Thursday, April 23, 1998 | 9:49 a.m.
It hangs on one wall in the Las Vegas Art Museum, an acrylic mixture of olive drab, beige and pale yellow casting a harsh and hollow mood.
They are the colors Arie Lagstein chose to portray a concentration camp, along with an ominous red sun that draws the eye skyward and the predictably appropriate black lines of barbed wire behind which so many souls died.
Yet it is in these very colors that the greatest significance of the piece lies: a departure from the brilliant primary shades that dominate his typically abstract art, Lagstein's "The Camp" marks the first time the Holocaust survivor has painted a shockingly vivid image of his past.
And it is the heart-wrenching personal power of pieces such as Lagstein's lifetime retrospectives that make the LVAM's "Holocaust Exhibition 1998" perhaps among the best exhibits ever displayed in Las Vegas.
The exhibit opens to the public Friday and runs for a month through May 24, coinciding with International Holocaust Education Month.
It is a collection of survivors' memories, spiritually-stirring artistry and remembrance of one of the world's greatest tragedies.
The show includes a wide range of artistic modes and styles, from "Badges of Shame" -- a collection of 11 dolls dressed in period clothing that identified Jews over the centuries to Irving Munowitz's stained glass creations, and a sculpture of an emaciated body draped in cloth, entangled in death by barbed wire.
Lagstein's work possesses a remarkable contrast. While he painted "The Camp" specifically for this exhibition, his other works are beautifully detailed in bold shades of cobalt blue, red, and orange.
A deeply personal piece he is showing is "Village on Fire," cast in bright orange and red tones -- colors of destruction. The image is that of his birthplace in Poland.
Lagstein was 16 when he lost his family to the Holocaust, fleeing with his 19-year-old brother to the woods, hiding underground. Shot in the leg and afraid of being found, he suffered till the war's end before getting treatment. He walks with a limp to this day, a hint of the horrors he survived yet never speaks of.
The chance to show his work in Las Vegas was appealing; both because his son, Dr. Zev Lagstein, lives here, and to help people remember the Holocaust.
"There is optimism," he said, his wife Rose acting as interpreter when asked of his paintings during a private reception Wednesday. "There is sadness but also hope. The colors are lively, not colors of crying all the time."
Numerous entries in the Holocaust exhibit were inspired by the invitation of Dr. James Mann, museum curator, who selected approximately 30 emerging artists from around the country to create original pieces for the exhibit. The motivation was to spark new ground in visual art so that a theme does not become predictable and ordinary.
And what he received was monumental, from Domenic Cretara's "Vanishing Point," an oil on linen impression in sepia tones of a Nazi soldier shooting a naked woman on railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz. The tracks blur and vanish at the gates -- the vanishing point for Jewish humanity.
Marci Gehring's "Holy Cost" dominates the exhibit hall, for both its sheer size and unique perspective.
Presented on a 12-by-16-foot canvas, "Holy Cost" was created in about a month of day and night meditation, a thoroughly absorbing period that a deeply spiritual Gehring describes as a sort of "exorcism."
She turned to history books in stores and nearby libraries, trying to absorb all she could about the Holocaust. The self-taught artist eventually closed the books to stir the creative process.
"I went into a quiet closet and cried," Gehring said. "I cried because of the photographs I'd seen in books and the personal accounts of survivors, and I cried for how terribly men and women treat one another. I prayed to God for a vision, and this is what I received."
Her floor-to-ceiling creation is set off by a series of borders, progressing from side-by-side skeletons (every third one from the corner smiling, she said, "because I think some of them were happy to die"), to a double-helix strand of DNA, to a row alternating star of Davids and swastikas, to a border of menorahs.
The center holds an urn from which a tree of life sprouts, its branches breaking off into separate swirls -- "the Jewish people were segregated, and, like the spirals, they swirled off in their own directions and thrived."
Her last step in the creation was equally symbolic -- "red-washing" what had been a brilliantly colored canvas with red paint to symbolize the bloodshed.
Joseph McKinney's "A World on Fire" is riddled with symbolism. Bold acrylics on wood, it portrays a German soldier and several Jews about to be consumed by fire. Tiny swastikas are visible beneath their feet and explosive lightning forms a star of David above them, contrasted by a dark blue sky.
The American flag emerges in at least two entries, that of Jessica York's "Holocaust" and Patricia Vasquez's "...which Hitler read about." Vasquez's studies revealed Hitler's ideas for a concentration camp were developed in part from reading about America's Indian reservations in novels about the Wild West. The 1915 Turkish genocide of Armenians further had Hitler believing the world would ignor the genocide of Jews.
"It brings to my heart and mind stories I've heard from Holocaust survivors, and how they captured all of it on canvas is extremely touching," said Las Vegan Faye Steinberg. "It tears at your guts."
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