The above image is by Charlotte Salomon, it came  courtesy of Susan V Facknitz who loves the work. The original conversation was about sibyls and oracles and the work of engagement by post-holocaust writers and poets.

There are a few such artists and writers on the site, those would include: Nelly Sachs, RB Kitaj, Leonard Baskin , Simone Weil, and Paul Celan, whose lives and works formed a critical engagement with the Shoah.

The image on the Sibyls page is of The Matriarchs by Baskin, whose work on women , on Judaica, on war and on poetry inspired a generation of writers – not least of whom was Sylvia Plath whose poem about Baskin’s  studio and disembodiment is in The Collected Sylvia Plath, Faber and Faber.

Sylvia Plath’s Sculptor , excerpted here :

“To his house the bodiless
Come to barter endlessly
Vision, wisdom, for bodies
Palpable as his, and weighty.

Hands moving move priestlier
Than priest’s hands, invoke no vain
Images of light and air
But sure stations in bronze, wood, stone.

Obdurate, in dense-grained wood,
A bald angel blocks and shapes
The flimsy light; arms folded
Watches his cumbrous world eclipse”.

(Sculptor , to Leonard Baskin, by Sylvia Plath from The Collected Plath, a Faber edition)