THE "JEWISH MARK" IN ENGLISH PAINTING

Wolff, J. (2003) ‘The “Jewish Mark” in English Painting: Cultural Identity and Modern Art’.

This is a personal summary of Chapter 6 of the book by Janet Wolff:  AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.  Pp159-167

The Chapter is entitled ‘The “Jewish Mark” in English Painting: Cultural Identity and Modern Art’.

In the early Twentieth Century in England to be English was, among other things, to be not Jewish

In England at the start of the Twentieth Century it was believed that some Jewish quality might be detected in a work of art.  Wolff quotes the memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell in which she writes of the paintings of Mark Gertler in 1914: ‘In those early days there was still the Jewish tradition, the Jewish mark, which gave them a fine, almost archaic quality’.

Social historians have shown that at this time Englishness was defined by that which it was not; to be English was, among other things, to be not Jewish.   Wolff focusses on the end of the Nineteenth Century and the start of the subsequent Century. 

The Jew is the archetypal ‘Other’

The 1986 work by Colls and Dodd - ‘Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920’ - is seminal.  The redefinition of England during the forty years that are the subject of the book had implications for England that continue to be relevant at the start of the Twenty-first Century. 

In his work of 1978 ‘Culture, Ideology and Social Process’ Davies showed that literature was important for the formation of national identity in England in the late Nineteenth Century.  ‘Standard English’ and English literature provided a binding agent in the face of social divisions. 

In his ‘Englishness and the National Culture’ in Colls and Dodd’s 1986 work, Dodd argues that in the late Nineteenth Century two specific groups that were marginalised and at the same time invited to participate in Englishness were the working class and the Irish, Scots and Welsh (‘the Celts’).  These groups had been initially identified as excluded from the dominant culture.  

Englishness ‘is not so much a category as a relationship’ that thrives on the identification of enemies both within and without.  The Jew is the archetypal ‘Other’.

The Jew was always in an intermediate state between exclusion and inclusion

Wolff’s main concern is the discourse of art critics about Jewish artists and their work. 

Between 1880 and 1914 large numbers of Jewish people from Eastern Europe settled in Britain.  The 1905 Aliens Act was intended to reduce Jewish immigration.  Amongst other pressure for this legislation was that from Jews who were well-settled in Britain and who were fearful of ‘less respectable’ Jews from rural Eastern Europe.  Reference is made to works by Feldman and Stedman of 1989 and 1994 in which Feldman explores the extent to which it would have been possible in early Twentieth Century England for Jewish people to ‘become English’ in this era.  He concludes that the ‘new immigration’ made it more likely that the Jew would be regarded as ‘the necessary other in the construction of Englishness’ and that it was this immigration from Eastern Europe that provided the ‘ideal alien for the construction of Englishness’. 

In his work of 1993 ‘Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1875-1945’ Cheyette has shown that in English literature of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century ‘the Jew’ is not a fixed figure and is one that signifies ‘protean instability’.  Thus in the necessity of Englishness to define itself against alien groups, ‘the Jew’ was always in an intermediate state between exclusion and inclusion. 

A parallel issue is to ask how Englishness is manifest ‘in the discourse of the visual’.  Pevsner’s work of 1955 ‘The Englishness of English Art’ has been regarded as the starting point for this.  Wolff shows that by 1975 Pevsner’s defining characteristics of the English – climate and language – had been redefined by David Piper for British art in his ‘The Genius of British Painting’ as the island nature of Britain.  Both Pevsner and Piper assert that ‘linearity’ is a defining characteristic of English art.  Piper compares English light with Mediterranean light: the former is ‘more hazy’, and consequently the painterly qualities of the art of Mediterranean cultures become more linear in English painters’ works. 

Wolff reviews a number of authors and he observes that, whilst the concepts of both ‘Englishness’ and ‘English art’ have changed over time – before and after the end of the 19^th Century -  a constant has been the pre-eminence of landscape painting depicting an essentially southern English scene as typifying Englishness in art.  Thus, Wolff argues that discourse on the visuality of Englishness also depends on a dynamic of exclusion, with ‘the Other’ being ‘the northern English’ or ‘the French’ or ‘the Celts’.

Wolff asserts that in the early Twentieth Century ‘the Jew’ was the paradigm of ‘the Other’, and that whilst we may read anti-Semitism in this, many Jewish people ‘colluded in this belief in ethnicity as a foundation for art-making’. 

