Holocaust Memories from Rural Poland: Esther Nisenthal Krinitz at the Columbus Museum of Art

Black and white are the colors of the Holocaust. The black and white starkness of documentary images result simply from the available technology of the 1940s. Respectful subdued tones follow suit as if to add color would be to pile unbearable sensation onto images and memories already overwhelming in color-drained grayscale.

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, Swimming in the River, 1978. Embroidery on linen. Art and Remembrance.

So I was surprised when I walked into the gallery where Fabric of Survival: The Art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz is showing at the Columbus Museum of Art until June 14. Filled with textiles detailing the memories of a Holocaust survivor, the room is alive with bucolic scenes of nature sewn from vari-colored fabric, crewel, and embroidery threads. Krinitz's hand-sewn tableaux feature Polish village life and landscape—backgrounds durable enough in memory to have survived all that the Nazis perpetrated; scenes in which the Nazis in fact seem dwarfed by the fields and forests around them. 

These scenes of rivers, grain, and gardens remained vivid enough that when Krinitz began recording her childhood at age fifty, the horrors remained contained in images of a world much larger than the certainty of the death that only she and her sister, out of the whole family, escaped.

The tapestry above was the first she made, in 1978. She recollects her childhood home before the war. She and her brother swim in the river while their sisters look on. The villagers come and go about their tasks, and benign Nature dominates. Her house is big and solid, the size of a castle. It doesn't matter that Krinitz was fifty when she made this, for it is a picture of what the child still alive in her left behind. 

This is the picture of home that is fundamental to personality and to character, the image that each of us harbors at some level. The top portion is linear and structured; the bottom is curvaceous and flowing. The whole is both stable and relaxed. The naive image has little artifice and an abundance of unfiltered, joyous expression.

During the 1970s, Krinitz originally made several pieces with subject matter like this, drawn from pre-war memories of Polish village life, where Jews and Gentiles lived side-by-side. She records memories of matzoh-making, of walking to holiday ceremonies on stilts that her brother made: The pleasure of simple, pre-industrial, pre-electrical, agricultural life ordered by the combination of seasonal and religious community observations. 

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, The Bees Save Me, 1996. Art and Remembrance.

After a long hiatus, Krinitz returned to her project in the 1990s, finally moving into the darkening story of her early adolescence and the arrival of the Nazis. Several of the Krinitz textiles show the indignities of Nazi sadism. She depicts soldiers cutting the beard off her grandfather; arousing the family in their nightclothes at gunpoint while neighbors gawked; marching Jewish boys off to forced labor where they were shot when depleted; and, finally, rounding up the Jews from among their neighbors for transport to death camps. 

Esther and her thirteen year old sister fled (the rest of the family was killed). They survived by speaking only Polish and pretending they knew no German (closely related to their native Yiddish). They disguised themselves to find work for an elderly couple in a nearby village. In the scene above, Esther works in the garden that the old man to allowed her to plant. One day Nazis came and tried to question her. She explains in the embroidered caption: 

"June 1943 in Grabowka. While I was tending the garden I had planted, two Nazi soldiers appeared and began to talk to me. I couldn't let them know that I understood them, so I just shook my head as they spoke. Dziadek, the old farmer who had taken me in as his housekeeper, came to stand watch near by, but the honey bees rescued me first, suddenly swarming around the soldiers. "Why aren't they stinging you?" the soldiers asked Dziadek as they ran out of the garden."

Take away the rifles, take away the caption, and what distinguishes these two scenes, made almost twenty years apart, first when the artist was 50 and then approaching 70? 

The first, the pre-war memory, is quite specific—each of the five siblings is located, the house is recalled in loving detail—yet it is mythic too. It is an undatable memory of golden childhood. Esther's memory could be of life at four or fourteen. It is a recollection of well-being, innocence, stability, and love—a memory of place as feeling. Many adults recall such an idyll of childhood. But few recall the idyll's interruption by such sudden and complete trauma as Krinitz was to experience.

