French masterpieces for sale in postwar Germany

by Marc Masurovsky

From a business standpoint, art dealers do not run charities. They buy, sell, trade works and objects of art to make money, and, hopefully, lots of it. The dealer’s instinct is—you guessed it—to look for opportunities, expand networks of informants and clients, make deals, and jump on them before the competition does. As a result, the oftentimes legendary rivalries that arise between art dealers shape and transform the art world as well as the business of art. Every now and then, their acquisitions and sales influence the taste of current and future generations. A thrilling wave to ride but one that comes with a heavy price.

For those dealers who are willing to go all the way, they may assign ethics and History to a backseat in order to unleash their thirst for acquiring unique, expensive and (maybe) transformative objects wherever they can be found hopefully at a low enough price. During the Nazi era (1933-1945), dealers made a pact with the Devil by ignoring the heinous nature of hate-based political systems rising across the European continent and elsewhere. They saw how the discriminatory policies unfurled by the New Nazi/Fascist Order could generate immense opportunities for them as a result of the involuntary disgorgement of valuable works of art on the art market by the victims of Nazi/Fascist violence and persecution.

The dealers, collectors, agents, cultural officials and brokers who invested themselves in acquiring and selling Nazi victims’ cultural property did so willingly, eyes open and focused on the prize. And it so happens that even dealers who fell victim to the rapacity of Nazis’ covetous seizure of their inventories between 1933 and 1945 also saw opportunities for themselves and their colleagues as the genocidal dust of the Nazi-driven Holocaust was barely settling across war-torn Europe. Even if their desire to acquire such works might have been guided by the best of intentions…as art dealers.

To wit, Paul Rosenberg, an iconic figure of the international art world in Europe and the United States, had a keen visionary eye for high-quality art. He exercised his skills with brilliance on both sides of the Atlantic. On December 12, 1946, Rosenberg penned a two-page proposal to the Foreign Division of the US Treasury Department in Washington, DC, regarding the disposition of works of art located in the US zone of occupation of Germany (viz., Bavaria) which belonged to impoverished collectors. Here are the relevant portions:

“There are, in Germany, many great art collections…which include internationally famous French paintings…there might be a possibility that the owners of these paintings, due to lack of funds, might be interested in selling their collections. [Some] are celebrated masterpieces…We, as art dealers, are interested in these pictures…If this is possible, many of these great masterpieces would be acquired..by American collectors and…be donated to American museums or artistic institutions, thereby adding to their greatness.”

The “we” refers to a group of art dealers and their galleries based in New York who shared Rosenberg’s feelings and agreed to contact the US government and encourage the US military occupation authorities in Germany to enact policies that would loosen up export restrictions from the former war zone and allow art dealers and collectors to resume business as usual. The desire to “liberate” heaps of cultural objects from the shackles of Allied military policy and (re)fuel the engine of the international art market appears to be the main motivator behind this proposal. It is unclear whether this proposal was accepted, but it would not have sat well with American cultural officials who were working around the clock in Washington and in liberated Europe to ensure that art collections and individual objects located in liberated areas would be prioritized for restitution and not be offered for sale.

 In June 1946, the celebrated Roberts Commission committed harakiri and put itself out of business, confident that, to a large extent (although the proof for this has always been elusive) its leaders opined that very little looted art had entered the United States.  Before doing so, almost to legitimize its own demise, the Roberts Commission had successfully revoked Treasury Directive TD 51072, a key instrument in the fight against illegal imports of looted property into the United States. The directive was issued on June 8, 1944, two days after D-Day, under sections 3(a) and 5(b) of the Trade with the Enemy Act. Its aim was to restrict the importation into the US of any art object with a value exceeding 5000 dollars or is of artistic, historic and scholarly interest irrespective of monetary value.” The method of restriction was sequestration of objects falling under the aegis of the Directive. The Roberts Commission's job was to review the documentation accompanying these sequestered objects and either approve or refuse their release under a license issued by Treasury.

