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) 

Duress revisited

by Marc Masurovsky

Duress should be a no-brainer. It’s a tangible manifestation of State-sponsored persecution and marginalization exercised against a specific group of individuals, namely the Jews in Nazi Germany. A forced sale is not conceivable without duress. It is the duress environment that makes the sale of Jewish-owned property an inevitability and a logical outcome of a Jew’s loss of prerogative in making day-to-day decisions that affects her life and her future and that of her family. Although duress is not a difficult concept to grasp, it is characterized by a loss of individual freedom in making practical and existential decisions and loss of control over one’s resources and property fueled by an oppressive regime which extolled the racial inferiority of an entire group of people (the Jews) as a basis for using all the necessary levers of State power to oppress and marginalize them. Duress foreshadows the Holocaust.

Here are some examples of duress which were highlighted during restitution proceedings over the past decade or so.

Max Stern, Düsseldorf

Max Stern

In December 2007, in a case that pitted the heirs of Max Stern, a Jewish gallery owner based in Düsseldorf, against Maria-Louise Bissonnette, a resident of Providence (Rhode Island), US District Judge Mary Lisi ruled in favor of the late Max Stern’s estate with a landmark judgment in which she equated forced sales with looting and an act of theft. She justified her decision in part on the fact that Max Stern had never received any compensation for the 1937 forced sale of his gallery’s inventory, including a painting by Xaver Winterhalter which Ms. Bissonnette had acquired. In Max Stern’s case, the duress began as soon as he received an official notification from the Nazi-sponsored Reich Chamber of Fine Arts shortly after he had inherited his father’s gallery. The Reich Chamber asserted that as a Jew he was not qualified to run such a business and he should proceed expeditiously with the liquidation of the gallery’s inventory through an approved point of sale, in this case the Lempertz auction house in Köln. Max Stern had no other choice but to proceed with the liquidation. The absence of payment was an egregious manifestation of his persecution. (See 2008sternvbissonnette)

Are price and value essential guideposts to determine whether a Jew living in Nazi Germany was subject to acts of duress? Not necessarily. In fact, if one looks solely at value and price without appreciating the importance of the socio-economic and historical context surrounding the events that produced the state of duress, one may end up deciding the fate of a contested object without giving due attention to the “why”, “how” and “when” of the sale of a claimed object.

Max Emden, Munich

Max Emden

We see this in the case of the late Max Emden, a German Jewish department store magnate. The Nazis made Emden’s life increasingly difficult as noted by the German Advisory Commission (so-called Limbach Commission) when commenting on the 1938 sale of his three Bellotto paintings to Hitler’s Linzmuseum project, a sale that was brokered by a Munich-based dealer named Anna Caspari: “[the sale] was not undertaken voluntarily but was entirely due to worsening economic hardship… deliberately exploited by potential buyers…” However, the Houston MFA where one of the Bellotto works ended up, remained unflappable. It disagreed with the Commission’s assessment noting that Emden had obtained a fair price for the three paintings.

Houston Museum of Fine Arts

By solely looking at the price realized by the sale of 1938 and ruling it as reasonable given the time period and quality of the works, Houston essentially ruled out all other facts in making its determination, therefore implicitly denying that Emden had acted out of duress. Regardless of where one stands on the Emden case—for or against restitution—the fact is that Emden had to part with much of his property before leaving Nazi Germany. The German Advisory Commission (ex-Limbach Commission) reached this conclusion based in part on the facts surrounding the forced sale. The “worsening economic hardship” that Emden experienced as the main factor prompting the forced sale had become the bane of most Jews living under Nazi rule, especially in 1938.

Fritz Grünbaum, Vienna and Dachau

Fritz Grünbaum

In the case of Fritz Grünbaum who died at Dachau in January 1941, once arrested in Vienna by the Nazis in 1938, he lost control over his property and assets, including a rather significant collection of modern works of art. Four months after his transfer to Dachau, he was forced to sign a power of attorney, thereby effectively finalizing under duress the surrender of his art collection as a direct consequence of prevailing circumstances—racially- and politically-motivated incarceration, physical and emotional abuse. (See Bakalar v. Vavra).

Lilly Cassirer Neubauer, Munich

Lilly Cassirer Neubauer

In a complaint filed against the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation in 2019, the heirs of Lilly Cassirer Neubauer argued that their great-grandmother “was forced to transfer [a painting by Camille Pissarro] to Jakob Scheidwimmer, a Nazi art appraiser [in Munich], in order to obtain exit visas for herself and her husband, Otto. Scheidwimmer transferred 900 RM [or 360 US dollars in 1939] in payment for the painting which he deposited in a blocked account as Ms. Neubauer was of Jewish descent and subject to Nazi anti-Jewish discriminatory laws since the advent of National Socialism in Germany on January 1933. 

Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation

As an art market player in Munich, Mr. Scheidwimmer was very much a part of the Nazi machinery for recycling confiscated Jewish cultural assets as attested by his direct participation in high-level meetings with local, Bavarian and Reich officials around the time of Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938) during which thousands of Jewish apartments were raided and their male occupants corralled and interned into camps, in part, to force them to disgorge their assets and leave Germany. Ms. Neubauer did not stand a chance against Scheidwimmer and was forced to relinquish the Pissarro painting.


Are there different shades of duress like a palette of colored hues ranging from very light to very dark? Or is there just one universal expression of duress, plain and simple, equally applied to all Jews living in Nazi Germany at all times between 1933 and 1945? Was it less severe in some parts of Germany? How quickly did Jews feel the paralyzing and oppressive nature of Nazi rule in all its petty manifestations? Can we periodize duress? Did it wax and wane like the tides or was it always dispensed in equal amounts to all Jews in Germany, regardless of status, class, income and geographical location? The question may seem unfair but it goes to the heart of how we view duress in Nazi Germany and the forced sale of cultural assets by Jewish owners desperately seeking to flee Germany at all cost. Unfortunately for the heirs and descendants of Jewish victims of the Nazis, their detractors in museums, auction houses, and private collections nitpick to death the “quality of the duress” that their families experienced as if to find a flaw in their argument, implying that they might be exaggerating the circumstances under which their ancestors sold works of art. This debasement of the experience of Jewish families in Nazi Germany has led to restitution claims being denied, thus allowing current possessors to retain the object(s) in their collection. The unwillingness of cultural officials to accept and acknowledge the circumstances of a family’s duress under Nazi rule is tantamount to revisionist and constitutes an implicit recasting of the Jewish experience under Nazi rule.

We have seen this scenario unfold many times since 1945.

It is essential to study and compare all forms of duress sustained under oppressive regimes like that foisted by the Nazis on the citizens of Germany and later on most of Europe. We need to deduce, outline, define and publicize the complex manifestations of duress in the daily lives of Jews using witness statements, contemporaneous reports, legal and governmental proceedings. Duress and forced sales are real phenomena that haunted Jews from the advent to power of the Nazis in Germany in late January 1933 to their forced exit from Nazified Germany with little or nothing left to their name.