20 Jewish
artists of the 20th Century
A two week
stay in New York City in June 2015 to visit museums of art and the Jewish
Museum has led me to write up accounts of twenty Jewish artists of the 20th
Century. This is predominantly a
USA-centred list of Jewish artists. The
accounts of the following have already been published in this blog: Modigliani;
Epstein; Soutine; Chagall; Newman; and Guston.
The sources
are:
·
Paintings on display in the Jewish Museum, New York
·
Van Voolen. E.
50 Jewish Artists You Should Know. 2011. Prestel.
·
Harries. R. The Image of Christ in Modern Art. 2013.
Ashgate.
·
Other sources as acknowledged.
The artists
are listed chronologically by the date of a specific work produced by each artist. Thus, a Jewish history of the 20th
Century is also presented. The story that
is told also shows intimate interweaving between Jewish and Christian identity.
The stay in
New York City was made possible by sabbatical grants made to me by the Bishop
of Chichester, Ecclesiastical Insurance and St.Matthias Trust, and by the generous
understanding of my wife Kerry.
Amadeo Modigliani’s ‘The Jewess
(La Juive)’ of 1907-08 is reproduced in van Voolen’s ‘Fifty Jewish Artists
You Should Know’. Modigliani lived from
1884 to 1920.
The paper ‘The Faces of Modigliani:
Identity Politics under Fascism’ by Klein,
M. & Brown, E. (in Klein. M. (ed); Modigliani
beyond the myth. 2004; New York / New Haven Conn; Jewish Museum) shows that
Modigliani painted the ‘European tribe’ in a challenge to the monolithic
Christian perception of Europe.
Modigliani was born an Italian Sephardic Jew. When he was in Paris from 1906, Modigliani’s
origin distinguished him from Eastern European Jews. And to be Italian in Paris was to embody a
land that had been snubbed diplomatically as a backward nation at the dangerous
southern margin of European civilisation.
Modigliani was, however, from Livorno, in Tuscany, the birthplace of
Renaissance art, and this, together with his ‘aristocratic bearing’, gave him
an air of cultural authenticity in Paris.
Conversely, Modigliani’s success in Paris made him a celebrated artist
in Italy.
Characteristics of Modigliani’s
portrait style include: the influence of African sculpture; emphasis on
qualities of passivity and modesty; and styles of imagery that originate more
from Eastern Europe and the Orient than from Western Europe and which define
the ‘otherness’ of Modigliani’s subject matter.
In 1927 Giovanni Scheiwiller
produced the first Italian monograph on Modigliani: this is the origin of the
‘standard interpretation of Modigliani’s experience abroad’: of self-discovery
in Bohemian Paris; of Modigliani’s ‘italianita’ being revealed in the artist’s
elegance of style; and the ‘humility’ of his portraits of women being in the
line of the old masters’ depictions of the Madonna. Modigliani’s Jewishness was not mentioned by
Scheiwiller. Scheiwiller’s
‘interpretation’ of the decadence of Modigliani’s life and his restlessness is
‘displaced onto the contemporary Parisian environment’.
It was in 1929 that Lamberto
Vitali gave an account of Modigliani’s ‘racial qualities’: in Modigliani the
qualities of the Italian and the Jewish were combined and both were displayed
to good effect. But Vitali is writing
about himself and his own Italian Jewish identity as much as about Modigliani. Vitali was nevertheless the first Italian
critic to describe positive stereotypes of Jewish religion and culture: the
eroticism of Modigliani’s nudes was ‘transfigured into chaste emotion’; and
Modigliani’s sensuality drew on Judaism’s ancient worship of women ‘with the
most ancient and beautiful of hymns’. And Vitali found that Modigliani’s
draughtsmanship echoed that of the 14th Century Tuscan Christian
artist Simone Martini. Thus, Modigliani
embodied Jewish and Christian, and ancient and modern.
A powerful perception ‘that was
present in European fin-de-siècle Europe’ was that of the “wandering Jew”. It was held that the Jewish diaspora was
rootless and thus unable to develop a distinctive Jewish artistic culture. Moreover, it was held that this diaspora was
responsible for disseminating modernism.
Modigliani was understood and accepted as Italian because Jews had
‘lived on the peninsula for two thousand years’, but when ‘in exile’ in Paris,
Modigliani had become an émigré Jew as much as an Italian yearning for
home. The stereotypes of Jewishness were
applied to Modigliani and his life and death in Paris: he had assimilated the
modern art around him because Jews had no artistic culture of their own, and yet
as a Tuscan he had drawn on his Renaissance heritage, thus proving his
genius. The influential critic – and
advisor to Mussolini – Margherita Sarfatti – a Jew – argued that Zionism was a
threat to Italy and its Jews. Sarfatti
ignored Modigliani’s Jewishness and regarded him as having been an ambassador
of Tuscany abroad. It was held that
Modigliani had nothing in common with the works of his fellow Jews in Paris:
Marc Chagall, the abstractionist (see below), and the disturbing Chaim Soutine (see
below). Modigliani’s portraits were
received as modernist versions of the old masters. ‘Stereotypes of Jewish suffering’ merged with
‘Christian misericorda’. The narrative
of Modigliani’s life was given overt Christian symbolism: his time in Paris was
a ‘road to Calvary’; Modigliani was a ‘hermit of beauty’ who sought neither
fame nor disciples; ‘the diasporic Jew and the patriotic Italian came together
in this “martyr for art”’. Alberto
Savinio asserted that ‘the destiny of all “good” Jews is to relive the tragedy
of Christ – to be Christianised’.
In the 1930s the proponents of
Modigliani began to suffer under Fascism.
Even so, during the Second World War Modiglianis remained in private
collections and there is evidence that his work was not universally reviled by
the Fascists – because of his great international reputation.
