In Poland, he is known only as the co-creator of the iconic Monument to the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto. However, his artistic work is also associated with the USSR, Israel, and the USA. In the latter, he was one of the most recognized creators of Holocaust commemorations.
A Varsovian who did not want to support Hitler's regime with his artistic work
Natan (Naftali) Rapoport (sometimes incorrectly called Rapaport or Rapapport) was born in 1911 in Warsaw to a working-class Jewish family. He reportedly studied sculpture at the city art school, earning a living during this time by, among other things, creating portrait busts of children of wealthy families. According to uncertain sources, during this time he also worked as an apprentice in an architectural studio. It is certain that Rapoport began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1931 in the sculpture studio of the renowned artist Tadeusz Breyer. After graduating, he enrolled at the same university in 1935 in the monumental sculpture studio run by the eminent architect Bohdan Pniewski. In the "shack in Powiśle," as the students themselves called the school's headquarters on Wybrzeże Kościuszkowskie, Rapoport was to receive distinctions for his architectural designs and his sculptural and metalwork [fig. 1]. As a result, the university awarded the young artist a travel scholarship to study in Paris and then to Italy, where he spent two months each. In 1933, Rapoport made his debut at the Jewish Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts in Warsaw, with whom he exhibited numerous times. That same year, he also exhibited his work with Yehuda Wermus, Fishel Zylberberg, and Yitzhak Schor at the café of the Institute of Art Propaganda in Warsaw. As a member of Hashomer Hatzair ("Young Guardian"), an international Jewish youth organization with a Zionist profile, Rapoport was to exhibit his sculptures at the organization's Warsaw headquarters.
Perhaps the young sculptor gained the most attention in 1936, when at an exhibition organized by the Institute of Art Propaganda "Sport in Art," Rapoport received a silver medal for his sculpture "Tennis Player" (one of two he exhibited there). The work was planned to be sent to an exhibition associated with the Summer Olympics in Berlin that year. However, the artist objected to this in protest against the policies of the Nazi German authorities. He wrote in a letter: "Given the current conditions in Germany, I cannot in any way reconcile myself to the idea of participating in, and thus supporting, the aforementioned event." As a result, he lost the prize money. In 1938/39, Rapoport traveled again to Italy and Paris. In June 1939, he returned to Warsaw.
The aforementioned "Tennis Player" sculpture, lost, like others known today only from photographs in the collections of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, clearly demonstrated a connection with Breyer's style. It was a figurative work with a clear tendency toward monumentality through the elimination of detail and the use of large surfaces and a perceptible stereometry of solids. These sculptures, primarily depictions of women, were not dissimilar to the themes of Breyer's other students. The classicizing forms of these Rapoport sculptures reveal both inspiration from classical and Renaissance works (e.g., Michelangelo) seen in Italy, as well as the influence of the sculptures of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), Aristide Maillol (1861-1944), and Charles Despiau (1874-1946), studied in Paris. Exposure to their works allowed Rapoport to crystallize his style, which remained evident in his work until the end of his life.
Although, as Rapoport himself claimed during his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, there was nothing "particularly Jewish" in his sculptures; nor was he attracted by ethnicity or modernity, the connection with Rapoport's own ethnic background is revealed by "Bust of Isaac (Icchak) Grünbaum" (1933?, plaster, not preserved?), an outstanding Jewish political activist of the Zionist movement, and a member of the Sejm of the Second Polish Republic.
Creator of propaganda sculpture in the Stalinist USSR
Little is known about Rapoport's time in the USSR. Most likely conscripted in September, he found himself caught in the chaos of military operations near Białystok. After the city was occupied by the Red Army, he became part of a group of approximately 120 Jewish artists who found refuge there. He then moved to Minsk, Belarus, where his wife and infant daughter joined him. There, Rapoport was to work with other Jewish sculptors on a monument to Stalin and exhibit his works at the exhibition "10 Years of Art in Belarus." After the Third Reich invaded the USSR, he was evacuated to Tashkent, from where, "drafted" to the workers' labor corps, he was essentially exiled to fell forests near Novosibirsk. He was saved from this grueling work by the patronage of Nikolai Kalugin, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Minsk. Rapoport was not only released from the corps but also granted the status of state artist. In this role, he created a number of sculptures with a propaganda message, primarily portrait busts of generals, partisans, workers (e.g., Miner, Conductor, Coal Digger), and prominent cultural figures, including Shostakovich, Gorky, and Mayakovsky (monument in Novosibirsk). This part of Rapoport's oeuvre, reportedly largely preserved in museum storage facilities in the Russian Federation, remains virtually unknown. A bronze sculpture (1945/46, Moscow, Museum of the Great Patriotic War) is published online, depicting a half-length portrait of Zoya Kosmodeyamskaya (1923-1941), a Soviet partisan executed by the Germans and the first woman awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. The idealized realism of this sculpture, full of expressive pathos, foreshadows the style of the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes Monument.