The pre-war scene is actually a tapestry. Every bit of the linen is covered with crewel embroidery so that the surface is entirely worked with stitches. Every inch of the surface has been touched and transformed by the artist's hand. The ideas of caressing and modeling come with this. It's not only a scene she recalls, but one she has invented as well—one she has caused to appear, and to appear just as she wants to remember it. She is its author. 

The picture of her as an adolescent—no longer a girl, shoved into untimely adulthood—is not a tapestry. The sky, the "earth" of the garden and some other areas are simple fabric underpinning. The plants in the garden have been sewn in place by embroidery or appliqué; the bees, the flowers, the details of the figures, but the surface has not been as carefully stroked. In contrast to the first picture, it is entirely lined up. The importance of order at this stage in the girl's life was paramount. Even the bees on their hives rest in lines. Krinitz has made up this scene too. She has authored this scene not to refresh herself, but as a way to diffuse trauma.

More of the artist's time and attention have gone into a substantial narrative below the image the explains what might otherwise elude the viewer. She interprets the picture for us to be sure we know what she felt and how Nature continued to aid her.

The second image is remarkable for the way a survivor of great trauma pictures herself coping. The human figures—both the good and bad ones—remain small in the largely natural scene. She is located off to the side. She seems to mediate her own feelings of fear by spreading all possible feeling through the natural landscape, like healing wounds with resort to the earth. Even the bees, massing around the hives and buzzing around the soldiers, appear insignificant in the grand scheme of the picture. Krinitz controls her panic and fear by telling the story, controlling the context and perspective, and placing herself in a large framework.

Esther Nisehnthal Krinitz, Ordered to Leave Our Homes, 1993.
Embroidery and fabric collage. Art and Remembrance.

"This was my family on the morning of October 15, 1942. We were ordered by the Gestapo to leave our homes by 10 a.m. to join all the other Jews on the road to Crasnik railroad station and then to their death." 

This wall hanging, in narrative sequence previous to the one above, pictures Esther's recollection of the day her family had to face their impending deportation to the camps. This is a family portrait, undiluted by the presence of their killers. This was the day that Esther and her sister, in red, would flee. 

Of the thirty-six pieces Krinitz made, this is one of the least dense in terms of sewing. The fabric background is largely plain cloth with a few large swathes of appliqué. Huge crows hunch on the housetop, symbols of impending death for the black-clad quintet.Two outsized sunflowers bloom for the escaping girls in their red capes.

Dark colors signify the grievous content of this picture but its momentous content is signaled by the size and forthright positioning of the family and the house. Nature does not soften or disguise emotion; if anything, it underscores the tragedy. Krinitz does not caress or decorate this image with thousands of strokes of her needle. In terms of presenting the most traumatic event of her life—a moment where she could be emotionally frozen forever—she is if brief, still heroically direct. In naive art, to place the figures near the bottom of the picture is to locate them in the most important place. It's to ground them, as children do in crayon drawings. This is the drawing that stays forever on the parents' wall, the treasured picture of the family, drawn by the daughter with a heart full of love. From this instant forward, Esther would be her own mother and her sister's. In her seventies, mother and child, she recounts the story of how this came to be. 

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, Granddaughter, 1999. Embroidery and fabric collage.
Art and Remembrance.

The final image in both the series and this show pictures a little girl who raises her arm to examine the trunk of a stout tree in a beautiful garden. The lawn, the bark, the flowers, the girl's hair—all are elaborately embroidered. They are touched all over with a loving, lingering hand. Krinitz has brought her story sequentially through the war years and her visit to the camp where her family was killed, a harrowing scene even in naif stitchery. She details and names the piles of ashes, the gas chambers, the burnt down home of the camp director. Aside from the girl's pigtails and dress, there is nothing bright in the meticulously catalogued scene.

In this final scene, she has lived a long life in Brooklyn with her husband whom she met in a refugee camp, with her daughters, and now celebrates her granddaughter, joyous in nature. There is an attempt at observational representation her; she has moved beyond the grip of memory and the burden of interpretation into a real and safe present. The girl is little and the tree next to her is really enormous; there is actual scale and it feels reassuring. The border is green, the text is white: "When you were three years old dear Mami Sheine, Grandma came to visit you. We went to a park where you discovered a huge tree. I never forgot the expression on your face as you stood there admiring the tree. Grandma loves you so much." 

