

Resurrection
Author: | Samuel Bak (b. 1933) |
Samuel Bak (b. 1933) was a true Vilnius artist. The Nazis interned him in the Jewish Ghetto during the Second World War, where he began to draw and showed his work in an exhibition organised in the ghetto in 1942. His father and grandparents were shot, together with thousands of other Jews, but the eight-year-old boy and his mother managed to escape. After the war, Bak studied at the Munich Academy of Art, the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem, and later in Paris. He was a wanderer: he lived in Rome, Israel, New York and Switzerland, and in 1993 he settled in Weston, near Boston (Massachusetts). All his work is about the Holocaust, and it conveys the experience of the tragedy.
Source: Valiunas Ellex (LAWIN until 2015) art album: VILNIUS. TOPOPHILIA I (2014). Compiler and author Laima Laučkaitė.
Samuel Bak’s talent was revealed at an exhibition in the Vilnius ghetto in June 1942 when he was a nine-year-old boy. Only he and his mother survived the ghetto; his father and his grandparents all died. After the war, he left Lithuania and studied in Munich, before emigrating to the newly founded State of Israel in 1948, where he became a student at the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts. He later travelled extensively, lived in Paris and Rome, and in 1993 settled in the USA. While searching for his own style, Bak explored various trends, and in the mid-1960s he drifted towards symbolic Surrealism, having created a unique language of symbols. His personal experiences and the loss of his close family were at the core of his work. He held over 100 exhibitions all over the world and received many awards. In 2002 he was awarded the German Herkomer Cultural Prize, and in 2018 he received the Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merit to Lithuania.
Source: Ellex Valiunas (LAWIN until 2015) art album: STORIES OF LITVAK ART (2023). Compiler and author Vilma Gradinskaitė.

Samuel Bak (b. 1933) was a true Vilnius artist. The Nazis interned him in the Jewish Ghetto during the Second World War, where he began to draw and showed his work in an exhibition organised in the ghetto in 1942. His father and grandparents were shot, together with thousands of other Jews, but the eight-year-old boy and his mother managed to escape. After the war, Bak studied at the Munich Academy of Art, the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem, and later in Paris. He was a wanderer: he lived in Rome, Israel, New York and Switzerland, and in 1993 he settled in Weston, near Boston (Massachusetts). All his work is about the Holocaust, and it conveys the experience of the tragedy.
Source: Valiunas Ellex (LAWIN until 2015) art album: VILNIUS. TOPOPHILIA I (2014). Compiler and author Laima Laučkaitė.
Samuel Bak’s talent was revealed at an exhibition in the Vilnius ghetto in June 1942 when he was a nine-year-old boy. Only he and his mother survived the ghetto; his father and his grandparents all died. After the war, he left Lithuania and studied in Munich, before emigrating to the newly founded State of Israel in 1948, where he became a student at the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts. He later travelled extensively, lived in Paris and Rome, and in 1993 settled in the USA. While searching for his own style, Bak explored various trends, and in the mid-1960s he drifted towards symbolic Surrealism, having created a unique language of symbols. His personal experiences and the loss of his close family were at the core of his work. He held over 100 exhibitions all over the world and received many awards. In 2002 he was awarded the German Herkomer Cultural Prize, and in 2018 he received the Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merit to Lithuania.
Source: Ellex Valiunas (LAWIN until 2015) art album: STORIES OF LITVAK ART (2023). Compiler and author Vilma Gradinskaitė.