"Painted in Words is a masterpiece, miles above hundreds of Holocaust memoirs, with an extraordinary diversity of its contents and astonishing insights into the soul of a child. A treat to read!"—Vera Laska, associate editor, New England Journal of History
"Samuel Bak's vivid account of his childhood and youth is also a biography of much of his art, offering readers considerable insight into the origins of his creative vision even as they delight in his lively evocations of a vanished past."—Lawrence Langer, author of Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays
Description
Samuel Bak is a renowned artist whose works have been exhibited in museums worldwide. In Painted in Words Bak sets aside his brushes to narrate the stories of his life—as a child in Nazi-occupied Vilna, as a youth in European refugee camps, and as a maturing artist in Israel, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. Lovingly, he evokes his departed parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, along with their household employees, to create a vital gallery of dramatic, lyrical, epic, and sometimes absurd heroes. With gentle humor, the child prodigy of the faraway past and the accomplished artist of today engage in a spirited dialogue from which emerges a self-portrait of the “Artist as a Young—and middle-aged and aging —Survivor.”
In the foreword, novelist and social critic Amos Oz writes, “I regard Samuel Bak as one of the great painters of the twentieth century. There are few artists who have so successfully represented the mad cruelty of our era—its horrors, its desolation, its sadness and vacuity. And fewer still are the artists who have created their own unique personal language. In Bak’s world, horror, humor, and dreams all solidify into one radioactive mass.”
The brilliance, vision, and virtuosity that Bak brings to his painting are equally in evidence in his writing. This deeply touching work is a worthy addition to Holocaust literature and art history.
About the Author
Artist Samuel Bak was born in 1933 in Vilna, Poland, at a crucial moment in modern history. Bak’s artistic talent was first recognized during an exhibition of his work in the Ghetto of Vilna when he was nine years old. In an artistic career of over seventy years, he has had numerous exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout Israel, Europe, and the United States and has been the subject of numerous articles, scholarly works, and books.
Related Interest
October 2019