Reginald Case (born 1937)
Sonderbehandling (special treatment, Nazi bureaucratic term for killing prisoners)
1978
Photo-collage on composition board
Museum No. E.34-2008
Given by Reginald Case

Trained in painting and drawing at San Francisco State College and Boston University, Reginald Case began working with collage in about 1975. In his first explorations he projected a collage composition onto canvas and painted from it. Eventually the qualities of collage as a medium led him to abandon the painting altogether, introducing him to subject matter and effects that he could not otherwise achieve.

This piece has been selected from the Holocaust series of the late 1970s. In these works, Case juxtaposes nude or scantily-clad figures from German music hall and burlesque theatre or uniformed figures from Nazi military handbooks with delicate flowers and butterflies or the decorative accoutrements of central European bourgeois interiors.

The effect of these compositions is chillingly to remind us that the Nazis, in a depraved inversion of the age-old formula of conquest (destroying an adversary's assets and enslaving his person), instead murdered the Jews and appropriated their possessions.