Maurycy Minkowski’s ‘He Cast a Look and Went Mad’ of 1910, in
the Jewish Museum, New York, painted in Poland, shows young Talmudists –
contemporaries of Minkowski - who are contemplating the dilemma between faith
and secularism. Minkowski is included in
‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’.
His work of about 1910 ‘After the Pogrom’ is reproduced in the book:
this work is also in the Jewish Museum, New York. Minkowski (1881 – 1930) was born in Warsaw
and studied in Cracow. He witnessed
pogroms that took place in Bialystok after the attempted revolution in Russia
in 1905 and this led him to specialise in paintings that depicted Jewish life
in Poland. Minkowski had been deaf and
mute since the age of five years old.
The entry for Minkowski in ‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’
summarises the history of Christian persecution of Jews. It states: ‘Although the 18th
Century Enlightenment promoted equality for all humanity and ultimately led to
Jewish emancipation, its vitriolic critique of religion, especially the
supposedly backward and particularistic Judaism, created the roots of secular
anti-Semitism’. Specific circumstances
in the late 19th Century in the Jewish Pale of Settlement (in which
eastern Poland lay) that are stated to have created the circumstances for
pogroms are: continuing religious hatred; envy of the success of Jewish
entrepreneurs; revulsion at Jewish poverty and Jewish non-assimilation; and state-sponsored
anti-Jewish restrictions. In pogroms
‘Jewish property was destroyed, women raped, and hundreds of thousands of
people were brutally killed or forced to flee’.
Consequently, over 1.5 million Jewish people emigrated from Eastern
Europe to the USA in the late 19th and early 20th
Centuries.
Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Red Gaze’ of 1910 is reproduced in van
Voolen’s ‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’. Schoenberg (1874 – 1951) was both a composer
and a painter. He was born and
circumcised a Jew but was Baptised a Lutheran in 1898 in Vienna. His Jewish contemporary Gustav Mahler was
Baptised a Roman Catholic in 1897 in order to enter the Viennese musical world:
in contrast, Schoenberg was an outsider.
Schoenberg’s ‘Red Gaze’ is an Expressionist portrait: Kandinsky showed
this work in the Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich. Schoenberg was pursued by anti-Semitism in
Austria in the 1920s, and in 1923 he was made unwelcome at the Bauhaus due to
its anti-Semitism. He fled to Paris in
1933 where he reconverted to Judaism ‘though rejecting all official forms of
it, religious or national’. He arrived
in the USA on a Czech passport in 1933 and in 1944 he became a citizen of the
USA ‘changing musical history in the New World as he had in the Old’. In the early 20th Century Schoenberg
had experimented with abstraction in both music and art. He knew Sigmund Freud’s view that ‘Art
belongs to the subconscious’. Schoenberg
remained in America and resisted offers to return to Vienna or to go to
Israel. Van Voolen writes: ‘Many people
change and choose new identities – voluntarily or not. As Freud once commented about the Jews, one
has to be both an insider and an outsider to develop new visions. ‘Red Gaze’ and Schoenberg’s personal history
– shows that this sometimes hurts’.
Jacob Epstein’s sculpture ‘Risen Christ’ of
1917-1919 was Epstein’s first major work.
Epstein was born in New York’s Lower East Side in 1880; he died in 1959. His career as sculptor spans the period from
his move from New York to Paris in 1905 and throughout his subsequent residence
in the UK until his death in 1959.
Harries
writes that in his autobiography Epstein states that the New Testament and
Dostoevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ were his primary reading matter as a
young man. It is also known that in his
teenage years in New York City Epstein was encouraged by a Christian foundation
- referred to in the biography of Epstein by June Rose – as ‘the University
Settlement’. Harries writes that Epstein
was befriended in this Settlement by a Mrs Moore who encouraged him. Rose writes that Epstein did not mention this
in his autobiography, stating: ‘Epstein shabbily omitted the whole episode,
ashamed perhaps to admit how much he had been helped by the University
Settlement. Mrs Moore does not rate a
mention’.
In the sculpture
(ie. ‘Risen Christ’), Christ points to his wounded hand – said by Epstein to be
an accusation of the world’s ‘grossness, inhumanity, cruelty and
beastliness’. Epstein wrote ‘the Jew –
the Galilean – condemns our wars and warns us that “Shalom, Shalom” must still
be the watchword between man and man’.
Later in his life Epstein affirmed that the sculpture spoke of both
‘man’ and ‘the Son of Man’. Harries
writes about the controversial nature of Epstein’s sculptured figures in the UK
throughout the mid 20th Century: they were seen as simultaneously distorted, modern and mysterious; they ‘cleared away
sentimentality and concentrated on essentials’.
Harries describes how, when a work by Epstein was proposed for the new
Coventry Cathedral in 1954, the architect – Basil Spence – recorded that a
member of the committee established to commission the new cathedral initially
objected that Epstein was Jewish, Spence replied ‘So was Jesus Christ’.
In Chapter 6
of her book AngloModern: Painting and
Modernity in Britain and the United States (Ithaca, New York; Cornell
University Press; 2003) Janet Wolff
discusses ‘The “Jewish Mark” in English Painting: Cultural Identity and Modern
Art’. This chapter helps with
understanding of the perception of Jacob Epstein and his works in the UK during
his lifetime. Wolff writes that at the
start of the 20th Century Englishness was defined by that which it
was not: to be English was, among other things, to be not Jewish.
Wolff writes
- from Colls and Dodd - ‘Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920’ – that
‘the Jew was the archetypal Other’.
Working from Cheyette’s 1993 work - ‘Constructions of “the Jew” in
English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1875-1945’ – Wolff
asserts 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. Wolff writes that 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. On this Wolff concludes 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’. Wolff discusses three examples of Jewish
acceptance of this paradigm in the UK in the early 1920s. One example concerns Jacob Epstein: the
Jewish Chronicle described Jacob Epstein’s sculpture as “entirely Hebraic” at a
time when non-Jewish critics used this formula to serve anti-semitism.