Jewish acceptance of the paradigm of the Other

Wolff describes three occasions of Jewish acceptance of the paradigm.  Wolff’s interest is in the texts that ‘position the Jewish artist (and his work) as Other as part of the project of (negatively) producing an English identity’. 

The first occasion of Jewish acceptance of the paradigm of ‘the Other’ is the curating by David Bomberg of a special room devoted to the work of Jewish artists in an exhibition in 1914 at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery.   The second occasion is Mark Gertler’s apparent acceptance as a complement of D H Lawrence’s statement to him about his 1916 painting ‘The Merry go Round’ that “It would take a Jew to paint this picture”.  The third occasion is the Jewish Chronicle’s description of Jacob Epstein’s sculpture as “entirely Hebraic” at a time when non-Jewish critics used this formula to serve anti-semitism.

Wolff notes that the ‘Jewishness of art’ was still being referred to in the mid-1980s by Frederick Gore, writing of Gertler’s early work in ‘British Art in the Twentieth Century: The Modern Movement’ (ed. S Compton, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1986).  

The complementary position of the ‘quest for Jewish style’

The complementary position is the ‘quest for Jewish style’ referred to by Avram Kampf in his ‘Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in Twentieth Century Art’ (London, Barbican Art Gallery / Lund Humphries, 1990).  

Wolff notes that Kampf reviews Russian writers of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries who discussed the ‘quest for Jewish style’.  The focus moved from ‘aesthetic characteristics’ (particularly ‘realism’) in the Nineteenth Century to ‘content’ so that Chagall typifies the latter focus.  By the time of the Revolution in Russia, ‘realism’ has been displaced by the ‘avant garde’.  Kampf concludes that by 1922 the notion of ‘an essentially “Jewish” art’ had faded.  

Milly Heyd and Ezra Mendelsohn’s ‘”Jewish” Art?  The Case of the Soyer Brothers’ (Jewish Art 19-20 [1993-94], 196) – which does not address English or British art - concludes that ‘one can only describe the work as Jewish in the particular sense that much of it contains themes related to Jewish life, including the artists’ own ambivalence with regard to their heritage’. 

Wolff concludes that in English art the ‘”ideology of Jewishness” is founded on a generic conception of Jewishness’, which means that this same ideology – this search for the ‘Hebraic’ – this search for the “Jewish mark” - could take place anywhere else in the world.  But critical analysis easily deconstructs this approach so that one must enquire instead about the “Jewishness” of each individual work of art.

The art-critical language employed of Jewish artists in England in the 1910s

On this basis Wolff will enquire into the ‘art-critical language employed of Jewish artists in England in the 1910s’.  Subject matter and style were the two main reasons for describing a work as ‘Jewish’.  Styles that led to this attribution were ‘primitivism’, ‘modernism’ or ‘being foreign’.  The aspect of subject matter was ‘less ideologically weighted’.  ‘Family life’ and ‘traditional Jewish themes’ were often the subject matter of Jewish artists in England in the early Twentieth Century.

Jacob Kramer

The artist Jacob Kramer (1892 – 1962) is discussed by Wolff.  He was born in Ukraine and came to Britain at the age of eight.  Kramer was a student at the Slade School of Art and subsequently worked in Leeds.  Much of his work depicted Jewish life including religious practices.  ‘Day of Atonement’ (1919) shows Kramer’s participation in modernism – specifically vorticism.  The most straightforward reason why the painting was described as ‘Jewish’ is its subject-matter: it shows ‘the rhythm of prayer in the repetition of the human figure’. 

Mark Gertler

Mark Gertler (1891-1939) was born in England and spent part of his early childhood in Galicia, returning to East London at the age of five.  Like Kramer, he also attended the Slade and, again like Kramer, his early work showed traditional Jewish themes.   Lady Ottoline’s comment about Gertler was made in 1914: her comment (‘in those early days there was still the Jewish tradition, the Jewish mark, which gave them a fine, almost archaic quality’) seems to be about style as much as about content. 

In 1915 Gertler abandoned subject matter ‘drawn from Jewish life’. 