Grandma is free and insures that she will be part of another little girl's strength, no matter what comes.

Navajo Weaving at the Palm Springs Art Museum

Navajo, Transitional Period Banded Wearing
Blanket, circa 1890, handspun natural wool and
synthetic dyes, collection of Jan and
Mark Hilbert

Woven Together: Art and Design in Southwest Indian Textiles," presented by California's Palm Springs Art Museum, is an exemplary overview of a century of Navajo weaving. The show is abundant with examples of blankets and rungs from 1870 to 1970, elegantly installed in well-organized and warmly-painted galleries. 

Native American weaving is an art form about which I knew nothing, going in. I came out visually dazzled and enriched by the history of the art and of the complicated modern social context in which it developed.

The show's title refers to southwestern Indian textiles, but I'll refer to this as a show of Navajo work. The Navajo art is based on inherited traditions from the Pueblo people, who had been weaving with cotton since 700 AD. Spanish colonists introduced sheep to the Pueblo in the 16th century, and wool became the fiber of choice. This exhibition shows examples of late Spanish and Pueblo blankets that illustrate cultural influences. The focus, however, is on the development of Navajo weaving practice in light of its connection with Anglo commerce and aesthetics. What seems to be truly "woven together" here are the entrepreneurial desires of whites and Navajos' skillful adaptations as they worked to prosper within both the marketplace and their own traditions.

Navajo, Wearing Blanket (Possibly Zuni), Moki Style, circa
1860-1979, handspun natural wool, Saxony (red) and
raveled (red) yarnd, and indigo (blue) synthetic dyes,
collection of Jan and Mark Hilbert

The first big distinction for beginners like myself was that the Navajo were weavers of blankets, not rugs. Blankets had many purposes, all personal. Not the least of these was use as garments, which they either wrapped singly, or sewed together to be pulled over the head. The illustration below shows an installation of chief blankets. Their name doesn't indicate a particular connection to tribal chiefs, but recognition of the fineness of yarns, the clarity of colors and the bold, outstanding designs. The traditional Navajo "wearing blanket" has evenly-spaced bands across a plain field of background color. Chief blankets introduce outstanding designs like zigzags, diamonds, or chevrons.

Chief blanket installation at Woven Together, Palm
Springs Art Museum, December 2012

The world of the Navajo was devastated during the 1860s when it was determined that there were no independent Indian lands in New Mexico, and Kit Carson was instructed to beset the Navajo and undertake a scorched earth campaign that included killing all their sheep. The Long March took the Navajo in groups 350 miles to internment at Bosque Redondo on the Pecos River. They marched back in 1868 when mounting pressure on the federal government forced them to release the several tribes they had corralled there.

The effects on weaving would seem counter-intuitive, for the emergent style was more brilliant and lively than before. Because the Navajo had lost their sheep, the government supplied them with what was generically called Germantown yarn. This was wool yarn spun in the neighborhood of Germantown, Pennsylvania and dyed synthetically into many colors previously unknown in the Southwest. The Navajo weavers continued to produce banded wearing blankets, but in zigzag or dentil designs, and using unusual, new color combinations to produce "eye dazzlers."

Navajo, Early Ganado Rug, circa 1900, handspun
natural wool and synthetic dyes, gift of the
George Montgomery trust.

It wasn't until the 1890s and after that the complicated, geometric patterns that many of us associate with Navajo weaving appeared at all. The diamonds, windmills ("backwards swastikas"), crosses, diagonal stairways, and arrows were not generated by Native Americans, but by artists working for the Anglo trading posts, which became the major employers of Navajo weavers and purveyors of their products.