It should come as no surprise that Paul Rosenberg's proposal came at a time when some parts of the US government were no longer focused on restituting victims' property but on returning to business as usual as quickly as possible even if it meant releasing art objects from Europe into the United States with no filters and no way of vetting imports for evidence of loot.

Source:

Paul Rosenberg to Foreign Department, US Treasury Department, Washington, DC, 12 December 1946, 2 pages, Enclosure III, Box 28, Lot 62D4 (Ardelia Hall files), RG59, NACP, College Park, MD.

“Enfants jouant à la table” by Edouard Vuillard

Édouard Vuillard, Enfants jouant à la table, 1922-1923, 

Christie’s New York, 13 May 2025

by Claudia Hofstee

A signed pastel drawing, Enfants jouant à la table (Children playing at a table) by the French artist Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940), dated 1922-1923, an unpublished work, was consigned at Christie’s New York to be sold on 13 May 2025. It shows two small children, a girl in a pink dress and a boy with a white shirt sporting a ruffled collar and a black one-piece suit, sitting around a table. 

Édouard Vuillard, Self-portrait, 1889, 
National Gallery of Art, 
Washington, DC

Identification of the children

The children depicted in the Christie’s pastel are those of the Jewish art collectors Juliette Weil née Schloss (1885-1976) and her husband, Prosper-Émile Weil (1873-1963). In 1922, Juliette Weil commissioned Edouard Vuillard to paint a portrait of her and her two children, Claudie (1917-?) and Alain (1918-2015), which Vuillard completed in 1923. There are remarkable similarities in the appearance of the children in the painting and the Christie’s pastel. They are also of a similar age. Mathias Chivot [CH1], co-author of the catalogue raisonné on Vuillard, confirmed the identification of the children in the Christie’s pastel as Claudie and Alain Weil. He also stated that the pastel was a preparatory drawing for the painting Madame Weil and Her Children (1922-1923).

The Weil Collection

Juliette Weil née Schloss was the daughter of Adolphe Schloss (1842-1910), a German-Jewish art collector. Several months after her father’s death in late December 1910, she married a Paris doctor, Prosper-Émile Weil, on 22 February 1911. Juliette and Prosper-Émile Weil were close friends of Vuillard and belonged to his intimate circle. The couple collected paintings and drawings by French modern artists like Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), Ker-Xavier Roussel (1867-1944) and Odilon Redon (1840-1916). Before WWII broke out in 1939, their art collection (the ‘Weil Collection’ or ‘Collection’) consisted of 88 works of art. On 16 April 1943, the Weil Collection was confiscated by Vichy officials and German security agents from Château de Chambon, Laguenne (Corrèze), where it had been hidden for safekeeping. The Collection was confiscated together with the Adolphe Schloss Collection. Both collections were taken to Paris and stored at the Banque Dreyfus, where the Weil collection was inventoried on 11 August 1943 by art dealer André Schoeller (1881-1955). Schoeller was responsible for appraising many artworks confiscated by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) in Paris and served as an expert appraiser with Paris courts. 

The sale of the Weil Collection was organized by Jean-François Lefranc (1890-1950), the orchestrator of the mass confiscation at Laguenne. The Weil Collection in its entirety was placed with Schoeller’s at his Parisian gallery, 13 rue de Téhéran. The art dealer Raphaël Gérard (1886-1963) bought most of the Weil collection on 28 September 1943, for the sum of 2,428,100 FR. Throughout the war, Gérard traded in confiscated artworks, dealt with compromised art dealers, and made gifts to Nazi officials. At the end of the German occupation, without waiting for a court order, Gérard returned almost all the works to the Weil family. He even bought back some of the works that he had sold and, when the artworks were no longer accessible, he provided monetary compensation to Weil who waived all further claims against Gérard, although he did not recover all of the works from his collection.

