Absence / Presence: Critical Essays on the Artistic Memory of the Holocaust

Since the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and recognition of the Holocaust as a watershed event of the twentieth century, if not in Western Civilization itself, the capacity of art to represent this event adequately has been questioned. Contributors provide case studies that include a broad spectrum of artists from North America, Europe and Israel, and examine some of the dominant themes of their work. Contents include: "Picturing Death: Better This than Silence," Robert Poor "Probing the Limits of the Politics of Representation," Jeremy Varon "After Auschwitz: Art and the Holocaust Six Decades Later," Monica Bohm-Duchen "Jewish Artists in New York: The 1940s," Matthew Baigell "From the Sublime to the Abject: Art and the Holocaust Six Decades Later," Andrew Weinstein "R.B. Kitaj's 'Good Bad' Diasporism and the Body in American Jewish Postmodern Art," Sander Gilman "Bak's Variations on a Theme by Bak," Lawrence Langer "Toward a Post-Holocaust Theology in Art: The Search for the Absent and Present God," Stephen Feinstein "How to Remember," Nancy Weston "Disaster Art: A Plea Against the Peripheral Stuff," Pier Marton "Conversations with Rzeszow: An Artist's Journey," Joyce Lyon "Haunting the Empty Place," Ziva Amishai-Maisels