Jesi showcases memorial of William Congdon, artist and ambulance worker in Bergen-Belsen

On the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day, the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Jesi, in collaboration with The William G.Congdon Foundation, under the patronage of the United States Diplomatic Mission in Italy, Fondazione Intercultura onlus and the Shoah Memorial in Milan, presents from January 13 to February 19, 2023, at Palazzo Bisaccioni in Jesi, the exhibition William Congdon. In The Death of One. Artist and Ambulance Worker in the Hell of Bergen-Belsen/May 1945, curated by Rodolfo Balzarotti and Francesco Gesti, with coordination by Mauro Tarantino.

Already produced by the William G. Congdon Foundation and on display at the Holocaust Memorial in Milan until last March 2022, the exhibition now comes to Jesi to straddle the annual anniversary of January 27, 2023, Holocaust Remembrance Day, to give space to the testimony of the famous American painter William Congdon, who worked as an ambulanceman for theAmerican Field Service in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp that had just been liberated by British troops.

In fact, between late April and late May 1945 William Congdon worked to rescue survivors of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, witnessing firsthand thehorror of the Holocaust-an experience that marked him so much that it was instrumental in his decision to devote himself to painting. To the faces he saw, Congdon attempted to give form through texts and sketches collected in a diary, later reworked into a typescript entitled In the Death of One, a kind of memoir of his military campaigns, culminating, in the last part, in a series of descriptions of harrowing moments and figures in the concentration camp. The text, which constitutes a valuable and rare documentation of the impact the event had on first responders, and which the artist would have liked to have seen published along with the numerous drawings he made on the spot, remained unpublished, and still is, with the exception of some sections recently published in Columbia University’s Italian Poetry magazine.

The exhibition has as its main thread this very work by Congdon, some of whose original pages are shown, to which are added a series of drawings, oil works, texts and documents testifying to his wartime experience.

The exhibition is organized through a threefold educational-documentary apparatus: on William Congdon’s biography, the history of the American Field Service, as well as the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in its tragic developments between 1939 and 1945. This is followed by some original drawings executed on site and others present only in reproduction, to which is added a bronze made before the war along with a couple of paintings from later years in order to show the rapid and radical transformation of Congdon’s art after the traumatic events he experienced during the conflict.

Finally, two multimedia aids round out the exhibition: a video during which voices of native-speaking actors offer alternating readings, in Italian and English, of a few pages of the typescript In the Death of One, against a background of eerie light and sound flashes; and finally, a short silent film made on location by an American Field Service ambulanceman filming rescue work in the Bergen-Belsen camp in May 1945.

Image: William Congdon, Morgen Tod (1945)

Jesi showcases memorial of William Congdon, artist and ambulance worker in Bergen-Belsen

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