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Tribute to the memory of Zeev (Laszlo) Kun with the Castel Prize

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The remarkable Israeli artist Zeev (Laszlo) Kun, who died on June 20 (2024) in Tel Aviv, was born on April 16, 1930, in the town of Nyiregyhaza in northeastern Hungary. His parents, Blanka and Sandor, ran an art supply store, where Zeev worked from the age of twelve. That life, however, was not to last long. In March and April 1944, the deportation of Hungarian Jews began, and Kun, then fourteen, was sent to Auschwitz and then to the Jaworzno concentration camp, 23 kilometers away.

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 U.S. Army, which found more than 1,500 half-starved prisoners; one of them was Kun, who had just turned 15. In late August 1945, he managed to return to Hungary, where he learned that of the 8,000 Jews of Nyiregyhaza, only a few hundred survived the Holocaust. Only three of his 28 classmates survived World War II and the Holocaust.

With the concentration camp tattoo visible on his arm, Kun returned to school. After graduating, he entered the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts in the fall of 1947, where he studied for more than two years. As the new pro-communist political regime in Hungary became increasingly repressive, all of his family’s property was nationalized.

In 1949, Kun joined a group of 30 Jews from the Zionist organization Hashomer Hatzair who had secretly managed to 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 took three months in total.

The artwork of Zeev (Laszlo) Kun

Kun initially settled in Kibbutz Givat Haim near Hadera. Shortly afterwards he left the country for Austria, where he enrolled at the art academy 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 from quite different backgrounds. Rudolph Hausner (1914-1995) had been drafted into the German army in 1941 and spent the entire war at the front 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 the enormous efforts of his mother.

‘Tower of David Jerusalem’ (photo: PRIVATE COLLECTION)

The students and professors of the Vienna Academy of Arts attempted to analyze and reflect the horrors of World War II in their art, while entering into 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 particularly connected to Anton Lehmden and Ernst Fuchs. The main theme of Fuchs’s works was the Apocalypse. His paintings are permeated by the fear of an inevitable catastrophe, of the impending 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 quite different from what was then considered the true contemporary art trends. He had to wait until 1963 – almost 10 years – before he managed to exhibit the works openly, showing his unique and instantly recognizable style. Many gallery owners thought that Kun had lost his mind, because although his impeccable technique allowed him to achieve any artistic goal he set for himself, he still focused on creating deep and philosophical works, which did not bring him any commercial profit.

Of all the art institutions in Israel, the Rosenfeld Gallery in Tel Aviv, founded by Eliezer Rosenfeld in 1952, was the only one that regularly collaborated with Kun. 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 of his work. Of all the artistic awards given in Israel, Kun received only the Max Nordau Prize (1973), which is far from 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 CEO of the Moshe Castel Museum, Hagai Sasson, the award was presented at his home in early January.

Kun’s artistic fate was largely determined by the decade 1943-1953. His teenage years were blighted by the horrors of the death camps; he spent his youth at the art academies of Budapest and Vienna, and then began a new life on the soil of the young state of Israel, which was struggling with the consequences of the Holocaust and the losses suffered during the War of Independence of 1948-1949.

In his work, Kun created a unique material world that was abandoned by people against their will. The victims of the Holocaust, who were captured and deported in a hurry, had no time to take anything with them. So almost everything they had in their homes remained there, intact or in some kind of disarray. But in any case, the people to whom these objects once provided 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 Kun wanted to convey to his viewers. At first glance, the interiors and exteriors he painted seem pleasant and appealing, but then they turn out to be images of “the death after death,” visions of life after the Apocalypse—a life that still continues, but gradually, inevitably, slows down. Objects tend to live much longer than people, but buildings only have a purpose if they provide shelter, while furniture and kitchenware only exist to make a house a home. Only people can give objects real life and meaning; otherwise, they remain lifeless and useless, doomed to decay while nature takes its course. That is what Kun so vividly shows in his paintings.

One of the most important representatives of post-Holocaust surrealism (alongside Anatol Gurewitsch, Yosl Bergner, Samuel Bak and Baruch Elron), Kun produced a great number of astonishing landscapes and still lifes, but he rarely painted portraits or self-portraits. That is why his Self-Portrait with Easel really stands out among his works, and the Castel Museum is very pleased to exhibit it.

The painting Five Minutes Before the War Ends shows a dead tree near a house nearly destroyed by bombs, stretching its dry branches across the ground, which is strewn with rubble and shrapnel, wounded by projectiles and awash with scarlet blood. An alarm clock hangs from one of the branches, miraculously saved from the bombing. Pain and horror are everywhere. Shattered wooden roof beams stretch up to the sky, looking like bare bones. The cracked and crumbling walls raise their empty windows to the sky, with the occasional shutter still dangling from broken hinges, like a ghost pleading with heaven with empty eye sockets. Chunks of masonry, wood and concrete lie in a huge pile on the street, and it seems as if the earth itself is rising in bumpy, red-tinged waves. Meanwhile, the ruins are collapsing, burying human lives and memories beneath the rubble. And for a moment you catch a glimpse of the last green blades of grass, reminding you of last summer, and of a woman’s face under one of the broken planks, 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 center of the painting. The clock has almost stopped working, but the white face is still there, intact with its thin hands frozen at five minutes to six. But these five minutes will never pass. The clock will never tick again; there will be no one to wake up to their alarm clock and start a new day. The painting is permeated by the deafening silence of despair and emptiness. And for a moment one can feel that the alarm clock is still ringing, unheard, as if it is trying to wake the people from this nightmare, to make them witness the tragedy of the carnage 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 core message Kun conveys, the core idea so vividly expressed in all 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 will live on in us forever.

Zeev Kun and his artwork will live on and enrich us decades and centuries after his death. The Moshe Castel Museum of Art plans to host a memorial exhibition dedicated to his art later this year. ■

Alek D. Epstein is curator of the Moshe Castel Museum of Art in Ma’ale Adumim.

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