When Elsa Ross posed for her portrait, she had to remember not tosmile. In 2015, she arrived at the Albuquerque studio of the painterDavid Kassan (b. 1977), wearing the simple black outfit he hadrequested and clutching a black-and-white photograph that showedher as a little girl with her parents, at their apartment on Panska Street in Warsaw.
Now living in Houston, the innately elegant and poised Ross insists that she was not adept at posing — unsure of where to place her hands or how to hold her cherished photograph outward so that viewers could see what it depicts. “It was my decision to hold that photograph close to my heart,” she says. She had come to Kassan’s studio so that he could take photographs of Ross that he would later reference while paintingher life-size portrait. “I tend to smile for photos,” notes Ross, “but I had to stop myself from doing that this time. I had to remember that this wasn’t that kind of photograph.”Of that other photograph, taken around 1938, she muses, “It’s a miracle that I havea photograph of my parents, of course. If I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t know what they looked like, since I was sepa-rated from them at a very young age.” Nor would she know what they looked like together, for their time as a family was brief. Ross is one of the sub-jects of Kassan’s forthcom-ing solo show at the Univer-sity of Southern California’s
Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, Facing Sur-vival: David Kassan, which
features 13 stand-alone oil portraits of Holocaust survivors, as well asthe many preparatory drawings he made for them. Also included inthe exhibition (on view September 18–December 7) is Kassan’s group
portrait of 11 survivors of Auschwitz, a monumental work titled Bear-ing Witness (in reference to a line by the late Elie Wiesel: “For the
dead and the living, we must bear witness”). That painting is so large
(8 x 18 feet) that it is composed of five seamlessly aligned acrylic mir-ror panels, a material that Kassan describes as providing “more depth
and luminosity” than wood.“I know what a diptych is and what a triptych is, but what do you calla painting that has more than three panels?,” Kassan asks rhetoricallyfrom his New Mexico studio. (He also maintains a studio in Brooklyn.)
“It’s called a polyptych.” As that expansive work came together, SelmaHolo, who directs the Fisher, mentioned to Kassan that it had certainlyassumed the scale — if not the lasting import — of Rembrandt’s NightWatch. “I don’t necessarily believe that myself,” Kassan insists, “but itwas an awesome moment as a painter to hear your name mentioned inleague with Rembrandt’s.”TESTIMONY IN PAINTHolo explains that this exhibition is a joint presentation with the USC
Shoah Foundation, which has created Dimensions in Testimony, an in-gallery interactive feature that allows visitors to ask questions of some
of the portrait sitters, as if they are right there giving firsthand accounts
of their experiences. “I first learned of David’s work from John Nava [b.1947], one of the very finest realist painters of our time,” says Holo, whohas previously mounted a show of Nava’s works and commissioned himto make a tapestry. Kassan, meanwhile, describes Nava as “a mentor.”So taken has Nava been with Kassan’s work that he showed Holo someof the completed portraits of survivors.“John kept telling me there was this colleague that he greatlyadmired,” says Holo, “that the young Kassan was a phenomenon. WhenI saw David’s work, frankly, I went nuts. He is really something.” She, inturn, introduced him to Stephen Smith, executive director of the USCShoah Foundation, which helped engender grants for Kassan to travel andpaint, as well as residencies, all of which resulted in this show’s contents.
When asked what she hopes Facing Survival will accomplish, Holoreplies that it will certainly make Kassan’s name and talents even better
known. “In a more existential way, though, these works are about testi-mony,” Holo says with deliberate emphasis. “Stephen [at the Shoah Foun-dation] believes in personal testimony, testimony, testimony, as the way to
concretize the memories of people who went through the Holocaust, andother genocides like those in Rwanda and Armenia and elsewhere. David,by virtue of his sentient skills, has created art akin to testimony. People
who can’t or haven’t listened to or read or watched the testimony of Holo-caust survivors will pay attention to these paintings.”
