Sieg Maandag and Holocaust Art

Abstract

According to Sarah Gendron, following Terrence Des Pres's notion of "Holocaust etiquette", there are two forms of art which government sponsored museums and memorials feel to be "safe" in representing the Holocaust: pure abstraction or direct, realist representation. The former is permissible since, with its "perceived capacity to sidestep misrepresentation", it "does not seek to portray the event or those involved in a figural way"; the latter is acceptable for precisely the opposite reason, because they "present themselves as re-presentations, portraying moments 'as they were' without intervention, manipulation, or interpretation." The artist appears to bear witness to the event, "providing proof of its 'having definitely been.'" Art which does not fall into these two categories offers more of a challenge to the post-Holocaust world's ability to grapple with the meaning and representation of the genocide of the Jews. One thinks of the photorealism, or blurred "photorealism" of Gerhard Richter; the symbolic art of Józef Szajna where thumbprints, for example, stand in for human beings at roll call; or the anonymous mass of Menashe Kadishman's shalechet (fallen leaves), each representing a human face, all the same but all different. Sieg Maandag's paintings cannot be regarded as falling squarely into any one genre; some are abstract (increasingly so over time), some naïve or surreal figuralism or landscape. Maandag's paintings are reflections of moments of his life and by no means all obviously "Holocaust art." In this paper I argue, however, using Susan Suleiman's notion of the "1.5 generation", that it was his experience as a boy in Bergen-Belsen that stamped Maandag's career as an artist. Through an analysis of several paintings, especially the unfinished and untitled work of a perpetrator who has a fork emerging from his eye pushing into the mouth of a child opposite; Het mooie hemd (the beautiful shirt, 1986); three faces; and the 1983 self portrait where Maandag's crumpled face and an empty speech bubble betray an inability to speak, I suggest that Maandag's concentration camp childhood and subsequent knowledge of the Holocaust are, as Raymond Federman says of his fiction, the "gap" in him that "controls my work and gives it its urgency." Sieg Maandag, famous as the boy walking past the laid out corpses in George Rodger's photograph after the liberation of the camp, deserves greater recognition as a "Holocaust artist" not only because of the subtext of his works but because his oeuvre is in its own right a significant contribution to the field of art perse.