A tableau of a crime taking shape under the viewer’s gaze: Trajectories of Yosef Kuzkovski’s The Last Way (1944–1970)

Irina Tcherneva (1, 2)

1 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
2 EUR'ORBEM - Cultures et sociétés d’Europe orientale, balkanique et médiane

Representing the massacre of Jews in Babi Yar (Ukraine) by the Nazi, the Soviet painting The Last Way traversed several temporal and socio-political conjectures : war context, Stalinist censorship, Khrushchev reinterpretation of the Second World War and the integration of the Jewish Soviet survivors in the memory institutionalized in Israel. The present article restores the genesis and the public exposure of the painting, highlighting a variety of semi-private and public spheres of the Holocaust memory in the Soviet regime. Doing this, it opens a window on the visual presence of the Holocaust’s remembrance in the State-controlled memory of the Second World War. A cross-analysis of the artistic imagery with the social environment where it was exhibited underpins this history of the collective usage of the art works and examines how their perceptions were shaped by the various installations, exhibitions as well as by the socialization of the audience.

Domaines: Histoire

Irina Tcherneva. A tableau of a crime taking shape under the viewer’s gaze: Trajectories of Yosef Kuzkovski’s The Last Way (1944–1970). Stephan Stach et Anna Koch (eds.). Remembering Across the Iron Curtain: The Emergence of Holocaust Memory in the Cold War Era, in Stephan Stach et Anna Koch (eds.), DeGruyter, In press. ⟨halshs-03092449⟩