STERN GALLERY ARTIST PORTFOLIO

b. 1933

Born in Vilna, which is now Vilnius, Lithuania, Bak was recognized from an early age as possessing extraordinary artistic talent. He describes his family as "secular, but proud of their Jewish identity.

In 1948, he and his mother were allowed to emigrate to Israel, and four years later he studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Bak spent most of his time in Israel studying and living in a modest flat in Tel Aviv and did not paint very much during that period. After serving from 1953 to 1956 in the Israel Defense Forces, Samuel Bak lived from 1956 to 1959 in Paris, where he studied at the ֹcole des Beaux-Arts. In 1956, he received the first prize of the American-Israeli Cultural Foundation.

In 1993, he moved to Weston, Massachusetts, United States, and published Painted in Words: A Memoir, ISBN 0-253-34048-9, in 2001. Now 74, Bak has spent his life dealing with the artistic expression of the destruction and dehumanization which make up his childhood memories. He speaks about what are deemed to be the unspeakable atrocities of the Holocaust, though he has hesitated to limit the boundaries of his art to the post-Holocaust genre. He created a visual language to remind the world of its most desperate moments. Many of Samuel Bak's works are on permanent display at Pucker Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts and there was a special exhibition of his recent works in October and November 2006.