and Eve were not forbidden to eat an apple, but, according to Genesis, only the fruit of a certain tree. And in an act of secular creation, with no constraints attached, invites us to cherish a succulence and admire a purity of form embodied in a different kind of fruit, a pear.

The annual ritual of nature that allows old leaves to fall and new ones to emerge, old petals to wither and fresh flowers to flourish is embodied in the teeming vigor inside the envelope of decaying skin, much as the modern mind seeks to shape a more vital future out of the remnants of a mournful past.

Four Introductions. Does a work drained of color imply a world drained of meaning? Or are we merely asked to confront a monument stripped of embellishments and reduced to a state of decay? We are looking at a gloomy composition in black and white that also includes many shades of gray.

At first, the structure seems to resemble several adjacent tombs in various stages of decomposition. And this is certainly a possibility. The absence of bright hues is more appropriate to the theme of loss and death, and the dismal landscape supports this view.

But seen from above, the roofs of the adjoining buildings take the shape of a familiar Bak icon-- the twin tablets that once contained the 10 Commandments, though the shape is now nothing more than a silhouette, without surface or divine content. Much is missing that was once present, but enough is present to provide us with clues about how to continue the task of interpretation.

Indeed, interpretation is itself the central subject of Four Introductions. But without some background information, it would be impossible to proceed. Because of the lack of tinted contrast that a painting in color would contain, it is easy to overlook the Hebrew letters that preside over each of the door frames.

Reading from right to left, as Hebrew texts require, we find in sequence PRDS, an acronym for the Hebrew word "pardes," which means garden or orchard. "Pardes" is also a cognate for the English "paradise," a reference to the Garden of Eden. So here, the illusion is far from a happy one, since eating the forbidden fruit, as Milton affirms in "Paradise Lost," brought, quote, "death into the world and all our woe," end quote.

It is as if the temple has become a mausoleum, and viewers are invited not to worship, but to mourn. The four Hebrew letters also refer to four levels of biblical exposition, ranging, again reading right to left, from the literal to the allegorical to the moral to the mystical. Each doorway invites our entry, though only the simple or direct meaning is fully open.

Scripture may once have revealed its meaning to anyone introduced to it, but now such introductions are increasingly difficult to achieve. The second doorway is partially closed. The third, entirely shut. And the fourth, the mystical, the most sacred, is inaccessible behind a pile of debris.

Inside that fourth section, rising in silhouette like the tips of flames, is the top part of the Hebrew letter "shin," the first letter of "Shekhinah," one of the scriptural names of God, signifying the mystery of divine presence. Here it might just as easily signify the mystery of divine absence. And when combined with the missing 10 Commandments and the reference to the loss of Eden, we are left with introductions to the fate of certain biblical traditions that are more unwelcome than we might at first have imagined.

The Number. Three scenarios merge in Bak's, The Number-- a landscape of memory, a landscape of faith, and a landscape of death. The landscape of faith is propelled by the legacy from Mount Sinai, the twin tablets that once contained the basis for human morality, the Ten Commandments.

The surfaces are now blank, with two exceptions. On one, floating off into the void, is etched the unpronounceable name of God, commonly represented by the twin yods that are etched into the stone. This is all that remains of the covenant that once joined the people of Israel with their divine protector.

The faith that was the basis for that union is now tested by the giant numeral six that is embossed on the other tablet, which is tilted precariously, as if it were about to tumble into an abyss. That number evokes a divided memory, which shuttles uneasily between faith and death.

The sixth commandment in Hebrew scripture is "Lo tirṣaḥ," do not murder. But its violation looms with equal force as we recall the 6 million members of European Jewry killed during the Holocaust. The images elicit questions to which we are still struggling to find answers. How do we retain our reverence for these cracked and crumbling remnants that once contained the principles of conduct, designed to guide the moral behavior of much of Western civilization?

How do we account for the cosmic failure of the particular commandment intended to support life and preserve faith among the peoples of the world? If history can so easily disturb consciousness with the memory of such violent death, is it possible to inscribe new commandments on the blank faces of these stone monuments so as to include the possibility of events like the Holocaust? It is as if these tokens of faith are slowly being embedded in a landscape of death, floating above a painful cemetery of remembrance, doomed to undergo a metamorphosis that will convert the tablets of God's words into replicas of tombstones.

