The Parade is an epic cycle of 63 charcoal, pencil, and ink drawings conceived by Si Lewen (1918–2016) in the aftermath of World War II. The work unfolds a visual narrative on war, memory, and the human condition that is informed by the artist's extraordinary life. Born in Poland to Jewish parents and raised in Germany, Lewen fled Nazi persecution with his family in 1933 before immigrating to the United States. While serving in the U.S. Army as one of the Ritchie Boys, a specialized unit of German-speaking soldiers, Lewen arrived at the Buchenwald concentration camp shortly after its liberation in 1945. The Parade is rooted in the artist’s experience of these events as well as his coming of age during the tumultuous years when, as he reflected later, the parades after World War I gave way to the death marches of World War II.
Experienced together as a sequence, the drawings carry viewers from military pageantry to conflict, devastation, and mourning through the cumulative force of their imagery. The power of The Parade lies not only in its historical origins but in its ability to speak across generations with urgency, asking viewers to confront the persistent cycles of violence that continue to shape our world. The exhibition's title, There Are No Words, is inspired by Lewen's own description of the format of The Parade as a wordless novel in which he explained: "there are no words . . . just the picture itself is the narrative." At the same time, the title reflects his conviction that the horrors of war ultimately defy language and description.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art