Samuel Bak’s twenty large landscapes bear witness to the artist’s childhood experience in Vilna, Poland, during World War II.  Bringing to his audience a compelling message of Jewish survival in the face of Nazi oppression, the images are replete with metaphors for remembrance conceived as if to thwart a recurrence of this kind of devastation to humanity.  Each painting, executed with a meticulous attention to detail and a precise rendering of natural forms, bears a distant resemblance to paintings of the Surrealist movement of the 1930s.  Subject matter and artistic intention, however, mitigate references to the dreamlike imagery of such an artist as Salvador Dali to create in Bak’s paintings a landscape of magic realism fraught with the substance of recalled trauma.  Bak thrusts his viewer into the landscape, and, by extension, into the emotional recollection of a past to hold before us for all time. In the years preceding 1941 when the Germans invaded Vilna, Bak was a small boy, immersed in a center of Yiddish leaning amidst a Jewish culture of 57,000.  By the time of the liberation in July 1944 only a few thousand had survived – Bak and his mother among them.  The destruction of not only his home, by the entire Jewish community laid bare the artist’s pain and defined his future artistic perceptions.  The artist described his awareness that his paints convey “a sense of a world that was shattered, of a world that was broken, of a world that exists again through an enormous effort to put everything together, when it is absolutely impossible to put it together because the broken things can never become whole again.” Bak’s visual references to symbols and structures rivet the viewer’s attention to the devastation of his culture through the melding of substance into the nurturing landscape from with springs all life.  Life in memory cannot put away what for him has been wrought in those days.  Effigies of houses appear ghostlike as shards of human reality now buttressing the present by their shear numbers.  Crematoria have become the new abode, sometimes appearing in the form of the train used to transport people to their doom. The text of Bak’s paintings remains at once declarative and circumspect, inviting involvement at both the immediate and the contemplative level.  Complex symbolism, disguised and blended with the landscape, have undergone exhaustive analysis by Lawrence L. Langer in his catalogue for the exhibition.  As a scholar of Holocaust themes, Langer resolutely offers his view of the artist’s motivation in that “perhaps, for Bak himself, the rituals of belief have been replaced by the equally demanding rituals of art.  His paintings are his acts of devotion, his tributes to remembrance.” The Lore Degenstein Gallery presents this series of twenty paintings accompanied by a selection of works on paper that share the artist’s thoughts at the moment of their germination.  We are exceedingly appreciative of Samuel Bak’s efforts to bring this body of work to Susquehanna.  Through the cooperation of the Pucker Gallery, Boston, arrangements have been made to mount this exhibition for our campus and community.   Valerie Livingston 1. Cited in Lawrence L. Langer.  Landscapes of Jewish Experience:  Paintings by Samuel Bak.  Exhibition catalogue, Boston:  Pucker Gallery, 1997, 2-3. 2. Ibid., 27. Trains. Samuel Bak. Oil on linen. 1991. 48 x 63" Collection of the artist, presented in cooperation with the Pucker Gallery, Boston.