A. K. Segan workshop paper, June 2006, on my slide class on Felix Nussbaum art - Fifth International Conference on the Holocaust & Education, Int’l School for Holocaust Education, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.
“WOW! THESE SELF-PORTRAITS ARE INCREDIBLE!”
Workshop Paper by Akiva Kenny Segan, of Seattle, Washington, USA.
(Segan facilitated his workshop in a classroom during the conference).
International School for Holocaust Education - The Fifth International Conference for Educators, “Teaching the Holocaust to Future Generations,” Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel, June 2006
A. BACKGROUND TO THE PRESENTER; UPBRINGING, EDUCATION, ART, TEACHING:
Akiva Kenny Segan (ne Kenneth Ralph Segan) was born in New York City, 1950, and attended public schools. While religious observance was minimal, he attended a Reform synagogue as a youngster and visited regularly as a child and teen with his three living east European-raised immigrant grandparents, an important influence later in life after they were gone.
Segan received a B.A. in art, Southern Illinois U. ’77; M.F.A., U. of Missouri ’80, printmaking and drawing. He set up shop as a working artist in Seattle, Washington, USA, autumn 1980.
He attended English-language summer studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Krakow ’84; Jagiellonian U, Krakow ’85. Travels in Poland profoundly affected his thinking and the direction of his art in the years to come. He was International Artist-in-Residence, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Scotland ’87.
In 1991 Segan began his “Under the Wings of G-d” art series depicting victims of the Nazis.
In 1994 Segan created his first slide class, the Holocaust art of Israel Bernbaum and Akiva Segan. The class interwove photographs, art of late Warsaw Jewish district raised Israel Bernbaum, whose book “My Brothers’ Keeper: The Holocaust Through the Eyes of AN Artist” was publishedi in 1985, and Segan’s UWG art series.
In 1999 Segan presented a workshop based on this slide class at the Second Int’l Conference on the Holocaust & Education, Yad Vashem. (Workshop title: Holocaust Education through Art: A Slide Presentation).
In 1999 Segan began portraying selected non-Jewish victims of the Nazis in his UWG series. These have included anti-Nazi resistance fighters (e.g. Robert Desnos); a nameless Roma child; Joop Westerweel, a Christian teacher executed for saving Jews; Munich University student Sophie Scholl of the “White Rose” group, and Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
In 2002 Segan created a new class based on the drawings & paintings of Polish Jewish survivor Toby Knobel Fluek. Inspired by her book “Memories of My Life in a Polish Village, 1930-49” Segan presented the class as a workshop on the Holocaust art at the Third Int’l Conference, Yad Vashem. (Workshop title: The Imagination of Remembrance: The Paintings and Drawings of Toby Knobel Fluek, a Slide Presentation.)
In 2003 Segan created his first post-WII artwork for the wings series, depicting a 15 year-old black skinned Norwegian youth murdered by a Nazi gang (“Bootboys”) in Oslo in January 2001.
In 2005 Segan began creating additional post-Shoah themed artworks; these have been branched out to a companion series (from the original UWG series) called “Sight-seeing with Dignity.”
Since 1994 Segan has been guest teaching in schools, colleges, houses of worship, at museums, in prisons and other venues.
B. SEGAN “MEETS” NUSSBAUM:
The life, artwork and martrydom of Felix Nussbaum achieved increasing (posthumous) fame in recent years. As such his posthumous fame is comparable to that of two other Jewish artists murdered by the Nazis: Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jewish visual artist and playwright, and Charlotte Salomon, a German Jewish painter.
Nussbaum’s most famous work, dated late 1943, was reproduced in a catalog published by New York’s Jewish Museum in 1985. Titled “Art and Exile – Felix Nussbaum – 1904-1944” it includes several color reproductions of Nussbaum’s art and was an early influence on Segan about the value of Nussbaum’s visual record of creating art during a time of hiding and terror.
Segan acquired a used copy of the catalog around 1990. When Segan decided to use this same self portrait as the first image in a major multiple depiction artwork portraying Jewish victims of the Nazis (Shoah Dreams, completed 1999) the stage was set for the creation of an eventual educational program focusing exclusively on the art of Nussbaum.
