Untitled (from the Ghetto Documents series)

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Miriam Beerman created the Ghetto Documents series in response to reading primary documents collected from the Warsaw and Łódź ghettoes that were established in Nazi-occupied Poland to segregate and confine Jews relocated from other areas. The artist’s work had dealt quite directly and unflinchingly with violence through the 1960s, shifted towards animals and other subjects leading up to her breakthrough exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1971, and then moved back towards subject matter related to human trauma in the 1980s and ‘90s. This included various forms of engagement with Beerman’s own Jewish background, World War II, and the Holocaust, including works like Six Views (in the collection of The Jewish Museum), which shows a grid of grotesquely bloodied heads. This Untitled painting on paper takes a different, more abstracted, and less explicit approach. Nevertheless, a central head seen in profile is clearly visible, rendered through rough paint handling which provides a sense of charged emotion and dire expressiveness. Flanking yellow and black shapes may suggest smoke and fire, perhaps of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, in which the ghetto population resisted being rounded up and relocated to death camps. Despite the broader impetus for Beerman’s series, the passage written at the top of the image comes not from a Jewish source but from the seventeenth-century Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo. Still, the phrase’s mix of sadness and vengeful anger aptly fits the subject of the Holocaust, and the very possibility of this connection across time and cultures suggests (in parallel with the abstract quality of this work, and indeed in parallel with much of Beerman’s work in general) the ubiquity and gravity of violence.