INTERPRETING THE ART OF TOM McGUINNESS

Interpreting the art of Tom McGuinness

This is a personal summary of the section of the book McGuinness: Interpreting the art of Tom McGuiness that is entitled ‘Influences on the art of Tom McGuinness’.  The authors are Robert McManners and Gillian Wales.  The book was published in 2006 by Gemini Productions.  The book is dedicated to ‘The Bevin Boys – especially Tom McGuinness’.

The sections of the book are unnumbered and are as follows: Acknowledgements; Foreword; Preface; Introduction; Influences on the art of Tom McGuiness; Development of the characteristic McGuiness style; Epilogue; Plates; List of plates; List of exhibitions; Glossary of art terms; Glossary of mining terms; Bibliography.

Wikipedia on Tom McGuinness: ‘Tom McGuinness (1926-2006) was a British coal miner and artist.   He studied at the Darlington School of Art, and was one of the artists at the Spennymoor Settlement, where his contemporaries included Norman Cornish, Herbert Dees and Robert Heslop’.

Interpreting the art of Tom McGuinness

Coal

Coal mining was unique among the heavy industries that dominated North East England in the 19^th and 20^th Century: it was both the source of power for all other industries and it was a complete way of life in itself.   This way of life included ‘a corpus of experiential art’.  Painters of coal mining subjects included both members of the mining community and artists from outside that community.  Tom McGuinness is the supreme exponent of coal mining art.

McGuinness painted from direct personal experience of coal mining in County Durham.  Much of the content of his many sketch books was drawn at the mine and down the mine.  These sketches were the origin of many of McGuinness’ paintings.  This makes McGuinness unique among painters of coal mining subjects. 

McGuinness worked in collieries until he was made redundant in 1983.  At the end of his life he became a witness to the end of coal mining in County Durham and its social aftermath.

Witton Park

McGuinness was born in Witton Park in the year of the General Strike and the subsequent Miners’ Strike.  In the early 20^th Century Witton Park suffered high unemployment and great poverty.  This arose from the sudden decline in iron-making at Witton Park in the late 19^th Century, due to technological change.  As McGuinness grew up in Witton Park, he was more interested in the local environment than in school work.  Significant influences on McGuinness are described as his childhood observation of the derelict landscape and machinery, and his interest in human behaviour.

In 1940 McGuiness left school.  In 1944 he was conscripted under wartime regulations to work in coal mines as a ‘Bevin Boy’.  He had not wanted to be a miner.  With mines in the Witton Park area closed he had to travel elsewhere in County Durham to work.  McGuinness considered that if he had not worked in mining, art may have been less important to him. 

Darlington

In 1944 McGuinness enrolled at Darlington School of Art after being encouraged to do so by the Colliery Training Officer.  McGuiness attended this art school for six years and studied life drawing, portraiture and ‘antique drawing’.  His art teacher, Ralph Swinden, urged McGuinness to adopt a bold line in drawing and this was remembered by McGuiness as significant.   McGuinness was self-taught in anatomical drawing.  McGuinness travelled in the UK to see other artists’ work in public galleries: Daumier’s lithographs particularly inspired him.   He collected reproductions of artists and was particularly influenced by the works of Rembrandt, Durer and Goya, as well as Daumier. 

In 1947 coal mines were nationalised.  Many Bevin Boys left the industry, including McGuinness who took up other work, but he soon returned to coal mining.

Spennymoor

In 1948 McGuinness enrolled in the Sketching Club at the Spennymoor Settlement – an educational and recreational organisation that had been established in 1931 to help to alleviate the effects of the Great Depression.  This is where McGuinness met other ‘pitman artists’ including Norman Cornish.   Cornish and McGuinness became close friends.  McGuinness was inspired by the Spennymoor Settlement in the same way that Cornish had been when he joined in the 1930s. 

Bill Farrell – the first warden of the Settlement – advised both men to ‘paint what they knew’.  There was no tuition: the Sketching Club worked together by peer support and shared problem solving.  Farrell insisted that all work be drawn from life.  This led McGuinness to draw and paint directly from his working environment.  Farrell also insisted that only the best materials should be used. 

