Ceija Stojka’s small paintings at the Drawing Center swarm with such harrowing incident that viewers may not spot the mystery in the bottom right corner of many of her canvases. There, arcing over her signature, is a jagged black mark. Sometimes it forks like a lightning bolt. Only in a few of the paintings is the mark clearly discernible as the crooked branch of a tree.
Born in Austria in 1933, the year Hitler took power in Germany, Stojka was a survivor of the Romani Holocaust, in which the Third Reich murdered as many as half a million people. In 1943 she and her family were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The next year they were transferred to Ravensbrück, and then the next to Bergen-Belsen. In the despairing final months before the British liberated the camp in 1945, Stojka’s mother came upon a small green tree and fed its leaves and bark to her starving children, telling them, Stojka later wrote, “Here’s something good. It will make you strong.” She would remember the tree as her savior.
Stojka came to painting decades later, in her mid-fifties, with the mission of depicting life in the concentration camps. She was spurred in part by the election of Kurt Waldheim as president of Austria in 1986; revelations of his Nazi past shattered the myth that the country had been an innocent victim of Hitler. Encouraged by the documentarian Karin Berger (whose films featuring the artist’s testimony play at the Drawing Center), Stojka published an autobiography, We Live in Secrecy (1988), at a time when the persecution of the Romani was still largely unacknowledged. A flood of memoirs by other Romani survivors followed, along with wider research into the Romani Holocaust.
What gives Stojka’s work its power is how finely it balances the clarity of folk art—she received no formal training—with a gouging expressionism that keeps the horrors of the Holocaust fresh. Her paintings preserve a child’s unguarded but uncomprehending view of depravity. One untitled work from 1994 shows a strange monster—a guard bent over, gazing back at us between his own legs, his upside-down grin framed by his jackboots. Another, from 2009, is dominated by the profile of what appears to be a guard dog gripping a black hunk of something unidentifiable. Dense rows of Xs in the background suggest barbed wire.
Stojka’s paintings honor her people’s suffering, though the Nazis, as part of their project of dehumanization, imposed the same horrifying imagery on the Romani as they did on all their victims: gray smokestacks, cattle cars, the skeletons of fellow victims. The few works in the show depicting Stojka’s experiences before and after internment capture the particularity of Romani life. In an untitled work from 1995, a cluster of sturdy wagons sits at the edge of a frozen lake, a site where her family of peripatetic horse traders often camped. Doors gape, the family’s possessions are exposed to the weather, and humans are absent. In the snow nearby, a red flag signals who the kidnappers were.
Stojka is sometimes said to have made “memory pictures,” but that term seems imprecise. Seen from far off, as in a children’s book, the lake scene is not an image she herself witnessed; her family was arrested in Vienna. Her later paintings maintain this free indirect style. Final liquidation in Auschwitz, August 1944. We fell through their nets (2002) shows inmates, rendered with spidery black lines, being herded at gunpoint to their deaths in the gas chambers beneath a crow-filled sky. This event likely haunted Stojka not because she witnessed it herself but because she just missed it; the mass murder of Romani prisoners at Auschwitz occurred days after her family was transferred to Ravensbrück.
Stojka was trying to find a way to give lasting substance to experiences too intimate and too collective for individual documentary images to convey. The anguish of her impossible mission is best revealed in one abstraction with a German phrase scrawled across its bottom edge: “Smeared with blood, that’s how Mama and I left Bergen-Belsen.” Lurid splashes of red surge up against a swampy green background. The painting’s somber atmosphere seems to bear Stojka’s knowledge, in adulthood, that the trauma of her childhood will linger long after her direct exposure to this hellish imagery. Down at the bottom, the thread-thin branch sprouts, holding out hope that there might be some kind of nourishment in revisiting the scene again and again.
English (US) · 