How to rescue the divine message from the graveyard of memory is the challenge facing us in this vivid and powerful assemblage of suggestive images.

Recovered. This cluster of apparently unrelated images resembles objects that some curious modern archaeologist had unearthed in a recent dig. He has assembled, in an apparently casual manner, the results of his discovery. And since we are privileged witnesses to this episode, we can join in the task of organizing the random assemblage into a meaningful artistic vision.

Fortunately, the work itself contains a significant clue to its design. The letters of "life" are clearly visible. They are preceded by the word "still," which is partially obscured by a stone fragment, perhaps left over from the excavation. Once upon a time, the letters remind us, there was a popular tradition of painting called still life. Cézanne was one of its most expert practitioners.

Devoted to celebrating the joys of existence, the fertility of nature, the pleasures of domestic tranquility, they usually exhibited a table, often covered by a richly embroidered cloth, bearing a bottle of wine, a decanter, a glass, a bowl of fruit, or a vase of brightly colored flowers. In short, a display of visual harmony that represented the very opposite of Bak's discordant drawing. That drawing may be an attempt to rescue from oblivion some items from a time of past beauty, but it is clear that its visual harmony has been tainted by the incursions of history.

One can decipher the outlines of a wine bottle, but it seems to have been absorbed by the surrounding stone, incapable of pouring anything into the tilted goblet that in any case has lost its own stability. Instead of an embroidered cloth, the table, also askew, holds a ragged garment with the iconic stripes of the uniform of a concentration camp inmate. The sign "still life" is attached in poster fashion to a huge stone structure, perhaps the base of a crematorium chimney, extending beyond the frame of the picture. It is another iconic image of past destruction looming over the contents of the work.

The only fully intact shape before us is a large pear. But its ripe promise is shrouded in shadow, making it a timid example of the bounty of nature that earlier artists in the still life tradition once applauded. The Book of Common Prayer reminds us that "In the midst of life, we are in death." Since Bak is less committed to beginnings and ends than to uncertainties, he might revise that line to read, "In the midst of life, we are in if," coincidentally the central two letters of the word. We may cherish whatever has been recovered from our Holocaust legacy as a sign that life persists, but we do so while simultaneously remembering how much of that past remains unrecoverable.

Broken Strings. Everything in this mixed-media composition speaks of improvisation. Two musicians marooned on a forlorn promontory are hardly in a position to practice their accustomed art in a normal fashion. They appear to be violinists, but the other members of their string quartet, if they exist, are nowhere to be seen. Very few duos for two violins appear in the library of chamber music.

But these performers have no choice but to ad lib their talent as best they can. The work thus mourns a loss. They are also deprived of their instruments and their bows, but simultaneously celebrates the ingenuity of the players who manage to mime a recital that cannot possibly be taking place. There is thus a pathos in the effort to extract sound through gesture alone.

Using as bows, branches that have been plucked from the decaying remnants of trees already stripped of their bark, yet from that wood will be carved the instruments they lack. The shape of a cello begins to emerge from the giant masses of wood that loom in the background. The sprig of leaves sprouting from the tip of one of the improvised bows offers some hope that all is not lost.

That from this visual tribute to the sounds of silence, there may yet blossom a genuine concert to restore our faith in the beauty these musicians were once capable of creating. Yet the mystery and the meaning of the Broken Strings of the title remain. The dangling ropes reaching beyond the upper frame of the picture seem to be dropping from heaven.

But two of the four strings have snapped as if some divine instrumentalist were striving to harmonize the music of the spheres with the earthly representatives below, who seem metaphorically to have been cut off from a previous source of inspiration. How extensive a damage to the creative imagination has been suffered by this rupture and what needs to be done to restore a mutually advantageous connection remains an unresolved issue for Bak's audience to ponder.

After Dürer. The title of this drawing leads us in two directions. Since it refers both to the passage of time, what happened after the age in which Dürer lived, and the influence of art since it contains figures and images that first appeared in the famous 1514 engraving by Albrecht Dürer called Melancholia I. To indicate the measure of time, Dürer included a simple hourglass.

