Full Afterword for Lydia Kann’s Book: Germaine’s Daughter
by Shana Nys Dambrot

“The War Inside: Lydia Kann’s Inheritance of Memory

There are stories that live in our bones before we learn their words. In Germaine’s Daughter, Lydia Kann gives powerful form to the lingering, mutating aftershocks of historical trauma as it reverberates through three generations, rendered with both formal vigor and narrative compassion. Bridging the personal and the political with unapologetic intimacy, what we have witnessed is not illustration — it’s revelation.

The works naturally suggest a narrative arc, unfurling as a kind of hand-painted graphic novel — but instead of fixed frames and printed ink, while Kann’s images tell a story, as objects with affecting presence, they breathe and live through the porous language of brushstroke and fiber, gesture and ghost, scale and nuance. Working primarily on paper in acrylic, oil, charcoal, and occasional textile and rope interventions, Kann deploys a vivid, expressive lexicon that moves fluidly between abstraction and figuration. Scenes of domestic fragmentation — hospital visits, mental unraveling, flights across continents — are rendered with an emotional immediacy that is less about realism and more about essence. Her color palette shifts in concert with the arc of the story, moving from raw, high-chroma urgency to more nuanced, even lyrical tonalities as the narrative progresses toward resolution. But even at its most saturated, there is restraint — the painterly choices are not decorative, but diagnostic. Form and feeling are one.

The project unfolds in three acts: war and displacement in Europe; inherited instability and silence in mid-century America; and, ultimately, a kind of reclamation. These are not mere historical tableaux — they are reenactments and embodiments of psychical scenarios. Some paintings, made years earlier during Kann’s mother’s hospitalization, are especially visceral. Their immediacy — their childlike, even cartoonish simplicity — underscores the psychological regression that trauma can trigger, in life and in its rendering. At the same time, their deep roots of art historical stylizations recall the seminal work of artists from Edward Munch and Kathe Kollwitz to Art Spiegelman and Leon Golub — each of whom confronted aspects of this same seething world of the demons we harbor.

Kann’s background as a psychotherapist is not incidental here; it gives her the tools not only to surface the submerged content of her lineage, but to shape it into something both legible and resonant for others. The artist becomes an intergenerational translator, articulating what was unspeakable — not only the horrors of war, but the quieter violences of its aftermath: exile, mental illness, inherited silence. And she does so not with didacticism, but with generosity. The paintings offer entry points rather than prescriptions. Their scale, materiality, and presence in space extend an invitation to feel — and perhaps to remember something not personally lived, but deeply known. The rope elements recur as both metaphor and material: bonds, burdens, umbilici, nooses — a visual syntax of entanglement and attachment.

That is the quiet power of Germaine’s Daughter. It doesn’t scream. It pulses. It aches. It gathers the scattered fragments of memory, family, and place, and composes them into an embodied archive — not to resolve history, but to hold it differently. As the viewer moves through the sequence, and/or finds themselves in the physical presence of the epic painting cycle, what emerges is less a chronology than an atmosphere. As the installation moves through sorrow, perseverance, rage, grace, it reminds us that art does not heal by pretending things didn’t happen — it heals by showing how survival, too, can be artful.”

— Shana Nys Dambrot, Art Critic, Curator, Author

Los Angeles, 2025