The art of Arthur Szyk is dazzling in its jewel-like colors and exquisitely rendered details, and, as an exhibit in Germany shows, there is a message behind his methods.

Drawn in stark black and white, the uniformed officer poses, dagger sheathed, cap perched at a jaunty angle. His face, however, is a skull with a frozen grin.

This chilling 1939 illustration,The German ‘Authority’ in Poland, is one of the images beck­oning the public to the first exhibition of works by Arthur Szyk in Berlin, on what the illustrator and caricaturist would have considered enemy territory.

“When we traveled from Paris to Poland, you had to stop in Berlin; my father would not get out of the train,” recalled Alexan­dra Bracie, Szyk’s daughter. “He fought the Ger­mans all his life.”

On display at Berlin’s Deutsches His­toriches Museum’s I.M. Pei Building through January 4, 2009, “Arthur Szyk—Drawing Against National Social­ism and Te­rror” (011-49-30-20304-750;www.dhm.de) in­cludes 200 works by one of the world’s greatest modern illustrators. It is art with a lesson: Szyk (pronounced Shick), who was born in Poland and came to the United States in 1940, spent most of his career using his illustrations as a way to fight the enemy—from members of the Nazi party and their Japanese allies to racists in America. Today, his images confront Ger­mans with how they were seen by others during World War II.

Divided into nine sections, the exhibit, created in cooperation with the California-based Arthur Szyk Society, is presented both biographically and thematically, with the earliest image dating from 1913 and the latest from 1951, the year of Szyk’s death.

Original works hang on the outermost walls, which circle the rest of the exhibit: Wandering through, guests encounter Szyk the artist (in the first section, called “Artistic Roots”), then Szyk the political activist (in “Political Convictions” and “Art as Propaganda”).

A 1925 illustration of Queen Esther and her attendants, in “Artistic Roots,” is a glorious celebra­tion of color and design, convey­inga sense of Oriental mystery. It showcases Szyk’s style, from his fine detailing, seen in the work’s rugs and tapestries, to his mastery of ancient illumination and illus­tra­tion techniques—in this case, reminiscent of Persian mini­a­tures.

Taken from Le Livre d’Esther, a collection of illustrations in­spired by the Purim story, which Szyk published in France, the piece is one of curator Katja Wid­mann’s favorites. Even when portraying a scene from ancient Jew­ish legends, Szyk “de­picts very modern-looking wom­en,” noted Wid­mann, who co­cur­ated the exhibit with historian Johannes Zech­ner. “One of them even looks like Greta Garbo, minus the dangling cigarette! But the message is clear: History is important for the present.”

The DHM is, after all, a history museum, and thus dramatic events and themes of the first half of the 20th century unfold through Szyk’s eyes. The melding of politics and artistry came to full flower in Szyk’s anti-Nazi Haggada, known as The Szyk Haggadah, on display in the “Political Convictions” section: The artist worked on these illustrations from 1932 to 1938, using the Passover story of Jewish liberation from Egypt as backdrop for virulent caricatures of Nazis as well as militant Zionist symbolism. His Polish publishers were afraid to print the book for fear of arousing Germany’s ire. The Haggada was eventually published in London in 1940. Here, the book is opened to Szyk’s illuminated dedication to King George VI. Last year, the Haggada was reprinted in a limited edition by Irwin Ungar, director and founder of the Arthur Szyk Society (www.szyk.org).

Szyk’s presence in the american media is conveyed through a veritable forest of his wartime magazine covers, printed on floor-to-ceiling banners. Visi­tors walking among these fixed banners, with their sinister lampoons of the Axis leaders Hitler and Mussolini as well as Japanese Emperor Hirohito, will understand how the artist’s work became so much a part of the American landscape. (According to an Esquire magazine study from just before America entered the war, Szyk’s drawings of the enemy were more popular among United States servicemen than pictures of starlets and pinup girls.)

A room within the exhibition is dedicated to media perceptions of Szyk, with newspaper articles and correspondence. Two vintage World War II propaganda films—one about Szyk himself and another that features some of his works—are shown on video screens.

