Dan Mitchell Allison Art

Salvador Dali - The Winged Demon - Original Stamp-Signed Etching Stamp signed by Dali Edition of 294 copies. Paper : Arches vellum. Dimensions : 16x12"....

HIDDEN PEAR, color etching, signed in pencil, numbered 7/50, Jerusalem Print workshop blind stamp, image 7 ½ x 5 ½”, sheet 15 x 10 ¼”. Samuel Bak (born 12 August 1933) is a Polish- American painter and writer who survived the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel in 1948. Since 1993, he has lived in the United States. Samuel Bak was born in Wilno, Poland, Bak was recognized from an early age as having an artistic talent. He describes his family as secular, but proud of their Jewish identity. By 1939 when Bak was six years old, the war began and Wilno was transferred from Poland to Lithuania. When Wilno was occupied by the Germans on June 24, 1941, Bak and his family were forced to move into the ghetto. At the age of nine, he held his first exhibition inside the Ghetto. Bak and his mother sought refuge in a Benedictine convent where a Catholic nun named Maria Mikulska tried to help them. 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. By the end of the war, Samuel and his mother were the only members of his extensive family to survive. His father, Jonas, was shot by the Germans in July 1944, only a few days before Samuel's own liberation. As Bak described the situation, "when in 1944 the Soviets liberated us, we were two among two hundred of Vilna's survivors--from a community that had counted 70 or 80 thousand." Bak and his mother as pre-war Polish citizens were allowed to leave Soviet-occupied Wilno and travel to central Poland, at first settling briefly in Lodz. They soon left Poland and traveled into the American occupied zone of Germany. From 1945 to 1948, he and his mother lived in Displaced Persons camps in Germany. He spent most of this period at the Landsberg am Lech DP camp in Germany. It was there he painted a self-portrait shortly before repudiating his Bar Mitzvah ceremony. Bak also studied painting in Munich during this period, and painted "A Mother and Son", 1947, which evokes some of his dark memories of the Holocaust and escape from Soviet-occupied Poland. In 1948, Bak and his mother immigrated to Israel. In 1952, he studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces, he continued his studies in Paris (from 1956 at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts) and spent various periods of time in Rome, Paris, Switzerland and Israel before settling permanently in the United States. In 2001, Bak returned to Vilnius for the first time and has since visited his hometown several times. Samuel Bak is a conceptual artist with elements of post-modernism as he employs different styles and visual vernaculars, i.e. surrealism (Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte), analytical cubism (Picasso), pop art (Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein) and quotations from the old masters. The artist never paints direct scenes of mass death. 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. Further devices are quotations of iconographical prototypes, i.e. Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" on the Sistine Ceiling or Albrecht Dürer's famous engraving entitled "Melencholia" . In the late 1980s Bak opened up about his paintings, stating they convey “a sense of a world that was shattered.” He turns these prototypes into ironical statements. Irony in the art of Samuel Bak does not mean parody or derision, but rather disenchantment, and the attempt to achieve distance from pain. Recurring symbols are: the Warsaw Ghetto Child, Crematorium Chimneys or vast backgrounds of Renaissance landscape that symbolize the indifference of the outside world. These form a disturbing contrast with the broken and damaged images in the foreground. Samuel Bak's paintings cause discomfort, they are a warning against complacency, a bulwark against collective amnesia with reference to all acts of barbarism, worldwide and throughout the ages, through his personal experience of genocide. In Bak's piece entitled Trains Bak creates a vast grey landscape with large mounts creating the structure of a train. Massive taper candles burn in the distance further down the train tracks, surrounding an eruption. The smoke from the candles and volcano pour into a sky of dark ominous clouds that lurk over the landscape. Here Bak has created a whole new meaning for “trains.” Many of Bak’s pieces incorporate aspects of Jewish culture and the holocaust with a dark and creative twist, such as Shema Israel, Alone, and Ghetto. Chess as a theme of life has always fascinated Bak. In the DP camps and in Israel, he often played chess with his stepfather Markusha. Underground II, 1997, portrays chess pieces in a sunken, subterranean evocation of the Vilna ghetto. Select Group Exhibitions Graphic Works by Contemporary Israeli artists - Israel Museum, Jerusalem Avraham Ofek, Igael Tumarkin, Shmuel Bak, Avigdor Arikha,Jakob Steinhardt, Anna Ticho Artist and Society in Israeli Art, Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv Moshe Gat, Marcel Janco, Yohanan Simon, Ruth Schloss, Menashe Kadishman, Samuel Bak, Yosl Bergner. Selected museum exhibitions Bezalel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel – 1963 Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel – 1963 Rose Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA – 1976 Germanisches National Museum, Nuremberg, Germany – 1977 Heidelberg Museum, Heidelberg, Germany – 1977 Haifa University, Haifa, Israel – 1978 Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf, Germany – 1978 Jüdisches Museum, Stadt Frankfurt am Main, Germany – 1993 Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, NY – 1994 South African Jewish Museum, Cape Town, South Africa. 2013-2014. B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, Washington, DC – 1997 Holocaust Museum Houston, Houston, TX – 1997 National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius, Lithuania – 2001 Felix Nussbaum...

