Ofen, these secret drawings would be stripped and scattered to avoid confscation from guards, yet in Kantor’s case, a few sketches were kept safe, hidden under the foorboards of his barrack. 127 drawings – some originals and some reconstituted from memory upon liberation – were assembled in a book called The Book of Alfred Kantor, accompanied by short texts providing context for each image. While the few surviving originals Kantor made in camps are extremely simple, immediate and understated in appearance, made with a pencil and lined paper, the reflective drawings that followed his liberation brim with added colour, text, and narrative, conjuring a more explicitly violent appearance that nonetheless feel more distant in content. The two original sketches that most obviously served as models for Schwarzheide, – carrying the same trees and deafening sense of silence – are pictorially reduced, unremarkable and muted to the point of eeriness, as if essentially relaying lived experiences with no voice or flter. Schwarzheide was in fact the third and last camp that Kantor experienced during the war. Having first been sent to the Terezin ghetto in 1941, at the age of 18, he was then moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, and later to the labour camp at Schwarzheide, north of Dresden, where he worked grueling 12-hour shifs to help rebuild a German synthetic-fuel plant. At the end of his imprisonment in Schwarzheide, Kantor participated in the death march to Theresienstadt, which eventually led him to freedom in May 1945. He was one of 175 prisoners out of 1,000 to survive this march. The sketches Kantor made across his three experiences illustrate the daily routine and environments of a Jew during the Holocaust, and, more specifcally, of a Jewish man held captive in Terezin, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Schwarzheide – three of twenty main concentration camps in countries occupied by Nazi Germany. Kantor had written: ‘My commitment to drawing came out of a deep instinct of self-preservation and undoubtedly helped me to deny the unimaginable horrors of that time’ (Alfred Kantor, quoted in ‘Depicted Life in Nazi Camps’, The New York Times, 26 January 2003, online). As such, the source image from the present work may be understood as a found document from a desperate moment in history; a shy witness to unfathomably cruel and threatening forces. The black lines puncturing the scene’s vista – the literal reproduction of the paper’s idiosyncratic lines – act as reminders to the oppression that weighed on the lives of insiders during their imprisonment. Their sof, unobtrusive rendition reminds the viewer of how easily this oppression went unseen. Crucially, Tuymans notes that the yellowish backdrop coating the surface of Schwarzheide drew from the similarly toned sketches he engaged with in the creation of his work.
Luc Tuymans, Gaskamer, 1986, oil on canvas. © Luc Tuymans.
Luc Tuymans, Our New Quarters, 1986, oil on canvas, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. © Luc Tuymans.