Samuel Bak

Samuel Bak (Hebrew: שמואל בק; born 12 August 1933) is a Jewish Lithuanian-American painter and writer who survived the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel in 1948.

After returning to the ghetto, they were deported to a forced labour camp, but took shelter again in the convent where they remained in hiding until the end of the war.

Bak and his mother, as pre-war Polish citizens, were allowed to leave Soviet-occupied Vilnius and travel to central Poland, at first settling briefly in Łódź.

Instead, he employs allegory, metaphor and certain artistic devices such as substitution: toys instead of the murdered children who played with them, books, instead of the people who read them.

[8] Further devices are quotations of iconographical prototypes, i.e. Michelangelo's Creation of Adam (1511/12) on the Sistine Ceiling or Albrecht Dürer's famous engraving entitled Melancholia (1516).

Many of Bak’s pieces incorporate aspects of Jewish culture and the holocaust with a dark and creative twist, such as Shema Yisrael, Alone, and Ghetto[10].

In Bak’s 2011 series featuring Adam and Eve (which comprised 125 paintings, drawings and mixed media works), the artist casts the first couple as lone survivors of a biblical narrative of a God who birthed humanity and promised never to destroy it.

Unable to make good on the greatest of all literary promises, God becomes another one of the relics that displaced persons carry around with them in the disorienting aftermath of world war.

The Family, oil on canvas, 1974