At this time McGuinness began to rent an attic room at a boarding house in Bishop Auckland, to use as his studio. 

McGuinness attended the Spennymoor Settlement until 1951 when he returned to art classes in Darlington: this is when he produced his first oil paintings.

Durham University

In 1956 McGuinness met Gill Harman (later Holloway) who was art tutor at Durham University Extra-Mural Department.  Gill taught many artists from North East England who later had succesful careers.  Gill advocated study of art history alongside the practise of painting. 

In 1958 McGuinness had his first solo exhibition, at the Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation in Hobart House, London.  Subsequently Gill Harman arranged that a room at the City Hotel in Durham could be used as a gallery: many artists’ works were shown here and the gallery was an artists’ meeting place.

Newcastle upon Tyne

In 1969 an exhibition was held at The Stone Gallery in St.Mary’s Place, Newcastle upon Tyne, showing the work of McGuinness, Cornish and Josef Herman – a Polish artist who had painted in the Welsh Coalfield ‘in an expressionist manner’.  On 30^th November 1969 Bill Johnson – art critic of the Manchester Guardian – reviewed the show and concluded that Herman’s work was inferior to that of the two Northeasterners. 

London

In the early 1970s McGuinness was commissioned to work for three years under the patronage of Lady Hirshfield – a Labour peer in the first Wilson government.  This led to McGuinness’ work being known nationally, and London exhibitions were held, with many sales taking place.  McGuinness continued to work as a miner.  He saw himself as a ‘miner who could paint’ and not as ‘an artist who was trapped in the stony grasp of the coalmine’.  In 1972 Lord Hirshfield encouraged McGuinness to broaden his subject range to include more above ground scenes ‘in brighter colours’ so as to be ‘more commercially acceptable to the London market’.  Having produced a number of beach scenes, McGuinness did not take the experiment further.  In 1974 the patronage ended.

Durham

At this time McGuinness was featured in the National Coal Board’s ‘Mining Review’ news film and in a BBC ‘Omnibus’ documentary, and this led to a valuable commission in 1976 from Barclays Bank.  The resulting work – a painting entitled ‘The Miners’ Gala’ – hangs in the Market Place branch of the bank in Durham.

In 1978 McGuinness organised his own show of seventy of his works in London.  This was successful.  It led to an exhibition of works by artists of Northern England in Moscow in the early 1990s, including works by McGuinness.

SIMON SCHAMA ON THE SECOND COMMANDMENT IN 'THE STORY OF THE JEWS'

SIMON SCHAMA: THE SECOND COMMANDMENT IN ‘THE STORY OF THE JEWS – FINDING THE WORDS 1000BCE – 1492CE’ pp173-198

In his ‘The Story of the Jews – Finding the Words 1000BCE – 1492CE’ (pp173-202), Simon Schama describes the discovery in the 1930s of the remains of a synagogue dating from 240 CE at Dura Europos on the Upper Euphrates in what is now in Syria.  The archaeological find is significant because the walls of the synagogue are decorated lavishly with wall paintings illustrating Biblical scenes and characters alongside scriptural inscriptions ‘as objects of devotion’. 

Schama writes that after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, the wall illustrations at Dura Europos in the 3^rd Century CE would have ‘resonated with specific messages of consolation and hope’.  Particular paintings illustrate the promise of redemption in the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Moses and David.

In the context of this 3^rd Century CE synagogue, Schama reviews the significance of the prohibition of the making of images and objects contained in the Second Commandment.  Schama then reviews archaeological evidence of synagogues in the 3^rd to 6^th Centuries CE that contain illustrations and statues. 

Exodus 20:4 and Deuteronomy 5: 8 use two Hebrew words to characterise the forbidden objects: pesel and temunah. 

The first word pesel refers specifically to the activity of carving in order to make cult objects of the kind that would have been common in the ancient Near East and the classical world.  These are the kinds of object that a religion of a formless deity such as Judaism would reject. 

