From Ashes to the Rainbow: The Art of Alice Lok Cahana
by Barbara Rose

Among the artists inspired to illustrate the Hell described in Dante’s Inferno, who include Botticelli, William Blake and Robert Rauschenberg, only Rauschenberg had access to literal images as opposed to entirely fanciful recreations of the tortures of the damned. Using a transfer process, Rauschenberg incorporated newspaper photographs into his images of Hell as a banal, everyday world of ordinary people in ordinary situations. If Hell is a state of mind, as it may be, Rauschenberg’s Inferno illustrations are perhaps a more accurate metaphor than Hieronymous Bosch’s compelling imaginary tortures. In either event, neither Rauschenberg nor Bosch ever experienced the physical reality of Hell, or were eye-witnesses to murder or torture. Few artists have been; even fewer could communicate what they saw to the world.

To make an artistic statement that would last as permanent testimony to her first-hand experience of the Holocaust was the task that Alice Cahana set herself. Determined to overcome the contradiction between aesthetics and mass murder, two irreconcilable opposites representing the highest and lowest levels of human consciousness, she experimented with techniques, imagery and style until she felt she had the means to speak the truth she had witnessed as a teenager in the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. The decision to bear witness to what she had experienced was difficult since Alice Cahana began her career as an abstract painter, much indebted to the transcendental color field paintings of Morris Louis, whose mysterious “veil” paintings she rightly understood as the expression of a mystical vision. Her early art training in Sweden, augmented by years of study at the University of Houston and at Rice University, where color field abstraction was the dominant style, prepared Cahana to pursue her natural inclination toward a modernist art of pure light and color, a lyrical statement implying a cosmic consciousness. Moreover, in Houston, where she has lived since 1956, Clement Greenberg, who visited the city to lecture, was a decisive influence on local taste and collecting. As a result of his influence, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston assembled an outstanding collection of works by color field painters like Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, which Cahana came to know well.

However, Cahana’s development as a lyrical abstractionist came to an abrupt halt in 1978, the year she decided to return to her birthplace in Hungary. That there was no memorial to the vast numbers of Jews who had once played an important social, cultural, and economic role in Hungarian society, who had been dragged from their homes and sent to Nazi death camps, shocked her to the point that she felt she could no longer paint abstractions. When she realized that no one remembered her own mother, who had perished in Auschwitz, in their native town of Sarvar, 120 miles from Budapest, where the family had a large carpet weaving factory, Alice Cahana felt she must dedicate her art to creating the memorial that was lacking to those who had been murdered and forgotten. At the same time, she believed that art could not be a negative statement and that her message had to be about the transcendence of the human spirit, the triumph of human spirituality over inhuman evil and bestiality. From the horror of her experience, there was one positive image: that of Raoul Wallenberg, the young Swedish diplomat who risked his life to save the Jews of Budapest.

For years, Wallenberg’s fate as a prisoner in a concentration camp, where the Soviets had interned him after the War, was met with the same stony silence and indifference that the world expressed when news of the “final solution” became known. Raoul Wallenberg, who set up a series of “safe houses” in Budapest where he sheltered an estimated hundred thousand Jews to whom he had issued false Swedish passports throughout the war, had saved Alice Cahana’s father. Because he had gone to Budapest the day the Jews of Sarvar were herded into the trains heading for Auschwitz, her father was able to get one of the schutzpassen Wallenberg handed out to protect the Jews under the fiction that they had Swedish passports. In her mixed media polyptych, Raoul Wallenberg, Cahana has incorporated some of these faded passports as collage elements. The series of works dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg, the series generically titled 1940–44 and the two series of paper works, the Pages from Mother’s Prayer Book and the Children’s Poems, which incorporate poems mothers asked their children to write before they were taken to their deaths in the gas chambers, were done between her visit to Hungary in 1978 and 1984. During this period of feverish activity, she felt she had to remember and record as much of her experience as possible so that memory would not be obliterated over time.

