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.