Holocaust art endures at Israel's Yad Vashem museum
With a 10,000-piece Holocaust-era collection and growing, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem leads the effort to conserve and display works by persecuted artists.
Reporting from Jerusalem —
Most people skip the little art gallery at Israel's Holocaust museum Yad Vashem because they think it will be too depressing.
After an emotionally draining tour through a maze of testimonies and artifacts, few have the stamina to look at so-called Holocaust Art, which seems to promise only more dark images of death and destruction: skeletal shapes emerging from smokestacks, hollowed eyes looking through barbed wire, piles of emaciated corpses.
So it's a surprise that Yad Vashem's little-known art museum is actually a respite, offering an unexpected glimpse into how a group of persecuted artists, facing one of the 20th century's ugliest chapters, managed to secretly produce a body of work that was often quiet, understated and beautiful....
Read entire article at LA Times
Reporting from Jerusalem —
Most people skip the little art gallery at Israel's Holocaust museum Yad Vashem because they think it will be too depressing.
After an emotionally draining tour through a maze of testimonies and artifacts, few have the stamina to look at so-called Holocaust Art, which seems to promise only more dark images of death and destruction: skeletal shapes emerging from smokestacks, hollowed eyes looking through barbed wire, piles of emaciated corpses.
So it's a surprise that Yad Vashem's little-known art museum is actually a respite, offering an unexpected glimpse into how a group of persecuted artists, facing one of the 20th century's ugliest chapters, managed to secretly produce a body of work that was often quiet, understated and beautiful....