Symbol, Testimony, Evidence: Representations of Majdanek in the 1944–45 Work of Zinovy Tolkachev
n July of 1944, the Red Army liberated the Majdanek concentration camp. Among the soldiers at Majdanek was Zinovy Tolkachev (1903–1977), an artist of Jewish-Ukrainian descent who was trained in Moscow and taught at the Fine Arts Academy in Kiev. In the month following the camp’s liberation, Tolkache...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw
2020-01-01
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| Series: | Miejsce |
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| Online Access: | https://miejsce.asp.waw.pl/en/english-symbol-testimony-evidence-representations-of-majdanek-in-the-1944-45-work-of-zinovy-tolkachev/ |
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| Summary: | n July of 1944, the Red Army liberated the Majdanek concentration camp. Among the soldiers at Majdanek was Zinovy Tolkachev (1903–1977), an artist of Jewish-Ukrainian descent who was trained in Moscow and taught at the Fine Arts Academy in Kiev. In the month following the camp’s liberation, Tolkachev made a series of drawings based on his own eyewitness experiences and on the testimonies of camp survivors. This article takes up the task of reconstructing the exhibitions of Zinovy Tolkachev’s drawings, which have not yet received scholarly attention. It also provides an overview of the shows’ reception. The article offers a critical analysis of Tolkachev’s work based on reciprocal relations between the categories: document, evidence, and artwork. The text considers how and why Tolkachev’s drawings were positioned at an interface between these categories and traces a tension in the drawings between representational forms that evoke universal themes, and those that express a specifically Jewish experience of the Holocaust. |
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| ISSN: | 2450-1611 2956-4158 |