By Dr. Inna Rogatchi, curator of The Auschwitz Album Re-Visited exhibition in the Jewish People Memory & Holocaust in Ukraine Museum, Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine (from January 2014); co-founder and the president of The Rogatchi Foundation
Acclaimed American artist Dr Pat Mercer Hutchens started her work on her The Auschwitz Album Re-Visited series in 2006. The artist who is also widely recognised as a public figure, and who, together with her husband, Brigadier General , US Army ( Ret.) James M. Hutchens, have been actively supporting Israel and Jewish people for decades, does have her long-term strong interest towards the world of the Jewish spiritual symbolism, and she has authored particular and original works on that direction.
But the very story of the original Auschwitz Album has prompted incredible, unparalleled motivation for Pat Hutchens to undertake her unique series. As deeply human and passionate personality, Patfelt an immediate emotional inter-lock with that young girl who has survived the nightmare of the Holocaust, alone from her entire family, and who did find that photo-album made by the Nazi murderers in the first day of the Auschwitz liberation; who, upon random opening of the album, saw there the photographs of her family, relative and acquaintances, all exterminated.
Pat Mercer Hutchens did see in those photographs that had been made by inhuman criminals, something that has evoked into her, very powerfully, a strong and passionate intention somehow to return those doomed, hopeless, helpless, victimized people back to life – because people are alive as long as they are remembered. The artist had painted the images of the people from the Brehov ghetto with passionate love. She has provide an act of a high mercy for them, those victims annihilated without a slight of a reason or guilt.
By creating and re-creating the images of quite real people from Brehov ghetto, Pat was as if trying to give them a chance to address to us today. She has brought them back from oblivion. If there would be nothing else, such deeply human intention and highly passionate way of exercising it are worth of our high attention and unlimited gratitude to Pat Hutchens.
Working on her series which she named as The Auschwitz Album Re-Visited, Pat did not transfer the images of the people from the original album to her canvasses mechanically, but, continuing the line of the distinguished symbolism in her art approach, the artist has added some specific details to the scenes. In picking up those details, Pat has followed her visioning of the situations depicted in those photographs of doom, despair and unparalleled suffering of the innocent people.
The artist who is a highly educated person with a deep interest towards many fields of knowledge, and who is doctor of theology specializing in the Hebrew studies and the Levantine languages, also has added her highlights to every work of the collection. This is not happening often in the visual art, but in this case, the highlights of Pat Hutchens are providing a truly comprehensive guideline to the world she re-created on her canvases.
Returning to the original source of the Pat’s work, the Auschwitz Album itself, it shall be noticed that those photographs represent the unique document. There were a couple of Nazis who were entertaining themselves in fixing if not collecting a human suffering. And there were hundreds of their victims who had no power or choice whatsoever to escape to be photographed at the moment when there were on the edge of existence being completely overwhelmed by horror and dismay. They were elderly, babies, women… They had no slightest possibility to turn away from the cold indifferent mechanical eye of the camera lenses. They were absolutely powerless.
Having said it, the least of the concern of those haunted, suffering, helpless people was some camera around them. As it could be seeing on practically all photos from the original album, people featured on the photos were deep down into their own thoughts. They were in despair that comes from the territory beyond the point of no return.
Being a deep believer and a highly dignified person, Pat Hutchens just could not automatically transfer to her canvases such an ocean of bottomless human suffering. Pat’s husband, General Brig ( Retired) of the US Army James M. Hutchens, himself legendary American hero and the Deputy Chaplain of the US Army, had told me several times on finding his wife crying unstoppably while working on her canvases sitting in her studio in front of the photos from the original album from Auschwitz.
In her works from this collection, Pat Hutchens did try to return to life, to some extent, those concrete people from the Brehov ghetto in Hungary; to return them to this world through the perception of her viewers. She also did express her personal attitude towards the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis, and she did it the most expressively.
By and via those symbolic details that Pat has added to the scenes and personages, she compels us to see the most essential parts of the crimes committed as she is seeing it. In full accordance with the standards and criteria of what’s known as ‘thoughtful art’, the artist generalises phenomena, she highlights the accents which are the most important for her in the certain symbolic scenes.
She gets into the core of the crimes committed during the Holocaust and she tells on human suffering which had been inflicted by the Nazis onto colossal number of innocent people, straightforwardly, and most importantly, with an unparalleled passion and deepest understanding. The artist behind the canvases is the person with sharpest mind and a bleeding heart.
It is just impossible to forget the eyes of a small girl from the face which is turned towards us, on the work “Why I, Emma?”. Being a curator of the exhibition, I have chosen the work as a title one for the collection because this is the work of the category which stays with mankind as the one of its significant images.
It is the same impossible to throw off one’s head the question which Pat has made as a title of another her work: “Is My Dolly Also Jewish?..”
It is impossible to turn one’s eyes from the faces of those Rabbis who are looking on us from inside the ocean of grief with unimaginable dignity.
Pat Hutchens did succeed in her noble mission to return those concrete people on the photos from an oblivion, indeed, – thousands of people have been watching her canvases and will be doing it at the numerous exhibitions world-wide.
What’s more, the artist has completed quite-essential task in teaching all her viewers to be compassionate, and to comprehend crucial moments of history.
Because of these qualities, I am of a strong opinion that the Pat’s reading of The Auschwitz Album is the one of the best means of the teaching of the Holocaust to children, and our The Rogatchi Foundation is supporting the educational initiatives of the kind world-wide.
In her collection, Pat Hutchens has painted 40 of existing 193 photos from the album. She was choosing those one which has evoked the strongest response in her own heart. We can see from the series images that the artist is focusing her attention on three groups of people – women, children, elderly. To those ones who were the most vulnerable, the most helpless ones during that Nazi feast of evil on the earth.
We can also see that the artist is identifying itself, very often, with her heroes. She tries to share their destiny by thinking on them so intensively that her own feelings are getting palpable on her canvasses. And from that perspective, seven decades’ time difference from the moment of horrific actions does not mean a thing – as it should be the case, indeed, in the society which does respect human life and its values.
By sharing the destiny with those people on her canvasses, Pat Mercer Hutchens is doing it with regard to all the victims of the Holocaust, all those millions of crushed human souls. Precious souls, as my dear friend Pat is saying always. What on the earth could be more honourable than the artist’s mission understood and realised in such way?..
Dr Inna Rogatchi
The Rogatchi Foundation
January 2014