The outstanding Israeli artist Zeev (Laszlo) Kun, who died in Tel Aviv on June 20 [2024], was born on April 16, 1930, in the city of Nyiregyhaza in northeastern Hungary. His parents, Blanka and Sandor, owned an art supply store, where Zeev worked from the age of 12. However, that life was not to last. In March and April 1944, the deportation of the Hungarian Jews began, and Kun, who was 14 at the time, was sent to Auschwitz, and then to the Jaworzno concentration camp, 23 kilometers from there.
From January to April 1945, he was imprisoned in the concentration camps of Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, and Flossenbürg. On April 23, 1945, the latter camp was liberated by the 97th Artillery Division of the US army, who found more than 1,500 half-starved prisoners there; one of them was Kun, who had just turned 15. In late August 1945, he managed to return to Hungary, where he learned that out of the 8,000 Jews of Nyiregyhaza, only several hundred survived the Holocaust. Only three out of his 28 classmates survived WW II and the Holocaust.
With the concentration camp tattoo visible on his arm, Kun went back to school. After graduation, in the fall of 1947 he entered the Budapest Art Academy, where he studied for over two years. As the new pro-Communist political regime in Hungary grew increasingly repressive, all his family’s property was nationalized.
In 1949, Kun joined a group of 30 Jews from the Zionist organization Hashomer Hatzair who had managed to secretly cross the Czech border. From there, they moved to Austria, and later to Italy. Finally, the group boarded a ship in Bari and sailed to Israel. This journey lasted a total of three months.
The artwork of Zeev (Laszlo) Kun
Initially, Kun settled in Kibbutz Givat Haim near Hadera. Shortly afterward he left the country for Austria, where he enrolled in the Academy of Arts in Vienna. Kun arrived in Vienna just as the group of artists called the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism was emerging in the city. Its leaders were people of quite contrasting backgrounds. Rudolph Hausner (1914–1995) had been drafted into the German army in 1941 and spent the whole war on the front lines as a Wehrmacht soldier, while Ernst Fuchs (1930–2015), who was half-Jewish (through his father), had been sent to a concentration camp and was saved thanks to his mother’s enormous efforts.
The students and professors of the Vienna Academy of Arts sought to analyze and reflect the horrors of WW II in their art while maintaining a dialogue with the masters of the German Renaissance, such as Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and with the surrealists who had been active in the 1920s and 1930s – primarily Max Ernst (1891-1976). According to Kun, he felt especially close to Anton Lehmden and Ernst Fuchs. The main theme of Fuchs’s works was the Apocalypse. His paintings are shot through with the fear of an inevitable catastrophe, of the imminent destruction of the world. In his paintings, which are full of pain and despair, the presence of death is always palpable. It is no wonder that Kun, who had survived the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was so deeply touched and moved by the works of this painter, who was the same age.
After returning to Israel, Kun was admitted to the Association of Artists and Sculptors, but his artistic style was rather different from what was then regarded as the true contemporary art trends. He had to wait until 1963 – almost 10 years – before he managed to openly exhibit the works, showing his unique and instantly recognizable style. Many gallery owners thought Kun had lost his mind because, while his impeccable technique allowed him to achieve any artistic goal he would set himself, he still focused on creating deep and philosophical works, which failed to bring him commercial profit.
Of all the art institutions in Israel, the only one that worked with Kun on a regular basis was the Rosenfeld Gallery in Tel Aviv, founded by Eliezer Rosenfeld in 1952. Kun had exhibitions in London (1965), Sydney (1967), New York (1968), Detroit (1970), Paris (1972 and 1994), Stockholm (1975), Antwerp (1976), and Berlin (1987). However, neither the Israel Museum in Jerusalem nor the Tel Aviv Museum of Art has ever held a retrospective exhibition of his works. Of all the artistic awards presented in Israel, Kun received only the Max Nordau Prize (1973), which falls far short of a recognition of his true merits and contribution to art in Israel and abroad.
