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)