Personal Art or Collective History?
November 30th, 2006
Forced to paint as a prisoner at Auschwitz, Dina Gottliebova dutifully recorded the faces of doomed Gypsies in a series of watercolors; teaching pieces about race commissioned by Joseph Mengele himself. Thought lost in the chaos of World War Two, seven paintings reappeared in the 1970s and have since resided in the former concentration camp’s museum in Poland as powerful reminders of Mengele’s murderous racial theories.
Yet, for the last thirty years, Gottliebova – a Czech Jew who survived the war to become an animator in Hollywood – has been fighting a personal war to retrieve her paintings from Auschwitz, from her own past.
Gottliebova’s quest raises many difficult questions: at what point do objects transcend art to become historical objects? What rights do former prisoners have to their forced work? Are these paintings worth more to the world in Auschwitz or with the woman who made them?
The debate has driven a wedge through the Holocaust community, pitting traditional friends against each other over the paintings’ fate. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum continues to deny Gottliebova’s claims, and the watercolors remain on display.
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January 6th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
If a societal practice denies the “personal” value of a piece of art to the artist, it also denies the human value of that artist to society. To what “Collective”, then, can that art possibly belong?
There can be no human collective if it does not respect basic human rights. The last collective to work this effectively at Auschwitz, was the Nazi Party itself.
The replicas, now held by the Museum, of Dina Babbitt’s art can more than meet the requirements of public display. Give the woman back her art – NOW!