Rapoport reportedly learned of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the summer of 1943 and reacted strongly to it. It was then that he was to create the first designs (sketches and models) for monuments dedicated to the fallen, which he would later say were "impossibly romantic and idealized." He was to take them with him to Moscow and show them to Ber Marek, vice-chairman of the Organizing Committee of Polish Jews, affiliated with the Union of Polish Patriots.
Warsaw's opus magnum
In mid-1946, Rapoport arrived in Warsaw. He approached Marek, a member of the Central Committee of Polish Jews, with the proposal to create a monument to the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto. The proposal was accepted all the more readily because the artist had already enjoyed recognition as a sculptor before the war and was one of the few Jewish sculptors to survive the Holocaust. The erection of the monument was met with a great response among the surviving Jewish population in Poland, other countries in Europe, and beyond – in the Americas, where monetary donations were collected. The sculptor quickly began work on the monument. In early 1947, he traveled to Paris to cast the metal parts, as such technical capabilities were lacking in the ruined Warsaw [Fig. 2].
The monument was unveiled on April 19, 1948, on the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the Ghetto Uprising. It has an urban-architectural-sculptural character: the architect Leon Marek Suzin (1901-71) was responsible for the first part, who corrected some of the sculptor's ideas [Fig. 3]. The monument has the form of a pylon placed on a pedestal: a tall cuboid, with sides tapering towards the top, made of blocks of Swedish granite (labradorite). This material, purchased by the Jewish community of Sweden, was to be – according to a tradition not fully confirmed – extracted and initially processed for Arno Breker (1900-91), one of the “court” sculptors of Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer (architect, from 1942 – architect). Minister of Armaments and Ammunition), in order to create an unspecified Nazi monument (it was suggested that it was to be a monument to the victories of the "Führer"). Rapoport commented on this choice of material: "Fate decided that I was to use this particular stone!" The shape of the "pylon", covered with slabs of polished labradorite (in one version it was supposed to have a rough texture, reminiscent of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem), constitutes a monumental setting for figurative representations. On the western side it is decorated with a bas-relief cast in bronze, of great plasticity, showing a group of insurgents – "Battle", while on the eastern side – "March of the Jews" made in stone, in a rather flat relief (in one version the bas-relief was supposed to be on a larger scale). On the pedestal facing the square there are two bronze menorahs (in one version of the project, another pair was also supposed to be on the eastern side). Both figurative compositions, contrasting in texture with the smooth facing of the monument, are distinguished by the power of expression that corresponded to the expression of the ghetto rubble that originally surrounded the monument. The "Battle" scene, in its piled-up and "tight" composition, pathetic presentation of the whole and in details (facial characteristics), already foreshadowed by Rapoport's works in the USSR, refers to the famous sculptural group "La Marseillaise" (actually: "Departure of the Volunteers in 1792") by the French sculptor of the Romantic period François Rude (1784-1855), which decorated the Museum of the History of Polish Art since 1833. one of the sides of the Great Arc de Triomphe on the Place d'Etoile in Paris [ill. 4]; emblematic of this monument, as well as of the romanticism in sculpture and the pathos of monumental sculpture of the 19th century. The "Parade", on the other hand, reveals inspiration from the reliefs of Roman sarcophagi and imperial monuments from the first centuries of our era. The artist explained the choice of figurative sculpture and clear references to the great tradition of Western art as follows: "Could I make a stone with a hole in the middle and say: 'Voila!' This is the greatness of the Jewish people?« he said in the 80s. renowned American Holocaust commemoration scholar James E. Young – No, I had to show heroism, illustrate it literally with characters, so that everyone, not just artists, could relate to it. Besides, it was supposed to be a public monument. What speaks to people? Faces, silhouettes, human shapes. I didn't want to show resistance as an abstraction: it wasn't an abstract uprising. It was real." And he added: "I wanted to show Poles who we really were."
The Warsaw monument was highly praised by both professional art critics, including the artists themselves, and ordinary viewers. The monument became, on the one hand, an emblem and center of performative remembrance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and, on the other, the artist's life's work.