The second word temunah is more complex.  It derives from a word meaning a species or a class of thing.  The implication is that the banned activity would have involved the making of a copy or a likeness in the manner of the painting of an icon.  The copying that was forbidden involved copying things in both earth and heaven, and the latter inclusion suggests that the concern was that if such objects were to be made they would be used as objects of idolatrous devotion.  Exodus 20: 5 shows that the main concern is the potential use of objects in idol-worship.

In the 2^nd / 3^rd Century CE law code of the Mishnah an aggadah (exemplary story) makes the distinction between ‘incidental ornament and idolatrous objects’.  The patriarchal sage Rabban Gamaliel is in the Bathhouse of Aphrodite which is decorated with statues in Ptolomais (Acre) when the Greek Peroqlos Pelopsos criticises him for disobeying the Second Commandment.  As the two men leave the bathhouse the sage responds, saying that he never entered Aphrodite’s bathhouse, but that Aphrodite came into his bathhouse.  The primary purpose of the bathhouse was for bathing, and the ornament was secondary, and thus the sage was exonerated.

Schama writes about the remains of the synagogue at Dura Europos on the Upper Euphrates, dating from 240 CE.  Schama writes that Dura Europos would have stood in a central place between the two poles of Rabbinical learning in Palestine and Mesopotamia and that the synagogue here would therefore have been exemplary. 

Factors that Schama discusses include: (a) the presence in Dura Europos of places of worship of other religions and cults which would have influenced the decoration of the synagogue including Temples of Adonis, Zeus and Mithras and a church; (b) the sparsity of prohibitions of images and sculpture in the Mishnah that began to be written in the 2^nd Century CE to codify Judaism; and (c) the widespread presence of mosaic decoration in synagogues in Palestine, the wider Mediterranean world and the Near East in the 3^rd to 6^th Centuries CE. 

Schama shows that in the period of the third to the sixth Centuries CE there was a strong tradition of using painted scenes in synagogues to illustrate Scripture.  Indeed, synagogue illustrations appears to have evolved partly to complement the development of the written Mishnah. 

THE INTRODUCTION TO ROSEN'S ‘IMAGINING JEWISH ART: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MASTERS IN CHAGALL, GUSTON AND KITAJ’

A PERSONAL SUMMARY OF THE INTRODUCTION TO ROSEN'S ‘IMAGINING JEWISH ART: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MASTERS IN CHAGALL, GUSTON AND KITAJ’  

This is a brief personal summary of the Introduction to Dr Rosen’s work of 2009 Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the Masters in Chagall, Guston and Kitaj

Imagining Jewish Art

Rosen takes as his starting point Rosenburg’s essay of 1966 ‘Is there a Jewish art?’  Rosen observes that since 1966 there has been no consensus as to what may be Jewish art. 

Rosen takes the view of Margaret Olins in her ‘From Bezal’el to Max Liebermann: Jewish Art in Nineteenth-Century Art’ of 1999, that the most productive approach to the question concerns ‘narrative positions’ rather than aiming for a definition: works of art may not be considered to be inherently Jewish due to a particular characteristic of the art work or of the artist, but they may ‘speak “Jewish”’ in certain circumstances.

Rosen asks ‘How have modern Jewish painters responded to the Western artistic past, a tradition largely lacking in Jewish precedents? And in what ways do these responses reflect these artists’ self-understandings as Jews?’

The Second Commandment

Exodus 20:4-6: ‘You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments’.

The notion that representational art is anathema for Jewish artists is not borne out by the facts: indeed, it may be seen to be a product of the unhealthy relationship between anti-Semitic philosophies that gained popular credibility in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries and the desire of Jews to assimilate.

Jews were thereby caught in a double bind by the Second Commandment, by which they believed that representational art was forbidden and they were simultaneously subjected to ridicule for being unable to attempt to represent that which they worshipped.  Medieval sources show that Jewish artists did engage in representational art.  In practice, the Second Commandment has been ‘much more elastic than frequently has been assumed in the modern period’. 