Wolff
subsequently enquires into the ‘art-critical language employed of Jewish
artists in England in the 1910s’. She
considers the case of Epstein. Epstein’s
work was criticised for its ‘obscenity’ and its ‘uncompromising
anti-naturalism’. Elizabeth Barker has
shown 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 (referred to above), 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’.
Chaim Soutine’s ‘Carcass of Beef’ of about 1925 is reproduced in Van Voolen’s
‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’.
Soutine was born in Russia (now Belarus) in 1893; he died 1943.
Raymond Cogniat’s book ‘Soutine’ (Crown, New York;
1973) describes Soutine’s life and work.
Chaim Soutine was an ‘artiste maudit’: an artist who finds himself at
odds with his surroundings and yet who thrives in this marginal condition and
who thus comes to be representative of the era in which he lives. Chaim Soutine
was born in Smilovitchi – a small village near Minsk. From a young age Soutine believed he had an
artist’s vocation. At this time Soutine
befriended a young man named Kikoine. An
anecdote from this time tells of one or more people assaulting Soutine because
he had painted a portrait: in one version the assault is said to have been made
by the son of a rabbi who was angered that Soutine had defied the injunction
against representative painting in the Second Commandment. Soutine received compensation for his
injuries: this was partly given to his family and partly used by Soutine in
1910 to travel to Vilnius where he was accepted at the art school and where he
stayed for two years. Kikoine was also
at the school but in 1912 he left for Paris where Fauvism had originated six
years previously and Cubism was four years old.
Aspiring artists from Eastern, Central and Western Europe were arriving
in Paris to take advantage of the new opportunities. Soutine joined Kikoine, along with other
artists recently arrived including ‘Kremegne (another compatriot and friend),
Chagall, Fernand Leger, Robert Delaunay, and Blaise Cendrars, as well as
Laurens, Zadkine, and Archipenko. Soutine
spent much time in the Louvre. He
particularly studied Courbet’s The Burial
at Ornans which Cogniat describes as realism that exceeds visible
reality. He suggests that this – and
other works by Courbet - would have liberated Soutine. Rembrandt’s works in the Louvre were also a
revelation to Soutine: he ‘discovered (in Rembrandt) the constantly renewed,
shifting play of colours in relation to one another, and ….. the poignant
exploration and externalisation of the inner life’. Cogniat writes that another element to be
introduced at this point is to relate Soutine’s work not to French art but to
the German Expressionism of the time.
Cogniat argues that it is appropriate to attempt a
‘definition of a Jewish art style created to a large extent by the artists of
Central Europe, fortuitously congregated at this time in a flight from the
menace of ill-treatment and racial hatred that promised to grow worse’. Cogniat argues that a complete change
occurred with the start of the Twentieth Century and that Soutine was in the
vanguard. He writes: ‘Several artists
from Central Europe and Russia have introduced a very special note into the art
of our age, a feeling for the pathos of daily life, a latent despair, or even
simply a melancholy and a resignation, forms of Eastern fatalism expressed in
the choice of themes and style’. This
is a style, Cogniat writes, that delights in bold brushwork that results from
the artist’s ‘overstimulation … being held in check by the rules of an
aesthetic system’. Cogniat attributes
this style to the ‘state of mind resulting from political circumstances and the
climate of permanent anxiety in which the Jews of certain areas live’. In the early Twentieth Century the more
relaxed atmosphere of Western Europe stimulated Jewish artists to ‘give free
rein to the hitherto suppressed nostalgia to which they had become accustomed’.
In 1915 Soutine met the painter and sculptor Amadeo
Modigliani (see above), and the two of them became close friends – or more
accurately ‘companion hermits’, both living in ‘extreme poverty’. Soutine and Modigliani were drinking
companions, and temperamentally they were opposites: Modigliani’s extraversion,
his detachment, and his ‘controlled’ painting style contrasting with Soutine’s
introversion, his ‘hunted demeanour’ and his violent method of painting. ‘Alcoholism’ was a source of the conflict
between the two men, and yet Soutine received ‘daily nourishment’ from his
friendship with Modigliani. Modigliani
introduced Soutine to Zborowski – a Polish poet and art dealer. Zborowski and a small number of other patrons
assisted Soutine financially and by preventing Soutine destroying all of the
paintings that he was dissatisfied with.
Cogniat argues that other extant paintings from 1915 and 1916 show
Soutine’s immersion in anguish and misery.
Landscapes have a sense of impending doom; still lifes have a ‘despairing,
aggressive realism’.
In 1918 Soutine moved to the south of France. He was accompanied by Modigliani; Zborowski
enabled the move. The experience
precipitated in Soutine greater liberty and a more violent and intense
vision. Cogniat writes: ‘His art now
fully attained its apocalyptic character and became a suitable vehicle for the
painful revelation of its creator, who continued to live in materially
deplorable conditions …. increasingly harassed by his stomach troubles’. Cogniat concludes that Soutine’s works at
this time are an ‘affirmation of catastrophe couched in the form not of a
probable future but of a visible, present reality’.
In the period 1920 to 1927 Soutine experienced the
loss of Modigliani, who died in 1920, and a sudden upturn in his situation in
1922 when Dr Albert C Barnes of the USA purchased seventy five of Soutine’s
works from Zborowski. In 1927 Soutine
had his first one-man exhibition, in Paris.
