Visions of the Holocaust

Who would have thought that a painting from a survivor from the Holocaust wouuld make it on it's way to the New York Times. I think it's very intriguing because the Holocaust was a big part of our history as Human Beings. The paintings were the work of her husband, Arbit Blatas, a Lithuanian-born artist who escaped Nazi-occupied Europe and arrived in New York in 1941. The exhibition is the first New York retrospective of his work since his death in 1999. The paintings have been on display for several weeks; a reception for the official opening of the exhibition is scheduled for Wednesday, the 100th anniversary of Blatas’s birth.

The exhibition brings together brightly colored landscapes, portraits and stage designs with works for which, toward the end of his life, he was perhaps better known: bronze bas-reliefs that he cast in the late 1970s and 1980s as memorials to the Holocaust.

“One would never suspect, knowing him — elegant, exuberant, fun-loving, outgoing — that he had this past,” Miss Resnik said.

Blatas’s past was, in fact, seared by the Nazi atrocities: His mother died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and his father survived the camp at Dachau. The exhibition includes several angry paintings of Jews being sent to concentration camps that he painted in New York, one in 1944, the others in the 1970s.

But the centerpiece is the bas-reliefs. The ones on display were placed outside the Anti-Defamation League’s headquarters in the 1980s, when it was on First Avenue at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza. When the league moved to its current office on Second Avenue, it offered the reliefs to Hebrew Union.

“When they liberated Dachau, they asked his father where he was born,” she said. “His father said, ‘I was born in France.’ The American officer was very sweet. He said, ‘Do you have any identification?’ His father said, ‘Do you really think, when they came to the door, I had time to go to the bank and get identification?’ ”

His father was sent to a hospital in Paris as a displaced person. “He said, ‘If you find Picasso, I’ll find my son.’ They thought he was crazy, but he kept this up so long, one lady finally said, ‘Maybe he’s telling the truth.’ They got through to Picasso, who came and said, ‘Your son is in America.’ And they called Arbit.”


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