The Banque Dreyfus inventory of the Weil Collection lists as inventory (Inv.) no. 5 a work entitled de Vuillard, pastel, représentant deux enfants autour d'une table (by Vuillard, depicting two children around a table). Other descriptions of pastels/sketches by Vuillard in the Weil Collection show that Juliette and Prosper-Emile Weil might have owned multiple preliminary drawings for Madame Weil and her Children. The painting Madame Weil and her Children (mentioned above) is listed as Inv. no. 77 de Vuillard, intitulé ‘Deux enfants et leur mère’ (toile) in the inventory.

 Edouard Vuillard, Madame Weil and her Children, Artnet

Provenance of Deux enfants autour d'une table until 1943

Artist's studio;

Private collection Dr. Prosper-Émile Weil (1873-1963) and Juliette Weil née Schloss (1885-1976), Paris;

 confiscated by Vichy officials and German security agents on16 April 1943;

Transferred to the CGQJ at Banque Dreyfus in Paris, 10 August 1943;

Transferred by Jean-François Lefranc to art dealer André Schoeller (1879-1955);
Sold to art dealer Raphaël Gérard (1886-1963), Paris, 28 September 1943-10 December 1943 (acquired from Schoeller, 25,000 FR, inv. nr. 22124);
Sold to art dealer Felix Mockers (d. 1944), Nice, 10 December 1943, (acquired from Gérard, 40,000 FR together with Dreyfus inv. no. 27/ Gérard inv. no. 22146, 40,000 FR)

On the day he purchased Inv. no. 5 of the Dreyfus inventory, Felix Mockers, also acquired another painting, Inv. no. 27 de Vuillard, intitulé L'enfant écrivant’ (pastel) (by Vuillard, entitled “Child writing”. Mockers went missing in Savoie around 1944, likely executed by the French Resistance. Gérard’s ledger indicates that he did not return nos. 5 and 27 of the Dreyfus inventory to the Weil family. It can be deduced that Gérard could not do so because he could not reach Mockers and buy them back. Consequently, inv. no. 5 of the Dreyfus inventory remained missing.

Provenance after 1944

According to Christie's, the painting was acquired by Galerie Aktuaryus in Zurich. Toni Aktuaryus (1893-1946), owner of Galerie Aktuaryus, was involved in selling Nazi looted artworks during WWII After 1945 certain artworks sold by Aktuaryus were subject to Jewish restitution claims for their losses under the Nazis. Galerie Aktuaryus closed after the death of Toni Aktuaryus on 28 March 1946. It was subsequently acquired by a private collector, although it remains unclear whether this provenance is contiguous. The pastel was then offered for sale at the Swiss auction house Klipstein & Kornfeld in Bern as lot no. 1053 on 17 and 18 June 1960. The auction entry provided no provenance information and did not name the consignor. We don’t know who acquired the pastel at the sale. Klipstein & Kornfeld have often been accused of negligent due diligence. For instance, Cornelius Gurlitt (1932-2014), the son of notorious pro-Nazi art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895-1956), sold for decades artworks from his late father’s collection through Klipstein & Kornfeld.

The next entity in the Vuillard provenance is Galerie Hopkins in Paris, where the American art collector Julian Cohen (1924-2007) acquired it in May 2000. It is also unknown when and from whom the gallery acquired the object. These opaque provenances that highlight dealers compromised with the Nazi authorities and the Vichy regime further support the conclusion that Enfants jouant à la table, otherwise known as no. 5 of the Dreyfus inventory [Représentant deux enfants autour d'une table], is a looted work of art.

Klipstein & Kornfeld on 17 and 18 June 1960

Photo: Claudia Hofstee

The pastel was eventually withdrawn from the 13 May 2025 Christie’s sale for further research. The fate of the other missing pastel drawing [Dreyfus inv. no. 27/ [Gérard inv. no. 22146] remains unknown.

This article was edited by Marc Masurovsky.

Primary Sources

Archives Nationales-Pierrefitte, France

AN, Z/6/577, interrogation of Gabriel Mockers, report of 26 April 1947.
AN, F/12/9630, copie de la mainlevée de la saisie-revendication, 22 March 1945 (copy of the lifting of the seizure)
AP, 112W 14, letter from Jean-François Lefranc to Raphaël Gérard, 28 September 1943.
AP, 112W 14, offer to purchase from Raphaël Gérard to Jean-François Lefranc for the Weil collection, 26 September 1943. 