In the late 1920 and early 1930s Soutine achieved
some stability through friendship with the Castaing family. Zborowski died in 1932. Cogniat writes that the carcasses of animals
that Soutine painted emerged from Soutine’s exposure to ritual sacrifices that
he witnessed as a child ‘with their atmosphere of religious terror’. In the latter part of his life – the late
1930s and early 1940s - the dominant red in Soutine’s earlier works gave way to
a dominant green in his portraits of trees, often shown battling against the
wind. In 1941 Soutine escaped from Nazi
Paris and, due to misunderstandings, was not able to reach the USA. He moved to Touraine in Vichy France in the
company of Marie-Berthe Aurenche. In
1943 surgery on Soutine’s stomach became essential, and on 8th
August 1943 he was operated on in Paris.
Soutine died the following day.
In his book ‘Hang Ups’, (BBC Books; 2005) Simon
Schama has a chapter on Soutine entitled Chaim
Soutine: Gut Feeling. Schama assert
the apparent central role that Soutine’s stomach pain played in his selection
of subjects to paint and in his style of painting. Soutine painted in an Expressionist manner,
and expressed not only his inner mind but also his whole afflicted body. Schama describes Soutine’s contradictory
approach to personal relationships: he argues that Soutine’s physical suffering
inspired him to achieve some of his greatest works, and that this affliction
was a controlling influence on his friendships.
Schama observes that dietary concerns are key to Jewish identity. Schama asserts that shtetl culture within the
Pale of Settlement of Soutine’s origin may well have been inhibited by the
Second Commandment against figurative depictions in art, but that city life in
the Pale of Settlement was different. Minsk
and Vilnius were centres of creativity that produced ‘an entire generation of
Jewish modernists, including El Lissistzky, Jacques Lipschitz and Marc Chagall,
so Soutine was not isolated in pursuing a painter’s life.
Schama
writes that Soutine’s ‘Expressionist landscapes’ painted at Ceret are ‘of
dumbfoundingly original power’. The
Tate Gallery’s ‘Landscape at Ceret (The Storm)’ is described as ‘one of the
most radical pictures’ of this time. The
patronage of Soutine by Albert Barnes from 1922 was a surprising phenomenon:
Soutine returned to Paris as ‘primitivist poster boy’. But Soutine remained the tortured ‘wild
man’.
In the mid to late 1920s Soutine returned to the
Masters whom he believed ‘had treated painting as a perpetually incomplete
creation’. He was particularly drawn to
Rembrandt’s obsession with the texture of paint in the late part of his
life. Schama describes Rembrandt as the
‘proto-patriarch of Expressionism’.
Soutine was especially drawn to Rembrandt’s slaughtered beasts:
‘profound meditations on the relationship between sacrifice and
redemption’. This was the impetus to
Soutine’s ‘slaughter’ paintings. Schama
asserts that Soutine’s attraction to ‘sacrifice and redemption’ was ultimately
religious. From his upbringing he would
have had understood Jewish and Christian traditions of sacrificial atonement:
as an Orthodox Jew, he would have been averse to the Christian amalgamation of
God and sacrifice. But Soutine’s
blood-filled carcasses are ‘adamantly unkosher’. Jewish ritual slaughter requires the draining
of blood, but Soutine painted dead creatures hanging inverted, so that the
blood would not drain. And there is a
hint of life, still, in these dead bodies: these paintings have an ‘element of
self-portraiture’. Schama considers
that these paintings of slaughter have the meaning only of Soutine’s personal
fate.
In the early 1940s, as Soutine’s death approached,
he had already come to the notice of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb in the
USA. In 1950 Soutine’s works were shown
for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: he had become ‘the
patriarch of gestural abstraction’.
Lesser Ury’s ‘Moses sees the Promised Land before his Death’ of 1927 – 28 is
reproduced in ‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’. Ury was born in 1861 and died in 1931. His work was included in an exhibition in
1901 at Basle that was organised by Martin Buber and the artist Ephraim Moses
Lilien, in conjunction with the Fifth Zionist Congress. Ury’s ‘Moses sees the Promised Land before
his Death’ typifies Jewish culture during the Weimar Republic: it is ‘both
authentic and modern’. Amidst
anti-Semitism in post World War One Germany, Martin Buber – Zionist philosopher
and writer – encouraged Jewish self-awareness and held up Scriptural figures
such as Moses as exemplars. In 1933, one
week before Hitler took power, the Berlin Jewish Museum exhibited ‘Moses sees
the Promised Land before his Death’ in its entrance hall, along with a
sculpture of David about to kill Goliath, and two paintings of prophets. Statues of Moses Mendelssohn and Abraham
Geiger celebrated two German Jewish pioneers of civil rights and liberal
Judaism. Van Voolen writes that soon,
German Jews came to see that the land of Germany that they loved would not have
a place for visionary and courageous Jews seeking to achieve justice and social
progress; instead the figure of Moses became a symbol of a new homeland to be
achieved elsewhere.
Max Weber’s ‘Still Life with Challah’ of the 1930s, in the Jewish Museum, New
York, was painted in New York: it is oil on canvas. The painting has its origins in still lifes
that Weber painted when he was in Paris from 1905 to 1908: he was an admirer of
Cezanne. Weber returned to New York in
1909. In 1913 Weber painted ‘Still Life,
Judaica’ which is an assemblage of ritual objects for the Sabbath. By 1919 Weber ‘had abandoned formal
experimentation and turned to Jewish subjects in pursuit of the spiritual’. Weber was born in 1881 and died in 1961.
Jacques Lipchitz’s sculpture ‘David and Goliath’ – a bronze – of 1933 is reproduced in
Van Voolen’s ‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’. Lipchitz lived from 1891 to 1973. Lipchitz moved from Lithuania (then Russia)
to Paris and was a contemporary there of Brancusi, Soutine, Modigliani, Rivera,
Picasso and Gris. In 1940 Lipchitz fled
to New York where he stayed for the rest of his life. Lipchitz’s sculpture of the 1930s and 1940s
has subject matter and titles that depict the situation in Europe. ‘David and Goliath’ has its genesis in
sketches begun by Lipchitz soon after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. Lipchitz responded to Israel’s 1948 War of
Independence by creating his sculpture Hagar (1948 and 1969). Lipchitz wanted to bear witness to Exodus
22:20 ‘do not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the
land of Egypt’. His concern is with the
fate of Palestinians. Van Voolen writes:
‘Hagar is considered the ancestor of the Arabs’. Lipchitz was buried in Israel.