Concerned that the Holocaust should be seen for what it was—a unique event in human history and not simply another example of brutality and barbarism—Cahana used actual yellowed newspaper photographs and documents, newspaper clippings, and archival material in these works which combined techniques of staining pigment with collage. The latter was an art form that had never interested her because, in the tradition of Jewish mystical artists such as Rothko, Newman, and Louis, Cahana believed art should be the expression of wholeness, of the singleness and unity of the Hebrew conception of the deity. Yet she was confronted by the fragmented nature of memories of the Holocaust, as well as by the literal fragmentation of consciousness that human psychology underwent when confronted with such an experience. Moreover, she was determined to make certain that no one could explain her imagery as simply fantasies of an artistic imagination. For this reason, she used literal photographs and documents: factual evidence that could not be disputed.

However, the images she chose to embed in her collage paintings, although identifiable with the Holocaust, were hardly the shocking material visible in Holocaust museums. There are photographs of groups of people, of bewildered deportees carrying their belongings. In the works dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg, there are photographs of Wallenberg at different stages in his life, which she uses as testimony to demonstrate that one man could make a difference—that one life could be heroically used to confront a seemingly invincible force of evil. Of course, the destiny of Wallenberg himself, a hero who became a victim of Soviet totalitarian fears of his leadership potential, adds to the tragic dimension of his life, and to the universality of his action. Thus, for Alice Cahana, Wallenberg was not only a hero, a transcendent spirit, but also a victim of indifferent silence that a work of art may shatter by confronting the world with his image and deeds.

The works dealing with the Holocaust theme are no longer purist works like her abstract paintings; they are hybrid, collaged, textured works that take from “life” as well as from “art.” Although they differ both in subject matter and technique from Robert Rauschenberg’s collaged “combine” paintings, there is no doubt that Rauschenberg’s works are the other source of Cahana’s artistic background. Once again, that she lived in Houston, close to Rauschenberg’s home town of Port Arthur, Texas meant that she would know his work well. In that Houston is the cross-roads of the two streams of contemporary American art, the intersection where stained color field abstraction contends with an equally strong local tradition of Southern narrative art, Cahana was fortunate to find an alternative mode of expression both contemporary and artistically advanced, but which permitted a focus on content that purely formalist art did not offer.

Rather than use sensationalistic imagery, Cahana chose to use the language of metaphor. In this choice, she remains firmly within the conventions of fine art, eschewing the facile imagery of illustration. For her work does not illustrate the Holocaust: it conveys the feelings—the filth, the exhaustion, the laceration of body and mind, the ashes—of one who experienced this singular catastrophe. Because it is not illustrational, but metaphorical, her art continues to ally itself with poetry rather than journalism. To deal with such charged material in such a sensitive way through the use of metaphor, is an exceptional achievement.

Thus the surface is subject to various processes: it is burned, scratched, stained with blood red pigment; the images are grafted, buried, partially eaten away. These processes duplicate the fate of human beings in the camps in aesthetic metaphor. The clouds of swirling dust are not the ashes of the crematoria; they are like the flaming images in El Greco’s paintings that signify souls ascending into heaven. In the three-dimensional work Requiem, the row of yahrzeit candles symbolizes the annual ceremony commemorating the death of a loved one. The stone-like forms smudged with black receding before us evoke the feeling of the long marches through the dirty snow. White is pigment and also ice. Red is a color and also a wound. Black is death and mourning and also mud, slime, filth. The yellowed stained backgrounds bring to mind ancient parchment, while also evoking the horror of artifacts made of human skin.

Alice Cahana does not use images that would revolt or turn away the gaze. We are drawn to look at her colors and textures, her rhythmic calligraphy, her carefully structured compositions. When we look, however, we begin to feel directly, rather than merely intellectually or visually, the emotions of those who actually experienced the Holocaust. No sado-masochistic identification, such as that provoked by sensationalistic Holocaust literature and films, is possible because sado-masochism is not depicted. “I wanted to use photographs of normal people, to show we were not different from the rest of the world. We were not freaks; we were just like everyone else,” she has said.