D. H. Lawrence’s remark (“It would take a Jew to paint this picture”, which Gertler took as a complement) is problematic.  ‘The Merry go Round’ (1916) is one of the first of Gertler’s paintings not to deal with Jewish themes.  ‘The painting is a comment on the futility as well as the horror of war’.  Lawrence begins by stating his belief that there must be a dichotomy between Gertler’s outer life, and his inner life ‘which must be a “violent maelstrom of destruction and horror”’.  Lawrence then suggests that Gertler’s national history – stated by Lawrence to be a long history of over 3000 years that is much longer than Christian history - must have sustained him to enable him to reach the apex of ‘The Merry go Round’ which is both ‘great and true’ and ‘horrible, terrifying and obscene’.  Lawrence suggests that the Jewish race is dying and that ‘The Merry go Round’ – and other paintings like it – are its death cry.   Wolff considers that Lawrence’s focus on the ‘archaic qualities of “Jewishness”’ is similar to other descriptions of Jewish paintings as ‘primitive’.  The most significant example concerns Jacob Epstein. 

Jacob Epstein

The work of the sculptor Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) is documented by Elizabeth Barker. Epstein was born in the USA and grew up in New York City’s Lower East Side: he studied at the Art Students League.  He moved to Britain in 1905 and he remained in London for the rest of his life.  ‘Epstein was the first truly modernist sculptor in Britain’. 

Epstein’s work was criticised for its ‘obscenity’ and its ‘uncompromising anti-naturalism’.  Barker shows that this hostility was directed at Epstein’s Jewishness.  In 1912 Epstein visited Paris and was influenced by African and tribal art that he saw there.  Barker shows that the ‘racializing of this discourse’ (ie. art criticism) increased after 1917.  Barker has noted that a 1925 review of Epstein’s work described his ‘primitivist style’ as “an atavistic yearning of like for like”.   Barker states that a 1933 history of English sculpture omitted Epstein because his ‘ancestry and early environment go far to explain his art’ which was described as ‘essentially oriental’: Epstein was ‘with us but not of us’. 

The response to Epstein’s sculpture ‘Risen Christ’ of 1917-1919, which was exhibited in 1920, exemplifies the equation that was made between Epstein’s primitivist-modernist style and his Jewishness.  Wolff writes that the sculpture was intended as a personal memorial to the First World War and was an allegory of suffering.  Barker’s view is that the sentiment underlying criticism of the work was the principle that Jews had no right to portray Christ.   Barker writes that ‘Risen Christ’ was ‘a direct challenge to the moral and aesthetic values native to contemporary Christian art’.  Barker sums up the values that Epstein’s work was alleged to embody as: ‘”archaic”; “barbaric”; “Oriental”; “Egyptian”; “aesthetic”; and “revolutionary”’.  These ‘signify the otherness of Epstein’s Christ’, ‘offering a counter-image to the gentle divinity of Christian conventions’.  Barker refers to sensationalist and exaggerated criticism in the press.  In one example she quotes, the ‘“degenerate” racial characteristics of Epstein’s figure … suggested “some degraded Chaldean or African, which wore the appearance of an Asiatic-American or Hun-Jew, or a badly grown Egyptian swathed in the cerements of the grave’.

Wolff’s aim is to highlight particular instances ‘in this critical historical period’ (ie. the end of the Nineteenth Century and the start of the subsequent Century) that indicate the process of racial or ethnic exclusion that is necessary to construct ‘Englishness’: ‘Jewishness is invoked in art criticism’ …. ‘in such a way as to reinforce its obverse, namely ‘Englishness’.  

David Bomberg

The artist David Bomberg (1890-1957) curated the Jewish section of an exhibition in the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1914.  Bomberg’s parents emigrated from Poland to Britain and David Bomberg was born in Birmingham.  The family moved to Whitechapel, London in 1895 and Bomberg studied at the Slade School of Art.

In the period until 1913 Bomberg painted ‘Jewish themes (biblical as well as secular scenes from daily Jewish life)’.  His most radical work from this time is ‘Ju-Jitsu’ of 1913, which ‘verges on the entirely abstract’.  In the 1914 exhibition Bomberg included some of his own works including ‘Vision of Ezekiel’ of 1912 which shows stylized figures, ‘Ju-Jitsu’, and the abstract ‘In the Hold’ of 1913-1914. 

Wolff discusses the manner in which the necessary identification of ‘the other’ in order to maintain a definition of Englishness applied not only to ‘Jewishness’ but also to ‘modernism’.  The 1914 Whitechapel exhibition led to the equation that Jewishness in art equals the avant garde: Wolff shows (after Steyn) that this equation was as distorted as the notion that Jewishness had no place in art in England.  But in the case of the 1914 Whitechapel exhibition, the hostile critics’ identification of modernist and Jewish was correct, and Bomberg was the artist who embodied the connection. 

