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CANADIAN LANDSCAPES/ PAYSAGES CANADIENS
eye bulging in terror, his mouth wide open, helpless in the dark swirls of water
that surround him and are pulling him inexorably down. Nichols had in fact
witnessed a German sailor in exactly this situation; the work is a testimony to
the unspeakable horror of such an end.
If Nichols depicts a deeply disturbing death, Alex Colville and Aba Ba¬
yevsky depict the deeply disturbing dead. In April 1945 the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp was liberated by British and Canadian forces, who found
there more than 13,000 unburied bodies and perhaps 60,000 sick and famished
inmates. Less than two weeks later, Colville and Aba Bayevsky were sent to the
camp as official Canadian war artists, their task being to record what they
saw. Even as they were making their sketches of the dead in open pits, newly
dead were being piled on top of those already there. Ihe works the two art¬
ists produced are radically different, each powerful in its own way. Bayevsky’s
sketch Belsen Concentration Camp — The Pit is a miniature landscape. Done
in watercolour and charcoal, it shows a reclining corpse in the foreground so
emaciated that it might well be mistaken for a skeleton, and behind it decreas¬
ingly recognizable bodies, becoming mere piles of bodies/bones, and in the
background what look like low hills, but are in fact the edges of the pits into
which the bodies had been dumped. The effect is to universalize what we are
seeing: this is not just the camp, but the whole world “out there”. For Bayevsky,
who was Jewish, this experience was doubly searing: as he later said, “For the
first time I became aware of man’s monstrous capacity for evil” (“Holocaust
Art of Ava Bayevsky”).
The lines of Colville’s sketches from Bergen-Belsen are faint, making the
emaciated bodies he is drawing almost ethereal. And the finished painting that
he submitted to the War Records Office, Bodies in a Grave, is similarly under¬
stated. Both the bodies and the soil are painted in subdued tones of dull yellow
and brown, linking the two together. The viewer’s first impression is that the
four skeletal bodies, three of them horizontal and one at a slight angle to the
others, are somehow floating; only close inspection reveals the strange per¬
spective that creates this effect, bringing with it the realization that they are
in fact lying on the ground. The effect is to make them both real and unreal:
we are witnessing something that cannot be possible — yet it is. Every detail is
there in the painting, but nowhere is Colville pointing to something we must
notice: what he does is simply present to us what he sees as a witness. It is a
very strange, supremely reticent painting, as though the painter had no right
to intrude on what he is depicting, and as such hits one with unexpected force.
War paintings combine two functions: they are both historical documents and
expressions of their artists’ creativity. As expressions of their artists’ creativ¬
ity they live and are judged in a world shared with other works of art. But as
historical documents they are “sites of memory” — in this case, both for
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