Wings of desire

Samuel Bak’s ‘Remembering Angels’

January 30, 2008 5:16:48 PM

TESTIMONIALS: God’s angels deliver messages; Bak’s angels just wait to receive them.

Slideshow: Samuel Bak's 'Remembering Angels'

“Remembering Angels: New Work By Samuel Bak” Pucker Gallery, 171 Newbury St, Boston | Through February 24

“The bow of promise, this lost flaring star,/Terror and hope are in mid-heaven, but She/The mighty-wing’ed crown’d Lady Melancholy./Heeds not.” That’s the beginning of Victorian poet Edward Dowden’s sonnet “Dürer’s ‘Melencholia,’ ” an ode to the Nürnberg artist’s engraving that depicts an angel seated and sunk in thought, à la Rodin’s Thinker, surrounded by a dizzy array: a bell, an hourglass, scales, a four-by-four magic square (the numbers in every row and column and diagonal add up to 34, and the middle numbers in the bottom row give the engraving’s date, 1514), a ladder, a grindstone with a putto seated on top, a truncated polyhedron with what some have seen as the ghostly impression of a human skull, a dog, a sphere, a caliper, a hammer, nails, a saw, a plane, a crucible. In her hands the angel holds a drafting compass, symbol of God’s act of creation; from her waist dangle keys and a purse. In the upper left, over a stillborn sea, the sun blazes (or perhaps it’s a comet), and a rainbow arcs, and a flying bat holds the engraving’s title, Melencolia I.

Dowden concludes by warning his reader not to “Expect this secret to enlarge thy store;/She moves through incommunicable ways.” More than 100 years later, our store has been enlarged only by the innumerable attempts at interpretation, among them Peter-Klaus Schuster’s two-volume Melencolia I: Dürers Denkbild. One of the four humors of Hippocrates and mediæval philosophy (as in George Balanchine’s 1946 ballet The Four Temperaments), “Melancholic” designates a thoughtful individual capable of being imaginative and creative but also prone to depression and sterile inaction. Dürer’s angel is imagination in freeze frame (it’s been suggested that the engraving’s title refers to the type of melancholy the contemporary German philosopher Cornelius Agrippa called “Melancholia Imaginativa”): she has, it seems, no idea what to do with any of the implements of creation and alchemy, and the light that’s breaking in the distance could be a comet presaging disaster rather than the sun promising illumination. She looks ahead to Hamlet and Keats and 20th-century ennui, the Age of Faith receding into the Age of Uncertainty. Half a millennium after her birth, in the wake of world wars and genocides, she’s become timeless.

Samuel Bak has wrestled with this angel before (The Traveller, Seascape with Melancholia, Angel of Travellers, Nürnberg Elegy), but in the “Remembering Angels” show that’s up now at Pucker Gallery, she’s the touchstone. Bak, who was born in 1933 in Vilna (now Vilnius in Lithuania), was with his mother one of the 200 survivors (out of 80,000) from the Vilna Ghetto; he lost his father and all four grandparents. Resident in Weston since 1993, after stops in Paris, Rome, Israel, New York, and Lausanne, he’s devoted his art to the Holocaust, asking his absent God not just “Why” but “What now?”

“Remembering Angels,” Bak’s 18th show at the Pucker (his first was in 1969), is an unusually concise collection from this prolific artist: 19 paintings, all 40 by 30 inches, plus a handful of drawings on the same subjects. Dürer’s angel appears in each one: hoodwinked and sitting by the sea, or with a head bandage under her (laurel? watercress?) wreath, or a helmet, or with the head completely covered and holding a book instead of a compass, or turned to stone or plywood. The image is doubled or reversed or split, Bak exploring our postmodern world of deconstruction and dismembering (the opposite of remembering?) and the digitalization of identity. He rings changes on Dürer’s elements: the rainbow, symbol of God’s promise to Noah never to send another Flood, is broken; the ladder by which one might climb to Heaven (or escape from a death camp) leads nowhere. His settings look like construction (or demolition) sites, with pulleys hauling up rainbows and ladders and polyhedra and even angel wings. In On the Other Hand, the outline of a plywood angel “watches” (it has no eyes) as the feather in one pan of the giant scales (held from above by . . . God?) proves heavier than the cannonball in the other. In Measure of Time, Dürer’s hourglass occupies the entire left half of the composition: in its upper chamber, which is topped by the suggestion of a Nazi helmet, a shtetl-like clump of houses is visible atop the sand, and the lower chamber is broken off. There are elements particular to the Holocaust: the number 6 (the six million who died, and the Sixth Commandment, which forbids murder), trains making for the death camps, crematorium chimneys, the voyage of the SS St. Louis (which in May of 1939 sailed from Hamburg with nearly 1000 Jewish refugees but was denied entry by Cuba), prayer-shawl stripes that double as prison-uniform stripes, the forest outside Vilna where Bak’s father and grandparents were shot.

All this makes for grim viewing, but the subject matter is relieved, if not redeemed, by Bak’s color palette, which, echoing Bosch in The Garden of Earthly Delights and Brueghel in The Fall of the Rebel Angels, bathes you in warm ochers and russets and leaf-greens and sea-blues. And at the Pucker, you’re funneled toward the show’s focal point, Testimonials. Here the angel — in the usual attitude, with left hand on cheek — is a woman in a brown felt hat and fur-collared green coat who looks a little like photographs of the artist’s mother. She holds a book, but her eyes are closing. Her purse is at her feet, and a small suitcase, and there are portfolios and canvases and picture frames standing in for the artist. Her striped tin wings are nailed to the tree behind her; in the distance, a train steams toward smoking chimneys and a hot-air balloon rises. In Hebrew an “angel” is a messenger, a person who carries out God’s will. In Samuel Bak’s world, we’re all angels, just waiting for the message.