Alice Lok Cahana
| Alice Lok Cahana | |
|---|---|
| Born |
February 7, 1929 Sárvár, Hungary |
| Died | November 28, 2017 (aged 88) Portland, Oregon |
| Nationality | Hungarian |
| Occupation | Artist |
| Known for | Holocaust survivor |
| Website | www |
Alice Lok Cahana (February 7, 1929 – November 28, 2017) was a Hungarian Holocaust survivor. She was a teenage inmate in the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Guben and Bergen-Belsen camps. She was most well known for her writings and abstract paintings about the Holocaust. Her work celebrated Judaism and those who perished in the Holocaust by transforming the horror of their deaths into a testament to their lives. As she told Barbara Rose in the "From Ashes to the Rainbow" catalog interview, "I started to paint only about the Holocaust as a tribute and memorial to those who did not return, and I am still not finished."
Alice Lok Cahana was born in Sárvár, Hungary in 1929. She first learned to draw in a Jewish high school (Jews were forbidden to attend public schools at the time). In 1944 she and her entire family were was transported to Auschwitz as part of the massive deportation of Hungarian Jews. While interned at Gruben concentration camp Cahana made her first work of art when the Nazis challenged the children to decorate the barracks for Christmas. In an interview with art historian Cahana explained, "There were no paper or pencils to make decorations; we practically had nothing except one broom to sweep the floor with. We were about 24 children in our barrack. I decided we should choreograph ourselves into a living candelabra and hold the pieces of the broom as a part of this sculpture. We won a prize - each of us a little can of snails."
Cahana was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, where she was one of the few who survived. After the war, she lived in Sweden from 1952 to 1957 and then immigrated to the United States and settled in Houston, Texas in 1959 where she has since made her home.
Cahana's formal art education began once she settled in Houston. She studied at the University of Houston and at Rice University, where color field painting was the dominant style. Her exposure to the works of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland, color field painters collected by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, all contributed to the development of her mature style. When Cahana initially came to America she "wanted to paint like this wonderful country, all bright colors, all happiness. I wanted everything smooth and seamless." But in 1978 she made the pivotal decision to return to Hungary and visit her birthplace where nothing remained of the Jewish community she had known. That there was no memorial to the vast numbers of Jews who had once played an important social, cultural, and economic role in Hungarian society, who had been dragged from their homes and sent to Nazi death camps, shocked her to the point that she felt she could no longer paint abstractions.
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