The category of Holocaust art has been established by asking questions, the most vital of which is whether it should be a category of art at all. This question pursued Holocaust art long before it was categorized as such. Indeed, as a means of describing the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, the word Holocaust itself only came into use belatedly in the 1960s. The category Holocaust art followed at an even further delay. The first major survey was published in 1993 by American art historian Ziva Amishai-Maisels. Her book opened by asking whether an artwork that took the Holocaust as its starting point could obtain any purchase as a form of aesthetic expression.
Although Amishai-Maisels did not provide an answer, her book attests to the manifold attempts by artists since the 1930s to grapple with this most fundamental question of Holocaust art. Other, related questions about the form, style, and temporality of Holocaust art have swirled around the category since its inception. In this new survey, those questions will provide the organizing framework. After the primary question of the viability of Holocaust art as a category is addressed, the subsequent five sections will move through a series of questions framed as either-or propositions: Life or theatre? Sacred or banal? Then or now? Figuration or abstraction? Painting or photography? Each section will pivot around a single instance of Holocaust art, chosen for the artwork’s ability to illuminate the problematics of the given proposition. While these propositions will not be resolved, as a set of questions they will offer a far more coherent narrative for the development of Holocaust art than one provided by chronology or region. But this is only fitting for a category that is as much involved with the art it has named as the questions it has provoked.