Wolff concludes that in the years immediately before the outbreak of the First World War, the search for ‘the Jewish mark’ had progressed to the point at which it was no longer to be found in subject matter that was alien to the English pastoral idyll but was now to be seen in ‘the very different equation of Jewish-foreign (in this case continental European) – modernist – a triple formulation which produced “Englishness” as both visual realism and ethnic purity’.

Conclusion

Wolff concludes by suggesting ways in which the circumstances of individual Jewish artists in England in the 1900s and 1910s may be relevant to interpretation of their work.

Wolff considers Rosenberg’s 1966 article: ‘Is there a Jewish art?’ – see in this blog 14^th October 2014.  Wolff asserts Rosenberg’s conclusion that there is no Jewish art in terms of a specific style.  Wolff also asserts Rosenberg’s statement that in the Twentieth Century concern about identity - within the great displacement of populations that has taken place - has been the setting that has stimulated Jewish artists, and that this ‘has constituted a new art by Jews which, though not a Jewish art, is a profound Jewish expression’.  Wolff concludes that the displacement of people ‘moving from one class into another, from one national context into another’ is a potentially useful way to discuss the work of Jewish artists of the end of the Nineteenth Century and the start of the subsequent Century and is, indeed, the only way to talk about ‘the Jewish mark’.

All four artists – Kramer, Gertler, Epstein and Bomberg – were in the avant-garde of modernist experimentation in England.  These were ‘Jewish men from immigrant, working class or lower middle class backgrounds’.  They had all had ‘a particular training in art, a relatively easy cosmopolitanism and a clear position of marginality within contemporary British society, together with its correlate, a certain detachment from that sense of “Englishness” which was both entrenched and in the process of being re-formulated’.   Many Jewish artists in England at the same time had similar backgrounds, and all had to come to terms with their own heritage and their changing attitudes to the role of Judaism in their lives.  These influences manifested themselves in these artists’ work.  

LEWIS BALTZ: OBITUARY

Lewis Baltz: Obituary

This is a personal summary of the obituary of Lewis Baltz who was born on 12 September 1945 and who died on 22 November 2014. 

The obituary, by Sean O’Hagan, was published in The Guardian on 6^th December 2014.

Lewis Baltz: Obituary

Baltz grew up in Newport Beach, California.  He graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969.  He considered himself to have always been an artist: he considered photography to be the best way of making a visual record.  His works ‘echoed and criticised the soullessness of urban planning and the corporate rationale that lay behind it’.  His photographs contributed to the redefining of American landscape photography in the early 1970s. 

His aesthetic was minimalist and dispassionate.  It ‘drew on contemporary art practice and rejected the romanticism of traditional landscape photography’.  The style was known as the ‘New Topographics movement’.  Particular concerns were the spread of the city into wilderness and the anonymity of suburbs.

A significant exhibition of the work of Baltz and seven of his peers was held in Rochester, New York, in 1975: ‘New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape’.  Compared with the other photographers’ work, Baltz’s work ‘was the most stark, his subject matter the most ordinary: concrete walls, garages, vast industrial warehouses, metal fire escapes, anonymous buildings, an absence of people’.  Baltz produced a series of photobooks in the late 1960s and early 1970s that typified his minimalism. 

The publication in 1975 by the Leo Casteli gallery of Baltz’s ‘The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California’ ‘signalled the artist’s entry into the conceptual art world’.  In the late 1980s Baltz moved to Europe where his work was identified alongside the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher (see the entry in this blog of 6^th November 2014) and the Dusseldorf School.  The Bechers had been the only European photographers included in the ‘New Topographics’ exhibition of 1975.   Baltz was now working in colour, and making large-scale prints.  This led to a fascination with digital technology and its use in surveillance.  In 1992 the ‘Ronde de Nuit’ installation at the Pompidou Centre in Paris presented the subject of surveillance.

Baltz is recorded as having said: ‘I didn’t want to have a style.  I wanted (my work) to look as mute and as distant as to appear to be as objective as possible, but of course it’s not objective’.  O’Hagan observes that this is the essence of the power of Baltz’s work. 

ASKING THE UNANSWERABLE QUESTION: THE PROJECT OF HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL. GODFREY ON NEWMAN'S STATIONS OF THE CROSS

Asking the unanswerable question: the project of Holocaust memorial

Godfrey M. (2007). Barnett Newman’s ‘The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’, from Abstraction and the Holocaust. 