Navajo, Ganado or Klagetoh Rug,
circa 1920, natural handspun wool and
synthetic dyes, gift of Mrs. J. Beatty
McCullough

Two fine rooms in this show highlight the world of artisans connected the Hubbell Trading Post and one called Two Grey Hills. Hubbell was built at Ganado, New Mexico by a magnate of stage and freight lines, who owned fourteen posts on Navajo territory. He made a deal with the Santa Fe Railroad to stock Ganado rugs at their tourist sites.

The rugs Ganado weavers produced followed the leads of   Hubbell's commissioned Anglo painters. Ganado rugs can be identified by the characteristic designs the weavers copied from painted designs that were hung in the workshops for them to emulate and imitate.

Navajo, Two Grey Hills Rug, circa 1940,
hanspun natural wool and synthetic
over-dye (black), gift of Mrs. J. Beatty
McCullouth

Two Grey Hill rugs have their own pallet and motifs. These are at first glance similar to oriental rugs—and this is no accident. Rugs were popular as floor and wall decoration during the Arts and Crafts period that spanned the turn of the century. Navajo rugs were highly desirable, to serve the same purpose as orientals. One notices on all trading post rugs, too, that the geometric, abstract designs are contained by borders. These were mandated by the Anglo designers, in imitation of oriental rugs. Borders were never present in Navajo blankets, which were woven from selvage to selvage in uninterrupted bands.

Isabel John (1933-2004), Navajo Pictorial Weaving,  circa 1975, handspun natural and commercial wool,
vegetal and syntheti dyes, gift of Joyce F. Klein

During the 20th century, independent Navajo weavers began to produce pictorial weavings. In Isabel John's 1975, "Navajo Pictorial Weaving," above, the artist blended handspun wools with commercial; vegetal with synthetic dyes to create a tableau intended for explaining  aspects of tribal culture to children. A charming scene of village life is also a didactic panel.

Blossom Nez Yeh, active 1920s, Navajo Windway Sandpainting Textile, Wind People Dressed (Clothed) in Snakes, 1920-'23,
handspun natural wool and synthetic dyes, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Seymour Lazar, A6-2004.

Yet "Navajo Windway Sandpainting Textile," by Blossom Nez Yeh, represents a sacred ceremony and is considered by some controversial for its content. This immense rug is the showstopper of the exhibition. Its size, quality, and dignity mesmerize. The notes tell us that it represents figures draped with snakes, as in a healing ceremony. In the ceremony, these figures would be painted in sand and then swept away afterwards: It's considered sacrilege to render them permanent. Yet here are the Wind People for any and all to see, in a rug commissioned by a tourist trading post that has become part of the Petrified National Forest in Arizona.

The story told by Woven Together is a moving one: Any reminder of the mistreatment of native peoples is a grave collective shame; the reminders of their resilience and creativity are inspiring.

The Navajo blankets and rugs by themselves are all "eye dazzlers" of color, design, and workmanship. I understand that this show, organized by the Palm Springs Art Museum from its own collection, will not travel. It's a pity.

But the excellent catalogue costs only ten dollars. It's beautifully printed, richly illustrated, with excellent text by Christine Giles, curator, and Katherine Hough, Chief Curator. It's well worth having.

Navajo, Germantown Pictorial Blanket (detail of cowboy, steer and bow and arrows),
circa 1880, handspun natural and Germantown commercial wool and synthetic dyes,
gift of Isabel White Chase from the Cornelia B. White Estate.

Felt

Carded wool, left; and wool after water felting, right.
Display at "Made by Hand," The Works, Newark, Ohio, May 2012

Felt has been made for millennia in central Asia, where it's used for clothing, rugs, and as the coverings for yurts, the homes of nomadic people on the steppes. Its great advantages as are that it's portable and it's breathable, providing winter warmth and summer ventilation. Though we in the West think of felt as being made from the wool of sheep, it can be made from what wool's available—like camels' if you're in Kazakhstan, or bunnies' if you have enough. 


Felt's the material that artist Joseph Beuys told such a compelling story about. Maybe he was and maybe he was not rescued by Tartars after an airplane disaster left him near death during World War II. His saviors salved his body with fat and rolled him in warm, breathing felt to heal. Beuys used felt as medium and as symbol in his work.