Two other illustrated books are on display in the “Art as Propaganda” section: The New Order, Szyk’s 1941 collection of political cartoons and caricatures from the short-lived, leftist New York news­paper, PM; and Ink and Blood, a 1946 collection of his wartime drawings. A powerful Collier’s magazine cover (February 1943) is featured in an extensive section on Hitler and the Axis powers. Collier’s also picked up Szyk’s 1942 illustration titled He Who Rules by the Sword. It depicts a popeyed Hitler, holding Mein Kampf in one hand and a bloody dagger in the other, posing with Mussolini behind a globe. Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo sits in the foreground grinning, his gloved hand casting a shadow over the European continent. And lurking behind them all is a red-faced devil, horns sprouting from every bony joint. The Son of Heaven, an original work used on another magazine cover, shows Hirohito on a horse that, in a maca­bre twist, has human feet.

“And those human feet are leaving bloody footprints,” Widmann added. Practically oozing with ugliness, such illustrations have the same elaborate detailing that Szyk used to create images of beauty. However, instead of the rich paisleys of Esther’s Persian scene, they are studded with skulls and swastikas.

“It was not common to show caricatures of Hitler, to make fun of him,” noted Zechner. And “from today’s perspective,” the images of the Japanese would be “too much. But you have to understand it within its time. We could condemn it as racist today, but we were not experiencing Pearl Har­bor.”

In a section called “Solidarity and Jewish Resistance” is Szyk’s heart­rend­ing illustration of two Jew­ish children huddling to­gether, dressed in tatters. The drawing was featured on a 1944 Ha­dassah Nation­al Youth Ali­yah Com­mit­tee postcard thanking donors “In the Name of the Jewish Ref­ugee Child.” As the war in Europe came to a close, Szyk’s May 1945 propaganda pamphlet for the Unit­ed States War Department served as a reminder that the Pacific theater remained active: Mocking a wanted poster, Szyk drew big red “X” marks through the sour faces of Hit­ler and Mussolini. Only “One to go”—the Jap­a­nese emperor. In Szyk’s exaggerated caricatures, Germans—including Hitler and his henchmen—look like buffoons or spec­ters from a Brueghelian hell. And some of the Japanese are depicted as ferocious bats or winged monkeys. (According to Joseph P. Ansell’s Arthur Szyk: Artist, Jew, Pole, Littman Li­bra­ry of Jewish Civil­ization, Japanese pilots found his work so effective that they dropped leaflets bearing a Szyk image from their planes in hopes of scaring American soldiers.) And, though it was never proved, rumor had it that Hitler put a price on the artist’s head.

Szyk’s works are intricate and brilliantly colored, jewel-like; some resemble two-dimensional Fabergé eggs, every surface encrusted with detail. But “you can’t just look at them,” insisted Widmann. “You have to go inside the images…think about the message.”

Shock value is not the issue, suggested Cilly Kugelman, deputy director of the Jewish Museum Berlin, which lent items to the DHM for the exhibit. “For today’s young­er people, every figure in the Nazi state is a caricature,” she noted. “They make fun of them anyway. But on the other hand, it could raise interest to see that such images had been created already during the time of National So­cial­ism.”

Two works from Ungar’s collection on display, De Profundis andSamson in the Ghetto (also called The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto), present polar opposites: Jews as victims and as heroes.De Profundis, which Szyk created in April 1943, is a graphite-and-ink drawing that depicts lifeless Jewish bodies strewn in a corner together with the Wandering Jew and Jesus, who holds the Ten Com­mand­ments. The image at­tacks Christian anti-Sem­itism, said Ungar, and calls on Christ­ians to take accountability for the hatred.

Another of Szyk’s themes is the Jewish ability to stand up for themselves, said Ungar: “His images of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising are symbolic of the valor and heroism that Jews should represent.” With its exquisitely drawn bayonets and weapons, the detailed hats and other clothing, the beautifully rendered scene inSamson in the Ghetto is “accurate,” commented Ungar. “I think that the images [in Samson in the Ghetto] are the counterbalance to the world of De Profundis. Arthur Szyk’s call was for action, not pity.”

As Szyk once famously said, “Art is not my aim, art is my means.”

“And that is the idea behind the exhibition,” Zechner noted. “Not to show art by itself but art for moral, political and ethical aims.”

In the immediate postwar years, Szyk turned his sights to problems in American society. His cartoons critiqued racism as well as the rabid anti-Com­mu­nism of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Ul­ti­mate­ly, Szyk himself was questioned by the House Un-Amer­ican Activities Committee: The Berlin exhibit displays some of the “evidence” against him, including mem­bership in a human rights organization to which Al­bert Ein­­stein also reportedly belonged.