This is a personal summary of the article by Godfrey. M. (2007) ‘Barnett Newman’s The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’, from Abstraction and the Holocaust.  New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, pp51-77.

Godfrey shows that this series of fifteen works (‘The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’) by Newman was intended to compel the viewer to consider the question posed by the Holocaust: ‘Why did you forsake me?’

The compromised position of the post-Holocaust Jewish intellectual

In 1953 Morros Louis exhibited a series of paintings in Washington entitled ‘Charred Journal: Firewritten’. 

In 1954 Barnett Newman gave one of his paintings the title ‘White Fire I’.  Newman then painted three further ‘White Fire’ paintings, the last in 1968.  Godfrey asks whether these four paintings by Newman have a strong connection with each other and their titles in the manner of the Louis works.

Early analyses of the Louis works paid no attention to Jewish mythology but in the first account of the Newman works after that artist’s death, Thomas Hess described the Newman ‘White Fire’ series in terms of Kabbalistic texts.  Godfrey is sceptical of Hess’ ‘non-Greenbergian approach’ to Newman and his lack of depth of critical analysis.  In 1995 Newman’s widow - Annalee Newman  - asserted that although her late husband used Kabbalistic titles for some of his works, this was only for their poetic effect and had no deeper significance.

But Godfrey wants to explore further the titles of Newman’s four ‘White Fire’ works.  At the least, the titles show Newman’s identification with ‘Jewish religious and literary traditions’: this was a public statement by Newman who was also ready to assert himself in the public realm in ways other than art.  But a series of incidents in the 1960s show that Newman’s assertion of his Jewishness was ‘far from straightforward’.

In 1965 New York’s Jewish Museum held a symposium entitled ‘What about Jewish art?’  Prior to this event Newman had had a warm relationship with the museum, but three days after Newman attended the symposium he wrote a highly critical letter to its Director asserting that the symposium had compromised him as an artist because he was Jewish.  Newman then severed all ties with the museum. 

The notes for the speeches at the symposium indicate that all the speeches of those on the panel resisted the title of the symposium.  There is no record of any other aspect of the event. 

Godfrey writes that the symposium took place at a time when art historians and critics desired to ‘proclaim the category ‘Jewish art’’ as a response to the destruction of Jewish culture in the Second World War and subsequent claims that Jewish culture did not exist.  But Newman made the counter-claim – that Jewish art should not be specified as a category.  Godfrey writes that Newman feared ‘the risk of pigeon-holing his work’ within the ‘Jewish art category’.

Nevertheless, five years after Newman’s death his works were included in the 1975 exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum entitled ‘Jewish experience in the art of the Twentieth Century’.  The curator – Avram Kampf – wrote, of Newman’s work in the show: ‘if there were a Jewish art, Newman’s work would be regarded as its most authentic and classic expression’. 

Despite the episode with the New York Jewish Museum, Newman continued to show interest in Jewish culture by signing declarations in support of Jewish existence and identity in Israel and the USSR.   Throughout the late 1960s Newman continued to title his works with ‘Kabbalistic phrases such as ‘Voice of Fire’ (1967) and Biblical names such as ‘Jericho’ (1968-69)’. 

Godfrey asks what we are to make of Newman’s contradictory assertions. 

He writes that although Newman’s actions might be regarded as the ‘idiosyncratic behaviour of the strong minded and obstinate artist’, they should more accurately be understood as ‘the compromised position of the post-Holocaust Jewish intellectual’.  Godfrey sees that a series of conflicting impulses led Newman to swing backwards and forwards as he sought to maintain control of his identity: ‘”yes” to Jewish intellectual-artist-architect’; “yes” to scholar; “no” to maker of Jewish art’. 

The work of Newman as a ‘post-Holocaust Jewish subject’

We may therefore consider the artist Barnet Newman as a ‘post-Holocaust Jewish subject’ in the aftermath of war.

Godfrey writes that the Holocaust and Hiroshima would have been both too painful and too obvious to address explicitly by Newman and his contemporaries.   In 2002, at a symposium in Philadelphia, Benjamin Buchloh referred to Newman’s ‘skinny paintings’ of 1950: he advanced the view that Newman’s abstract style is an acknowledgement of the ‘impossibilities of lyric painting in the wake of the Holocaust’.   A number of sources lead Godfrey to suggest that Newman understood his works of the 1960s as his recollections about the impossibilities of painting during the War and the necessity to reject all styles in painting that pre-date the Holocaust.  But Godfrey acknowledges that this approach does not help us to distinguish the processes behind Newman’s works of the late 1940s such as ‘Onement’, from his works of the 1950s and 1960s. 

