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The war interrupted in a dramatic way his course, since he was exposed at this tender age to nazist brutality. In 1942 he made his first exhibition, consisting mainly of sketches, in the Vilna Ghetto, but then, next year, he was transferred to a concentration camp near Vilna. “Ghettos, murderous pogroms, concentration camps, moments of great despair, escapes and periods of hiding in incredible places”, is his own description of these hard years. Finally, on the day of their liberation by the Red Army in 1944, together with his mother, they were among the 200 survivors of a community of 70-80.000 Jews in the city. After liberation, they left for Germany, were he attended an art school in Munich. Later, he settled in Tel Aviv, studied and lived in Paris and Italy, and returned to Israel in 1966, where on and off he stayed for about 15 years. Since 1993, he is living in the USA. Bak’s art has its roots in the sense of loss and collapse of the world that the experience of the Holocaust provoked in him. As he puts it, “For me it is important to tell the story of that moment in my childhood when everything was disintegrated – despite arrangements for safety and protection. Nothing was sure anymore, only the knowledge that in a day, perhaps two, we would cease to exist”. In this context, he utilizes chess in an allegorical fashion, as it also has widely been done in antifascist chess literature, the Holocaust representing for the Jews of Europe a definitive “mate”. Bak, however, does not limit himself to the narrowly Jewish aspect of the problem. He deals with its broad human aspects, in connection with the big historical cataclysms of the 20th century. His chess paintings combine classical-realism with elements of modern-abstractons. With their troubled images they create a sense of denial and disappointment, keeping however open the prospect of salvation. In his own words: “The chessmen stand for Rationality. Their disfigurements and transformations speak of the absurdity of war and of the failure of the reasonable approach to prevent war and poverty”. According to the critic L. Langer, “In these paintings Bak provides us with a visual vocabulary for imagining the tension between fixity and flux that has plagued human effort since the birth of history. He is more concerned with striving than arrival; hence we have no portrayal of the final conquest of checkmate, any more than we have a single likeness of an intact chessboard, with its tidy pieces ready to charge into the fray. Bak's chess figures inhabit a middle realm between creation and decay, reminding us of the ceaseless struggle that informs our ongoing human saga of a journey without apparent resolution”. In fact, Bak’s chess works offer us vivid representations of social conditions, as well as their reflections in everyday life. His broken chessboards speak about the effects of the social surroundings on the individual world, effects aggravated by human mistakes and egoism. The message of his chess paintings, as well as of his art in general, is thus human responsibility, both against the destructive, decaying tendencies of the broader world, like fascism, as well as in individual life, which at a certain moment is intensely influenced by them. If under the existing conditions, a schism of human existence is to some extent unavoidable, its intensification from a moment onwards causes in an equally necessary way a reaction, confronting us with the dilemma: to act in way that intensifies and aggravates the schisms, or in a way that repairs them. In this connection, Bak constantly talks us of the possibilities of repairing that reality itself offers. This is not only his abstract philosophical viewpoint, but also the aesthetic stigma and entity of his chess paintings, where the sharp, intense reality of breaking is woven with lucid but delicate, gentle lines, and a lack of sharp color contrasts, making eminent the deeper elements of harmony and unity of the whole. Bak himself describes his artistic style as “a style founded in classical tradition” where “the contents have remained linked to the spirit of our age and express its anguish”. In this sense, however, it would be perhaps more exact to characterize his art as modern with roots in the classical. What his works really do is to show us the way in which the classical is transformed by the fundamental tendencies of historical evolution and the aesthetic impact of these tendencies to the forms of genuine artistic creation. His chess paintings sum up the essence of a situation, a hidden potential that manifests itself, a psychological attribute, a type of reaction to external developments. Thus, in “The mountains of Troy” he gives his own version of the Trojan Horse, while in “Underground” a chessboard splits to reveal the chessmen in its bowels. In “Points of view”, the chessboard is broken from various perspectives, expressions of the different subjective approaches to facts. In “As time passes”, the lack of sense in the empty, without content existence, is reflected as a monochromatic reality, a feeling also caused at an entirely different level by his “Knowledgable”, where the same monochromatic depiction of the piles of books shows the difficulty of really conquering an object, as well as the danger of stagnation. In “Middlegame”, a revolution has swept Kings, Knights and Bishops, establishing on the chessboard an equality of imperfections. In “Opponents” the two players become incorporated in the chessboard, while the dice form acquired by its squares – a theme frequently repeated in Bak’s paintings – depicts the role of chance in determining the outcome of human adventure, an element entirely absent from the strictly logical world of chess. One is also impressed by works like “Above and below”, with its contrast of a flying pawn and another one lying on Earth, “Luna” (where the breaking of the Moon by a pawn speaks about the disappointing failure of insufficiently grounded human aspirations), “Unexpected”, “Where the wind blows”, etc. Bak’s chess works are reproduced and discussed in books like “Chess as a Metaphor in the Art of Samuel Bak” (1991) and “The Game Continues: Chess in the art of Samuel Bak” (together with L. Langer, 1999). This last title does not only imply Bak’s hope for a persistence of the fight for a just world, but also his sadness about the continuation of oppressive practices by the powerful countries of our globe, the state of Israel included. His memoir, “Painted in Words” (2001) is part of the education programs of American teachers about the Holocaust. Christos Kefalis
«Chess-Theory Virtual Art Museum: Samuel Bak Artwork»
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