Arthur Szyk was born in Lodz in 1894. though his parents had other ideas for his career, Szyk’s teachers urged them to send him to art school in Paris. There, at 15, he began honing his skills in the art of medieval illustration. He was also exposed to debates on creating Jewish art and experimented with Mod­ern­ist styles. But Szyk went back time and again to pain­staking miniaturist methods modeled on 16th-century masters.

Such art resonated with Szyk because it was all about telling a story. Eventually returning to Lodz, Szyk earned a reputation as one of Europe’s fin­est illustrators.

In 1914, he visited Palestine with a group of artists. On his return, Szyk was caught up in the start of World War I and was drafted into the Russian Army. It was after the subsequent German oc­cupation of his home city that Szyk produced his first anti-German cartoons. Dur­ing the Po­lish-Soviet war of 1919-1920, he served as artistic di­rec­tor of the Polish Army’s Department of Pro­pa­ganda in Lodz. By then, he and his wife, Julia Lieker­man, had a son, George. Alexandra was born in 1922.

As a young man, Szyk celebrated—even revered—ideals he felt were em­bod­ied by far-off America: democracy, freedom and equality. Who would expect a Polish Jew to draw portraits of George and Mar­tha Wash­ing­ton? Or create an il­lumi­nated Declaration of Independence with all the intricacy of a ketuba? In 1935, Polish President Ig­nacy Moscicki purchased Szyk’s watercolors depicting the American Revo­lution as a gift to United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In 1934, Szyk was invited to the United States to receive the George Washington Bicentennial Medal from Congress. Coin­ciding with the trip, there were also several exhibits of his political cartoons and caricatures in England, where Szyk and his family moved in 1937.

After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, tipping the world into war again, Szyk—in London—wrote to a British newspaper that “Polish Jews have always called the Germans Amalek,” the biblical enemy of the Jewish people. He warned that Ger­many’s eastward campaign was “closely connected with the problem of destroying Jewry in Eastern Europe.”

Enamored of szyk and convinced his work could help garner American support for the war, the British and Po­lish governments secretly funded Szyk’s trip to Canada and the United States in 1940. He and his family ended up settling in America. His book, The New Order, one of the first collections of anti-Nazi caricatures, came out in 1941. Szyk then became an il­lus­trator for the Bergson Group, whose aim was to rescue Eu­rope’s Jews. Found­ed by activ­ist Hil­lel Kook (who later took the name Pe­ter Bergson), the group was associated with Zionist leader Zeev Jabo­tin­sky, who espoused armed struggle for Palestine.

“The Bergson Group was not part of the mainstream American Jewish community,” said Ungar. “They felt Jews were not doing enough in Amer­ica to help Eu­ropean Jewry.”

By the time the United States joined the war in December 1941, Szyk’s images were everywhere—on magazine covers, stamps and posters. He called them his “weapons of war.”

With his round face and round-framed spectacles, Szyk was not an imposing figure. “All he need­ed was a big table and he worked, whatever the circumstances were,” said Bracie, whose Flor­ida apartment is decorated with her father’s artwork.

Jeanne Per­sily, Bracie’s daughter, re­called how the sunlight would come in and illuminate her grandfather’s little jars of watercolor. “And every brush seemed to have four fibers of hair,” she said. “He spent hours bent over his work….”

Though not particularly religious, Szyk was steeped in Jewish values and deeply committed to the creation of a Jewish homeland. Szyk produced the Illuminated Declaration of Israel’s Independencein 1948, the year he became an American citizen. In April 1951, the House Un-American Ac­tiv­ities Committee in­ves­tigated Szyk, and a few months later he died of a heart attack.

Szyk’s accomplishments were ex­tra­­ordinary: Not only did First Lady Eleanor Roose­velt consider him a soldier armed with a paintbrush, his non-po­lit­ical images entered homes via his illustrations of children’s books and Jew­ish religious texts.

Nevertheless, after his death, Szyk seemed to be mostly forgotten—that is until Irwin Ungar, then a pulpit rab­bi, walked into a bookstore in 1974 looking for a wedding gift.

“I…saw stacks of beautifully il­lus­trated Haggadas,” he recalled. “They were fac­sim­iles of Szyk’s work. I bought one for everyone in the wedding party.”