When the Second Commandment is considered in context a number of issues are seen to arise.  The two statements of the Commandment at Exodus 20:4 and Deuteronomy 5:8 differ slightly but not significantly.  Both forbid the making of a ‘graven image’ or a ‘sculptured image’ and both state that a likeness of the specified subject matter is forbidden.  The concern is clearly a precaution against idolatry.   But accounts of the work of artists and craftsmen in the Hebrew Bible show a celebration of their work, even when, in the case of Solomon’s Temple in 1 Kings 6, its decoration is described as including images of ‘things from heaven above and the earth beneath’; ‘Solomon is never accused of transgressing the Second Commandment’.   The conclusion that may be drawn is that there is no inherent attribute to a ‘graven image’ or a ‘sculptured image’ or a ‘likeness’ that constitutes an idol, but rather that all depends on the object’s ‘context and relationships’. 

But this revisionist approach to the presumed iconoclasm of recent modern times is not the same as showing that there is a ‘Jewish visual tradition on a par with the artistic heritage of the Christian West’. 

Until Jewish emancipation in the late 18^th / early 19^th Century Jewish visual creativity was suppressed by deliberate restrictions imposed by Christian authorities.  In Eastern Europe poverty inhibited creativity.  Prior to the mid 19^th Century there are no significant Jewish artists that painters of the modern era can look back to: there is therefore no well-established tradition to feed and stimulate Jewish artists of the 20^th Century other than the tradition of the West. 

How do modern Jewish artists ‘speak Jewish’ in their dialogue with the Western artistic tradition? 

Rosen will focus on Chagall from the 1930s to the 1950s, Guston from the 1960s and 1970s, and Kitaj from the 1980s to the present.  He will find in these three artists that they work with models of family, tradition and home and thus ‘draw upon several fundamental elements of Jewish identity, opening up new possibilities for these concepts along the way’. 

Rosen reviews two theories of creative influence: ‘intertextuality’ and ‘mis-reading / discontinuity’, with the latter considered more appropriate for Rosen’s purpose. 

Rosen then surveys four of the ‘most prevalent strategies for defining Jewish art’:

Biographical approaches

To claim that Jews produce a distinctive kind of art raises many questions.  There is a danger that the search for this distinctiveness becomes a claim to status in a manner that is demeaning to Jews.  The discipline of art history began in the 19^th Century when notions of nationalist ideology had a pervasive effect on Jewish artists who were regarded as ‘anti-national’ or ‘peripheral’.  Jewish art therefore became ‘a problem’.  In 1901 Martin Buber argued that in the absence of a ‘homeland’, Jewish art would not appear.  Buber found in the landscape paintings of Palestine by the German artist Struck a first step towards a ‘proper Jewish art’: this had the effect of undermining the work of Jews in Europe and America whose work was focussed elsewhere.

In 1975 at the Jewish Museum in New York City an exhibition curated by Avram Kampf entitled ‘Jewish Experience in the Art of the 20^th Century’ suggested that Jewish artists were united by a ‘common Jewish experience’.  In 1980 Charles Spencer claimed that aspects of shared historical and cultural experience, and uniqueness compared with their peers, showed a connection that made a number of contemporary artists recognisable and different in their Jewishness. 

But there is a limitation in this biographical approach, in that there have been many Jewish artists, and any attempt to define a common denominator seems futile.  Conjecture about what all Jewish artists may have in common detracts from each artist’s individuality.   Chagall showed his scorn for debate that sought to define Jewishness in art: his response was to paint, and to paint for himself ‘making personal, complex, aesthetic choices’. 

The biographical approach can provide starting points for discussion of Jewish ‘identity’ and Jewish ‘dilemmas’ in the artist’s work, but, in Chagall’s words, a good painter’s art ‘will tend to approach the universal’.

Functional approaches

This approach asks not ‘Who produces this art?’ but ‘Why was this art produced?’ 

There is an aesthetic approach that shows an unbroken tradition of Jewish ritual objects leading seamlessly to contemporary works by Jewish artists and craftsman, but it tends to present a misleading impression of ‘commonality and progression’.  Rosen states that ‘the most promising clues, when investigating the Jewishness of a work of art’, arise when ‘Jewish artists turn not to traditional Jewish art forms, but outward to non-Jewish sources’.