Archives du Ministère des Affairs Etrangéres, La Courneuve (AMAE) 

Dreyfus inventory, AMAE, MH 117, tableau no. 1- 81, pp. 35-38.

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) via fold3.com

NARA, M1944, RG139, https://www.fold3.com/image/270257432/swiss-reports-page-199-eu-roberts-commission-protection-of- historical-monuments-1943-1946. Accessed 4 May 2025

Secondary accounts

Artdaily, “Galerie Kornfeld denies 'Nazi-looted' art claims insisting it only bought legitimate works”, https://artdaily.cc/news/66031/Galerie-Kornfeld-denies--Nazi-looted--art-claims-insisting-it-only-bought-legitimate-works#.YHGaqHtR02w. Accessed 4 May 2025.

“Gérard Raphael”, AGORHA, https://agorha.inha.fr/detail/180. Accessed 2 May 2025.

Gerber, Elisabeth Eggimann, Jüdische Kunsthändler und Galeristen, Eine Kulturgeschichte des Schweizer Kunsthandels mit einem Porträt der Galerie Aktuaryus in Zürich, 1924-46, 2022.

Gross, Raphael, Überprüfung der Provenienzforschung der S67ung Sammlung E. G. Bührle, 2024. https://www.lootedart.com/web_images/pdf2024/bericht-ueberpruefung-provenienzforschung-buehrle.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2025.

“Perdoux Yves", AGORHA, https://agorha.inha.fr/detail/86. Accessed 1 May 2025.

.Rosebrock, Tessa, Des Handels mit dem Feind beschuldigt. Akteure des Pariser Kunstmarkts vor der Commission nationale interprofessionnelle d’épuration und dem Cour de la Justice du département de la Seine, 2017, pp. 1-9.

Wasserman, Janet, Three hidden figures of Nazi art looting, 1940-1945: Santo Semo, Hugo Barcas, Rudolf Holzapfel, 2023, pp. 1-152.

Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Archives, Galerie Felix Gérard and Galerie Raphaël Gérard records, Stock books 1937-1945, Sales register, April 1941-July 1945; Purchases register March 1941- July 1945.

Correspondence

Email correspondence with Mathias Chivot, 1 May 2025.

Photos

Mutual art - courtesy of Christie’s
Artnet – courtesy of Christie’s
Photo by Claudia Hofstee

Acknowledgments

We are deeply grateful for the assistance given to the author by Mathias Chivot who wa kind enough to authenticate the history of the work by Edouard Vuillard and verify the identity of its subjects.

From Ashes to Rainbow: The Work of Alice Lok Cahana and Her Descendants (Part Two)

by Ori Z Soltes

The actual gate at Auschwitz

The very materials and techniques that Cahana used are metaphors for the reality they convey. The surfaces of her works are burned and scratched with blackened patterns, scarred and stained with blood-red pigments. Blurred fragments of texts are swallowed by images that are grafted, buried, partially eaten away, echoing the fate of human beings swallowed up in the camps. One sees this in No Return, from 1979–81 (this is Thomas Wolfe’s literary masterpiece You Can’t Go Home Again squeezed through a glass darkly!), with its torn central motif—suggesting a face in profile, with a gaping mouth—and flesh and blood colors against a devouring background of black darkness.

Arbeit Macht Frei: Concert in Auschwitz

A chronological sibling, Arbeit Macht Frei: Concert in Auschwitz (1979–81) is a diptych in which an array of prison-bar-like vertical stripes punctuated by a trio of black, blurry squares are contained by an arch that links the two parts of the image together. The phrase “Arbeit macht frei” (Work makes one free), which was inscribed at the entrance to that infernal camp, graces that arch, but in fragments, with the words almost blotted out. Across the upper part of the image, with its torn and singed holes, more vertical lines compete with a series of horizontals, among which one can discern some musical notes. This thus becomes a distorted musical stave, alluding to a particular aspect of Nazi perversity: forcing some inmates to play music to accompany the march of other inmates to the gas chambers.