Bak changes it into a clock, but its pendulum is broken and its face is blank. Clearly, the time is out of joint. Whereas Dürer had the rays of a bright sun capped by a rainbow shining in the distance, Bak has introduced clouds to cover the sun. And the striking rainbow has been transformed into a fragmented arc of wood behind the clock, curtailing any sign of promise it might once have revealed.

Dürer's engraving includes several unblemished geometrical forms. A flawless white sphere and a multi-sided block of stone-- emblems of the coming Renaissance and new scientific thought. Bak's sphere is an imperfect circle now resembling the globe of the earth, whose pock-marked surface hints at some kind of attack on its integrity.

The stone polyhedron has also been assaulted, an edge having been chipped off, while the instrument of destruction, a hammer, lies beside it. Hammers were initially designed to build, not to destroy. Somewhere between Dürer and the modern era, the constructive uses of science seem to have gone astray. Both Bak and Dürer offer us brooding angels, but the source of their melancholy is not the same.

The world after Dürer has suffered some injury, but Bak leaves to our imagination the task of defining its nature. Some visual clues may help. In Dürer, a cherub sits beside the angel. In Bak, it has disappeared. The ladder of aspiration that in Dürer connects earth to heaven in Bak leads to nowhere. Its broken top rung limiting the height to which an adventurous spirit might try to climb.

The scales of justice that figure prominently in Dürer's work now lie in ruins at the angel's feet, it's hollow cups having been deprived of their original purpose. Is it any wonder that the angel is perplexed as it occupies its landscape of loss, pondering how to regain its ancient role by rebuilding a shattered universe and restoring spiritual meaning to the world?

At least Dürer's angel has the advantage of worrying only about where the future might lead. Bak's angel bears the heavier burden of brooding about where the disasters of the past have already led.

Adam and Eve begin their journey in Genesis eastward of Eden after their expulsion from paradise. They have no clue about what lies before them looming. Above Eve's head in this painting is a hanging pear-- Bak's version of the forbidden fruit, whose mortal taste, as Milton reminds us in Paradise Lost, brought death into the world and all our woe.

But who could have foreseen the variety of woes that mankind would encounter as it pursued its voyage from biblical narrative to the modern era? We would like to see the expression on Adam's face as he beholds the landscape of disaster before him. But the artist prefers to let our imagination conjure up the look of bewilderment and despair that clouds his vision as he wonders where his next step might lead him.

Unlike Adam, Eve turns toward us, apparently holding an infant in her arms. Though her expression is no clearer than her husband's, Milton has told us that as they left their idyllic garden, the world lay all before them where to choose their place of rest and providence their guide. But such consolation seems to have vanished from Bak's scene. We see instead a broken signpost offering blank information.

It's wooden triangles pointing in opposite directions-- no help at all. Is that blanket of pears intended as a source of nourishment or a reminder of past transgressions? There are no clear answers to the ambiguous questions that this work raises, but there are hints that lead us toward some visual and mental clarity. The splintered pole of the signpost forms the Hebrew letter vav, while the wooden panels attached to it may be read as the letter gimel.

The v and g that represents Bak's traditional signature for the Vilna Ghetto, the smoke and flames in the distance, and the twin chimneys dimly visible beneath them evoke a Holocaust that neither God nor his human creations had envisaged at the birth of the expulsion legend. But it hovers on the horizon, casting an ironic shadow over the Miltonic idea that these travelers might ultimately choose their place of rest with providence their guide.

With its surface drained of all color, the pencil sketch of Suggestions leaves us with a triple portrait in black and white. A trio of flag waving orthodox Jewish enthusiasts who, because of the unity of shading, blend in with their surroundings. They appear to be posed behind each other, and, as with so many other works in this series, From Generation to Generation, the dominant lead figure towers over the other two, who, because of their smaller stature, seem to be his supporters or successors rather than his equals.

Has the passage of time, as the series title implies, reduced their status in the world of religious orthodoxy? One of them, a kippah-clad subordinate, must stand on a flimsy wooden crate to escalate his presence. They wave fragments of banners in celebration of a ritual we cannot understand, while their leader alone pronounces a blessing over invisible multitudes, if they exist. But since the torn banners are striped, like the flag of Israel and the garments of concentration camp inmates, maybe we are witnessing a ritual of mourning rather than a celebration, a blessing in commemoration of the dead.