Rosen refers to the writings of Mordecai Kaplan and his notion of Jewish art as part of the nation’s social heritage that ‘both expresses and concretizes Jewish identity’.  Rosen takes issue with Kaplan when Kaplan claims that a primary function of art is to elicit a communal response.  To focus too much on the functional role of art is to lose sight of the role of the individual.  There is a great scope for art to speak to Jewish concepts, and that requires a wider horizon that mere functionality.

Compositional approaches

Subject matter and style are the concerns here.  Rosen observes that scenes from Jewish life and Bible illustrations easily fall within the definition, but that the work of modern Jewish artists appears not to.  Specific works by the Jewish artists Newman and Chagall would, at first glance, be classified by their subject matter and title as ‘Christian’ or ‘Jewish’.  Rosen will show that ‘those cases where Jewishness is most ambiguous, most problematic’ are those that make the greatest contribution to understanding that artist’s Jewishness.

Jews have been at the heart of modern artistic movements.  It has been claimed that some particular ‘broad representational features’ are ‘inherently Jewish’, but Rosen argues that a claimed characteristic in 1906 – ‘a human note’ - could equally be claimed as ‘a common denominator of art in general’.

It has been claimed that modernism is inherently Jewish.   In the 1950s and 1960s the New York Jewish Museum adhered to the notion that characteristics of Jewish identity are coterminous with abstraction in art. 

These supposed Jewish characteristics and their supposed complement in abstract art are (summarising from Leo Steinberg in his remarks about an exhibition of Abstract Expressionist works at the aforementioned museum) are: (i) ‘renunciation ….. of all props on which existence as a nation or art once seemed to depend’;  ‘Jewry survived as an abstract nation ….. proving, as did modern art, how much was dispensable’; (ii) absence of ‘representational content’ in both Jewish religious ritual and modern painting, ‘the ritual being largely self-fulfilling’; and (iii) the ‘uncompromising exclusiveness’ of both Judaism and modern art.

Rosen shows that, contrary to Steinberg, the qualities listed above were also overtly embraced by the gentile artist Ad Reinhardt in his exhibition at the Jewish Museum in 1966, and that in 2000 Anthony Julius described a ‘diffuse Christian spirituality’ as an influence on Abstract Expressionism.  He also shows that by the end of the 1950s the dominance of Abstract Expressionism was beginning to lessen and that Jewish artists were among those with works in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of 1959: ‘New Images of Man’ – a show that was curated by the Jew Peter Selz.  Thus, the supposed characteristic modern style that had been held to epitomise the Jewishness of modern art was now being usurped by a more figurative style with Jews in the vanguard, thus undermining Steinberg’s assertions.

In the field of ‘distortion’ in modern art, it was asserted in 1987 by Schwarzschild that the aesthetic of distortion may incorporate figurative artists, as epitomised by Modiliagni.  Schwarzschild argues that distortion inherently embodies the quintessence of Judaism whilst simultaneously being integral to modernism in its ‘aesthetic of incompleteness’.   Rosen is critical of Schwarzschild’s essentialist approach: it tends towards the dismissal of difference and consequent ‘categorical denigrations’ – of both people and art.

Rosen concludes that it is not appropriate ‘to propose a singular mode in which Jewish art, or indeed modern art at large expresses itself’.

A Programmatic approach

Rosen critiques Anthony Julius’ work of 2000: ‘Idolising pictures: idolatry, iconoclasm and Jewish art’. 

Julius emphasises what Jewish art should be.  He observes that the Second Commandment is a prohibition against idols: he argues that the Second Commandment should be a positive manifesto for Jewish art which ‘contests the authority of the idol’ by the routes of aniconicism, iconicism, and iconoclastic representation. 

Julius considers that the first route should be a ‘gesture … towards the unrepresentable’ which was the objective, in the view of many, of the Abstract Expressionists.  Julius considers that the ‘genuinely aniconic artist’ is still awaited. 

