University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

• Print

• Comments

• 

  This drawing is part of Marty Kalb’s “Holocaust Series.”

By PATRICIA DONOVAN

Published: April 15, 2009

“If we are to learn from the past, if we are ever to rise above inhumanity, we must never underestimate its resources and terrors,” says Richard Cohen, professor of philosophy and director of UB’s Institute of Jewish Thought and Heritage.

With that in mind, the institute and the UB Art Gallery will bring noted artists together to discuss and demonstrate some of the stunning ways in which art illuminates such “resources and terrors” at work in the Shoah in ways that other forms of documentation do not.

In a lecture, “The Holocaust and Art: Differing Approaches,” Marty J. Kalb, professor emeritus of fine arts at Ohio Wesleyan University, will discuss how his own work and that of others continues to challenge the industrialization of murder by a modern government.

Kalb is an artist known in particular for his “Holocaust Series,” a visceral and disturbing group of paintings, site photographs, drawings, historical documents and constructions with which he evokes the horror of the Holocaust in profoundly emotional terms.

The UB Art Gallery will feature an exhibition of photos by Richard Ehrlich, “The Holocaust Archive Revealed: Bad Arolsen Through the Lens of Richard Ehrlich,” another unnerving body of work that has been exhibited around the world and documents the obsessive record-keeping practices of the Nazi bureaucracy. It will be on view in the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts, North Campus, April 21 through June 20.

Kalb’s lecture will take place at 5 p.m. April 21 in the Drama Theatre in the Center for the Arts and will be followed by a panel discussion featuring photographer Ehrlich and moderator Cohen.

Panelists also will include two other artists who have dealt with the Holocaust in their work. One is internationally acclaimed printmaker Harvey Breverman, SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the UB Department of Visual Arts.

Breverman’s “Federman Cycle” of prints depicts not the Holocaust itself, but what Raymond Federman, SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the UB Department of English, an internationally recognized writer, translator and subject of the series, called “the debris of its unforgivable enormity.”

Joining Breverman and Cohen will be Saul Elkin, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the UB Department of Theatre and Dance, founder of Shakespeare in Delaware Park and co-founder and artistic director of the Jewish Repertory Theater of Western New York.

“It is perhaps because the horrors of the Holocaust are unspeakable that so many have turned to art—to novels, films, painting, poetry, photography, etc.—in an attempt, however inadequate, to capture something of its significance,” Cohen says.

“Ehrlich’s photographs open up yet another ‘angle,’ another ‘doorway,’ to an event whose significance is not merely Jewish, or German, or even Christian, but human and global.”