As Smith writes in the exhibition’s catalogue, “David Kassan joinsa long history of artists responding to the Holocaust and its survivors.
But Kassan paints from an entirely different perspective to the artists who lived through and even painted during the Holocaust. None of his subjects were meant to survive. And yet all of them did, and lived to old age.” In line with Smith’s embrace of testimony as record, he adds that these portraits “tell a story with no words.”Holo also states what has become an
increasingly discomfiting truth: that the Holocaust is not known at all by many young people
and that there is a disconcertingly large number of people who deny its very existence as historical fact. “Just six years after the Rwandan genocide,” Holo points out, “I discovered there were
people denying it ever happened. I believe in the art that David is making, but I’m also a museum person and I recognize his ability to engage viewers with the testimony of his subjects.”Kassan, who is represented by Gallery
Henoch (New York City) and Maxwell Alexander Gallery (Los Angeles), and whose eerily realistic portraits have been exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, began the Facing Survival project in late 2014. Though he identifies as “ethnically Jewish,” Kassan says that he is not religious. “My grandfather escaped ethnic cleansing when he fled the pogroms then occurring in what was Romania, later settling in the United States,” he explains, “but I never got to hear his stories firsthand.” Through word of mouth, Kassan began to meet Holocaust survivors, both in and around New York, where he was living and working, and later in Albuquerque, where he lives almost full-time with his
fiancée, the talented painter Shana Levenson. He has heard what he estimates to be at least40 firsthand stories. “Some of the survivors talk about anger, others about forgiveness. As a painter who paints humans, I really have heard the full spectrum of pain.”Serendipity has often played a role in who Kassan paints. For years, Levenson had shopped at an upscale clothing boutique in Albuquerque, owned by Elsa Ross. One evening at the localWhole Foods, the two women ran into each other.They got to talking about Levenson’s work as a painter, and about her fiancée, David, who was embarking on a project to paint portraits of survivors of the Holocaust. “This was a profound coincidence,” recalls Ross. “When I heard that, I said to Shana, ‘I am a survivor of the Holocaust.’ David called me soon thereafter and the three of us met. I got to know him —and admire him. I remember David once telling me that he considered himself clumsy. I thought, how could anyone who paints so incredibly, with such detail, be clumsy? That couldn’t be possible!”But, like some of the other people depicted in Kassan’s show,Ross was disconcerted by the finished portrait. “I recognized it as an honor, from the beginning, that someone would want to paint me,”she observes, “but I thought, what a pity, the portrait is not going to be something I’ll like.” When asked why she thought that before it was even completed, Ross says, with poignancy, “Because I’m old. I knewI wouldn’t look beautiful.” After six weeks of working on the painting, Kassan finally showed it to Ross. “I don’t know if David even knows this,
but when I saw it, I could see that the portrait was extremely well done,but probably my first instinct was that I was I looked sad. A true orphan.It was — I can’t think of the exact word — ‘raw.’”INTERVIEWER AND ARTISTThat rawness is indicative of Kassan’s uncanny ability to capture theessence of his subjects. “You have to be inspired by what these peopleovercame,” Kassan insists, “but I wanted to show that they have livedamazing, full lives since. I was after the humanity that defines themnow, as opposed to what was done to them then. They had no controlover their lives during the Holocaust, but they have since. I’ve met realestate developers, high-powered lawyers, tailors who make suits forpresidents, and owners of art galleries” (as with Ross, who owned aprints shop for many years).To attain that sense of character and identity just through oilpaints applied to panel, Kassan interviewed each of his subjects, in
person. “I am not a good interviewer,” he claims, “so I just let thesepeople talk. If I sensed their stories were starting to become too heavyfor them to recount, I would ask them to tell me about their familiesnow. The atrocities of the Holocaust are well recorded, but not somuch the lives the survivors have led since.” One of the men in themonumental group portrait, Joshua Kaufman, explains in Dimensionsin Testimony that his “bank account” are his grandchildren, whom hepoints to in a photograph. As Kaufman says, “To give up is the easiestway. To die is the easiest. But to be alive, to fight for your life ... thatis a goal I set.” Holo adds, “This show offers new testimony. David isnot a recorder of historical reality. He’s reclaiming history and thesepeople as part of history.”