The second route is considered by Julius:  ‘the icon … must be domesticated to serve a larger Jewish purpose’ and this should include ‘testimonial art’ relating to the Holocaust.

Julius believes that Jewish artists have excelled in the third route: irony is used to subvert and mock idols, as is shown in the work of the artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid in relation to the USSR.

Rosen identifies two useful insights by Julius concerning the Second Commandment as an art manifesto, and in relation to iconoclastic art. 

Concerning the first, Julius asks how art may contribute to Jewish life today.  Rosen argues that Julius’ three categories or ‘routes’ are too prescriptive and that they are too ‘disabling’ to be a stimulus to artists.  Rosen finds Julius’ arguments in favour of contemporary potential for aniconicism and iconicism to be unconvincing. 

Rosen argues that the ‘route’ of iconoclastic art has potential, and that the potential is greater than is envisaged by Julius. 

And Rosen argues that Julius claims too much in making the breaking of idols the primary role of Jewish artists.  Instead, Rosen urges a more modest interpretation of Julius’ work, so that it becomes a discussion of ‘possible concerns for Jewish art’: this, he suggests, is a way forward. 

ROSENBERG:'IS THERE A JEWISH ART?'

ROSENBERG: 'IS THERE A JEWISH ART?'

This is a personal summary of the article by Harold Rosenberg ‘Is there a Jewish Art?’, published in Commentary, July 1966.

Rosenberg: ‘Is there a Jewish art?’

The Gentile replies: ‘Yes, and no’.  The Jew replies: ‘It depends what you mean’.  Each aspect of the Gentile answer is anti-Semitic. 

The German art historian Haftmann has published a history of 20^th Century art which divides European painting into the rational, harmonic Mediterranean approach and the subjective metaphysical Germanic approach, but ‘where do the Jews come in?’  The Jewish painters Chagall (from Russia), Modigliani (from Italy) and Soutine (from Poland) are grouped by Haftmann as a special case as if in a ghetto.  These three artists’ works have little in common with each other but Haftmann chooses to group them together as Jewish artists.  Haftmann therefore ‘deserves to be regarded with suspicion’. 

Jean-Paul Sartre’s work ‘Anti-Semite and Jew’, published soon after the end of World War Two argues strongly against anti-Semites.  But Sartre argued that Jews are essentially urban intellectuals of the metaphysical, abstract world who ‘lacked the dimension of sensibility and that continuity with things necessary for the creation of art’.   The chief abstraction in the modern world is money and so it is a short step that connects the perceptions of love of money and the absence of art. 

Thus, an affirmative and a negative answer to the question ‘Is there a Jewish Art? are both likely to be ‘not very flattering to Jews’. 

‘The facts of the matter’

The facts of the matter are not helpful: one can only conclude that ‘while Jews produce art, they don’t produce Jewish art’.  In order to do away with anti-Semitic caricature some have said that only individuals exist and that no qualities can be attributed to people such as ‘American’ or ‘Jewish’.  Thus many people deny the reality of Jewishness because they do not want to be accused of prejudice or bigotry.  But when those holding this viewpoint are challenged that they must recognise that there are marked Jewish facial characteristics they cannot disagree; thus, some will also argue that there must also be marked characteristics of art produced by Jews.

There is a parallel problem when one talks about American art.  A recent attempt to identify characteristics of American painting was unsuccessful, and yet, despite this, it is recognised that ‘we know there is such a thing as American art’.  ‘Jewish art is in an even more ambiguous situation’. 

Six possible meanings to the term Jewish art

There are six possible meanings to the term Jewish art. 

Art that is produced by Jews.  Jewish historical societies use this definition.  A Jewish historical society will seek to identify Jewish American artists, for example, and then will show Jewish cultural identity in America and thus will demonstrate that Jews are an asset to America and should be respected.  In this way, Jewish people ‘present their achievements as credentials entitling them to the status of ordinary Anglo Saxons’.  A painting produced by an early European settler in America who was Jewish, for example, would be likely to have contained ‘some Jewish ingredient’ but it would be hard to say exactly what it would have been.  Nevertheless, this hypothetical painting would have contributed in an unknown way to ‘Jewish American art’.