Godfrey argues that the titles that Newman gave to his works indicate that he was concerned with origins and ‘what it meant to begin art again after Auschwitz and Hiroshima’ (titles such as ‘Genesis’ and ‘The Beginning’) and he acknowledges that a further question needs to be asked about Newman: ‘Were all his works equivalent parts of this response?’ 

In particular, Godfrey asks whether the series ‘The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’ specifically addresses the meaning of the memory of the Holocaust?  This series of works by Newman was exhibited at the Guggenheim between April and June 1966.  Godfrey will show that this series is intended to compel the viewer to consider the question posed by the Holocaust: ‘Why did you forsake me?’

The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani

Godfrey then introduces this series of works that Newman painted between 1958 and 1966: it comprises a total of fifteen paintings, fourteen of which are six and a half feet high by five feet wide.  The fifteenth painting is slightly larger and is the only one that contains any colour: the previous fourteen are all done in black and white.

By 1961 four of the paintings had been completed, and in this year Newman is recorded to have come to understand what he was doing: that these were to be the first of a series of works, and the whole series would be entitled in such a way that it would have public significance. 

Godfrey describes these four paintings – ‘First Station’, ‘Second Station’, ‘Third Station’ and ‘Fourth Station’.  He observes that these paintings are ‘calibrated to the size of the (human) body’: each one of ‘around the breadth of an arm span’.  These four paintings do not contain Newman’s previous handling of colour, and instead they employ a limited palette of greys, blacks and raw canvas.  Newman is recorded as having stated that the white line in ‘Fourth Station’ was understood by him as ‘a cry’, and that the whole series would be the Passion of Christ.

Godfrey observes that Newman could have interpreted the cry as that of Adam or Abraham or the Psalmist, but Newman explicitly understood the cry to be the cry of Christ’s Passion.   Godfrey asserts that although Newman was not specific about his meaning, ‘through the title (of the series) Newman was able to partake in an established metaphor that had been used to address the suffering of Jews and other groups under Nazism for almost thirty years’.

Christological Symbolism and the Holocaust

Ziva Amishai-Maisels has written extensively on the subject in his Christological Symbolism of the Holocaust. 

In 1933 the German artist Otto Panok painted ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’  In this work Christ is painted with the features of the artist’s friend Karl Schwesig who had been assaulted by the SS in 1933 for being a Communist and actively anti-Fascist.  Later Panok painted Christ with explicitly Jewish features.  Artists employed the Crucifixion in order to engage with current events. 

At the liberation of the Nazi death camps one photographer’s composition has the outstretched arms of a corpse ‘spread vertically down the plane of the photograph, like a bright white band against a grey ground’ – an image that prompted the artist Harold Paris to continue to use the metaphor of the Passion of Christ.  It is not known if this photograph was known to Americans at the end of the War.  In 1945 Newman had written about ‘the photographs of the German atrocities’ and he had criticised surrealist artists for failing to respond to the Holocaust.

Chagall’s ‘White Crucifixion’ (1938) was widely known in the USA: it was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of 1946.  Some American critics did not acknowledge as significant   Chagall’s presentation of the crucified Christ surrounded by burning synagogues and scenes of destruction in the shtetl.  Most critics however, including Harold Rosenburg and Herbert Howarth, did understand the significance: ‘in the European Holocaust Jewry has undergone a new mass crucifixion’. 

American Jewish artists used Christological symbolism in the 1940s, and Amishai-Maisels writes that by the late 1950s this had become a mannerism, although its use continued in the early 1960s at the time of the Eichmann trial.

In the 1940s Christological symbolism for the Holocaust was also being used in the USA by writers: this was continuing in the early 1960s at the time of the Eichmann trial.  Eichmann referred to himself at his trial as Pontius Pilate.  Godfrey writes, quoting in part from Hannah Arendt in the New Yorker: ‘The Holocaust posed the unanswerable question of human suffering, and the idea of Christ’s Passion (the single moment when he posed that question), could be used to address the Holocaust’. 

Newman did not directly relate his ‘Stations of the Cross’ to the Holocaust, but in an interview in 1966 Newman spoke about his admiration for Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim altarpiece.  Newman stated that the Isenheim altarpiece is significant because the artist, who was making the altarpiece for a hospital for syphilitics, portrayed Christ as himself being syphilitic.  Newman seems to have been affirming the importance of the Christian narrative as a means of addressing the most pressing concern about human suffering in his own time. 

