Image via Jewish Museum Milwaukee
Erich Lichtblau-Leskly was a department store window dresser when the Nazis invaded his native Czechoslovakia. Along with his wife Elsa, he was deported to Theresienstadt, a Holocaust transit camp dressed up by the Nazis as a model “resettlement center” for Jews. International observers, including representatives of the Red Cross, were given carefully guided tours designed to dispel rumors of German ill treatment of Jews. With his commercial art training, Lichtblau-Leskly was assigned to camp duties that gained him access to paper and colored pencils.
His self-portrait, blown up as a wall display for the Jewish Museum Milwaukee’s exhibition, “To Paint is to Live: The Artwork of Erich Lichtblau-Leskly,” depicts his situation. With one hand raised in the air he holds a big paint brush. Behind his back is an artist’s fine-pointed brush. Under the noses of his captors, Lichtblau-Leskly executed a series of color drawings satirizing conditions in the camp as well as the Nazi’s Theresienstadt propaganda campaign. Those postcard size drawings are the heart of “To Paint is to Live,” on display through May 30.
Worried that the Nazis would discover his visual satires, Lichtblau-Leskly removed and destroyed the drawings’ captions before cutting the images into small pieces and hiding them in a crack in the barracks wall. Lichtblau-Leskly and his wife managed to survive until Theresienstadt was liberated by the Soviet army in 1945. After moving to Israel, he recreated those images in larger dimensions, sometimes with subtle changes but always with the words and captions restored. “To Paint is to Live” displays those recreations alongside the originals with their missing corners and torn edges held together by yellowing tape.
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Lichtblau-Leskly’s human figures are cartoon-like caricatures that wear their irony lightly. In Lunch Break, a group of women’s faces, their hair done as if for a day on the town, emerge from a dark background and gather around a stove for a concentration camp luncheon. Doctors are Hungry Too shows a white-coated Jewish camp physician beckoning a man carrying food through a crowded waiting room. Many of Lichtblau-Leskly’s images are specifically directed toward the visit by Red Cross officials who were given the impression that Theresienstadt was a good place to live. In All Sidewalks Will be Scrubbed, a woman scrubs the concrete as happily as if she washed her kitchen floor. Dining Hall in the Barracks: The Ghetto is Being Beautiful depicts well-dressed prisoners sitting before a table set for dinner with white linen but with empty bowls.
Lichtblau-Leskly’s colors are often bold in their darkness and his images can be hauntingly matter of fact. However, the most striking picture in the collection is the one that dispenses with realism. In Terezinka: A Ghetto Disease, a nightmarish figure descends along a spectral staircase toward the abyss, his head radiating in an explosion of madness. “To Paint is to Live” also includes an animated short subject based on Lichtblau-Leskly’s drawings and a documentary of his family visiting Theresienstadt.
For more information, visit jewishmuseummilwaukee.org.
