Exhibition: Si Lewen

Si Lewen
Curated by Art Spiegelman

James Cohan is pleased to present Si Lewen, curated by Art Spiegelman, on view at the gallery’s 52 Walker Street location from March 23 through April 27, 2024. Polish-born artist Si Lewen (1918-2016) is best known for The Parade, an epic cycle of sixty-three black and white drawings that contends with the horrors the artist witnessed during the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. Lewen served in the United States Army during the Second World War as part of the Ritchie Boys, a specialized force of native German-speaking G.I.s, some of whom were Jewish refugees who immigrated to the US fleeing Nazi persecution.  This strikingly modern and profoundly resonant work is presented at James Cohan alongside important works from Lewen’s oeuvre dating from the early 1950s to the mid-2000s, the majority of which have not been seen for four decades.

This exhibition marks the first time that the full suite of The Parade has been shown in New York, following an exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston in 2023.

Art Spiegelman writes:

“I found a copy of The Parade by Si Lewen about thirty years ago, when I was researching the wordless picture stories that briefly flourished between the two World Wars. They were precursors to today’s graphic novels, but unlike the comic books on the lower branches of my medium’s family tree, those books were highly admired by intelligent adult readers. Si’s work was a late and almost unseen entry in that relatively obscure genre. It was drawn and published in a small edition in 1957, after the genre’s heyday, but conceived on World War Two’s frontlines. Working with a Modernist vocabulary, The Parade is a haunting free-jazz dirge that decries the eternally recurring madness of war. Soon after finding the book, I found the then 94-year-old artist in a Quaker retirement community in Pennsylvania, still alive and dizzyingly prolific. He was a dynamo: a charming and elfin man, frail but bubbling with enthusiasm, wry humor, and unorthodox opinions. He was working on what was to be his last work: well over a hundred shroud-like canvases, called Ghosts. Some of these as well as several other works from his long and varied oeuvre will accompany the full suite of 63 drawings for The Parade in this show.”