Art depicting Jews or containing Jewish subject matter.  In the 1920s in the Lower East Side of New York the Ash Can School (East Side Realism) studied the artist’s deeply familiar local environment, and the area had a Jewish population.  The works of this school therefore include representations of contemporary Jewish street life and ‘other Jewish themes in the artist’s memory or imagination (‘Wailing Walls’ etc)’.  But style characterises art, and not subject matter. 

The art of Jewish ceremonial objects.  These are treasures that have been produced over the Centuries by Jewish craftsmen.  They serve ritual purposes and display Jewish symbols.  Ancient close regulation of symbolism has given way to ‘sophisticated modernist variations’.  ‘This is what scholars usually accept as Jewish art’, but it is doubtful ‘that this priestly work is art in the sense in which the word is used in the late 20^th Century’.  General interest in this form of Jewish art is very limited. 

Ephemeral ceremonial and semi-ceremonial folk-art.  Rosenberg’s grandparents made miniature edible furniture pieces and animal forms, and his grandfather made Chanukah dreidlach out of lead.  These, and similar contemporary works might be considered a Jewish art form.

‘Metaphysical Judaica’: ‘perhaps a genuine Jewish style will come out of Jewish philosophy’.  A contemporary artist (Ben Shahn) has ‘experimented with the Hebrew alphabet and has done reading in Jewish mysticism’ and another artist (Yaacov Agam) ‘desires to give plastic and artistic expression to the ancient Hebrew concept of reality, which differs in essence from that of all other civilisations’.  There has been a reasoning by others by which Agam travels from a conception of the uniqueness of the Hebrew concept of reality through the Commandment against graven images to his own non-figurative works that Agam describe as ‘more reality than abstraction’, but Rosenberg is not convinced that these paintings herald a unique Hebrew concept of reality in art. 

The Second Commandment is usually introduced as a relevant consideration.  Rosenberg’s theory is that ‘the Old Testament excluded carvings and paintings’ because ‘in a world of miracles, the fabrications of a human hand are a distraction’.  The sense is that ‘art is anything that appears in the aura of the wonderful’.  Unique elements of the story take on the status of art: ‘Joseph’s coat, Balaam’s ass, the burning bush, Aaron’s rod’.  This is not to suggest that Israel was the originator of surrealism, but it is to say that within a sacred world, art is found and not made.  The mind of the population of this sacred world is filled with ‘magical objects and events’ and all there is for the artist to do is to make ceremonial and ornamental objects.  Jewish art might therefore exist negatively in the making of objects in the mind and banishing the possibility of their physical existence.   The Second Commandment would therefore be the manifesto of Jewish art in that ‘Jewish art exists in not existing’.

There is therefore no Jewish art in terms of a specific style. 

But the contribution of Jewish artists in the 20^th Century has been vital, and these artists have worked as individuals, rather than as Jews or non-Jews.  Identity is the primary theme for contemporary Jewish artists, although the great displacement of populations that has taken place in the 20^th Century makes it also a primary theme in life for many other people.  The chaos of the Century has stimulated metaphysical concern about identity - particularly since World War Two – and this is the setting that has stimulated Jewish artists.  Jewish Americans are asserting their identity ‘in an independent and personal way’.  Specific artists referred to are: Rothko, Newman, Gottlieb, Guston, Lassaw, Rivers and Steinberg.  Their art is a ‘profound Jewish expression’ which is not ‘Jewish art’ but which ‘is loaded with meaning for all the people of this era’.  The Jew is now liberated above the need to ask whether or not there is a Jewish art.

MICHAEL BRICK: OBITUARY

MICHAEL BRICK: OBITUARY

This is a brief summary of the obituary of Michael Brick by Frances Spalding that was published in the Guardian newspaper of 10^th October 2014.

Michael Brick

The artist Michael Brick was born on 11^th May 1946: he died on 22^nd August 2014.  He worked primarily with abstract or emblematic shapes.