Charlottte Salomon’s ‘Self portrait’ of
1940 is reproduced in Van Voolen’s ‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should
Know’. Salomon lived from 1917 to
1943. Salomon was born in Berlin: her
family life became increasingly circumscribed by restrictions imposed by the
Nazi authorities. After Kristallnacht (9th
/ 10th November 1938) Charlotte was sent to the relative safety of
life with her maternal grandparents in the south of France. It was extremely difficult for German Jews to
gain visas to leave their native country.
Whilst in France, Charlotte learned of suicides in her family: this led
her to paint her life story over a period of 18 months. The work is entitled ‘Life? Or Theatre?’ These 769 pieces – all numbered and all of
the same size – were subsequently given to Charlotte’s parents who survived in
the Netherlands. In 1943 Charlotte was
arrested and deported to Auschwitz with her husband – where they were both
killed.
Mark Rothko’s ‘Crucifixion’ of 1941-42 is oil on canvas. It was painted in the USA. This work is in the Jewish Museum, New York. This is a presentation of a crucifixion that
separates the upper and lower part of the painting by two crucified arms – one
above the other, one a right arm and the other a left arm – on which the hand
is pierced by a nail. Above the arms is
a semi-human form which comprises several human faces, with the open eyes as
the dominant features. Below the arms,
on the left are several human pairs of legs – some fleshed and other
skeletal. In the lower right side of the
painting there are two nailed feet, emerging as from out of a wooden box and
above them, in a separate wooden box, is a human fist. The background to the whole painting is
vertical red and white stripes. The
‘floor’ on which the assemblage stands is painted as red and white
stripes. In her book ‘The Rothko Book’
of 2006, (Tate Publications) Bonnie Clearwater writes that in the early 1940s
Rothko was interested in the symbolic content of ancient mythology, and the
potential of myths to achieve personal unification in the present day. He was concerned about fragmentation and
compartmentalism. Rothko wrote in his
‘The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art’ (probably written in 1940 / 41, discovered
and published in 2005) ‘we have religion to serve our souls, we have law to
serve our notions of temporal and property justice, we have science to qualify
the structural world of matter and energy, we have sociology to deal with human
conduct .... and we have psychology to deal with man’s subjectivity’. Clearwater writes that several of Rothko’s
paintings from the early 1940s ‘represent multiple crucifixions, with figures
that are fragmented and compartmentalised.
The architectural details provide a unifying structure to these scenes
of communal suffering’. Rothko was born in 1903 and died in 1970.
Felix Nussbaum’s ‘Self Portrait in Death Shroud (Group Portrait)’ of 1942 is
reproduced in Van Voolen’s ‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’. Nussbaum was born in 1904; he died in
1944. Nussbaum was born in Osnabruck in
Germany: he moved to Berlin in 1923. In
1933 he travelled to Rome. In Osnabruck
he experienced a pogrom and in Rome his studio caught fire. Nussbaum and his wife were arrested in 1944
and deported to Auschwitz where they were killed. Nussbaum’s paintings show the unsettling
uncertainties that Nussbaum lived with.
Marc Chagall’s ‘The Yellow Crucifixion’ of 1942 is reproduced in Van Voolen’s
‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’.
Chagall lived from 1887 to 1985.
In his book:
‘Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the masters in Chagall, Guston and
Kitaj’ (Legenda; 2009), Rosen writes incisively about Chagall’s purpose in
painting. Rosen’s account of Chagall is
summarised here.
Chagall was born in 1887 in Vitebsk – then in Russia and now in Belarus
– and in 1910 he moved to Paris. He
decided that his future as an artist lay in Paris and that it could not thrive
in Russia. Chagall observed that the
artistic tradition of his homeland was that of Christian icon painting, and
that while he valued this tradition and considered Christ ‘a great poet whose
poetical teaching had been forgotten by the modern world’, the Russian,
Christian tradition remained strange to him.
Rosen discusses ways in which some of Chagall’s works indicate the
artist’s alienation from the Christian artistic tradition. His ‘Pregnant Woman’ of 1913 can be read as
an irreverent observation on the immaculate conception of Jesus Christ. His
‘Abraham and the Three Angels’ of 1956 is a re-working of Rublev’s icon ‘The
Holy Trinity’ of 1410-1420: instead of presenting the angels of Genesis 18 as a
prefiguring of the Christian Trinity, Chagall has the angels with their backs
to the viewer. Rosen asks why Chagall
felt so comfortable in Western Europe where the Christian tradition in art is
also dominant. Rosen quotes Harshav, who
states that Chagall would have come to Western art in the same way as a
newcomer who encounters all periods of art history as parallel galleries in a
museum. This would have stimulated
Chagall’s creativity. In this setting,
for Chagall Christ is no longer Christ of the icons but Christ the ‘great
poet’. Thus, the New Testament and the
Western tradition of art become for Chagall a source of stories and symbols,
and in paintings with a New Testament setting Chagall introduces his own
life-story. In contrast, when Chagall
paints from the Old Testament, these external references are less common.
Rosen refers to research that has been done by Meyer Schapiro which
shows how, in some of his paintings of Old Testament subjects, Chagall has been
influenced in his compositions by the works of Rembrandt and Ribera. In his ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ of 1956 Chagall has
added a Hasidic Jew who points at Jacob.
