Enjoying a cup of tea or coffee each morning in the warmth and safety of one’s home is almost the definition of civility, at least for that moment. Such a pleasant activity often includes friends and family, reinforcing the bonds of understanding and appreciation for shared human connection.
This Bak painting is an intense and poignant representation of that tradition in a state of utter destruction.
Damaged monumental teacups and spoons are strewn across the barren foreground appearing simultaneously like bomb craters and destroyed buildings, remnants on a battlefield or a razed community. The largest proximal cup with its semicircle of a gold-rimmed pottery fragment and opposing semicircle of broken stone, expands the notion of loss to include both culture and structure in a single image. With a tiny human figure for reference, the magnitude of the decimation for this person (and metaphorically for an entire population or community) is brought into sharp focus. This teacup’s handle displays the iconic question mark form which Bak employs to nudge the viewer into interrogatories of what, who, and why. In this painting the handle is detached from the cup and either emerging from or becoming a part of the stone wall semicircle, implying a permanence to these dilemmas.
The background vista of this painting contains multiple tilted embedded teacups extending as far as the distant horizon. Some of these pitched cups are dug in upon hilly structures like medieval castles. The more distal cups, further from the center of destruction in the foreground, still have erect spoon handles visible like flagless poles in defeated fortresses. Given the depth of field to which these teacups extend, one might think of the title, “Countless Mornings”, as T.S. Eliot had Prufrock express it, ”I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.” However, the damage and destruction presented to and around the teacups makes the title better read using the homonym interpretation, “Countless Mournings”!
Whether it is the countless loss of cultural artifacts, homes, or people, the destruction Bak endured as a young person (and unfortunately continues to witness in the world today) is expressed in this and many other paintings. Perhaps with careful engagement viewers may address the questions which need to be confronted and in some small way find to a better way forward for all mankind.
The small intact teacup and spoon within the monumental, cavernous foreground structure is that classical Bak diminutive beacon of hope. Do not give up!
Dr. Carl M. Herbert (Guest Writer)
BAK a Day, February 20, 2024
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A minyan of cups across the landscape.
How to start your day? At least one cup of coffee. Each day becomes a surprise as we start anew.
The Cup, saucer and spoon are a part of Bak’s memory bank. The painting on the easel in the Ghetto Vilna greeted him with his two poet mentors.
The artist had been deported and killed.
An innocent subject becomes a part of the life story and eternal questions about life and its meaning.
Are these reminders of a civilization gone by? Is this a post nuclear landscape? And yet the bearded man is perched on the rim as a witness.
How amazing that the Cups are slipping in the earth soon to be covered over!
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