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.