This, states Rosen, is Chagall showing that Jacob’s dream is a
specifically Jewish story with promise of future blessings by the Lord for the
Jewish people. In Chagall’s ‘Promise to
Jerusalem’ of 1956, Chagall refers to the promise made to Israel by the Lord in
Isaiah 54: 7. For Chagall this would
have been an assertion of future hope for both the Jewish people after World
War Two and for himself as he mourned the death of his wife Bella. Thus, Rosen shows, Chagall finds ‘spiritual
teaching’ in the Christian Old Testament and ‘poetical teaching’ in the
Christian New Testament.
The crucifixion is the primary New Testament image that Chagall draws
on. Rosen will examine how Chagall
approaches the crucifixion before, during and after World War Two. Rosen refers to the novel by Chaim Potok: ‘My
Name is Asher Lev’. Asher Lev is a young
Hasidic Jew struggling to reconcile his ability to paint with his religious
upbringing. He takes tuition from a
secular Jew who instructs the young artist to study paintings of the
crucifixion in order to learn about composition and the handling of space. After a while Asher Lev protests that he
wants to see no more crucifixions, but his teacher challenges him with the
assertion that the history of art is predominantly a non-Jewish history, and
that this is exemplified by the crucifixion.
An artist must engage with the crucifixion if he or she is to be found
in the history of art. This would have
been particularly challenging for Chagall – a Jew originating in the Pale of
Settlement. In Chagall’s move away from
Russia he was assisted in meeting this challenge by being able to encounter the
Western artistic tradition in the galleries and museums of Paris. Chagall himself commented on this in 1931
when he stated that ‘Jews perform a kind of purging function’ in bringing to
birth ‘an age of free creators …. when people were people and not calculating
machines, and society immediately recognized the creators and not their
imitators’. Chagall understands himself
as a Jewish artist, not imitating the past but adopting it so that he may stand
alongside it as a family member. It is
only by being a member of the Western artistic family that Chagall may see and
understand his childhood and youth.
Chagall identified in particular with Rembrandt, whose ‘rich
emotionality’ and treatment of figures in his paintings resonated with Chagall
as he sought in Western Europe for understanding of his Jewish European
heritage. Rosen states that Rembrandt
also appealed to other Jewish artists – specifically Guston (see below) and R B
Kitaj (see below). Chagall also
identified with other artists from the Western tradition: Rosen will look at
Chagall’s post-war crucifixions in the light of the work of Matthias Grunewald
(c1475 – 1528).
Chagall’s ‘Dedicated to Christ’ of 1912 is one of his earliest masterpieces. From the writings of Chagall it is apparent
that the Christ figure is himself as a child and that the two figures standing
by the cross are Chagall’s parents. The
style is that of Paris in 1912, and specifically of the Orphism of Robert Delaunay. In this painting Chagall rejects the
Christian icons of his youth, subverts Christian doctrine and asserts his own
identity. In his own writings in 1977
Chagall asserted: ‘For me, Christ has always symbolised the true type of the
Jewish martyr. That is how I understood
him in 1908 when I used this figure for the first time […..] It was under the
influence of the pogroms. Then I painted
and drew him in pictures about ghettos, surrounded by Jewish troubles, by Jewish
mothers, running terrified with little children in their arms’. Rosen states that Jewish artists had
previously painted crucifixion scenes in response to persecution by Christians
– both as an indictment and as an appeal for justice. ‘Dedicated to Christ’ shows the twin poles of
Chagall’s painting of the crucifixion throughout his life: expression of his
Jewish identity, and as an appeal against persecution; Christ as the ‘great
poet’, and Christ as ‘the true type of the Jewish martyr’. Before World War Two the primary mode for
Chagall is as Christ the Jewish martyr with his paintings being appeals for
justice; after the war Chagall tends more towards Christ as poet.
In 1930 Chagall had not painted the crucifixion since ‘Dedicated to
Christ’, but in this year he travelled to Berlin and then to the south of
France ‘shaken by a premonition of Jewish catastrophe’: he painted his ‘Vision
of Christ on the Cross’. Chagall’s
‘White Crucifixion’ of 1938 includes scenes of attacks on Jews in Nazi
Germany. There is no-one watching at the
foot of the cross; the ladder for the deposition is burning; there is no hope
of redemption or resurrection. In 1944,
after he learned of the destruction of Vitebsk and of the scale of the Shoah,
Chagall painted ‘The Crucified’: in the snow, death pervades the shtetl as if
in an inversion of the Passover; bodes are attached to crosses and the artist
sits on a rooftop as the silent witness.
In 1941 Chagall and his wife Bella left France for the USA where they
settled in New York City. Chagall was a
double exile: from both Russia and France.
He kept the company of those who spoke French, Russian and Yiddish: his
English was only rudimentary. Chagall
came to understand the crucifixion as an expression of his personal alienation
and his helplessness as the events of the Shoah took place. In 1941 Chagall had produced a small
gouache: ‘Descent from the Cross’. This
is a deposition, but in place of the body of Christ is a body that is shown by
the inscription above the cross to be that of the artist himself. An angel gives to Chagall a palette and
brushes, granting him revival in his art and the possibility that in his art
there may be revival of the Jewish people.
The theme of the crucifixion was used by a number of Jewish artists
during World War Two to communicate Jewish suffering.
Chagall is unique in continuing to work to the theme of crucifixion
after the war. His triptych painted
between 1937 and 1952 – ‘Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation’ - shows
‘overlooked elements of hope in Matthias Grunewald’s ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ of
1515.
The original setting of the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ was an Anthonite
monastery that cared for sufferers of ‘the burning sickness’. Christ is shown as being ‘flayed and
pestiferous’: ‘made in the image of the ergotics who prayed to him’. Rosen writes that the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’,
which was ‘discovered’ at the start of the 20th Century, spoke to
contemporary viewers of current-day horrors.