One of the unique features of numerous Bak creations is the absence, rather than the presence, of meaning, leaving to the viewer the task of identifying the activity represented by the artist's vision. Spread across the foreground of the sketch are barely discernible open volumes, presumably filled with ancient Jewish lore that would help us to interpret the religious roles of the sages before us.

But like so much else in the drawing, we have no clue as to their content. Although the work's title, Suggestions, may offer a playful hint from the artist, it is also an open invitation to his audience to provide their own analysis of what they see. The possibilities then become limitless, the boldest among them being that the hand gesture is not a blessing, but a greeting. Perhaps that three Jewish holy men are rejoicing at the fulfillment of a sacred prophecy. They are welcoming the arrival of the messiah.

Phylacteries, or tefillin, are small square leather boxes containing brief biblical verses that observant Jewish men attach to their foreheads and left forearms during morning prayers. They are connected to leather straps that are wound around the arm. In this painting, the second leather box is missing, and part of the strap seems engraved on rather than wound around the forearm.

Some consultation with historical memory is required to recall that the Germans (could it have been accidental?) chose the same site on which to imprint numbers for the new arrivals in the death camp of Auschwitz. The stripes on the prayer shawl and arm are enough to remind us of this physical violation of human anatomy and of spiritual identity as well. The purpose of the Hebrew verses is to remind devout Jews to keep God's law. The German intention was to mock it.

Is the aged praying Jew seeking to purify his soul to oppose in his mind today's candlelight of the work's title to the encompassing darkness of the German past? If so, why is the candle misplaced? It should be outside the cup-- badly damaged, we note-- and the spoons, one also broken, on the inside. The spoons are bound as if imprisoned by a tightly twisted rope, which contrasts with the loose folds of the tefillin' leather straps, intended to free the spirit and unite it with divine will.

The viewer is forced to inhabit both worlds, focusing on a foreground, crowded with challenging images and denied the relief, a common feature in many other Bak paintings, of a panoramic landscape and a cerulean sky. Still unresolved is the final mystery of why candlelight should be for today. Shouldn't it rather be for tonight?

And, finally, since this is just a study and not the completed version, we are left to wonder what more might be added to endow this complex canvas with further implication.

This blazing variation on the well-known allusion in the 23rd Psalm to a cup that runneth over, which traditionally grants praise to the Lord for a surfeit of blessings, here greets the viewer with an unsettling challenge. What if the cup runneth over with a surfeit of woe rather than bliss? An incandescent glow bathes the landscape with the heat and flames from a volcanic eruption that has already destroyed all signs of human life.

The vacant remains of the buildings that once housed its occupants with their empty windows that stare at us like blind eyes intensify the desolation of the scene. Who once dwelt there? And what explains their fate? Bak's iconography, which includes a giant question mark near the center of the painting, introduces a visual mystery for which there is no easy solution. Instead of containing a soothing drink that might quench the spiritual thirst of its audience, the colossal cup pours forth liquid lava that threatens any form of human encounter.

Is it simply an aberration of nature that ignites this panoramic ruin? Or is that dark descending cloud a harbinger of divine fury, an ironic contrast to the cloud from which a caring God descended to Moses on Mount Sinai? If those wrecked structures are intended to remind us of the remnants of ghettos during the Holocaust, then a more somber vision of mankind's spiritual destiny rises before us, a solemn alternative to the psalmist comforting world where the Lord is my shepherd.

Rather than revealing meaning, Bak's paintings unveil possibilities, leaving to his viewers the task of discerning and exploring them. Implicit in the title is the sense that the artist himself intends to enrich his vision, since a study is usually destined to be followed by a more complete version of the original canvas. How this might appear is left to us to determine. We, too, participate in our own kind of study, faced with the paradox of a world that offers us at the same time the memory of the psalmist's surplus of spiritual joy and the artist's current landscape of physical ruin.

Moving from Study for a Full Cup to Concept requires a disturbing journey from the concrete to the abstract. Here, there are no evident biblical references, nor are the significance of the shapes readily accessible to the imagination. A seemingly random assemblage of geometric forms dominates the central space of the painting. Cubes, prisms, and a truncated pyramid-- these items nearly smother the central image of the work.