In 2002 a German professor at Pacific Lutheran University, Janet Holmgren, bought a copy of the comprehensive hardcover book “Art Defamed, Art in Exile, Art in Resistance: Felix Nussbaum, a Biography” in exchange for some Segan artworks. The tome was published in 1990 by Kulturgeschichtiches MUSEUM OSNABRÜCK, in collaboration with the Felix Nussbaum-Gesellschaft e.V. Osnabrück; publisher Rasch Verlag Bramsche; edited by Karl Georg Kaster, English ed. Translated by Eileen Martin)
It was on sight of numerous self portraits by Felix Nussbaum in 2002 that Segan knew immediately that he would ‘have to’ eventually create a class exclusively addressing this monumental body of work left by Nussbaum. The Nussbaum self-portraits are an emotional powerhouse: they combine superb artistry and mastery of the medium of oil painting with the greatest thing an artist can create: a true emotive response to the world around him.
In Nussbaum’s case, it was the ongoing and ever-present reality that he would be captured and murdered. Such was the circumstances that lesser artists might have done no artwork at all; such was Nussbaum’s psyche that he painted on, with great passion, incredible conviction and used the terror within to portray that which is unthinkable and impossible for those of us who didn’t live through it to comprehend.
Thus, inspired by the tremendously moving self-portraits and other portraits created by murdered German-Jewish painter and draughtsman Felix Nussbaum, Segan decided to create a new slide class for the June 2006 conference. The class audience would be the proverbial “guinea pigs” for Segan, hopefully offering him feedback and straight-talk evaluation on the efficacy of the class as a new teaching tool for presentations in schools and colleges.
C. CREATING A NEW SLIDE CLASS – TOPICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND CHALLENGES:
An important goal was to try and evaluate how the images from the book could be used most effectively as a teaching tool. Reading the entire text through would begin the process. Adjoining considerations were to decide which Nussbaum works to scan and then from those, to choose which would end up being used in a class with limited time.
How much spoken narration would I need, assuming that at best any given audience would likely have no familiarity with Nussbaum’s work, or at best they might have seen the famed Self Portrait. Would I use a handout page to supplement my narration? What would I focus on with the narration?
As to the visual makeup of a new class, decisions had to be made regarding the visual presentation of materials: Would I focus solely on self- portraits? If not, what categories of other works might merit inclusion? His landscapes are beautiful and I love them dearly, yet only because of his death do they have an emotional punch that the self-portraits and his other works portraying people have.
And there were the works of great emotional trauma addressing death. And there were the works which seemed so related to the masterpieces of the turn of the century Belgian painter James Ensor, ripe for interpretation, what with depictions of masked carnival goers and the like, that it seemed a “sin” to not make reference to these works too.
Last but hardly least, the technical aspects of creating a whole new class presented a whole new set of logistical problems to overcome. Having decided to save non existent funds by not making enlarged photocopies of each book plate, to be photographed by a professional photographer in slide format, I was faced with a choice of finally joining the high-tech revolution and learning how to use power-point.
My own home computer was slow, with a dialup modem, thus making internet searches for useful photographs and reproductions of Nussbaum’s art an impossibly time-consuming task. Plus my computer lacked the two-disk drive needed to move a power-point presentation off of my computer and onto a disk. This was told to me in no uncertain terms by the 17 year old son of friends,; the lad’s computer knowledge having left this 55 year old in the dust.
As if that weren’t enough, my scanner wasn’t hooked up and I’d never used one anyway, so I’d have to learn from scratch. And I had no budget for any needed supplies nor to pay anyone for consultation or tutoring assistance.
Yet the power of Nussbaum’s self portraits was so tremendous on first viewing that it was apparent I’d be doing potential audiences – and myself - a disservice by not pursuing the quest to make a class, so the rest is history.
The Workshop will consist of a visual power-point slide presentation narrated by Segan. Introductory remarks will include a discussion of some of the considerations that Segan faced in making a new class. The emphasis will be an overview of Nussbaum’s art with a thematic focal point on how Nussbaum depicted himself over the years, from the years of normalcy to the years of terror.
Some examples will be shown of artworks by other artists whose works influenced him, as well as some artists whose works he may have been familiar with and who created paintings on similar themes to his own. These will include both historic famous artists who lived in decades or centuries prior to his own life, as well as peers whose works were contemporaneous to his own career. Discussion of the arrests and deportations of Jews around them, and eventually themselves, culminating in the arrest of both Nussbaum and his wife, Felka, will be mentioned.
The class audience will be invited to discuss critical responses to the presentation, no holds barred: Hearing what worked, what didn’t work and what ideas attendees have for improving and or changing the class to help make it an effective tool for classroom education is a priority of the facilitator. While Segan is happy to present a “sit back and be entertained with an audio-visual program,” doing that without generating feedback would defeat the purpose of the exercise, which is really to engage facilitators with ideas that can prove useful for creating real life programming that can have a positive value for education.