"This excellent and important exhibition poses the question of how the dictator who became evil ... "

Group exhibit: "1889 (Braunau, Austria) - 1945 (Berlin, Germany)," Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv

The theme of the group exhibit at Tel Aviv's Rosenfeld Gallery is the biography of Hitler; and alongside it is a moving selection of works by the artist Bela Kadar, drawn in the Budapest ghetto in the years 1944-45. The exhibition is part of the "Autobiography" project, which includes shows in the Herzliya Museum of Art, the Tal Esther Gallery and elsewhere. One of the problems of the project is its emphasis on young artists, whose "auto¬biographies" do not always have something interesting to say. In the current exhibition that problem simply does not exist, because the artists are engaged with one of the most enigmatic biographies ever.

This excellent and important exhibition poses the question of how the dictator who became evil incarnate and the most elemental threat to Jewish existence arose. It demonstrates how artists of the third generation after the Holocaust address the historical presence of the catastrophe in our lives today - and this in a commercial gallery, not a public institution (like Sigalit Landau's "The Endless Solution" at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion, or Hila Lulu Lin's "Mole"). It is also able to show and confront the way the collective memory, and to a great extent the individual memory of every Israeli Jew, is built on constructed images that wrench the Holocaust out of the flow of history and transport it to a mythical realm.

All the works on display were shown in the past at an exhibition in Berlin on the subject of Israeli contemporary art and how it deals with the Holocaust. Two of the artists, Roee Rosen and Boaz Arad, also exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York, in an exhibition titled "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery / Recent Art."
A sign on the door of the gallery notes Hitler's dates, where he was born and where he died, as is conventional at the beginning of any biography. The information also serves as the name of the exhibition. Many people do not recognize these years and places for what they are, even though the historical information is readily available. Hitler is perceived as a monstrous being, mostly as a way of avoiding the fact that evil is indeed human; and in the collective consciousness he is identified with the Nazi era and the war years alone, as if the man had no biography before it.

The exhibition presents a very intelligent balance between new contemporary works and Bela Kadar's historical oeuvre. The old does not cloud the new, but its presence is more than memory and document: it is art as well. Kadar's works share a space with Roee Rosen and a video work by Boaz Arad. This is an excellent choice which formulates, without superfluous verbal statements, a position about historical continuity and the power of creativity in even the most difficult situations.

 The Hungarian artist Kadar achieved considerable international success in the 1920s and '30s, exhibiting his works in important galleries in Hungary, Berlin (Der Sturm Gallery) and New York (Brooklyn Museum). In 1937, his works were shown in the notorious exhibition of "Degenerate Art," in which the Nazis presented leading artists like Picasso and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner as exponents of "Jewish and Bolshevik" art.

With the German conquest of Hungary, Kadar found himself confined to a ghetto. He apparently worked as the assistant to the ghetto doctor, and drew annotated scenes of ghetto life on prescription forms. He died, forgotten, in Hungary after the war. His sketches were bought by Eliezer Rosenfeld, father of Zaki Rosenfeld, the present owner of the gallery. Zaki's mother, Sarah, translated Kadar's comments, and every page has been photographed so as to display the sketch and the comments alongside each other.

These are small, intense works of excellent quality, some recalling the work of Georg Gross. In sketches like "Parade," it is moving to discover the sarcasm and power of an artist at the heart of the horror.

In his video work, "An Immense Inner Peace" (2001), Boaz Arad is seen wearing a Hitler-mask, and talking about the dictator's paintings. It is a highly effective work, in which Arad addresses the well-known (but neglected) fact that Hitler himself was a failed artist. In this way, Arad creates a fundamentally disturbing connection between absolute evil and art, a declaration that art is not impervious to evil.
The video work incorporates a scene from Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph des Willens" (Victory of Will), showing Hitler warmly shaking the hands of women and children. At the end of the work, Arad speaks about the symmetry and mirror-images in the latrines of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. It is a frightening comment about the danger of separating aesthetics and ethics.

Roee Rosen incorporated a portrait of Hitler in what appear to be illustrations of children's books of the late 19th or early 20th century. The poison spreads even within a world of ostensible innocence. Tamy Ben-Tor shows a video work called "Women Talk about Hitler," in which the artist herself portrays several women talking about Hitler with macabre humor. True, this kind of work - from Cindy Sherman to Woody Allen - is somewhat shop worn, but the work nevertheless succeeds because it dares to touch a taboo.

The collection of contemporary works and Bela Kadar's sketches alongside each other produces an exhibition, the significance of which spills beyond this or that biography. It shakes up simplistic stereotypes about evil as a separate, shut-off, ugly phenomenon, as if it were a disease to which we at least are immune.

HAARETZ GUIDE, NOVEMBER 25, 2005