Newman also alluded to the scale of human suffering in the world in 1966, and he suggested that current suffering exceeded the suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross; the Holocaust was not specifically mentioned by him.  These comments were excised from the interview as presented in the public domain and no similar assertions were made when the ‘Stations of the Cross’ series was exhibited.  The ‘specificity’ of these comments was probably seen to be a greater problem than possible accusations of blasphemy.  When ‘Stations of the Cross’ was exhibited, statements tended instead to the universal. 

Asking the unanswerable question

20^th April 1966 was the opening date of ‘Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’ at the Guggenheim.

The question posed by Godfrey is: ‘How did the paintings themselves and their arrangement contribute to Newman’s ambition to make of his viewers the subjects ask “the unanswerable question”?’

The arrangement of the works in the gallery forced the viewer to be close to the paintings: this was Newman’s intention.  The person standing before the works would have been drawn to concentrate on the differences between the paintings and the methods of making them: ‘the intensity of process’.

In the catalogue statement Newman wrote that the series was not the ‘terrible walk’ of the Via Dolorosa, but the ‘question that has no answer’: not a series of events but the one event of Jesus Christ uttering ‘Lema’. 

But how could a series of works embody a single moment?

The successive arrangement would have meant that as the viewer moved from one work to the next, the two works most recently seen would be the reference point for the one about to be encountered.   Anticipation and memory between the various works would have held all of the works together at once in the viewer’s mind.

Prior to 1966 Newman had stated that to view one of his works enabled a person to have ‘a sense of their own scale’.   Newman had also asserted the distinctiveness of places.  Newman wrote: ‘Some places are more sacred than others, and that depends, it seems to me, on the quality of the work of art, on its uniqueness, on its rigor’. 

Godfrey asserts that the manner of display of the ‘Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’ in the Guggenheim and the appearance of the last six works in the series ‘confirmed the specific kind of place that this was: a place of loss’.  By the ‘Eighth Station’ the canvasses have lost the little drama and signs of process that the earliest works had.  Contrast is re-introduced in the ‘Twelfth Station’ and the ‘Thirteenth Station’ but the ‘Fourteenth Station’ ‘is an extraordinarily blank painting, emptied of the minimal incidents that might have engaged the viewer before.  Seen with the earlier ‘Stations’ in mind, its sparseness is more apparent still’. 

Some critics were fiercely opposed to the exhibition, describing it as empty rhetoric.  Newman answered the strongest criticism, accusing the critics of anti-Semitism.   But other criticism was perceptive, even if its effect was to undermine Newman’s work.  In the Herald Tribune Emily Genaur described her visit to the exhibition as ‘an adventure in emptiness’. 

The fifteenth painting is entitled ‘Be II’: it is slightly larger than the previous fourteen paintings and it is the only one that contains any colour.    At the Guggenheim it was installed apart from the preceding works: it was the ‘end point’.  ‘Be II’ is more than an arm-span wide: its centre is white and it has slender bands at each side edge: black to the left and cadmium red to the right.  Some critics saw this work as a cheerful resolution to the series.  Godfrey suggests that a better way of seeing ‘Be II’ is to regard it as ‘a kind of re-beginning, as a moment of confirmation or awareness’. 

Godfrey writes that in 1948, when Newman was working on his ‘Onement  I’ ‘when he first intuited that he had answered the challenge of “what to paint” in an adequate manner”, Newman was also working on a text entitled ‘The New Sense of Fate’.  This addressed the difference between the Ancient Greek artists’ attraction to beauty and their poets’ attraction to tragedy. 

Newman favoured the tragic approach for contemporary artists.  He contrasted the surrealists’ understanding of tragedy as terror with the tragedy that was disclosed in the Second World War – tragedy that has been made real.  Awareness was the key for Newman in distinguishing between the two types of tragedy, and for him awareness involves the gaining of both knowledge and a sense of responsibility.

Godfrey considers that ‘Be II’ exists to ‘produce a moment of awareness’ and that it may be intended to ‘point to the individual responsibility that the viewer may come to realise.  He sees the whole series of the fifteen works as having ‘a tragic theme’. 

By 1966 the awareness of responsibility for the Holocaust had evolved from the circumstances of 1948 when Newman first formulated his ideas.  In the mid 1960s this responsibility had become, amongst other things, ‘the responsibility to Be’: ‘the responsibility of continued life’.

