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1) Dear Mr Bak, the experience of the holocaust played a central role in your formation as a painter. Can you tell us a few words about it? My formation as an artist is not unlike the artistic formations of most artists. It is the result of mastering of the visual language that is available to a painter of the twentieth and twenty-first century, and at the same time a journey into the secrets of one’s soul. On one hand the art schools in Jerusalem and Paris, and my study of great masterpieces that I found in museums all over the world, have provided me with the means of expression. On the other hand, a certain introspection and a degree of self questioning brought me to understand what I wished to express. It was the fact of my having survived the Holocaust, and been deeply marked by that experience. I would say that it is not I who has chosen the Holocaust as a theme that inspires my work. Rather the Holocaust has chosen me to be one of its bearers of testimony. 2) How did it happen that you became interested in chess and chess was made a vital part of your artistic creation? I owe this connection to a very special man, my stepfather. Nathan Markovsky, who introduced me to chess. Nathan or Markusha, as most people used to call him, was a survivor of Dachau. In early 1946, when he married my mother, I was 12. My stepfather was a great chess player, often he plaid games on an imagined board against himself. He loved to invent chess-problems. And I was always puzzled about what must have been going on in the caves of his mind. . . 3) The analogy of chess with life had already been made by Benjamin Franklin. In your books you speak of chess as a metaphor. Which particular aspects of human experience are you trying to capture and communicate with your chess paintings? Life is an ongoing struggle between forces that seek power and domination. The real game of chess sets up rules that reward intelligence, rationality, planning, and patience. The human experience of subsisting in our present world, a world that continually breaks rules, cheats and manipulates -- knows no such luxury. The opponents of the real world fight battles that are cruel and irrational. My painted chess-games try to be metaphors of the human struggle for survival. 4) The adventure of humanity is for you open like a continuing game of chess and it is clear that the destinies of the human game also vary in time like those of a chess game. On the other hand, many of your chess paintings show a destruction of structure and rules that are so vital to chess. For example, it is unusual to see a chess board with squares of dice, as in your “Opponents”... It is impossible to ponder life's essential questions, without thinking of the eternal conflict that opposes forces of rationality, humanism, and justice, against forces of irrationality, fanaticism, bigotry and totalitarianism. One must add to them the element of blind chance. Often, freak or random events decide between life and death, and impose the quality of life, which we are permitted to have. When we compare the visual imagery of the game of chess, to what represents "the game of life," the former looks very idealistic. Its paradisiacal domain is full of unquestioned rules and clear definitions, which allow us long range planing, etc, etc . . . In my paintings, which I always consider as metaphors of our existential experience, I transform the physical world of the chess game, and make it resemble the real space of our lives. A space that is filled with many dangerous pitfalls and a myriad of unanswered questions. I feel that we have inherited worlds, which have been broken in ways that aren’t easily repairable. Yet in order to go on with our lives, we must deal with what we have, and whatever is salvageable -- repair it. 5) Modern painting has turned to an abstract, deformed way of representation. This, of course, was not chance but a reflection of the deforming, often catastrophic impact the dramatic events of the 20th century had on human beings. On the other hand, abstraction and deforming sometimes became an end in themselves, to the extent of ceasing to present something meaningful. How do you think can a painter avoid this danger and can inspiration from chess be helpful to it? If I paint the way I paint, connecting myself to the canons of classical art, it doesn’t mean that I am not open to, or enjoying the contemporary modes of abstraction. I guess that I arrive to distinguish between very good art and less good art . . . Chess teaches us how to reach and understand levels of complex structures. They are indispensable for the creative as well as the perceptual experience of art. 6) Do you have any favorites in art and chess? I am a very poor chess player, and not very knowledgeable about the Chess-Masters. The act of painting, which I practice daily, for a good number of hours, demands concentration, planning, dealing with unexpected developments, etc. The termination of a work of art is a small victory. This is my game of chess. 7) What are your futur plans? In Forthcoming, there are several publications on my art, and they demand special care that takes away a lot of time. . . Planned are large exhibits in museums and galleries in Germany, Jerusalem, Boston and St. Petersburg, Florida. All these events demand traveling -- of which I am not too keen . . . The thing I love most is the time in which I play against myself -- the game of painting.
Samuel Bak interviewed
«Chess-Theory Virtual Art Museum: Samuel Bak Artwork»
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