To create a universal message that communicates a subjective emotional experience is the task of the true artist. This task becomes particularly difficult if the artist, like Alice Cahana, has to confront the darkest moment in human history, depicting an inferno that is not imagined but real. Cahana has said she used numbers and statistics because the reality of the nightmare was statistical, the reduction of a person to a number, to be classified, identified finally as a thing. In her works dealing with the Holocaust, she was determined to focus on why the Holocaust was different from any previous examples of genocide, not only in its magnitude, but also in the application of all that man had created in the name of scientific progress to the creation of a technology of mass murder. In its structure and emphatic presence, Requiem has some of the qualities of an icon, as do the other works dealing with Raoul Wallenberg. However, it is not an icon to be prayed to, but an emblem of remembrance: a very specific historical memento mori.

When Goya drew and etched his celebrated series of scenes of the Disasters of War, he apparently recorded directly the massacres that had taken place in 1808 at the Puerto del Sol as an eyewitness. “Yo lo vi—I saw it,” he wrote. When asked why he chose such subjects, he answered he wished his art to record what had happened so that people would remember and not repeat history. In the painting of the massacres of Spanish civilians by Napoleon’s troops titled the 3 de Mayo, he appears to have used his fingers to apply the red pigment depicting blood pouring from the head of a dead man. There is a mystery about the processes Cahana used to stain and burn her surfaces, what materials she used to convey the impression of withering and decay. This mystery adds to the power of her works to move the viewer, to find a direct means of communicating the unspeakable.

In Arrival, for example, the train tracks converge rapidly toward a single vanishing point, hurtling us through space toward the blood red dead end, making us feel what those who were herded into the jammed, airless cattle cars must have felt. Space is compressed, becomes claustrophobic. We look at the images of the series 1940–1944, and we, too, feel imprisoned behind the black bars, jammed as space in the paintings is jammed. The origin for the series of works dealing with Holocaust themes, which make a strict artistic order often based on a grid, is to be found in the first figurative work Cahana did, a small etching she made while a student at Rice University titled, The Six Million. The grid pattern, Hebrew calligraphy and floating numbers are already present here. In the series dedicated to Wallenberg, and the series titled 1940–44, they will be elaborated on.

Perhaps the culminating work of the almost colorless works dealing with the Holocaust, which are unique in Cahana’s oeuvre because of the absence of bright colors, is the horizontal scroll-like work on paper, Shabbat in Auschwitz. Here pages from Hebrew prayer books are stuck together, unified by delicate calligraphic tracery suggesting Hebrew script, once again in a dark red that looks drawn in blood. The work commemorates a specific experience: The children in Auschwitz spoke many languages, but they had a common language in Hebrew prayers. When they realized they could hide in the latrine from the Nazis for a brief time and say their prayers together, they organized Sabbath services, to feel their common bond and remember their traditions. Through the traditional, ancient prayers, memory was retained, even in circumstances of psychological extremity.

As the psychologist Victor Frankl has pointed out, writing of his own personal experience in a camp in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, a sensitive person can survive horror by disengaging himself, becoming the observer rather than the participant in his own life. He kept his sanity fantasizing the lectures he would deliver on the psychology of the concentration camp. Similarly, Alice Cahana dreamed of the art she would make, of the rainbow colored clouds she would paint and the story that she knew one day she would have to tell in art.

This concentration on the importance of memory, of a continuous historical memory that the various psychological pressures threatened by the degrading experiences of the camp, designed to destroy not just the body but the mind as well has been seen as more and more critical to survival of extreme situations. To create her Holocaust works, Alice Cahana has added to the fullness and substantiality of an episode in historical memory that was intended to be obliterated. The vividness, the directness of her ability to communicate without words is the lasting achievement she has sought.

