The Tuesday Question, Part III
The Jewish graphic artist Leo Glückselig emigrated with his family from Vienna to New York in 1938. Almost sixty years later, he saw a photograph of a work by the French artist Christian Boltanski in a newspaper article about an art exhibition. And was immediately taken aback by what he saw.
- Christian Boltanski Le Lycée Chases en 1931 / The Chase-Gymnasium in 1931, 1987 Vienna// museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig, Austria © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012
The work shows a school class at a Jewish gymnasium (high school) in Vienna in 1931. The artist greatly enlarged the class photo. He created separate portraits of each of the students and illuminated them with study lamps: ‘The murder of the European Jews was not carried out against an indefinable mass of people, but against individuals.’
Leo Glückselig saw a photograph of the work and was able to name each of the faces. He even discovered himself. It was his old class photo that Boltanski used for his installation. Glückselig contacted the artist and told him his story. He also began his own research and found out that he was the only one from his class to survive the Holocaust.
But which one of the individual portraits shows Leo Glückselig? This was the question from a visitor to the exhibition and is therefore our Tuesday question. We have to admit that we also don’t know. Our research efforts left two possibilities open:
1. The fourth portrait from the left:
2. The portrait on the right:
Leo Glückselig is quite a bit older in our comparison photographs of him (as you can see here and here) and we were not able to identify him, in spite of our careful examination of the photographs.
We would like to hear from you if have additional information or have good arguments for either portrait 1 or portrait 2!
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