Essay
ELIZABETH FRANK
Karen Gunderson And The Art Of Courage
Written for the accompanying catalogue for Moral Courage During World War II: Denmark & Bulgaria Exhibition for the Government of the ministry in Sofia, Bulgaria
One of the casualties of modern painting has been that genre known as “history painting.” The heroic scale and subject matter of seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century French academic painting, with its celebrations of classical and Biblical moments of moral crisis and grandeur, went the way of narrative subject matter, displaced by the formal concerns and innovations of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and, later, Abstract Expressionism. When modern artists turned their attention to history as such—as Picasso did in Guernica—it was the exception, rather than the rule, and even that famous indictment of Fascist brutality was fundamentally abstract.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, artists once again feel free to revive possibilities that modernist doctrine had eschewed. Moved to the very core of her being by the Danish and Bulgarian rescue of the Jews in World War II, New York artist Karen Gunderson has allowed herself to create a very special kind of “history painting”: works in which she commemorates incidents and persons who participated in these rescues, primarily as saviors. Yet rather than resurrecting the rather bombastic “grand machines” of traditional history painting, she has chosen an altogether intimate and direct style, using charcoal, chalk and paper for some of the works, and broad strokes of shimmering black paint for the others, achieving a vision in black and white, on the one hand, and black and light, on the other, to register an intensely felt response to these two parallel historical events, which were, after all, elemental struggles between life and death, and good and evil. At the same time, since the historical accounts of these events have their all-too-human ambiguities, the use of black, white and a compelling range of grays reminds us that in no way was either rescue a fairy tale, but, in fact, a nexus in which luck, accident, and the paradoxes of human character converged with surprising and ironic results.
For the paintings and works on paper whose theme is the Bulgarian rescue, Gunderson has based some of her images on photographs from Michael Bar Zohar’s fascinating account, Beyond Hitler’s Grasp: The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews (1998). Others are invented; still others are informed by details graciously supplied by the personal memories of Princess Maria-Luisa. The centerpiece of the Bulgarian works, Eleven of Many Brave, is a finely wrought group portrait in charcoal and white chalk of eleven people who played a crucial role in the Bulgarian rescue of the Jews. Before we even know their names, we feel and see how closely, and tenderly, Gunderson has stressed each person’s character. There is a luminous joy and moral strength that emanates from each face; each is stamped, as well, with intelligence, and dignity. Beginning on the left, we see Vulka Goranova, who, on May 24, 1943, directed the Communists’ secret participation in the protest against the deportation of the Jews; Nikola Mushanov, former prime minister, who spoke out against the pernicious Law for the Defence of the Nation, which made official policy out of Nazi-ordered Nuremberg-style persecution of Bulgaria’s Jews; Rabbi Daniel Tzion, who spoke out vigorously against the mistreatment of his people; Queen Giovanna, who helped many Jews escape through her connections with the Italian Embassy. Tsar Boris III—whose role in the rescue remains controversial even to this day, but whose ultimate decision to rescue the Jews is a matter of historical record--is fifth from the left. By depicting him as bare-headed and dressed in a simple military uniform, and not in the majestic and formal clothing with which he is represented in her august equestrian portrait in black, King Boris III, Gunderson has emphasized an enigmatic and complex dimension to the late tsar—not only his well-known aversion to royal pomp and circumstance, but the basic decency of the man who resisted Nazi demands by deciding not to deport Bulgaria’s Jews to the death camps in the “Eastern territories,” but to send them instead as “necessary” workers to local labor camps, thus sparing their lives. Next to the tsar we see Metropolitan Stefan, who supported the Jews, criticized the tsar for the deportation of the more than eleven thousand Macedonian and Thracian Jews whose subsequent deaths cannot be ignored, or forgiven, in any account of the period, and tirelessly opposed the planned deportations of the Jews of “Old” Bulgaria; beside him stands Dimiter Peshev, perhaps the supremely heroic figure in the whole rescue, the member of the Sobranie who, at great personal risk, single-handedly stood up to Prime Minister Bogdan Filov to denounce, on moral and humanitarian, and not practical and political grounds, the planned and imminent deportation of the Jews.