The crucible of destruction is repeatedly symbolized by the arched form, whether open, like the gateway to Auschwitz, or closed, like the doorway to the ovens to which the nameless were consigned. In No Exit (ca. 1980), the arched oven-door form is trebled (no redemptive spiritual symbolism of Father-Son-Holy-Spirit is intended here, for redemption was not in evidence when those who prayed to a triune God gassed and cremated those who prayed to God the Father alone), and the thick blackness of the doors is an impenetrable black-hole-like darkness, sucking nearly all light into itself, and marked by

No Exit

pronounced passages of blood-red hue. It is punctuated, nonetheless, by shards of light and an infinity of numbers and letters insistently referencing those who passed through those arched openings.

Cahana was an abstractionist who survived hell. She was also a student of Jewish mysticism, aware of the Kabbalistic inquiry into how to understand the transmutation of matter into spirit—the aspiration to ascend to union with the singular God—embedded in an array of often dark, inscrutable (like her painting Kabbalah, from 1982) questions pertaining to the relationship between God and ourselves. Primary among them is how an intangible, invisible, and singular God created a universe that is tangible, visible, and endlessly multifarious. The Holocaust was the ultimate act of de-creation, in its dehumanization of its victims by their reduction to numbers and letters. Those rounded up were stamped on their arms with numbers and letters. Names, which typically connect humans to the essence of what we are, were eliminated, replaced by those narrativeless numbers and letters.

One of the noticeable features in many of Cahana’s works is the presence of numbers and letters—those from the tattooed arms of the dead, those from the calendar of counting the endless days which had lost their coherent cycle in the concentration camp, particularly when, as Alice observed, “every day . . . was an eternity!” The tortured structure of Days and Nights (1979) offers numbers arrayed as if on a calendar—as if one could count the time left till the end, with no foreknowledge of when the end might eventually arrive and what sort of end it might be—and puns on the transmutation of human names into numbers (the word “name” repeats in the lower left corner of the canvas): numbers with more meaning for the victimizers than cipher-humans in the meaningless technology of their destruction. There is irony in the rising and falling line across the middle of the canvas: it suggests the graph of some economic analysis, with its ups and downs, but going from right to left, as in Hebrew, the diagonals lead to the letter shin, suggesting a reference to Shaddai, God’s name as the ultimate source of power and protection.

In turning the numbers and letters imprinted on inmates’ arms into art and thus memorializing them, Cahana reverses the Hitlerian process of de-creation and dehumanization. In No Names (1985), railroad tracks plunge into a dark night overwhelmed not with stars but with letters and numbers (that railroad track is at the same time an ironic Jacob’s ladder connecting heaven and earth): the insistent, Kabbalistic repetitions will into memory those whom the Nazis sought to consign to oblivion.

No Names

Hovering toward the central upper part of the painting is a yellow-brown, bulbous cloud and above it the numbers 1 9 3 9. These mark the year when World War II began, sandwiched between the first six years of Hitler’s expanding, increasingly systematic prewar campaign of terror against the Jews and the following six years of an expanding, increasingly efficient Holocaust campaign embedded within the war, as German armies overran much of Europe and its diverse Jewish populations. (The end of that process is more difficult to discern on Cahana’s canvas: the numbers 1 9 4 5 hover less clearly, just to the right of 1 9 3 9.) This painting was acquired by the Vatican Museums’ Collection of Modern Religious Art, and when Pope Benedict XVI asked Cahana about the large, miasmic smudge in its middle, she responded, “Every night I wake up with the smell of Auschwitz in my nostrils. How do you paint an odor?”