Salvador Dali - Woman on Horse - Original Stamp-Signed Etching Stamp signed by Dali Edition of 294 copies. Paper : Arches vellum. Dimensions : 16x12"....

Salvador Dali - The Torso - Original Stamp-Signed Etching Stamp signed by Dali Edition of 294 copies. Paper : Arches vellum. Dimensions : 16x12". Catalogue Raisonné : Field 68-6 (...

Image dimensions: 34 x 45 cm. Venice is an original lithograph realized by an unknown artist (Michel Kingl) in the 1960s. Colored lithograph on paper. Hand-signed in pencil by the ...

Salvador Dali - Woman with a Whip - Original Stamp-Signed Etching Stamp signed by Dali Edition of 294 copies. Paper : Arches vellum. Dimensions : 16x12". Catalogue Raisonné : Fiel...

20.75x14.5 sheet size. 9.5x7.75 image size Shlomo Zafrir is active/lives in Israel, France. Shlomo Zafrir is known for cubist painting. Shlomo Zafrir is a painter and, at the same t...

"Pillory, Charing Cross" is an illustration (Plate 62) from "The Microcosm of London", published in London in 1809 by R Ackermann's Repository of Arts. The scene was created by one of the most famous British satirists and caricaturists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries' Georgian Period, Thomas Rowlandson, who drew the figures, while Augustus Charles Pugin drew the architecture. The plate was then created by Hill, Stadler and Bluck using a combination of aquatint and etching and was then hand colored with watercolor. Scenes illustrated in "The Microcosm of London" gives an accurate and often comical view of everyday life in London during the Regency Period of the early 19th century. While Pugin’s excellent architectural drawings capture the size and shape of the exterior as well as the interior of London’s principal buildings, Thomas Rowlandson’s insightful and often whimsical and satirical view of the city's inhabitants depicts the color and vitality of the late Georgian society, both rich and poor alike. This print depicts the "Pillory, Charing Cross", where criminals were brought and placed on display while secure in the stocks, as are seen in this print. A crowd is present in the square jeering at the prisoners. A statue of Charles I on horseback stands atop a very large pillar to the right. Shops with apartments are seen on the left. Young wealthy people frolic around and on a carriage on the right in front of the statue of King...

John Harris after Harry Hall The Merry Beaglers c. 1845 48x65cm Aquatint with hand colouring The most famous beagling print there is, after the 1845 pa...

JOSEPH PENNELL (1857-1926) The Thames, 1894 Signed Aquatint Plate size 20.5 by 26.5 cm., 8 by 10 ½ in. (frame size 42 by 46 cm., 16 ½ by 18 in.) Pennell was born in Philadelphia where he studied at School of Industrial Art and the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1884 he was commissioned by the Century Magazine to supply a series of drawings of London...

Salvador Dali - Spiky Buttocks - Original Stamp-Signed Etching Stamp signed by Dali Edition of 294 copies. Paper : Arches vellum. Dimensions : 16x12". Catalogue Raisonné : Field 6...

John Harris after Harry Hall The Merry Beaglers Restrike print - c. mid twentieth century 48x65cm Aquatint with hand colouring The most famous beagling...