Last December, almost 50 years later, The Moshe Castel Museum of Art in Ma’ale Adumim had the privilege of naming Kun the first recipient of the Moshe Castel Prize for outstanding contribution to Israeli art. Together with the Moshe Castel Museum’s CEO Hagai Sasson, the prize was awarded to him at his home in early January.
Kun’s artistic destiny was largely predetermined by the decade of 1943–1953. His teen years were destroyed by the horrors of the death camps; he spent his youth at the art academies of Budapest and Vienna, and then he began a new life on the soil of the young State of Israel, which was dealing with the consequences of the Holocaust and the losses suffered during the War of Independence of 1948-1949.
In his works, Kun created a unique material world which had been abandoned by people against their will. The victims of the Holocaust, who were captured and deported in haste, did not have the time to take anything with them. Thus almost everything they had in their homes remained there, either intact or in some disarray. But, regardless, the people to whom these objects used to give comfort are no longer there. The material objects cannot take care of themselves, so their world falls apart – slowly, but surely.
That is the core message that Kun sought to convey to his viewers. At first glance, the interiors and exteriors he painted seem pleasant and attractive, but then they turn out to be the images of “death after death,” the visions of life after the Apocalypse – a life that still goes on but gradually, inevitably, slows down. Objects usually live much longer than people do, but buildings have a purpose only when they give shelter to someone, while furniture and kitchenware exist solely to make a house a home. Only people can give objects a true life and meaning; otherwise, they remain inanimate and useless, doomed to decay as nature takes its course. That is what Kun shows so vividly in his canvases.
One of the leading representatives of post-Holocaust surrealism (alongside Anatol Gurewitsch, Yosl Bergner, Samuel Bak, and Baruch Elron), Kun produced a vast number of astonishing landscapes and still lifes, but he rarely painted portraits or self-portraits. That is why his Self-Portrait with an Easel really stands out among his works, and the Castel museum is most pleased to exhibit it.
The painting Five Minutes Before the War Ends shows a dead tree near a house almost destroyed by bombs, stretching its dry branches over the ground, which is littered with debris and shrapnel, wounded by projectiles, and flooded with scarlet blood. From one of the branches hangs an alarm clock, miraculously saved from the bombing. Pain and horror reign throughout. Smashed wooden roof beams stretch to the sky, resembling bare bones. The cracked and almost crumbling walls turn their empty windows to the sky, with the occasional shutter still dangling on broken hinges, like a ghost beseeching the sky with empty eye sockets. Chunks of masonry, wood, and concrete are all mixed up in a huge pile in the street, and it seems as though the earth itself rises up in lumpy, red-stained surges. In the meantime, the ruins tumble down and bury human lives and memories under the rubble. And for a moment, one can get a glimpse of the last green blades of grass, which still remind you of the recent summer, and of a woman’s face under one of the broken boards, shining with a cold and morbid, almost otherworldly, light.
The clock has stopped forever; it seems so lost, surrounded by a vision of war and tragedy. It becomes the dramatic centerpiece of the painting. The clockwork has almost fallen out, but the white clock face is still there, remaining intact with its thin hands frozen at five minutes to six. But these five minutes will never pass. The clock will never resume its ticking; there will be no one to wake up to its alarm and start a new day. The painting is shot through with the deafening silence of despair and emptiness. And for a moment, one may feel that the alarm clock is still ringing, with no one to hear it, as though it were trying to wake the people up from this nightmare, to make them witness the tragedy of the massacre and do something to stop it before it is too late.
But no one did. No one stopped World War II or the Holocaust. That is the key message conveyed by Kun, the core idea expressed so vividly in all of his works. Despite the national Jewish rebirth in Israel and in some countries of the Diaspora, the painful memory of the Holocaust can never be healed, and it will live within us forever.
Zeev Kun and his artwork will endure, enriching us for decades and centuries after his death. The Moshe Castel Museum of Art is planning to host a memorial exhibition dedicated to his art by the end of this year. ■
Alek D. Epstein is curator of The Moshe Castel Museum of Art in Ma’ale Adumim.
