Haven't read it yet. But some paintngs are really beautiful. Love this pale [?] coloring.
Bak is Back.
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Yes his palette is fairly subdued which adds an almost kind of melancholic quality to his work. Super interesting to be honest.
wow, so desolate but immersing 
Makes me think that heaps of other chess art that I have seen might have just been based on this guy.
wollyhood wrote:
wow, so desolate but immersing Makes me think that heaps of other chess art that I have seen might have just been based on this guy.
deep
but yeah the stuff is very nice 
hehehe you think that's deep, well good luck
Thanks for sharing this. A great artist indeed!
After painting Knights, the next day, it Figures, he went Bak to Bak.
Nylonsock wrote:
Some of those paintings remind me, of so many of my chess related dreams, when I was a child .
have we met somewhere before?
qnxdjqhkdy
nonsensical spam is so low effort and impotent.
anjwl?
I am not your audience, beat it spanky!
woollensock and kinkysox, both legends.
very interesting!
you are nice
According to the Pucker Gallery, Samuel Bak's "artistic talent was first recognized during an exhibition of his work in the Ghetto of Vilna when he was nine years old." Having survived the Holocaust with his mother (unlike his father and 4 grandparents), he ended up in the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp and in 1948 relocated to the State of Israel. He studied fine arts and had his first exhibition in 1959 in Rome. Bak is a surrealist and many of his works have been chess themed.
In anticipation of the forthcoming the publication of the compilation book, Chess as Metaphor, The Art of Samuel Bak, Chess Life magazine did a spread of some of Bak's chess-related painting, along with some of his personal insights. Below are the paintings and texts presented in the January 1992 edition.
JANUARY 1992
... I must have been 13 when I first did a large watercolor with chess figures. My mother and I were
in a D.P. Camp in Germany.— My mother was a widow. She met a survivor of Dachau whom she later married. He taught me to play chess. Nathan lost a wife and two daughters in the ghetto. A very espected man in the community of the survivors, he was sensitive, quiet and soft spoken. Every night we woke up to the screams of his nightmares. He was plagued them till the end of his days. But, in the daytime he loved to sit for hours over the chess problems that he invented and solved for and by himself. Before the war, Nathan was a famous chess player in Lithuania."
The watercolor I did was for him. It depicted some wild scientists who proceeded with incongruous experiments over some chess figures in a lab for chemistry. The unjust, unpredictable, wild world in which we lived seemed to me already there: a strange place for the logical, rational, scrutinizing set of rules that define the struggle for power in chess...
... From purely a painterly standpoint, this is a theme which allows me to recreate three dimensional world into which I can inlands Inject a game of colors, light, shadow, atmosphere and different moods. All this serves as a framework that contains metaphors of existence, struggle, victory or loss.
... Whoever plays chess, knows well how important the unimportant can become. But if you employ logic; if you have a plan; if you can guess the projects of your enemy; then, you have a choice. If you make an error, you must accept the consequences. Everything is rational.
How very different from real life...
... There is such a thing as an inner vision.
This vision allows me to create images on paper or on canvas. Where do those images come from? In my search for the darker side of the moon, for the irrational elements of life, I am embarking upon a voyage to a strange country. As if there were such a thing as prehistorical chess. As if there was a world of chess mythology that sends out obscure oracles about the rules of the Game. There are many more questions than answers.
What do we do about a surface on which we are supposed to move; one which is connstantly changing? Values change, directions change and borders are not as clearly defined as we would have them. Things break; they are not complete. The powerful fall to pieces; the weak become stronger and more dangerous. Objects and landscape play hide and seek. And then everything is bathed in a light of peace and eternity. Vanity of Vanities — the good old words of the Sage that puts everything into
the right proportion. Bless you.
All the above were Bak's words.
Chess Life then provided some of its own:
The Pucker/Safrai Gallery on Boston's fashionable Newbury Street is recognized by many as the finest gallery in the city. From the shipping and framing warehouse in the center of commercial Boston, traveling exhibitions of Israeli art, some 40 to 50 each year, are sent to temples, museums, organizations, universities, community centers and Israeli expositions in the United States and Canada
Through the years, Bernard Pucker has established an impeccable reputation in the art world, a world in which a formal contract is a rarity. In his 18 years of association with Dov Safrai, while literally millions of dollars worth of art have been exchanged, there has never been any form of written agreement.
Chess as Metaphor, The Art of Samuel Bak will be published in February or March. The hardcover book will contain 80 reproduction as well as an essay by the Swiss art critic (and chess expert) Jean louis Cornuz.
The Pucker/Safrai Gallery is located at 17 5. Newbury St. in Boston, MA 02116, and is open 10 a.m. — 5:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday. Special thanks goes to USCF member Larry Kurtz for suggesting this feature, and to Bernard Pucker for his generosity.