Thirteen years passed: Un­gar left the rabbinate and became an antiqua­ri­an bookseller specializing in Judaica. While scavenging in an an­tique shop in Pittsburgh in the late 1980s, he discovered “some illustrated prints with amazing colors…. I said, ‘Oh my God, it’s the same artist.”

Though he never met Szyk, Un­gar—born in 1948—said he feels an almost mystical connection to him. To­­­day, Ungar is one of the foremost collectors of Szyk’s work, and he has taken on the task of bringing the art­ist to a broader audience. He has written a book—Justice Il­lu­min­ated: The Art of Arthur Szyk (Frog Books)— and pro­­duced two documentary films about the artist.

“What moved me about the work is, first of all, I think Arthur Szyk is a great artist,” said Ungar, who loves the way Szyk used color and “emphasized the totality of a page.

“But the reality was, it was not just about the art. Arthur Szyk’s art always had an agenda,” he added. “He was fighting against tyranny and oppression.”

Szyk’s art was used for rallies in New York’s Madison Square Garden. He drew patriotic ads for United States war bonds and created a stamp series that raised funds for humanitarian causes. “While he loved Po­land, the land of his birth—and Is­ra­el, the land of his people—he also loved America, the land of his ideals,” said Ungar. “And while he felt a sense of loyalty to all of them, he was always willing to criticize them for what they weren’t doing.”

Thanks in large part to Ungar’s efforts, there have been exhibitions at the Spertus Museum in Chicago and the Li­brary of Congress and the Unit­ed States Holocaust Memorial Mu­­seum in Washington (an online version is available, atwww.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/szyk). Szyk’s cartoons and illustrations were displayed at the Foreign Cor­res­pon­dents’ Club in Ja­pan, where many caricatures owned by Japanese collector Sodei Rinjiro were shown. A traveling exhibition, “Jus­tice Illuminated: The Art of Arthur Szyk,” was shown in three Polish cit­ies—Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow—in 2005. After Berlin, the current show will travel to Han­over, Germany.

Ungar actively sought a ven­ue in Germany in 2005 after the success of “Justice Illumi­nated” in Poland. But his queries to museums there went unanswered. Then, on their way back to the Unit­ed States, Ungar and his wife, Mar­gie, stopped at the newly reopened DHM. Ungar—struck with an inspiration—asked to meet museum director Hans Ottomeyer. It took only 10 minutes for Ot­to­meyer to decide that an en­tire exhibit should be dedicated to Szyk and his work, said Ungar. In a sense, the exhibit was ready-made. About 70 percent of the items are from Ungar’s collection. The rest are on loan from private collectors in the United States and Canada as well as from Rinjiro, whom Widmann fondly called a “Szykomaniac.”

Curators of the exhibit faced a few Germany-specific challenges, said Jo­hannes Zechner. For example, Ger­many bans the reproduction of the swastika except for educational purposes. There were difficulties with the exhibition poster, which used Szyk’s Ride of the Valkyries, a monochrome drawing of warrior valkyries on horses as bomb-hurling Nazis, swastikas and all. The curators decided to crop the image—and most of the swas­tikas—for the poster.

Would Szyk be happy to see his works on display in Berlin? “I have really wrestled with how to answer that,” said Ungar. “You need to take into account that there is so much that he has not been here to witness: that is, the relationship between Ger­many and Israel as it has evolved, the evolving confrontation that Germany has had with its past.

“Arthur Szyk was always eager for world recognition of his art and what he believed in,” he added. “And if the German people are willing to exhibit his art and to show its message to the world, I believe Arthur Szyk would be very satisfied with that.”

---

Szykomania
– “Arthur Szyk—Drawing Against National Socialism and Terror” will travel to the Wilhelm-Busch-Museum in Hanover, Germany, January 18 to April 21, 2009 (011-5-11-169999-11/16; www.wilhelm-busch-museum.de).

– “A One-Man Army: The Art of Arthur Szyk” highlights the extensive private collection of Gregg and Michelle Philipson, which includes many of the artist’s magazine covers and political cartoons as well as commemorative stamps and commercial art. From Oct­ober 20, 2008, through February 8, 2009, at the Holocaust Muse­um Houston, Texas (713-942-8000; www.hmh.org).

– “Justice illuminated: The Art of Ar­thur Szyk,” the traveling exhibition of the Arthur Szyk Society, will be on display at the Carnegie Mellon University Library’s Posner Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Jan­uary 7 through March 28, 2009 (412-268-7680;www.librarycmu.edu).