Reviews + comments

Five critics’ reviews follow below, spanning from 1994 to 2025. Following the reviews, you’ll find links to two essays by Gaber which he wrote to accompany the first two exhibits. Next, you’ll discover a link to a lengthy dialogue between art educator Mark Breitenberg and Harley Gaber that explores the artist’s intent. Finally, we have provided a timeline of events that influenced Gaber as he worked on Die Plage from 1993 to late 2002.

Los Angeles Times

Excerpts from Leah Ollman’s review of the exhibit at the Lab in Los Angeles (October 13, 2000)

“Harley Gaber’s vast, absorbing installation at the Laboratory steeps its viewers in the visual vocabulary of German politics and culture from the end of the first World War through the end of the second. Neither oppressively didactic nor consistently propagandistic, the work captures the tumult and terror of those years through a thoughtful, aggressive barrage of images…. Gaber’s tour through time is a fully immersive experience, and he makes a perceptive, dedicated and ambitious guide.”

Read Leah Ollman’s full review.

Jewish Journal

Excerpts from Ryan Torok’s review of the Holocaust Museum L.A. exhibit, published in the Jewish Bulletin (February 20, 2025)

“… Created by the late avantgarde artist Harley Gaber, “Die Plage” — German for “The Plague” — consists of collaged photographs, including archival images from Germany that Gaber photocopied and manipulated using razor blades and scissors. His images show Bauhaus architecture; uniformed Nazi soldiers; worked-up German crowds at rallies; and Jewish victims of Nazi crimes.

Gaber has reworked, resized and recontextualized the images. The result is an intense and reimagined history offering themes that continue to resonate today — specifically, the ease in which an individual can be swept up in the sociopolitical currents of the time.”

Read Ryan Torok’s full review.

San Diego Reader

Excerpts from John Saville’s review of the Southwestern College exhibit(Sept. 21, 1995)

"... Seeing these pictures, a great number of which are of exquisite poignance, you think not of newsreels but of the lithographs of Käthe Kollwitz, which look so much like charcoal drawings, and which -- like Gaber's collage-paintings in this section -- concentrate not on the historical circumstances of oppression but on the subjective feelings of the oppressed."

“His art is done in the spirit of painters and draftsmen like Kirchner and Nolde, George Grosz, Otto Dix, or Rudolf Schlichter…. Die Plage is a tragic work of art if ever there was one…. It will remind you with an unsilenceable voice of what art is for.”

Read John Saville’s full review.

Oregon ArtsWatch

Excerpts from Friderike Heuer’s review of the exhibit at the Oregon Jewish Museum (October 15, 2022)

"I see Harley Gaber’s work as enormously prescient in that the indoctrination of youth, so prominently displayed in his montages, is to be feared, and easily accomplished when education becomes usurped by those in power and ideologically or religiously driven. We see it, here and now."

"For someone interested in quantum physics and in the art of the Weimar Republic, as Gaber was by all reports, photomontage seems ideally suited as a visual medium. The combination of intimate scale and monumental extent, with ever-smaller units affecting each other across space, in some ways mirrored his approach to musical notation. He drew parallels between our insights from physics to how he perceived humanity to function. In quantum entanglement you cannot describe the state of one of the quanta without the state of the other one. They can only be apprehended as a unit, even if they are far apart. Gaber’s montages gave visual life to this concept: the distinct groups of a society only to be understood in their linkage to each other. Perpetrator and victim, oppressor and oppressed part of the same system under the umbrella of a deadly ideology."

Read Friderike Heuer’s full review.

San Mateo Times

Excerpts from John Oxendine’s review in the (11/28/1994)

"We see a commitment that is rare in art today; it addresses social concerns that have deadly consequences and are not a part of some fashionable trend. What Gaber has put into all of this cannot be stamped with a dollar amount, as his breath and blood are all over it."

"There are images that remind one of the early drawings of de Kooning and Henry Moore. We are presented with a host of artistic, literary and musical points of reference that make this work a veritable encyclopedia of early and middle 20th century thought. There is Max Beckmann and Otto Dix.... There is Kafka, Wagner and even a portrait of Jesus Christ."

Read John Oxendine’s full review

Gaber’s writing and interviews

Gaber writes about his method and purpose (1997)

“I have approached ‘my’ [version of this] history with the intention of making it more accessible and illuminated through a process of humanizing it, dramatizing it and fantasizing it.”

Read Gaber’s full statement (1997)

Mark Breitenberg in dialogue with Harley Gaber (1997)

Gaber spent three days with his friend, Mark Breitenberg—arts educator and leader in higher education and nonprofit sectors—to discuss Die Plage and its many intersections with art, science, philosophy, and history. This dialogue evolved into an 87-page essay, titled “A Visit to the Artist’s Studio, 1997”. Because Gaber later made extensive revisions to the original transcript, consider it to be a collaborative and co-authored essay.

Events 1990-2003

Harley Gaber was deeply attuned to the world around him. During the nine years he worked on Die Plage, California witnessed a tech boom and bust, an earthquake, and a growing public fear of crime and immigrants. Gaber's acute sensitivity to the anti-immigrant sentiment expressed both on talk radio and during California's election cycles amplified his interest in the interwar period in Germany. In the timeline below, national and California-specific events are distinguished by different colors.