Although Kassan is regarded as one of the premier realist paint-ers of our time, he embraces abstraction, too, particularly in his back-grounds. Citing Robert Rauschenberg, Franz Kline, and Clyfford Still
as artists he admires, he refers to them as abstract expressionists work-ing in a realist way — in that they remained true to their abstraction.
“Just as I am a formalistic painter, so, too, do I love formalistic abstrac-tion, which is what the abstract expressionists did.” As for embracing
abstraction himself, Kassan adds, “I want the backgrounds of my paintings to be so richly textured, in an abstract way, that were the figures to walk away from the canvas, their backgrounds would still hold up.” When he was considering the backdrop for the 11 Auschwitz survivors in the large painting, Kassan ruled out such clichés as barbed wire.
“The figures are explicit,” he emphasizes, “so I wanted the backgroundto be implicit.” And just as Kassan wanted the figures to have an actualconnection to one another now, beyond their being in the same room,he chose a subtle detail from the camp to highlight their past link. Uponvisiting Auschwitz himself, Kassan was particularly struck by the pileof suitcases people had brought there, their family names handwritten
on the luggage. “I lifted those names as design elements for the back-ground of the painting,” he says, “along with an abstraction of an aerial
view of Auschwitz that I saw.”As for the finished portrait of Ross, it belies her self-assessment.Yes, she may appear sad. Reflective, serious, haunted, heartbroken,heartaching, too. But that photo she holds is all she has of her parents.Confined to the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, she was smuggled out oneday by Polish laborers who hid her in their truck. They delivered herto a Catholic orphanage. Ross had become one of the so-called “hiddenchildren,” those Jewish boys and girls hidden from the Nazis — be it inorphanages or haylofts or safe homes in England. At the war’s end, heronly surviving aunt appeared suddenly to claim her. Ross recalls thatwhen she first saw this stranger, she thought it was her mother whohad come back for her. The aunt told her who she was and that the girlwould never see her mother again; Ross confesses that the blunt truthof that statement haunts her to this day. In the portrait, Ross appearsregal and self-possessed, a beautiful survivor.Ross regrets her own inability to talk to groups about her personalexperiences. The Holocaust Museum Houston, for instance, has invitedher to speak there, but, she says, “I don’t think I’m a good candidate. Ihave the tendency to cry. But I do think if I saw the people as a gatheredaudience, I might be able to do it. I want to see David Kassan’s show inLos Angeles, very much, because I feel that I’ve talked little about the
Holocaust.” What Ross seems not to realize is that by being visible bothin person and in Kassan’s portrait, she conveys that part of history toothers, proving how a human can survive and thrive. Her presence is aconstant act of doing.Kassan’s monumental Bearing Witness will be positioned on aplinth in the middle of the exhibition. Because its figures are life-size,viewers will confront them in an almost mirror-like manner, perhapssuggesting that any one of us could become a victim of such horrors.But these are people who survived, many of whom visit L.A.’s Museumof Tolerance regularly to speak about their experiences that occurredthose many — yet not so many — years ago. “Having the group portraitin the middle of the gallery,” says Kassan, “will give it — and the figures— presence. It’s almost as if they’re here with you, in the same spaceyou’re occupying.”Information: For more on the exhibition, visit fisher.usc.edu/davidkassan.Learn more about Dimensions in Testimony and the USC Shoah Foundationat sfi.usc.edu/dit. Watch a five-minute video about Kassan’s project at vimeo.com/283263907. This project is also accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogueavailable from the Fisher Museum of Art.DAVID MASELLO writes about art and culture. He is a widely publishedessayist and poet; many of his short dramatic works have been performed atvenues in New York and L.A.