Godfrey concludes that Newman had a moral purpose in ‘Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’: to make the viewer aware of their own responsibility. 

Godfrey writes: ‘the project of Holocaust memorial is not constructed as a project involving the acquisition of knowledge about history, nor the recollection of historical detail.  Holocaust memorial instead requires the subject’s repositioning of themselves with regard to the demands of memory’.

Modes of Jewish commemoration

Godfrey suggests that by placing the viewer before the metaphorical Crucifixion in order to induce in him/her the asking of the question that was demanded by the Holocaust in the mid-1960s, Newman might have been avoiding a specifically Jewish approach to Holocaust memory.   We know that Newman rejected the notion of ‘Jewish art’. 

Two modes of Jewish commemoration are advanced by Godfrey in order to understand Newman.  These modes are set out in the book Zachor by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. 

Yerushalmi describes to ways in which Jewish people responded to calamity during the Medieval period: by superimposing the ritual arising from a current disaster upon existing ritual that existed for the same purpose; and the way in which the person who has suffered recent calamity is invited to identify with those had had suffered calamity in a previous era.

Thus, argues Godfrey, Newman’s ‘Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’ employed the Crucifixion as a means of bringing that previous event into play to help to address a more recent calamity.  And by the progressive series of the fifteen paintings, and the manner in which they were shown at the Guggenheim, Newman provided a kind of ritual that enabled the viewer ‘to identify with the question imposed by the Nazi death camps’.  

ANSELM KIEFER AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY: A PERSONAL RESPONSE

Anselm Keifer at the Royal Academy: a personal response  

I visited the Keifer exhibition at the Royal Academy on 25^th November in the company of Andrew Baker.  I had summarised two reviews of the show on this blog but I had done no other preparation about Keifer before going to the Royal Academy.  

The war with Germany between 1939 and 1945 was a subtext to my growing up in late 1950s and 1960s suburban London, but with a maturing conscience and a teenage affinity with the anti-Vietnam war movement, interest in World War Two became increasingly distasteful for me.  It was a two week journey through Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine in early 2010 with an old friend and seasoned lone traveller east of Berlin that awakened in me a sense that in Central and Eastern Europe there is vital 20^th Century history and meaning for the 21^st Century that Western Europe has forgotten. 

Keifer confronts in his works the triumph, decay and legacy of Nazi Germany. 

The German Third Reich seems to be a subject that will not go away, and if anything, it gains in interest with every new European generation.  Keifer grew up in the ruins of Germany and he will not give up re-working the theme of Nazi Germany’s catastrophic hubris which he represents by destruction, dereliction and ruin.  But ‘ruin porn’ is everywhere to be found on the internet, so what’s different about Anselm Kiefer’s work?

For a start, there is an awful lot of it, and each piece is big. 

Many art works by Kiefer, whilst being paintings on the wall, are also assemblages and collages of raw materials.  Others are free-standing installations.  Kiefer’s history that he presents to us is visceral and relentless.  Many of the works in the show are weighty assemblages that include sand, lead, dead vegetable matter and other raw materials. 

The compositions are assured and the images are strong.  Keifer has developed personal symbolism and styles that lead the viewer into his world.  It is a disturbing journey. 

Is Keifer a great artist?  A cynic would say that his output is so prodigious that some of it must be good.  A small part of Keifer’s oeuvre is on show at Royal Academy: some is mediocre and mannered; mostly it speaks loudly of the monstrous folly of Hitler and his war, and its voice remains loud after leaving the gallery.

What does it all mean? 

In his review of the Kiefer exhibition, Martin A Ruehl, writing in Art & Christianity 80 (see this blog, 17^th November 2014) takes issue with the curator of the exhibition – Kathleen Soranio – who asserts that Kiefer’s work shows a link between the divine and the human.  Ruehl argues that there is no cosmology in Kiefer’s works and that Kiefer is Earth-bound and denies transcendence.  I agree with Ruehl in this.  There is no hope of redemption in Kiefer: no means of salvation for the German nation. 

In his review of the exhibition in The Guardian (see this blog, 26^th September 2014), Jonathan Jones concludes that Kiefer ‘provokes anger in order to dispel forgetfulness’ and that ‘only by dedicating his art to memory can an artist work with honour after Auschwitz’. 

Kiefer relentlessly presses his point – that all that Germany lived for and fought for in the mid Twentieth Century had no other intrinsic meaning than the substances that he uses to make the pieces of his art.