He writes that Picasso’s meditation on the work assisted him in
achieving his ‘Guernica’ (1937).
Rosen writes that the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ ‘served artists as an
aesthetic model for coming to terms with the grisly images emerging from the
liberation of Nazi concentration camps’.
He writes that Sutherland’s ‘Crucifixion’ of 1946 is influenced by
images of emaciated corpses in death camps and that the iconography is that of
the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’.
Chagall worked with the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ in a manner that was more
profound: he uncovered its ‘underlying promise of redemption’. The altarpiece was a series of folding
panels. The crucifixion scene was
followed in sequence by glorious images of triumph, redemption and salvation in
Christ which would have been unfolded on feast days. In this way the afflicted worshippers were
given meaning and hope. It is this
succession of resurrection after crucifixion that is essential for Chagall
after the Shoah. The titles of the three
panels in Chagall’s ‘Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation’ evolved as Chagall
worked on the painting. ‘Resistance’
extols the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943.
The crucified Christ is surrounded by energetic figures, some of them
the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto, but a figure lies on the ground at the foot
of the cross – asleep or dead: it is the artist himself. In ‘Resurrection’ the body of Jesus is still,
surprisingly, attached to the cross but the resurrection is found in the figure
of Chagall, now alive and standing, and in the figure of John the Baptist, also
once again alive, and serving as the herald of the coming of Christ. ‘Liberation’ is a ‘flood of illumination’:
Jewish life is revived; there is no risen Christ: the Jewish people, by their
own efforts are revived. Chagall shows
that this revival will come through ‘the mortal hands of lovers, painters,
poets, and fiddlers’ and it is only in this panel that he shows himself
painting again.
Rosen describes how Chagall’s own writings show that his primary concern
in producing ‘Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation’, and in using the ‘Isenheim
Altarpiece’ as inspiration, is that of rapprochement with the people of
Germany. Despite the artistic and
cultural heritage of Germany, its people failed in their humanity. Hitler was an artist and yet he had pursued a
vision of death and destruction for Jews.
The descendants of the great Western European artists had eliminated the
Jewish people, and thus ‘the ashen air of the Shoah not only begrimed the
canvases of the Gemaldegalerie and the Alte Pinatothetek, its miasma hung over
the whole of Western Art’. Chagall’s
post-war crucifixions state that the artistic past is now both available to
Jews and a means of asserting a Jewish future.
Art history is to be the field of peace-making. Chagall has repainted the great German
masterpiece of the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’: he has asserted that he is both a
brother of Jews who died in the Shoah and the son of the German Grunewald.
Lasar Segall’s ‘Exodus’ of 1947 in the Jewish Museum, New York, is oil on
canvas. The Jewish Museum notes state
that it ‘uses the language of German Expressionism to underscore the dreadful
condition of a mass of people floating in a compressed yet undefined
space. Painted shortly after the end of
World War Two, Exodus is especially poignant, given Segall’s personal
migrations and the traumatic rupture in Jewish history caused by the
Holocaust’. Segall was born in Lithuania
in 1891; he moved to Germany in 1906 to study art, and in 1923 he emigrated to
Brazil; he died in 1957.
Ben Shahn’s ‘Sound in the Mulberry Tree’ of 1948 is reproduced in Van Voolen’s ‘Fifty
Jewish Artists You Should Know’. Shahn
was born in Russia (now Lithuania) in 1898; he died in 1969. Shahn moved to New York in 1906: he ‘adopted
left wing politics as his secular religion’.
Shahn was aware of Scriptural emphasis on social justice and he will
have known Jewish history. During World
War Two Shahn was aware of the Holocaust and he knew about Hiroshima. He was torn between Judaism’s universal
concern for humanity and the desire to protect and serve the Jewish community. Until the Holocaust, the Jewish nationalism
of Zionism seemed irrelevant to many Jews, but afterwards the proclamation of
the State of Israel in 1948 seemed appropriate. In his ‘Sound in the Mulberry Tree’ Shahn
painted Hebrew text which is being read by a girl. The text is 2 Samuel 5:24 ‘And when you hear
the sound of marching in the tops of the mulberry trees, then go into action
for the Lord will be going in front of you to attack the Philistine forces’.
Lee Krasner’s ‘Composition’ of 1949 is reproduced in Van Voolen’s ‘Fifty Jewish
Artists You Should Know’. Krasner lived
from 1908 to 1984. Her parents had
emigrated from Shpikov in Ukraine to New York before Lee was born. Between 1946 and 1950 Krasner produced her
‘first important abstract paintings’. ‘Composition’
of 1949 includes hieroglyphics devised by Krasner. Krasner spoke Russian, Yiddish and English as
she grew up, and she was interested in calligraphy. After the Holocaust, many non-observant Jews,
like Krasner, were attracted to expressions of Jewish continuity such as
language, alphabet, texts and the new Nation State of Israel. Krasner’s husband was Jackson Pollock.
Morris Louis’ ‘Untitled (Jewish Star)’ from the ‘Charred Journal Series’ of about
1951, in the Jewish Museum, New York was painted in the United States. It is magna on canvas. The museum notes state that the Charred
Journal Series comprises seven largely abstract paintings. These were created as a commentary on Nazi
book burnings. The museum notes state:
‘The blackened background is reminiscent of burnt paper, from which rise
letters, numbers, agitated swirls, and, in this example from the series, a
Jewish star. The artist described his
white letters and symbols as rising like ashes from the charred page; they may
also be seen as a metaphor for resistance and survival’.