Joseph Beuys, Felt Suit, 1970.
Felt, sewn, stamped.
National Museum of Scotland, GMA 4552.

A current show at the Ohio Center for Industry, Art, and Technology (The Works) in Newark, "Made by Hand," features felt as a material for expression. Co-curated by Chris Lang and Lyn Logan-Grimes, the selected artists include Lang, Renee Harris, Sharron Parker, Mary Helen Fernandez Stewart, Yiling Tien, and Megan Henderson.


In the curatorial statement, Lang explains, "wool fibers react to hot water, soap, rubbing and pressure, causing the scales on the fibers to open and mat together allowing it to be molded like a piece of clay. More control over the fibers can be achieved with the use of a felting needle to mat dry wool fibers together, allowing felt artists to paint and sculpt." So despite its roots in the farm necessities and its hand manufacture, felt is described to have the function of other materials that are used to make decorative or non-functional items. And, indeed, in The Works' show, most of what is displayed sits along this spectrum of non-utilitarian craft to fine art. 

Chris Lang, Rows and Rows.
Note that even from a distance, the textures of the various regions
 are discernable and distinctive.

Chris Lang's work in two dimensions is pictures of variegated rural scenery. Working from a natural colored felt canvas (underlayer), she dry-felts her own hand-spun yarns with the barbed felting needle. For the skies, she mixes shades of blue wool together with long strands of white to create the effect of a fine afternoon's high sky with cirrus clouds. Each of the rows of crops has a unique look because she has selected either single-colored yarn or a mixture of loose wools to represent it, thus creating nuance and variety of color and texture. Lang understands and uses the properties of her material—she does not attempt to "paint the picture" but makes the picture that she can make from wool. I appreciate an artist's thorough knowledge and well integrated use of specific materials.

Chris Lang, Rows and Rows. Detail.

Lang's relationship to wool work comes from long association. She and her husband acquired sheep for their children's 4-H project (4-H is an American rural children's development organization: Head/Heart/Hands/Health), which led to the acquisition of her own flock. In a YouTube video she both explains that background and demonstrates the basics of felting technique.

Chris Lang, Mother Nature's Footstool

Bird's nest detail

The finest piece in the show is Lang's heirloom Mother Nature's Footstool. This wonderful, folkloric covering for the cushion and legs of a stool has extraordinary appeal for the eyes and fingers. It has the friendly feel of someone as welcoming and familiar as a favorite pet. Lang uses felt in an ebullient variety of ways—sometimes closely matted, sometimes soft and curly (uncarded wool, she tells me). There is as much textural interest and the natural forms are fascinating. Vines, fruits, mosses, leaves, and even an egg-filled bird's nest, dependent from one leg, create a fairy microcosm. Magical as this work is, it still strikes me as a furnishing, as something real. A child would love to sit down on this. Feet unwinding in felt slippers would happily rest here.

 Chris Lang, detail from Mother Nature's Footstool

Yiling Tien is an active crafts instructor in the Columbus area whose work demonstrates the pleasure of felt as craft material. She shows felted three-dimensional objects that are pleasurable to hold, play with, or admire as decoration: jewelry, jewelry boxes, the balls and toy cat in these photographs. The pretty things Tien sees in her imagination can be realized through felt.

Yuling Tien, Sarah the Cat

Yiling Tien, Four Spheres

Tien's work made me realize that I saw nothing she made that could not have been made of clay or even glass. This reminds me how important the touch, weight, malleability, and texture of a material are; the ease with which it is colored or modified; its durability and portability. In her statement, Tien mentions that she had almost given up on felting when all she knew was the rigorous water method, which would require much heavy work with hand forming objects. Once she understood dry, needle felting with its additive process, she fell back in love with it.

Sharron Parker, Capturing the Light

At the fine arts end of Made By Hand, Sharron Parker's wall hangings are like studies in color, light, and geology, calling on the particular property of felt to be at once dense but light in weight, to represent a massiveness it does not embody. Both Capturing the Light and Capturing the Light II (the latter in the neighborhood of 35" x 50;" the former a little smaller), when seen from across the room, seem like arid landscapes in the dramatic light just before sunrise or sunset. Then they are vivid blades of extremely saturated color: I wondered that it  didn't drip and pool on the floor.  

