Arnold Trachtman
Born 1930, Lynn, MA, works and lives in Cambridge, MA
Daimler-Benz Unlimited, 1989, acrylic on canvas (diptych), Museum Purchase, The Frederick P. Walkey Fund, a gift of the Stephen and Sybil Stone Foundation, 2004.124
Arnold Trachtman is a long-time Boston expressionist artist whose work deals with socio-political and historical concerns. This painting is from an extensive body of work that critiques the industrialists who made the Third Reich possible. Trachtman writes, “What I wished to do was demystify the demonology of Nazism. I wanted to show the men behind this great engine of genocide: the major industrialists and corporations of Germany.” Daimler-Benz Unlimited specifically references the luxury car manufacturer who used concentration camp labor to manufacture military equipment and engines during World War II. To drive home this point, he placed the emaciated legs of Holocaust victims under the car, emblazoned with a swastika and Hitler's repeated face, as if they were bearing its weight. By using photographic sources for imagery that is then recombined and re-contextualized, Trachtman creates a powerful work.
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