On Biblical and Mythological Imagery

There is basically no continuity between the war and the immediate postwar generations on the one hand and artists who came of age in the 1960s on the other. Images and, approaches to subject matter favored by figures such as Lipton, Rothko, Ben-Zion, and Shahn are, for the most part, not continued by younger artists, who are much less inclined to present their subject matter in biblical, mythological, or traditional imagery. And it does not seem to matter if the artist is a survivor or a person born years after the end of the war. Nevertheless there are at least two artists (there must be others whom I have not located) whose work connects comfortably with that of, say, Ben-Zion and other earlier artists. These are the American-born (1924) George Segal and the Czech-born (1929) Tibor Spitz.

Tibor Spitz’s experiences of the war were radically different from Segal’s. The son of a cantor and a schoolteacher, Spitz and his family survived the war in Slovakia, living for a time in a hole dug out of a hillside in mountainous forestland near the town in which he was born. Approximately seventy relatives were murdered before the war ended. After the war his situation improved, but anti-Semitism remained a constant during the many years of Communist rule. Trained as an engineer, Spitz turned to art after escaping to the West in 1968, living at first in Canada for almost a decade before settling in the United States. Without a continuous, sustaining community to fall back on, Spitz has invoked in his art combinations of memories of the war, family history and traditional imagery as in “March to Eternity” (1983). It includes monumental Jewish male wearing phylacteries as he prays over the corpses of his coreligionists while an endless number of others trudge off to their certain deaths.

Of such works, Spitz has said that “pictures of the long lines of people with hounded faces moved from my tortured past to the canvases. The empty spaces they left behind were replaced by [the] memory of them. Maybe this way the agony they have been through has not been totally in vain and forgotten. My pictures somehow try to keep them alive.” In addition to his desire to witness and memorialize, he also wanted to show the “unbroken spirit of the persecuted, [their] dignity even in a situation facing a certain death..., but also looking far ahead into the future with perfect confidence of survival. (2). One imagines that despite all of Spitz’s anguished memories and experiences, of remembering dead relatives but at the same time realizing the fact of his own survival, the presence in the painting of the traditionally dressed and shawled Jew at prayer is an affirmation of the Hebrew slogan: Am Yisroel Chaj, the people of Israel live!

Spitz has made other paintings, including a torso of a barechested biblical prophet weeping to heaven and a bearded Jew in old-fashioned clothing clutching a Torah while surrounded by flames, which recall works of earlier artists. On the other hand, he links himself to more contemporary imagery in a work entitled “Anguish and Pain”, which shows the head of man in profile behind prison bars, his teeth clenched, obviously in great pain. This work resonates with those by most contemporary artists who choose not to use biblical or mythological themes, and therefore do not link themselves with such artists as Rothko, Ben-Zion, and Ben Shahn.