The high degree of formal structure—the usage of grids as structure, the repetitions of the horizontals and verticals of the tracks and bars echoing the framing edge of the support as in a Mondrian—creates a stable, formalist structure—a rational container for material and feelings that far exceed the rational mind. This, too, is a kind of tour de force in Cahana’s art: to use the metaphors of bricks and mortar, railroad tracks and roads built by slave labor as devices to keep the material depicted in the painting from spilling out in a non-artistic lack of control. Although her experience was of chaos, as an artist she understands completely that the task of the artist is to create some kind of order from this chaos so that others may have an understanding of the nature of ungovernable, inchoate, primitive behavior.

Because she does not wish to be literal, sensationalistic or journalistic, there is a certain degree of ambiguity in Cahana’s works. Close inspection, however, reveals that there is an unmistakable specificity in her choice of imagery and in the way that the works are created, through a process of mortification that makes them appear ruined, old, layered—like memory itself—the opposite of a pure, slick shiny photograph or a bright silk-screen of Warhol’s decorative electric chair.

Many of her images deal with prayers, for prayers were a daily part of life in Auschwitz. The burning and ascending symbol of the Hebrew letter shin, first letter in Shalom or in the Shema—the traditional prayer Jews recite to glorify the monotheism of the deity who is indivisibly One. The paper in the Pages From My Mother’s Prayer Book and the series based on Children’s Poems are concentrated on devotional images. In many, the gritty ash-like black (a textural effect she achieved by adding coarse salt to her pigments) is reminiscent of ashes; but the action of swirling upward, entering heaven, is a pronounced direction. The image is one of aspiration, of transcendence, of liberation. The transformation of matter into spirit is of course the essence of alchemy. Through her husband, Rabbi Moshe Cahana, Alice also became interested in the mystical Jewish literature of the Kabbalah which speaks of the possible transmutation of matter into spirit.

In the camps, Hebrew prayer, a communal activity, was an important means of remembering a collective tradition and of preserving that memory. In the painting Oseh Shalom, based on a prayer, there are images of the conflagration. There is no need to be able to identify precisely the activity: the colors, surfaces add to the sensation of a world on fire, going up in smoke and ashes in many of these works based on poems. But now there is the possibility of ascension, of color coming back into the world, as the artist perhaps feels that through poetry and prayer transcendence is once more possible. The use of the Hebrew shin, its strong trident form often unifying a composition is deliberate: the books may be burned but the prayers will endure in memory.

And that is finally the objective of Cahana’s art: to make a beautiful, moving, esthetic experience that nevertheless transcends the eerily esthetic to become a spiritual marker for further generations. Art incarnates in the present moments of past history in a physical, tangible sense. The events and experience that produced them are no longer a reality; yet their existence in the present and the future means that those who follow us come face-to-face with the meaning and continuity of history.

Speaking of why he continues to write about the same themes, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has said that: “The fear of forgetting remains the main obsession of all those who have passed through the universe of the damned.” When George Segal recently completed his monument to the Holocaust, which is far more explicit in its imagery than Cahana’s works, Segal, an American with no experience of the camps, used a more graphic reference to the fate of European Jewry in the image of a pile of chalk-white bodies piled up behind a barbed wire fence, in a studied arrangement imposed by the artist in his will to art rather than to simply documentation. “If I were to recreate the chaos,” he explained, “I’d have to use the Nazi brutality and contempt to arrive at a solution. I don’t think it is the function of the artist to repeat that kind of bankrupt frame of mind. It is more important to make room for the private tendrils of response everywhere.”

Here of course is the heart of the difficulty of making art about the Holocaust. Only now does it seem that sufficient time has elapsed that this painful material may be integrated into the collective human consciousness as a permanent memory never to be confused or effaced.

First published in From Ashes to the Rainbow: A Tribute to Raoul Wallenberg, Works by Alice Lok Cahana, 1986.