Shoah - Holocaust art
Mixed media painting-installation-photography-collage-sculpture-hand printed silk screen-photomontage Art trying to tell the history of the Holocaust. The "SONG" My Sister Anne ( Anne Frank ) words and voice by Thomas Dellert -Bergh. Recorded in Swedish 1986 Please contact us with your comments or suggestions of exhibiting this important art ? The artist wants to donate the Shoah collection of art to the Holocaust Museum anywhere in the world , who will take upon themselves to exhibit it and paying the cost of the art transportation from the storage in Germany. The art is too important to be stored in a warehouse.
- Thomas Dellert- Bergh SHOAH - Holocaust Art Donation 2022
My Name is Thomas D Bergh. I'm an artist dealing with history in my art.
I'm contacting you concerning my Shoah art for donation now in storage.
Im looking for an organisation or a Holocaust Museum to except my “donation” of my Shoah art collection of works including paintings collage, photography, and my short documentarry movie
“White Silent Hell “ about the architecture of evil filmed on a frozen day in Auschwitz Birkenau.
My intention is to give this work I have dedicated over 40 years to create ,to an institution or Museum that will show my work to the public in order to spread the important message of what happened in order to try to prevent it from happening again.
My artworks are based on serious research and dedication in an effort to tell the important story of the Shoah.
My SHOAH ART Collection
This collection of works has gradually developed over the last 40 years.
It combines my interest for humanity and history, with my passion and belief in the inherent necessity for the story of the Holocaust to be told, and as loud
as possible. I feel that it is vital to keep the story alive and to ensure that the truth reaches out, especially in these new times of denial.
I also view it as an important warning and wake-up call for the younger generation that is so easily misled. Today we face new dangers in the form of a new anti-semitism with new Right wing movements, Neo-Nazism and Islamic fundamentalism and this is something we all have to take very seriously. It is imperative we do all of which we are capable of to avoid a repetition of this aspect of modern history.
My interest for the Holocaust began already as a small child when my grandmother told me stories from the second world war and when she as a Swedish tourist in Germany was thrown of a tram in Dresden by two SA men as she refused to saw on the star of David on her and my mother's coat and instead saw on a Swedish flag. This and many other stories created a fascination for the subject and already at the age of ten I started to create art about the horrors of the Holocaust.
I still have these child drawings and watercolours. I have also had contact with the family of Raoul Wallenberg as my grandmother was friends with his mother in Stockholm in the 1920s.
I have one of his Swedish military hats, and his newspaper birth ad and other memorabilia in my Shoah collection. I have also been in contact with Per Anger when he visited my art exhibit in 1986 in New York. Mr Anger as we known was Raoul Wallenberg’s associate in Budapest during the Holocaust and together with Wallenberg saved many Jewish people risking their own life in the process.
When I exhibited some of my Shoah art at the first International Forum on the Holocaust Conference in Stockholm in 2000 when I had the opportunity to meet ElieWiesel. And through my work as an Absolut Vodka Artis I have through the late Michel Roux donated a Shoah artwork titled “Playing for Time” see images in PDF. Its now in the art collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC.
For the “Shoah” project I have used several different forms of media: Painting and collage on canvas complimented with sculptural elements in the form of objects that draw a direct link to the persecutions and exterminations, or to the life of Jewish families before the deportations. .
I have also used traditional photography and video installation based on what is today left of the actual places in which the crimes occurred.
My short film “ White Silent Hell” is a documentation of what is left of the architecture of evil in Auschwitz Birkenau. Filmed and edited in a kind of chronological order to show the gradual humiliation of those who had to walk their Golgotha toward death. And at the same time the ice cold and calculated every day routines of the death technicians who handled the death machinery.
Many of my works have an educational approach, but others are more poetic in their reflection upon what is one of the darkest periods in the history of mankind. It is impossible to portray the horrors of the Holocaust justly, as the magnitude of the crimes are beyond all comprehension and understanding. Still we have to try, we owe it to our children and the millions that perished.
I also believe it is important to approach the subject in as many different ways as possible, in order to reach out to as many people as possible in addition to conveying the message to future generations, not only to those of Jewish faith, for whom the Holocaust might be a family memory.
The story of Shoah must be conveyed to people of all faiths and of all nationalities in order that no one should be fooled. The truth and reality of what happened can be hard to understand, or even to accept, but it can not be questioned or denied. Art is only one tool in this mission to “tell the story”, but often an effective one. It reaches and touches other groups of people, who usually don't care to read books about history or see documentaries about the Holocaust.
I see my humble involvement, through this collection of pictures, as no more than a handful of dust, yet this dust is a part of our testament, my contribution to collective memory, one could say.
