Describing the recent staff and budget cuts at the Judah L. Magnes museum as “criminal,” artist Fred “Fritz” Hirschberger said he wants his painting back so he can donate it to a museum that won’t “have it stored like a football somewhere in the basement.”
“I feel what they are doing to the [Judah L.] Magnes is terrible. They are destroying it,” said Hirschberger, a 90-year-old German-born survivor and San Francisco resident, who has created dozens of abstract paintings that deal, often allegorically, with the Holocaust.
“If they are really going to create a Jewish museum in this town, then I have no objections. But if they take four or five years and destroy the Magnes, then I want it back. And I will give it to another institution. I gave those paintings away, and they were created for a purpose…to perpetuate memories of the Holocaust. People should not forget what happened.”
Connie Wolf, the CEO and executive director of the Magnes Museum, said she’s been in contact with Hirshberger, and said the two have agreed to meet over lunch and talk about the situation in the next month or two.
The museum actually owns two of Hirschberger’s works: “Memories of the Survivors,” which the artist donated to Berkeley’s Judah L. Magnes Museum in 1992 following an exhibition of his work and “Matter Over Mind,” which was given to the museum by a private donor in 2000.
“We hope he will consider keeping his work in the collection. If he wants it back, we think that’s a mistake,” said Wolf. “I think his work belongs in this collection for this community to enjoy and benefit from.”
Hirshberger wrote several letters regarding the return of “Memories of the Survivors” following the Jewish Museum San Francisco’s merger with the Judah L. Magnes last January, and each time Wolf was able to convince him to wait a few more months.
Besides being angered over what he perceives as the dismantling of the Judah L. Magnes and lies about the extent of the estimated $2 million in cuts to the museum’s budget, Hirshberger is still offended by what he described as an insult inflicted by the Jewish Museum San Francisco in the 1990s.
The artist said he was puzzled when the museum declined to exhibit his Holocaust series because it was “objectionable,” yet turned down a $5,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in solidarity with controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
“It is very strange they find photographs of fisting from Mapplethorpe less objectionable than my paintings,” said Hirshberger. “I’m not criticizing Mapplethorpe, it is a free country. But photographs of fisting are odd. It is not revenge, but I don’t think the Jewish Museum San Francisco is a place for any of my paintings. How would you feel? I would never have donated to the Jewish Museum San Francisco.”
He also accused the Magnes of striving to build a Daniel Liebeskind-created building “that is just another museum to compete with the Yerba Buena or Museum of Modern Art, a monument to Mr. Liebeskind. That is not what art is for.”
Wolf said neither of its two Hirschberger paintings has been displayed in years, but museum officials are doing all they can to accommodate the artist.
“Museums always collect more than they can show at any one time,” she said. “His work is important and I feel like we’re doing everything we can to keep him engaged.”
Born to Polish Jewish parents, Hirshberger was deported from Germany in 1938 and fought against the Nazis in the Polish army. After fleeing to the Soviet Union, he was sentenced to 20 years hard labor in an Arctic prison camp when it was discovered that he belonged to a Zionist organization.
After two years in the Gulag, he was released as a “political prisoner” after Hitler invaded the USSR. He joined a free Polish regiment and fought against the Nazis in the Middle East, North Africa and Italy.
Nearly 40 of his Holocaust paintings were destroyed in a probable arson fire in his studio in 1990, but he “painted day and night” to recreate the lost works.
“My painting was painted to perform a function,” he said. “It should go where it will teach people something.”