ELIZABETH FRANK Karen Gunderson And The Art Of Courage

Written for the accompanying catalogue for Moral Courage During World War II: Denmark & Bulgaria Exhibition for the Government of the ministry in Sofia, Bulgaria

One of the casualties of modern painting has been that genre known as “history painting.”  The heroic scale and subject matter of seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century French academic painting, with its celebrations of classical and Biblical moments of moral crisis and grandeur, went the way of narrative subject matter, displaced by the formal concerns and innovations of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and, later, Abstract Expressionism.  When modern artists turned their attention to history as such—as Picasso did in Guernica—it was the exception, rather than the rule, and even that famous indictment of Fascist brutality was fundamentally abstract.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, artists once again feel free to revive possibilities that modernist doctrine had eschewed. Moved to the very core of her being by the Danish and Bulgarian rescue of the Jews in World War II, New York artist Karen Gunderson has allowed herself to create a very special kind of “history painting”:  works in which she commemorates incidents and persons who participated in these rescues, primarily as saviors.  Yet rather than resurrecting the rather bombastic “grand machines” of traditional history painting, she has chosen an altogether intimate and direct style, using charcoal, chalk and paper for some of the works, and broad strokes of shimmering black paint for the others, achieving a vision in black and white, on the one hand, and black and light, on the other, to register an intensely felt response to these two parallel historical events, which were, after all, elemental struggles between life and death, and good and evil.  At the same time, since the historical accounts of these events have their all-too-human ambiguities, the use of black, white and a compelling range of grays reminds us that in no way was either rescue a fairy tale, but, in fact, a nexus in which luck, accident, and the paradoxes of human character converged with surprising and ironic results.