Nameless Evil

Manhattan's Whitney Museum occasionally displays a Dickensian sense of satire. It picked Ladies' Day last week to unveil as its third attraction, as unsettling a set of drawings as any museum has shown in years. The 30 drawings were the handiwork of Iowa's mordant Mauricio Lasansky, 52, Argentine emigre printmaker and head of one of the nation's best-known graphics workshops in Iowa City. His topic: the excesses of bestiality displayed in German extermination camps of World War II. The impact of the drawings is so devastating that the Chicago Institute of Art declined to show them altogether, although they have been seen at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and will travel next to the Des Moines Art Center.

Precisely sketched in an ordinary lead pencil on large sheets of heavy paper, colored with dark brown and rust-colored washes, Lasansky's "Nazi Drawings" begin with images of bloated officers clothed in uniforms that could be either surplices or straitjackets, wearing tooth-studded half-helmets that could well be the skulls of their victims. No event is detailed; no face recognizable: Lasansky relies for his effects on the evocation of an essentially nameless evil.

As the series progresses, hairy, obscene women with their skirts pulled down around their knees join in the orgy. Money flutters around them; gigantic vultures hover about them. Huge, grotesque babies' heads, their mouths distorted with pain, are superimposed on pages torn from the Bible containing wrathful Old Testament passages and stenciled with prison numbers. Naked cadavers dangle; a pregnant woman is crucified head downward.

In the final picture of the series, a Hitler figure is viewed in the act of self-castration. At least, some critics have him as Hitler. Lasansky declines to identify it. His concern, he says, is not primarily with indicting German Nazis; his larger intent is to remind the younger generation that the human mind and will have a vast and terrifying capacity for brutality. "It could happen again," he believes. "And I don't think the imagination can even conceive of what it would be like."

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