The Vilnius Gaon Museum of Jewish History invites visitors to its Samuel Bak Museum for its largest exhibition this year – The Art of Samuel Bak in Vilnius: A Retrospective, 1942–2023. The exhibition is a celebration of Bak’s 90th birthday. The artwork, never before exhibited in Vilnius, encompasses over 75 years of creativity, from 1947 to 2023. The oldest work reflects the history of 1942, in the Vilnius ghetto, when leaders of the Jewish community first noticed the nine-year-old Samuel’s talent and invited him to show his work. In a virtual appearance at the show’s opening the artist noted that the retrospective provides an 80-year window upon his passion to create art.
“And this passion does not subside. Art can mean many things – freedom, spirit, connection and relationships between people. Justice and humanism. Art seeks balance. All this may sound naive while a criminal war rages not far from Lithuania. But today more than ever, people need hope. They must believe in their capacity to do good,” said Bak. Harsh times forced the artist to become a wandering Jew. Just as Ukrainians seeking asylum today, he was compelled to be a refugee. “Many countries offered me asylum. But there is no other place on earth that became a part of me and that I truly belonged to, only Vilnius,” he said. The artist is among the 4.5 per cent of Vilnius Jews who survived the Holocaust. The retrospective unites the realm of Bak’s art and expands it with new works. Some of them reflect the traumatic experience of the war in Ukraine and evoke the eternal question: is it possible to rebuild a ruined world?
Asked where he is from, Bak, a citizen of the world and a cosmopolitan artist, always answers in Yiddish: “Ich bin a Vilner“ (I am a Vilnian). But the Vilnius of his childhood was shattered by war. The world of his art, revealed through the exhibition, speaks in metaphors, seeks to amaze, intrigue and provoke questions in the viewer. The retrospective includes never-before displayed artifacts from the Great Synagogue of Vilnius, unearthed over ten years of archeological research on the site. Tiles, the remnants of columns, keys – artifacts redolent of Bak’s works, evoking the artist’s childhood world, forever lost.
Born in Vilnius, living in Boston, Bak is one of the most famous Litvak artists alive today. He will be donating about fifty of his artworks to Lithuania.
PHOTOS: M. Žičkus
