En 2014, the painter Gerhard Richter completed four abstract paintings, which he called Birkenau. They are the result of his long confrontation with four photographs taken during the summer of 1944 near crematorium V of Auschwitz-Birkenau by members of the Sonderkommando assigned to the preparation of victims and the treatment of their corpses, which are the only images documenting directly the process of extermination of the Jews of Europe by gassing and destruction of their remains.
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These four paintings are at the origin of Éric de Chassey’s book Show. Images of Birkenau, from the Sonderkommando to Gerhard Richter (Gallimard, 104 p, €20). This Monday, he received, at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, the prestigious Pierre Daix prize, created by François Pinault (owner of Point) in 2015, in tribute to his writer and Art historian friend.
Each year, this prize crowns a work devoted to the history of modern or contemporary art and, after Paula Barreiro López and her Fellow fighters. Avant-garde and art criticism in Spain during Francoism (Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme) in 2023, he is therefore the director of the National Institute of Art History (INHA) in Paris and professor of modern and contemporary art history at the École normale supérieure de Lyon which is distinguished by the 2024 edition.ALSO READ Ode to “companions in struggle”, by Paula Barreiro López
In Showa short and sharp essay, Éric de Chassey first investigates meticulously in order to understand what treatment the terrible photographs (taken by their authors at the risk of their lives) have undergone, on the part of a contemporary artist who has always been attached to the idea of keeping the memory of the Shoah alive.
To discover
Kangaroo of the day
Answer
Before offering us an incisive reflection on the way in which, in a universe saturated with them, we look at images. “That’s what shocked me when I saw Richter’s paintings accompanied by so-called documentation,” confides the laureate. “The spectators simply did not see them, because everything tended towards the spectacular and not towards the complex capture of images, which necessarily takes time. As for the Sonderkommando photographs, we owe it to those who took them and who risked their lives to do so, in a situation where they were considered by their executioners as dead people on borrowed time, to be faithful to their intentions, as we can understand them through the documents they themselves transmitted. Because they are the only images at the heart of the extermination process, they commit us to respecting them in a very particular way. Their authors wanted to show the process of extermination: the only thing we can do is in our turn to show them with as much accuracy and restraint as possible, so that they continue to produce their effects on our thinking and our life choices. » More than a title, an ethic.
“Giving to see. Images of Birkenau, from the Sonderkommando to Gerhard Richter”, Gallimard, 104 p., €20.