A cup whose handle is a question mark and whose oval rim struggles to achieve coherence from a series of disconnected arcs. This is a modernist visual symphony composed of lines and curves from which emerges not a familiar natural phenomenon like a volcano but a fragile mountain-like structure shorn of its peak. A sign that something has damaged the integrity of the original edifice.

Only the power of art could transform a cup that runneth over into one that is overrun by the leftover fragments of an unknown collapse. To rebuild a broken world, to re-establish harmony amidst disorder, to understand the need for hope despite the promptings of despair. These are all challenges that a mind concerned with the ravages of history in our time will easily grasp.

But instead of a desolate landscape of rubble, Concept offers us a colorful scheme of curves and lines that regales the imaginative eye with multiple possibilities. The grouping's upward thrust suggests that it may even be floating free, in search of an undetermined destiny, since we have no way of knowing whether it is attached to a stable base.

The background of an unruffled sky echoes its rich blue tones with no natural threat in sight. Its true subject thus may be the mystery of how art manages to uncover beauty even within the apparent visual confusion of the prospect before us.

At first glance, Inverted resembles Concept, with its jumble of unrelated objects forming the vague shape of a loosely integrated pyramid. It is held together not by geometric curves and lines, however, but by a display of colors, a visual grouping in which certain items share their hues with their adjacent neighbors. The distant mountain reflects the sky. The blue-capped pear mirrors the fragments of banner.

The wooden frame that seems cut to embrace the profile of the pear and the band encircling it echo the orange shades of the letters of "hope." And the tilted green goblet imparts its tint to the top of the inverted bottle, which, after careful inspection, could be mistaken for a similar vessel to the base of the fruit. Even the small cup blends into the light-brown tone of the nearby stone.

When we consider the tension between the unity of color and the chaos of form, we wonder whether the languishing letters of "hope" will ever succeed in rising above their crestfallen state. Even the central image that dominates the painting, the gigantic pear, leaves us doubting whether it will ever regain the perfect symmetry and ripeness of its original condition.

The inverted floating wine bottle, in violation of the orderly laws of physics, is a stark emblem of something amiss at the heart of the natural universe. The undamaged pear and goblet in the foreground may be nostalgic reminders of a simpler and more innocent way of seeing and being that is no longer available to the imagination. If hope once sprang eternal from the human breast, there is little evidence before us that its resurrection will be an easy matter.

The surrealistic Dali-like image of the upside-down bottle should not be allowed to distract us from a different, very real inversion that the painting portrays. The letters of "hope" should be proudly displayed at the summit of this intricate symbolic scenario. Why they are not is a question the members of Bak's audience must still struggle to understand.

A series titled Hope may mislead viewers into believing in the certainty of a better future, though it is doubtful whether the artist would encourage such an option or lead them through a more nuanced visual exploration of the value and limitation of such a conviction. The silent dialogue in this study, apparently a conversation between a turbaned Arab and a kaftaned Jew leaves to the imagination its explicit content, making members of the audience active participants in the interpretation of the scene.

We bring to such effort our own sense of the decades-long encounters between these parties, ultimately futile and full of promise. Successful agreement between contending factions, whatever the subject, requires a delicate balancing act. Here, the letters of the word do not easily assemble into their familiar unity. One spokesman holds the H, the other the P. He also sits on the E, possibly a piece of whimsy, while his companion supports the O on the tip of his finger to keep it from collapsing on the ground.

Spread across the foreground are bundles of pages, but they only tempt us to guess the meaning of their illegible scrawls. One might think of the unsuccessful Oslo Accords, which tried to get both sides to embrace each other's existence as a step toward permanent peace. Restoring hope to a world riven locally and globally by hostility and violence is no small task, and there is no way of telling whether the discussion argument depicted in this work will reach a cordial fruition.

Meanwhile, the letters of "hope" play a waiting game as their sponsors try to solve the puzzle of the elusive intimacy that keeps them lingering in their uncompleted state. At least we are viewing a literal hands-on meeting rather than an impersonal quarrel, increasing the chance that these rivals may succeed in restoring some practical meaning to that intangible theoretical word.