There are, of course, many further works that demand our attention, but I will reference only one more in this brief discussion. Raoul Wallenberg—Schutz Pass (1981) offers a monumental polyptych, whose vertical sweep is dominated by the Swedish diplomat’s name, written along the left side of the top panel. An abstract dialogue between brightness and darkness rises from the conceptual ashes—photographic images of ordinary people sent to extraordinary deaths—toward the spiritual rainbow of the hero’s own photographic image. He serves as a commanding symbol of how one person’s efforts can and did make a difference, in contrast to the active and passive collaboration in the destruction detailed in the lower horizontal sweep of visuals.

Wallenberg’s face is the ultimate metaphor of transmutation: the would-be deaths that became, instead, lives saved by his hands, by way of the Schutzpasse, (letters of protection), that he issued—including Cahana’s own father; the rescuer who vanishes; the hero who fights against the silence, which then turns against him when people fail to ask, to press, to demand: Where? Why? And fail to remember well enough not to repeat the silences—from Cambodia to Uganda, by the time this mixed-media work was made (the list of countries has grown in the decades since). The imperative to speak against the silences, even if only in yearning and hope, impels Cahana’s artistic efforts.

What in a longer essay becomes their own substantial discussions must be limited here to a lengthy epilogue. The move to Houston that yielded an extended outburst of artistic creativity also yielded a family: Alice and Moshe began to have children: Ronnie, Michael, and Rina. They were engulfing Hitler’s annihilationist intentions in a brilliant, future-looking sea of reeds. One: that the last of their three children, Rina, who was born with Down syndrome and would therefore have been among the first consigned to his slaughter, was fiercely loved and nurtured by the family into adulthood. Two: both Ronnie and Michael became prominent rabbis, and Ronnie a noteworthy poet. His poetry often focuses on his parents, his wife, and his children—and achieved an even more unique voice after he suffered a brain-stem stroke in 2011 that left him initially completely paralyzed, and able to communicate only by moving his eyelids.

The Cahana family

Three: that all of their own children became artists in varied media or rabbis (or both). Kitra, the oldest—who initially organized the group of friends who painstakingly wrote down her father’s poetry communicated through eyelid movements, letter by letter—has already, in her thirties, achieved extensive recognition as a photographer and filmmaker. Four: that Kitra’s work reflects a strong influence from her grandmother in its unceasing social messaging—resonating, in part, as she has commented, from the sense of pressure to do something with her life and her art when, turning fifteen, she thought about where Alice had been at that age. Kitra’s daughter, born in late 2024, is named for Alice’s sister, Edith. Rainbows continue to emerge from the ashes of Alice’s teen-aged experience from one generation to generation.

(Author’s note: Much of this essay is extracted from the essay in Soltes’ exhibition catalogue/book, Survival and Intimations of Immortality: the Work of Alice Lok Cahana, Ronnie Cahana, and Kitra Cahana, published by the Fritz Ascher Society, NYC, in 2020. The exhibition is currently on view at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Studies)

From Ashes to Rainbow: The Work of Alice Lok Cahana and Her Descendants (Part One)

by Ori Z Soltes

The Cahana Family

Alice Lok Cahana (1929-2017) responded to the human quest for immortality by achieving it in a multi-layered manner, defeating Hitler in three ways: she survived his murderous efforts—three different Concentration and Death Camps through which she was moved as a teen-ager during Hungary’s embrace of Nazism in the last year of the war; she evolved as a visual artist who transmuted the ash greys and mud browns of her experience into the subtle but distinct colors of the rainbow, reshaping his destructive enterprise into profound creativity; and she overcame his exterminationist ambitions for the Jews by producing children who in turn produced grandchildren, many of whom themselves became artists in diverse media—and, as of this writing, one great-grandchild—so that Alice’s own corner of the Jewish world has continued not merely to survive but to flourish.

Cahana was born and raised in Sárvár and in the midst of her transit through those camps she swore to herself that if she survived she would one day become an artist who would effect just such a transformation of her experience on the canvas. It took her more than three decades to fulfill that promise to herself. By the late 1970s she had begun to produce a series of large, dynamic images—and words—that, as a totality, she called From Ashes to the Rainbow: A Tribute to Raoul Wallenberg. Her memoir, Empty Windows, offers a word-painting, in prose and poetry, of how her beloved sister, Edith (aged seventeen), her younger brothers, her mother, and she (aged fifteen)—and her grandfather, uncles, aunts, and cousins—were deported from Sárvár to Auschwitz in 1944, and how all the others, separated from Alice, disappeared soon after their arrival.

