The Holocaust has not been a viable subject for art. A handful of artists have built monuments to it, but the subject has always seemed too large and too terrible, and the consensus was that whatever images it inspired would appear trivial and anecdotal alongside the evidence of photographs and films. How could art deepen our understanding of a subject about which it seemed that there was nothing more visually to be said?

It now appears, however, that for Jewish artists who lived through World War II, something has changed. At the same time that the Jewish Museum was preparing its current installation of the plaster version of George Segal’s 1983 sculpture of the Holocaust, commissioned for a Holocaust Memorial site in Lincoln Park in San Francisco, the painter Cleve Gray was working in his Connecticut studio to complete a series of works in which the ghosts of the Holocaust were encouraged to stand up and speak. Read More