(Pierre Mania)
I rarely watch TV and when I do there’s only one or two channels that appeal to me. I find most TV programs chaotically dull, anti-imagination, and ruthlessly vulgar; from fetishization of food to the savage banality of reality and talent shows, TV in its entirety is a dispenser of nihilistic amusement and a repository of imaginary experiences. Nevertheless, once in a while a certain program escapes the structure of dullness and gravitates beyond entertainment.
I am talking about the program I saw the other night on channel 54 (Rai Storia) one of a handful decent local channels in Italy. The program was called “Drawing The Holocaust.” It was an unsettling, grim and fascinating account of artists during World War II interned in the nightmarish concentration camps of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Theresiensdadt. Artists who are quite unknown today: Leo Haas, Bedrich Fritta, Pierre Mania, and Auguste Favier were some of the artists (among many who are largely forgotten in the ashes of the holocaust) featured in the program. These were artists who made art right in the middle of absolute inhumanity using the simplest and most unlikely tools—a pencil, scrap paper or a cigarette box; some who were lucky smuggled a few colors. Their drawings are some of the most compelling 20th century art. Their eye witness accounts of daily life in concentration camps are lucidly documentary in their precision; their depictions of toil and privation, hunger and death, the depths of human suffering and cruelty are disorienting and painful to watch. Yet despite the rawness and grimness and the anti-romanticism of their style their drawings are staggeringly beautiful.
(Leo Haas)
Looking at their drawings one begins to reflect upon the relation between Beauty and Terror. How can depicting terror be beautiful? Is beauty nourished by terror? These are disturbing questions, but when I think of how these drawings came about such questions become theoretical, too superficial, only of value to art critics. I am defeated by immense pity and admiration for those artists who despite the savage and inhumane circumstance they faced proceeded with indescribable endurance to become witnesses of their times through art.
More than anything, these drawings attest to the inexorable endurance of man in the face of barbarity. To draw was a desperate act to be sane. To draw without doubting the value of art when insanity reigns around. What these drawings ultimately tell us is—art is the willingness to be sane when insanity is the prevailing normality. Imagine the courage and discipline it took to finish a piece of drawing when at any time one could be killed like an animal.
When the program ended I thought of those artists and writers living and dead who had to go and are still going through such unthinkable suffering. I think of the great Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish who wrote some of the most beautiful poems in the loneliness and sorrow of exile. I think of the artists and writers languishing in the prisons of Burma and Turkey and anywhere else in the world. And now I think what I already know: that we writers and artists who are neither in prison or in camps or in exile should be unnerved by our freedom; we are haunted and nourished by those who had to go what they had to go through. To be nourished is to not feel better. It is a kind of admonishment that tells us we have no right not to write or not to draw, we have no right not to be disciplined and courageous when the needfulness of the times is asking us to be.