We held a wonderful conversation with Pucker Gallery Artist Samuel Bak, Professor of English emeritus at Simmons University, Larry Langer, and Gallery Director, Bernie Pucker. For this discussion we explored Bak’s most recent body of work in depth. With a focus on the Figure we all are implicated in Bak’s quest for more questions fundamental to our humanity.

The exhibition, Figuring Out: New Work by Samuel Bak will be on view at the Gallery from 5 March through 24 April. With essays by Professors Lawrence Langer and Andrew Meyers, Bak's latest monograph is available for purchase on our website.

Lawrence L. Langer was born in New York City and educated at City College of New York and Harvard University. He is Professor of English emeritus at Simmons University in Boston. Among his books are The Holocaust and The Literary Imagination, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 1991, Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology, Preempting the Holocaust, and Using and Abusing the Holocaust. His most recent work is The Afterdeath of the Holocaust (2021). He has also collaborated with Samuel Bak on ten volumes of the artist’s work, for which he wrote critical introductions and commentaries.

Samuel Bak was born on August 12, 1933 in Vilna, Poland at a crucial moment in modern history. From 1940 to 1944, Vilna was under first Soviet, then German occupation. While both he and his mother survived, his father and four grandparents all perished at the hands of the Nazis. At the end of World War II, he and his mother fled to the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp. Here, he was enrolled in painting lessons at the Blocherer School, Munich. Bak’s studies continued as he immigrated to Israel, and he later received a grant to pursue his studies in Paris.

In 1959, he moved to Rome where his first exhibition of abstract paintings was met with considerable success. In 1961, he was invited to exhibit at the "Carnegie International" in Pittsburgh. And, in 1963 two one-man exhibitions were held at the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Museums. It was subsequent to these exhibitions, during the years 1963-1964, that a major change in his art occurred. There was a distinct shift from abstract forms to a metaphysical figurative means of expression. Ultimately, this transformation crystallized into his present pictorial language.

Since 1959, Samuel Bak has had solo exhibitions at private galleries in New York, Boston, London, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Zurich, Rome and other cities around the world. Numerous large retrospective exhibitions have been held in major museums, universities, and public institutions around the globe.

Since Pucker Gallery’s establishment in 1967, Gallery Owner and Director Bernie Pucker and his wife, Sue, have expanded the collection to include artists from New England and around the globe, exhibiting a breadth of both 2D and 3D fine art. The gallery has exhibited Samuel Bak's work since 1969.