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.