His style was minimalist.  His works are more like objects than paintings: their authority when on the wall is undeniable.  Brick’s work stands in the tradition of European constructivism: it is exhibited widely in the UK.

Michael Brick was born in the English Midlands and at the age of 13 moved with his family to south Wales: his father was a Welsh radical.  Brick inherited his father’s liberal outlook and staunch Labour party views.

Brick began university at Newcastle upon Tyne in 1964 – a contemporary of Stephen Buckley, Bryan Ferry, Tim Head, Mark Lancaster and Sean Scully, all of whom were taught by Richard Hamilton.   After graduating, Brick served a further year as a Hatton teaching fellow; he was committed to abstraction.  This led to immediate success as an artist, being associated with several London galleries. 

In 1970 Brick married the cultural historian Jill Steward, and they had a daughter Emily.  The marriage ended in 1992.  Brick returned to Newcastle upon Tyne in 1986 as a half-time lecturer: his relationship with students was good.  In 1993 he married Manucha Lisboa, a lecturer in the modern languages department.

In 2001 Brick formed a working partnership with the printmaker Kip Gresham.   Their most significant work was The Size of What I See (2010) – ‘a set of 12 prints aligned with poems by Fernando Pessoa (writing as Alberto Caeiro) and which had been translated by Brick’s wife Manucha’. 

Spalding writes: ‘The cruciform shape is a recurrent motif in Brick’s work. Aware of the essentially non-referential nature of Brick’s aesthetic, as well as his complete aversion to any form of religious belief, Gresham asked Brick whether he was concerned that this might be read as Christian symbolism.  “How could it not?” Brick replied, admitting an undeniable connection to religion in his work, because religion had influenced art in the past, giving to the cruciform, and other shapes and words, an inextricable set of associations’.

IN A GREEN SHADE: HOWARD HODGKIN

IN A GREEN SHADE: HOWARD HODGKIN

This is a personal summary of Andrew Marr’s article ‘In a green shade’ published in the Guardian Review newspaper of 27^th September 2014.

The article previews the exhibition Green Thoughts at the Alan Cristea Gallery in Cork Street, London from 11^th October to 15^th November 2014. 

In a green shade: Howard Hodgkin

A writer’s conversation with an artist who produces representational art will be different from a conversation with an artist who produces abstract works.  The former will be concerned with direct matters relating to the subject and the artist’s skills in achieving a representation of it.  The latter may result in ‘reams of commentary, often in rather opaque and self-referential language’; alternatively abstract art may be so ‘genuinely abstract’ that ‘it is simply the thing that it is’ and thus it defies any effective commentary upon it. 

Hodgkin ‘takes up a position that is neither abstract nor, in any conventional sense, representational’.   His works have meanings that ‘are not readily available to the viewer’: he paints memories and emotional states that are ‘representational pictures of emotional situations’, but Hodgkin implies that there is also nuance and deeper meaning as well.

Hodgkin’s paintings provoke, tease and entice.  How should we make our response?  What is it that we seek in these paintings?   Hodgkin’s personal experiences are not our experiences, so we cannot respond at a personal level.  But we may reflect on our own emotional experiences that are brought to mind by the titles and content of Hodgkin’s works.  This makes us look again at Hodgkin’s paintings and scrutinise them.  Colour is the feature that is of the greatest interest.

The brain responds to colours and juxtapositions of colours, and this response can be expressed in a limited way by language.  Particular colours may evoke subliminal responses because of their evolutionary function, but it would be crass to suggest that this is the guide to responding to Hodgkin’s works.  Even so, there is probably a power in Hodgkin’s use of colour that engages with the contemporary collective subconscious. 

Hodgkin now uses colour with an economy and deftness that are a mark of age and experience.  The works in the current exhibition are recent ones: they show noise, emotional struggle and muscularity; they suggest that the artist is ‘not going quietly into that good night’. 

Green Thought is a mysterious piece in the exhibition.   It is based on Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’, which concerns ‘the metamorphosis of memory and feeling achieved in art’.  Hodgkin’s works form his autobiography, and in his works of art we too may find ourselves.