In Pucker Art Publications' twelfth book on the art of Samuel Bak, the artist collaborates with Lawrence L. Langer to explore the book of Genesis, the search for identity, and that first couple: Adam and Eve. Bak's 120 paintings depicting the couple as travellers, Renaissance-era and twentieth-century lost souls, are rich in symbolism, posing questions of good and evil and of how we are to repair the world. Langer effectively and intelligently analyses and provides insight into the paintings' meanings and allusions.

Samuel Bak is a renowned artist whose works have been exhibited in museums worldwide. In Painted in Words artist Samuel Bak sets aside his brushes to narrate the story of his life-as a child in Nazi-occupied Vilna, as a youth in European refugee camps, and as a maturing artist in Israel, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. Lovingly, he evokes his departed parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, along with their household employees, to create a vital gallery of dramatic, lyrical, epic, and sometimes absurd heroes. With gently humor, the child prodigy of the faraway past and the accomplished artist of today engage in a spirited dialogue from which emerges a self-portrait of the "Artist as a Young-and middle-aged and aging-Survivor.

This book is a tribute to the artist's return to his birthplace, to the place of his childhood, once filled with happiness; to the streets of his tenuous survival during World War II, and to the memorial for his grandparents and father. Bak's journey was marked by memories and profound sadness and a great awareness of his responsibility to express the spirits of all who were destroyed during the Holocaust. Scholar Lawrence L. Langer provides commentary on the rich symbolic significance and uniqueness of the artist's work.