In my recent series of photographs, taken in both Auschwitz Birkenau and Kazimierz the Jewish quarters in Krakow during the winter of 2007, I have combined images in order to tell the story chronologically.
These ‘triptychs’ in the form of vast silent winter landscapes, with crumbling concrete from blown-up gas chambers, take the shape of monsters, organic, frightening. Depictions of the many piles of shoes that remain, glasses, pots and pans are a harsh reminder of the many scattered lives. Furthermore, the walls, where inscriptions borne of pain are still clearly visible, worn down floors upon which thousands passed on their way to a premature death, lay testament to the torment those many men and women experienced. The barbed wire cuts through the clear blue sky like a razor. All of this remains, frozen in time, covered with frosty ice and as with the annual rings defining the age of a tree in the forest of remembrance.
The images contrast each other and at the same time they are all telling the same story. They are documents of pain. It is a sort of excavation of this pain within the objects, a frozen landscape where time stands still, but where the thought and spirit travels freely: A silent hell, in which the ashes , and everyday objects like spoons and forks hide under a frozen pond.
I have entered this landscape, in silence and with respect for its many victims.
Thomas Dellert - Bergh
LINK TO MY SHOAH ART
https://www.holocaustshoahart.com
Some Art Critics
“A Place in History”
Like the spirit of energy intense, strung tight with boundless supply, with focus that burns most deeply into the mind, this nucleus of uncontrived unfitted and most complexed genius came here, delivered his message, and this whom his thoughts could touch are still as smouldering ruins.
This man Thomas D Bergh is ten times the power of many of the other artists of his generation. He has the energy of a man half his age and his art is many times the force of a laser beam or an army of artists. He dead not tap you gently upon the shoulder and mutter “ remember Auschwitz “ no he grabs you by the nigra substantia and dangles you before the awful memories of Holocaust and human indecency. And he dead it with collage and contents of which are rare and actual memorabilia of the unbelievable creators of that sickening and sinful Nazi philosophy. He hunts down labels and posters and permits af death and ancient photographs ( if not he’s own ) he stamps them with strident orders, using the original rubber stamp
Of the SS and then more he shouts “ Wake Up ! “ You generation of sloth’s, computer and TV game addicts , wake up and see, the road you are taking now is backwards and will lead to death. Stop now or history will be repeated. Irony, satire and sarcasm and pointed jibes at our human failings are some of the tools of his statements. He takes two portraits, the heads ripped apart, and he portrays the repaired picture stitched coarsely back, like the rapid stitches of an overworked surgeon working overtime upon the shredded and bleeding wounded of a nearby battle field, the wrong head to each boy. An ironic statement that points an accusing finger at incompetence and thoughtlessness in our careless times.
Perhaps age is creeping upon me too quickly. And as I drove away I felt spent and weary, incapable and sterile. The little energy that remained within me was drained with humble admiration for an almost unknown artist whose place in history of art is reserved and waiting for him.
John Orr
Art critic at Miami Chronicles.
"The importance of being courageous in your art"
It is difficult to choose a work that has more edge than another in Thomas D Berghs substantial oeuvre- and let me say that he excels at all techniques, whether we refer to his silk screens in the Andy Warhol technique, his photo montages, paintings on canvas, his old school photography, his collages or his video art. If we take for example the work about the Swedish Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg titled Silent Track 1979. There he has taken his own photograph from the last meters of railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz Birkenau. The artist has given it a yellowish color that connotes the color of the star of David worn by all Jewish people during the Nazi years of occupation of Europe. The silkscreen paper has than been beaten severely to resemble the wounds inflicted from torture by the fanatical and cruel SS. Still this work of art has a serene suggestive beauty. The last metres before death. What its left of this genocide today..a fragment of cloth, a few meters of innocent railroad track. Is that all that remains ? No! The importance of our collective memory is to never forget what happened, to tell the story over and over again, to try to prevent it from being repeated. That is what Thomas Image is trying to do. Any of the different series of works we look at are on a high level of artistic craftsmanship. And what makes these works so exciting and tantalising is the authentic energy that they transmit and as we observe and immediately feel.
To discover an artist like Thomas D Bergh is not only exciting, it is surprising. Indeed it is unbelievable that this Swedish artist has not yet been more appreciated in his own homeland.
To pass an artist like him is difficult. It is absolutely clear that he is one of the most interesting and powerful Swedish artists we have today. Probably he will soon become one of the more well known Swedish artists on the international art scene. Not only because his works touch us, or are artistically expressive or because they talk about us in our time, epoch and future. But mostly because they shine off that courage that carries art and life forward.
Jonas Stampe Art Critic and Curator