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Holocaust Crowd Scene II

© Peter Howson. All rights reserved, DACS 2024. Image credit: Ben Uri Collection

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This painting graphically depicts the horror and brutality of the Nazi concentration camps with the crowd of Jewish prisoners, stripped of their own clothing and dressed in striped camp uniforms, depicted in attitudes of grief, suffering and lamentation. They are flanked by two thuggish Nazi guards wearing swastika armbands, one making a Nazi salute and the other pointing inward to focus attention on a prisoner prominently displaying the yellow badge with the Star of David that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied Europe, used here symbolically to indicate martyrdom. Both the structure and composition of the painting draw on classical themes and Christian imagery, with the naked child held aloft recalling Rubens 'Massacre of the Innocents' and the draped dead body to the lower left of the composition with a mourning figure draped over it suggesting the dead Christ or pietà.

Ben Uri Gallery & Museum

London

Title

Holocaust Crowd Scene II

Date

2011

Medium

oil on canvas

Measurements

H 122 x W 184 cm

Accession number

2020-01

Acquisition method

purchased, 2020

Work type

Painting

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Normally on display at

Ben Uri Gallery & Museum

108a Boundary Road, St John's Wood, London, Greater London NW8 0RH England

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