Between America, Europe and Palestine
After the unveiling of the Warsaw monument, Rapoport returned to Paris, and from there, in 1950, he moved to Israel, where he worked periodically in a studio in Ramat Gan. Ultimately—according to Batia Doner, an Israeli monographer of the artist, because his figurative work was misunderstood by the abstract-leaning Israeli artistic community—he came to the United States in October 1959. On August 9, 1965, he obtained American citizenship. However, he maintained a studio in Israel (which is now his museum) and regularly visited Europe, using his bronze foundry in Paris and in Pietrasanta, Italy, for his work. He died in New York in 1987 at the age of 76, leaving behind two children from two different relationships.
The period of his creative activity from the 50s onward remains virtually unknown in Poland, yet it brought Rapoport significant achievements as the creator of important and impressive commemorations of the Holocaust—of the victims and struggles of Jews—both in Palestine and North America. Among his most important projects in Israel are five or six monuments. In 1951, the monument to Mordechai Anielewicz, cast in bronze and of larger-than-life size [Fig. 5], was unveiled at the Yad Mordechai Kibbutz. He is depicted as a morally invincible hero in the pose of Michelangelo's famous Florentine "David" from 1504. As in Warsaw, the figurative part gained an expressive (and still preserved) backdrop – a shattered and toppled concrete water tank, destroyed during the Egyptian attack in the 1948 war. The heroes of this struggle are commemorated by a monument at the cemetery in Kibbutz Negba, unveiled in 1953 [fig. 6]. The centerpiece of the monument is a bronze group of three figures, depicted almost frontally – two men and a woman – joined in firm handshakes, forming a symbolic wall of resistance. The pathos of both monuments, the shots of the faces of their figures, derive directly from the monument in Warsaw.
The artist created subsequent significant commemorations for Israel when he was already an American citizen. The figure of "Job," installed in 1969 at Yad Vashem, is characterized by its modesty yet powerful expression. Cast in bronze, the life-size statue depicts the titular figure of the Old Testament "vir dolorum," gazing up at the silent heavens with an expression of great pain. This moving work has several replicas, installed in locations including Forest Park in Queens (New York, USA) and on the campus of Brandeis University near Boston (Massachusetts, USA). Rapoport's most impressive and best-known Israeli work is the "Scroll of Fire," installed in 1971 on the Judean Hills in Jerusalem [fig. 7]. The eight-meter-high monument resembles an unrolling Torah scroll, on which the sculptor commemorates in relief both the victims of the Holocaust, including Janusz Korczak, as well as Israeli soldiers from the recent war four years earlier. In 1976, another of Rapoport's more impressive monuments was unveiled at Yad Vashem [fig. 8]: bronze-cast replicas of the bas-reliefs of the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes Monument, this time placed on the same side of the high, broken brick wall symbolizing the Warsaw Ghetto Wall. Finally, in the year of the sculptor's death, the sculptural group "Human Brotherhood" [fig. 9] was unveiled in Ramat Gan (in the part known as Tel Hashomer, in front of the OMRIX Biopharmaceuticals headquarters), depicting two men, identified by sheaves of grain as farmers, in a brotherly, though strangely distant, embrace.
Rapoport also became the author of important commemorations in North America. In 1964, the "Six Million Holocaust Memorial" was unveiled in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania, USA), a magnificent, expressive bronze form [fig. 9], composed of the bodies of Jewish victims and fighters of World War II. In 1978, the bronze group "Jacob Fighting with an Angel" was placed in front of the Jewish Community Center in Toronto (Ontario, Canada). Its openwork structure, unusual for the artist's previous work, yet its expressive power was typical. This power is also present in two bronze reliefs with which Rapoport commemorated the "One Million Jewish Children of the Holocaust" on one of the facades of the Orthodox Park Avenue Synagogue in New York in 1980. In the lower relief, he depicted Korczak surrounded by children from the Warsaw Ghetto orphanage, as if floating in the air. Above, in the composition "Victory," he took up a motif from Jerusalem's "Scroll of Fire": a triumphal procession of contemporary Israelis with a menorah (a paraphrase of the famous relief from Rome's Arch of Titus). Perhaps Rapoport's most famous American monument, however, is the "Liberation Monument" in Libert Park, New Jersey, USA, unveiled in May 1985. The larger-than-life sculpture, depicting an American soldier carrying a liberated Jewish prisoner from a Nazi concentration camp, is undoubtedly a variation on the Christian Pietà. Along with the nearby Statue of Liberty, located on a different island, the "Liberation Monument" constitutes one of the symbolic visual motifs welcoming visitors by water to New York.
Since the 60s, Rapoport has been making series of small bronzes, and less frequently – lithographic prints, in which he repeated or created variations on the themes of his monumental sculptures, in line with his motto: "My words are of stone and bronze – silent, but everlasting" [Fig. 10].
Paul Freus