Sharron Parker, Capturing the Light II

From a distance, I wondered if these fantastic color studies couldn't have been made of paper, or canvas? Approaching them, though, the nature of the material and its importance became clearer. Not as stiff as paper nor as draping as woven fabric, felt has sculptural qualities and mass without heaviness or hard edges. Parker takes advantage of the possibilities that wool and felting needle hold in the ways she twists and folds different colors of wool together, creating valleys, inlets, and gulches defined both by color and actual depth. In the areas with less detail, the felt drapes like sandstone dried after eons in water, a condition that the wet felting process imitates well.

Parker, Capturing the Light II, detail.

I'm very happy to have seen The Works' felt show. It makes me long to see a bigger institution with more resources do a more comprehensive show, one that would cover Asian roots, and the architectural and fashion uses of felt. 

Parker, Capturing the Light, detail.

In the meantime, I can recommend to others this good video that shows Mongolians preparing felt from sheep's wool to cover yurts. Architonic magazine—far from Mongolia, at the other end of architecture and design—has a June 2012 article about felt in contemporary furnishings and wall construction, praising especially its ecological profile. And this site will take you to my dream show long past (2009) at the Cooper Hewitt Museum, Fashioning Felt: Another addition to the long list of fascinating shows I've missed!  

Floating cloud of dyed, carded wool welcomes guests
to "Made by Hand" at The Works.

Wax Cloth and Textile Designs on the Street in St. Louis, Senegal

 
 On a recent visit to the northernmost city of Senegal, St. Louis--located near the border of Mauritania, where the Senegal River meets the North Atlantic--I had a few hours to watch people come and go downtown. The Senegalese are touchy about being photographed, so I've found it frustrating in my travels there to get photos of the vivid daily dress that I so admire. My hostess assured me though, that from our balcony, snapping photos in the interests of fashion would be fine, so I invoked the spirit of Bill Cunningham in the interest of art journalism.

My hostess in St. Louis is my new Congolese sister-in-law, a woman whose wardrobe exhibits her impeccable taste and insistence on first-quality materials. She is the mother of five daughters (the youngest is twenty), all of whom are tres chic. One hosts and produces a twice-weekly television program in Dakar on subjects that include current fashion.

In this family, the women move naturally between traditional dress and contemporary Western dress. The sisters tell me that they tend to save African garments for formal occasions. During the two weeks we were together, though, they did indeed enjoy the comfort of casual, capacious African garments.

Madame wears nothing Western. The difference between her day-to-day attire and her ensemble for the wedding of our children left no question, though, about which was which. The difference was materials, the latter being made of fabric shot through with gold thread and her headdress of lavish design being yet more radiantly golden. Day to day, she is usually in wax.

Wax cloth is decorated with wax resist processes, the best known techniques in the West being batik and tie-dye. Both  are ubiquitous, and, like nearly all fabrics I've seen in Senegal, they are brightly colored.

Few of the fabrics worn in Senegal originate there. Some are made England and the Netherlands exclusively for the African market. But many come from Mali, Nigeria and Cameroon; all carry the mark of their nation of manufacture. Quality varies: Some bleed and shrink when laundered; the best are very stable.

The batik and tie-dye processes help trace the origins of wax cloth back to Indonesia, which was a Dutch colony in the 18th century. Through Dutch trade and manufacture, the fabric and processes were imported to Africa.

The other highly popular form of wax is printed (machine or block-printed) resist designs, from simple to elaborate. These are, again, nearly always bold and bright, in colors of great intensity. Some of these designs clearly require five or six printings, their designs have so many layers of interlocked designs.

The pictures below are selections from my pleasant morning of fashion-watching above a busy commercial corner in St. Louis, on a 85º morning in December. From time to time a car rapide, the cheapest form of local and inter-city transportation will drive through, each with its own painting and personality, reflecting the exuberant approach to color and decoration that mark life in West Africa.