Samuel Bak

Represented by Pucker Gallery since 1969

BORN: 1933 in Vilna, Poland
RESIDES: Weston, Massachusetts

Samuel Bak was born in Vilna, Poland in 1933, at a crucial moment in modern history. From 1940 to 1944, Vilna was under Soviet, then German occupation. Bak’s artistic talent was first recognized during an exhibition of his work in the Ghetto of Vilna when he was nine years old. While he and his mother survived, his father and four grandparents all perished at the hands of the Nazis. At the end of the war, he fled with his mother to the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp, where he enrolled in painting lessons at the Blocherer School in Munich. In 1948, they immigrated to the newly established state of Israel. He studied at the Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem and completed his mandatory service in the Israeli army. In 1956, he went to Paris to continue his education at the École des Beaux Arts.

In 1959, he moved to Rome where his first exhibition of abstract paintings was met with considerable success. In 1961, he was invited to exhibit at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, followed by solo exhibitions at the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Museums in 1963. It was after these exhibitions that a major change in his art occurred. There was a distinct shift from abstraction to a metaphysical figurative means of expression. Ultimately, this transformation crystallized into his present pictorial language.

Bak’s work weaves together personal and Jewish history to articulate an iconography of his Holocaust experience. Across eight decades of artistic production, Samuel Bak has explored and reworked a set of metaphors, a visual grammar, and a vocabulary that ultimately privileges questions. His art depicts a world destroyed, and yet provisionally pieced back together, preserving the memory of the twentieth-century ruination of Jewish life and culture by way of an artistic passion and precision that stubbornly announces the creativity of the human spirit.

Bak has exhibited extensively in major museums, galleries, and universities throughout Europe, Israel, and the United States. He lived and worked in Tel Aviv, Paris, Rome, New York, and Lausanne before settling in Massachusetts in 1993 and becoming an American citizen. Bak has been the subject of articles, scholarly works, and over twenty books, most notably a 400-page monograph entitled Between Worlds. In 2001, he published his touching memoir, Painted in Words, which has been translated into four languages, and a biography entitled Art & Life: The Story of Samuel Bak was published in 2023. He has been the subject of two documentary films, was the recipient of the 2002 German Herkomer Cultural Prize, and has received honorary doctorate degrees from: the University of New Hampshire in Durham; Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania; Massachusetts College of Art in Boston; the University of Nebraska Omaha; and Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA. In 2017, The Samuel Bak Museum opened in the Tolerance Center of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum. In addition to the more than 50 works already donated by the artist, the Museum will accept more than 100 works in the coming years, and ultimately build a collection that spans the artist’s career. In 2019, The Samuel Bak Gallery and Learning Center, In Loving Memory of Hope Silber Kaplan, opened at the Holocaust Museum Houston to house more than 125 works donated by the artist. A 2019 exhibition at University of Nebraska Omaha led to the Samuel Bak Museum: The Learning Center, which opened Phase One at UNO in early 2023. Phase Two envisions a brand new, state-of-the-art, free-standing facility to house over 500 works donated by Bak.

Samuel Bak

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