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A pair of gleaming boots hogs the page. Twin black shafts loom against a charcoal ground, monumental as skyscrapers, sinister as death. Vincent van Gogh used battered shoes as emblems of honest peasant labour; these erect, well-tended SS jackboots carry the weight of domination, of doors kicked open, of lives halted mid-step. They speak of all that was stripped away, conjuring long marches, camp yards, moments when belongings were confiscated, and the piles of ownerless shoes that remain as a horrifying memorial at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Ceija Stojka painted this image long after she walked out of Bergen-Belsen aged 12 in the ragged footwear of an inmate. And yet it feels like a child’s memory, seen from a crouch or a viewpoint near the floor. Terror lives in the glints of polish.
The fifth of six children born into a Roma family in Vienna in 1933, Stojka grew up on the road, travelling in caravans through the Austrian countryside as the adults plied their trade in horses. The Nazis cut off that centuries-old form of nomadism; they deported Stojka’s father to Dachau in 1941 and murdered him. The rest of the family was rounded up in 1943 and sent to a succession of concentration camps: Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen, where they were finally freed in April 1945. Ceija, her mother and four of her siblings survived, but they were the exceptions. Hundreds of thousands of Roma were killed, a catastrophe that for decades remained almost invisible in the wider story of the Holocaust.
Stojka spent decades guarding the silence of those years. She focused on raising children, selling carpets and doing her bit in Austria’s grand national project of forgetting. Then, in 1986, the far right’s resurgence, which led to the election of the ex-Nazi Kurt Waldheim as president, set off a bomb in her psyche. She began speaking publicly about all that the Roma and Sinti peoples had endured. In 1988, she wrote a memoir — the first of three — about her childhood of arrest, deportation and survival. She picked up a brush for the first time at 56 and only then began her visual chronicle of that tormented past, a two-decade career that yielded more than 1,000 works.
The Drawing Center has marshalled more than 60 of those pieces, which recapitulate her early years. The show begins with idylls of the before times, when nature served as a sanctuary for the seasonally itinerant Stojkas. She paints their encampments from a distance, as colourful shapes atop a lush green pasture or on the shores of a sunlit lake. Members of her extended family dot the water’s edge, fishing, washing clothes and enjoying the land’s generosity. A winter scene is starker. Skeletal trees line a grey expanse of water, and flecks of colour punctuate the monochrome panorama: bright clothes drying on a wind-whipped line. A tiny red flag emblazoned with a swastika lies portentously in the snow.
Other paintings speak more directly of cruelty. A cattle car grinds towards the blood-red sky, its barred windows offering only a glimpse of the suffering inside. In another, more stripped-down work, a blade of white light slices across the blackness and a severed arm bears a tattooed number that starts with Z, for “Zigeuner”, or “Gypsy”. The mark outlives the flesh it’s stamped on; the painting outlasts them both.
Stojka veered deftly between modes. Some canvases unfold as legible narratives, populated by emaciated prisoners and guard towers. Others radiate feeling but don’t specify its source. Curator Lynne Cooke notes in the show’s catalogue that Stojka’s style evolved along with her technical confidence, the brushwork loosening into a more modernist language, less concerned with literal depiction than emotional force.
One square canvas, heavy with black and grey and scored by dark vertical strokes that sink into a ground of scarlet and crimson, is labelled “Untitled”, but bears an eloquent subtitle: “(Smeared with blood, that’s how Mama and I left Bergen-Belsen)”. The painting offers no parable, but instead is steeped in viscous horror. In another work, human figures dissolve into black smears that converge on a point just outside the page. Monstrous violence is absorbed into a dense, all-over field made by dipping fingers in ink and dragging them across the paper. At the bottom we read “To the Crematorium”, words that make explicit what the image declines to describe, letting the viewer perceive the connection between abstract movement and specific fate.
Stojka’s story makes it easy to grasp her art but difficult to see its inherent qualities. The combination of child trauma and adult memory, the belated acquisition of technique, the historic scale of what she experienced, the revelatory Roma perspective — all these attributes inch her paintings almost beyond the realm of critical judgment. I don’t know how I would have responded if I’d come equipped with less information. The interference is so intense that at times I see the efforts of an amateur with shaky command of her medium, and then, a few minutes later, the same pictures look like the assured work of a self-taught talent who leveraged authenticity into scenes of visceral power. Either way, the paintings demand to be seen.
Late in life, Stojka turned back to blossoms. Fields of poppies and sunflowers, thick with pigment, press towards the edge of the board, almost spilling over. They are bright in their urgency, radiating life. Ravens wheel through the sky above, shadows cutting ominously across the glow. The spirit of Van Gogh hovers in this fusion of landscape and inner weather, of declaratory, rather than objective colour. Here, the fields register joy and vigilance, abundance and the lingering traces of nightmare.
According to Cooke, Stojka was perpetually disappointed that audiences and critics preferred her dark scenes to the light ones, as if misery alone heightened the effectiveness of an artwork. I prefer her alternatives to pessimism, the verdant landscapes and clan get-togethers that drip with yearning for a vanished society. I find them buoyant, rather than tragic, evidence that tough memories need not blot out more hopeful ones. The grim pictures exhort us to remember how bad things can get; the sunnier ones represent the slender victory of hope over despair.
To June 7, drawingcenter.org
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