She writes about finding Edith and their managing, together, to survive an ineffably hellish reality—a tribute to the unique capacity of humans to shape a systematic art and science of torture and torment for other humans. She describes how Edith became very ill and how, after liberation, she was taken to a hospital—though Alice never saw her again or even found out what had happened to her: she could find no record of either her death or her survival.

Lamentation

Cahana’s Lamentation (ca 1980)—its fragment of Hebrew text surrounded by flowers and overrun by barbed wire; its yellow at once recalling the six-pointed stars attached to Jewish garments by Nazi decree and connoting sunlight, filling the entire window-like frame of the image—is biblical in conceptual size. The parchment-like text, flanked by black smudges—pillars of smoke, from both the tabernacle in the wilderness and the crematoria in a different wilderness—can be seen as a Jeremiah-like cry for Alice’s loss of Edith, for the loss of virtually her entire family, and for the loss of all those for whom no family survived who could lament their eradication.

Cahana left unwritten in Empty Windows the epilogue to all of that loss: the events of her life after the war: her reunion with her father, who had been away at work in Budapest when the deportation order came in Sárvár—a reunion that proved difficult given the divergence of their experiences. Her subsequent time recovering in Sweden and living in Budapest and then in Israel. Her meeting her future husband in Israel: a rabbi, Moshe Cahana, who made her feel beautiful after such intense ugliness. Their subsequent five years together in Sweden—he serving as a rabbi for a congregation composed largely of Holocaust survivors, and she as an educator. Their ultimate settling in the United States.

With their move to Houston, in 1959, Alice took up the formal study of art, and was influenced in particular by the transcendental, light-suffused color field paintings of Morris Louis. From her studies at the University of Houston and at Rice University, where color field painting was dominant, and from her interest in the work not only of Louis but of Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland—who were also color field painters and were collected by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston—she evolved a style based on pure abstraction, light, and pigment.

Developing as a colorist, she also emerged as a social observer in the tradition of Goya when she found herself on suddenly new ground, rather than expected familiar territory, more than a generation after the Holocaust. In 1978 she decided to visit Sárvár—where no memorial to its slaughtered Jews stood; where no recollection of her wiped-out, thousand-year-old community, or even of her communally active mother, was evinced by individuals with whom she spoke (including those residing in what had been her family home). The need for visualized memory, the artistic imperative to wrestle kosmos (order) out of chaos, and Alice’s self-imposed obligation to convey a transcendent positiveness in the context of overwhelming negative power. These elements combined to engender a new group of works: the abstractions and collages of dark, but often also pastel, coloration that, continuing through 1985, became From Ashes to the Rainbow. These works rise to meet the hope embodied by Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat responsible for the rescue of twenty thousand Hungarian Jews, which efforts cost him his own freedom and probably his life.

Wallenberg SchutzPass

As Barbara Rose noted (in her essay in the catalogue of Cahana’s 1986 From Ashes to the Rainbow... exhibit at the Skirball Museum in Lose Angeles), Cahana’s works bear comparison with Robert Rauschenberg’s 1958-60 illustrations of Dante’s Inferno. Unlike artists in earlier centuries whose illustrations of Dante were most often created only by power of imagination, Rauschenberg had access to literal images of the damned, in newspaper photographs. For all his incorporation of scraps of these images in his Inferno illustrations, however, his drawings are still second-hand, whereas Cahana embedded her canvases with memories of her personal experience in hell.

End of Part One

(Author's note: much of this essay is extracted from the essay in Soltes’ exhibition catalogue/book, Survival and Intimations of Immortality: the Work of Alice Lok Cahana, Ronnie Cahana, and Kitra Cahana, published by the Fritz Ascher Society, NYC, in 2020. The exhibition is currently on view at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Studies)