For the paintings and works on paper whose theme is the Bulgarian rescue, Gunderson has based some of her images on photographs from Michael Bar Zohar’s fascinating account, Beyond Hitler’s Grasp: The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews (1998). Others are invented; still others are informed by details graciously supplied by the personal memories of Princess Maria-Luisa. The centerpiece of the Bulgarian works, Eleven of Many Brave, is a finely wrought group portrait in charcoal and white chalk of eleven people who played a crucial role in the Bulgarian rescue of the Jews. Before we even know their names, we feel and see how closely, and tenderly, Gunderson has stressed each person’s character. There is a luminous joy and moral strength that emanates from each face; each is stamped, as well, with intelligence, and dignity. Beginning on the left, we see Vulka Goranova, who, on May 24, 1943, directed the Communists’ secret participation in the protest against the deportation of the Jews; Nikola Mushanov, former prime minister, who spoke out against the pernicious Law for the Defence of the Nation, which made official policy out of Nazi-ordered Nuremberg-style persecution of Bulgaria’s Jews; Rabbi Daniel Tzion, who spoke out vigorously against the mistreatment of his people; Queen Giovanna, who helped many Jews escape through her connections with the Italian Embassy. Tsar Boris III—whose role in the rescue remains controversial even to this day, but whose ultimate decision to rescue the Jews is a matter of historical record--is fifth from the left. By depicting him as bare-headed and dressed in a simple military uniform, and not in the majestic and formal clothing with which he is represented in her august equestrian portrait in black, King Boris III, Gunderson has emphasized an enigmatic and complex dimension to the late tsar--not only his well-known aversion to royal pomp and circumstance, but the basic decency of the man who resisted Nazi demands by deciding not to deport Bulgaria’s Jews to the death camps in the “Eastern territories,” but to send them instead as “necessary” workers to local labor camps, thus sparing their lives. Next to the tsar we see Metropolitan Stefan, who supported the Jews, criticized the tsar for the deportation of the more than eleven thousand Macedonian and Thracian Jews whose subsequent deaths cannot be ignored, or forgiven, in any account of the period, and tirelessly opposed the planned deportations of the Jews of “Old” Bulgaria; beside him stands Dimiter Peshev, perhaps the supremely heroic figure in the whole rescue, the member of the Sobranie who, at great personal risk, single-handedly stood up to Prime Minister Bogdan Filov to denounce, on moral and humanitarian, and not practical and political grounds, the planned and imminent deportation of the Jews.
Next to him we see Peter Mikhalev, another member of the Sobranie, who with Peshev participated in the efforts of the Kyustendil delegation, which worked tirelessly to oppose the deportations; we then encounter Liliana Panitza, who betrayed her employer and lover, Alexander Belev, in order to alert the Jews of Bulgaria to their already-decided fate. Next to her stands Ekaterina Karavelova, who used her connections as the widow of an eminent statesman to help the Jewish people in every way she could; and finally we see Princess Evdokia, sister of Tsar Boris, another great friend of the Jewish people. Each of these faces gazes out at us with a moral candor and strength that irresistibly entice us into speculation about the mystery and drama of individual conscience. And the group as a whole speaks for all the hundreds and thousands of other Bulgarians who joined hands and hearts in saving their Jewish friends, neighbors and co-workers from what everyone in Bulgaria knew, without euphemism, and openly acknowledged to be genocidal extermination.In Friendships, a drawing in charcoal, two Jewish girls, forced to wear the Jewish star as a consequence of the odious Law for the Defence of the Nation, walk arm-in-arm, in public, with Bulgarian friends who are not afraid to be seen with them. These young women stride forward toward the viewer, defying injustice and inhumanity, proclaiming through their sturdy young legs, their linked arms, and their strong young bodies the concrete reality of justice and integrity—not as abstractions, but as ideals incarnated in the youth and beauty of the young women themselves. The image is based on a true story told to Gunderson by Philip Dimitrov, former Bulgarian prime minister and ambassador to the United States, whose mother is the figure on the right and who actually did link arms, in public, with her Jewish friends.
In all of the works, both drawings and paintings, Gunderson has engaged in an approach she herself has termed “haptic”— that is, involved with the sense of touch. His Decision is a drawing in which Tsar Boris stands, arms crossed, at a window at the royal palace, his back to German envoy, SS Hauptsturmführer Theodore Dannecker (active in the “Final Solution” in France), in black, and a shadowy figure representing simply a generic Nazi, both of whom, we assume, have come in anger and impatience to the royal palace to insist that the tsar proceed with the scheduled (and promised) deportations of the Jews.
Here the tsar is no longer the beribboned and bemedalled head of state, but a figure who remains enigmatic and whose straight back is a sign of stubborn resistance to an official and inhuman policy to which he knows perfectly well that he and his government have at the very least given nominal and official consent. Gunderson’s handling of the geometric grid of the window, so intimately rendered, so that the light almost physically creates a division between good and evil, establishes a moment of intense moral drama, in which we share the agony of his struggle with the conflicting political, practical and moral realities of his country and his situation.
Gunderson’s imaginative freedom is nowhere more apparent than in the marine drawings of the Danish rescue, In Water Everywhere), North…Look Ahead to Sweden (1993), East…Our Shadow/on to Sweden, South…Look Back Home to Denmark, and West…Moon Shadows/on to Sweden, in which the undulating line shaping the waves and the deep shadow into which the eye attempts to penetrate evoke the the shifting moods of the passengers, who remain vividly present and unseen, so that the viewer, identifying with them, takes their place in the vulnerable boats in which they are transported across the sea. With these pulsating and perilous waves, Gunderson makes us feel the insecurity, danger, terror and exhilaration of these clandestine night crossings to Sweden and safety; the line, and the hand that makes them, participate from the heart in the actual moment with profound empathy and compassion. In both sets of works, however, the Danish and the Bulgarian, it is her emphasis on earthly essentials, on light, and water, and what the great English poet William Blake called “the human face divine,” that offer and enact Gunderson’s vision of redemption.
For finally, it is the moral vision of selflessness, of the human capacity to imagine the sufferings of the other, that this exhibition commemorates. In the image of the butterfly on a leaf of zdravets in For Bulgaria, the lit candle seen through a window in The Enemy is Gone, and in the hands tenderly holding a cloth Star of David in Cherish, Gunderson creates emblems—or rather, icons—of twentieth-century spirituality, where the Bulgarian and Danish courage she celebrates is holy in the only sense of the word that has an unassailable modern relevance for us.