Louis’
‘Charred Journal: Firewritten A’ of 1951 is reproduced in Van Voolen’s ‘Fifty
Jewish Artists You Should Know’. Louis
included his ‘Charred Journal Series’ in a solo exhibition in Washington in
1953. In answer to criticisms about the
monochrome nature of the works, Louis cited Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ in reply. Van Voolen writes that the title and use of
black pigments invokes not only the burned books but also of ‘the Jews in the
European crematoria, about which Americans were by then fully informed’. Louis’ earlier style had been Social Realist,
but he moved to abstraction because he considered it ‘the only appropriate
medium to express the haunting, unrepresentable reality of the Holocaust’. Van Voolen writes that the Charred Journal
Series’ evokes the legendary martyrdom of Rabbi Hannanyah ben Teradyon at the
time of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. The
Rabbi wrapped himself in a Torah scroll.
As he burned he said ‘I see the parchment burning but the letters are
flying to heaven’. Louis was born in
1912 and died in 1962.
Louise Nevelson’s ‘Homage to 6,000,000 (1)’ of 1964 is made of black painted
wood. It is reproduced in Van Voolen’s ‘Fifty
Jewish Artists You Should Know’.
Nevelson was born in 1899 in Pereiaslav near Kyiv. She emigrated as a child with her parents to
Maine, USA. Nevelson travelled widely
and practised in the visual and performance arts. Van Voolen writes that Nevelson’s ‘large and
dramatic sculptural environments .... beginning in the 1950s brought her
increasing international renown’.
‘Homage to 6,000,000 (1)’ is 5.5 metres wide and 0.3 metres high. Its
depth is 0.25metres. This is one of
Nevelson’s few works with a clear Jewish association. Van Voolen writes of this work: ‘It
impressively conveys this association with death and destruction. ...... In the sculpture’s presence, one is
immersed in a realm of shadows, forced to reflect on the essence of life and
death’. Louise Nevelson died in
1988.
Philip Guston’s ‘Paw’ of 1968 is an
early example of his ‘object drawings’ – his ‘making a golem’.
Chapter 2 of Rosen’s book:
‘Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the masters in Chagall, Guston and
Kitaj’ (2009; Legenda) concerns Guston and ‘the making of a golem’.
In the 1960s many of the New York
School of Art came to the end of their life: Pollock, Kline, Reinhardt, Newman (see
below) and Rothko (see above) all died between the years 1956 and 1970; none of
these had lived for more than sixty six years.
One wonders whether any of these artists would have painted in styles
other than abstract, had they lived longer.
It is Philip Guston who actually
moved from abstraction to figurative art between 1968 and his death in 1980. At the time critics reacted to Guston’s
espousal of figurative art as a traumatic surrender. Recently Guston’s change of style has been
seen as a triumph for the principle of the individual freedom of the artist. Guston’s figurative work is in the style of
‘emphasis on the common and the ordinary’: this style by Guston influenced
subsequent painters including Paul McCarthy and Jason Rhoades. At the time of Guston’s espousal of
figurative art he is recorded as having spoken about his early life and his
Jewish identity. Guston’s parents – Leib
and Rachel Goldstein - had fled pogroms in Odessa, Ukraine. Philip Guston – the youngest of seven – was
born in Montreal, Canada in 1913. In
1919 the family moved to Los Angeles: Philip Guston’s father worked as a
rubbish collector, and it is this kind of material that appears in Guston’s
figurative works. Lieb committed suicide
in 1924: Philip found the body; this may be the origin of ropes that appear in
Guston’s figurative works. During
Philip’s youth one of his brothers died from gangrene: this may be the origin
of severed limbs that appear in Guston’s figurative works. In the mid-1930s the surname Guston was
adopted by Philip in preference to his family name: this may have been an
attempt at distance from the traumas of youth but it may also have been to
impress the parents of his fiancée. In
retrospect, Philip Guston bitterly regretted his rejection of his Jewish
surname, particularly so after details of the Holocaust were published after
1945. Guston did not consciously seek to
present himself as a Gentile, but having established himself as Philip Guston
the artist, he could not re-name himself.
In the 1970s Guston explicitly
explored his Jewish identity, and he declared that he was attempting to ‘make a
golem’. Psalm 139:16 is the only
reference to ‘golem’ in Scripture; in the Talmud Adam is described as ‘golem’
before he is animated by the breath of God.
The sense is that golem means ‘amorphous, unformed matter’. The Medieval Kabbalistic tradition gave
methods for making golems from earth and water: this was a ‘ritual representing
an act of creation’ which gave insight into God’s creative power, and thus
ecstasy. By the 15th Century
a legend of a Golem had evolved: the creation of a man-like creature that had
destructive powers, the best-known having emerged in Prague. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (the ‘Maharel of
Prague’) had made a being and had animated it by placing into its mouth a
parchment on which was written the name of God.
The Golem was servant to its master, who controlled it by removing the
parchment on the Sabbath: on one occasion when this was not done the Golem grew
in size and wreaked havoc, potentially threatening the destruction of the
world. The Maharel of Prague managed to
remove the parchment, the golem returned to mud, and its remains were placed in
an attic in Prague where, according to legend, they remain. Rosen asserts that it is Rabbi Loew’s ‘autonomous
clay creation’ that inspired Guston. In
1965 Guston published an essay – ‘Faith, Hope, Impossibility’ – in which he
asserted his faith that it is ‘possible to make a living thing’: ‘to posit with
paint something living, something that changes each day’. Rosen argues that Guston’s ‘wager on making a
living thing’ out of paint is a ‘Faith located within Impossibility’. The dirt from which Guston works is ‘the
accumulation of art history’.
Rosen explores the path by which
Guston arrives at figurative work in the late 1960s: ‘Guston’s late dilemma’.
In the late 1940s Guston moved
from his figurative style to abstraction.
After touring Italy to view the Renaissance works he had previously only
known by reproductions, Guston began working in the early 1950s in a fully
abstract style: he was associated with the Abstract Expressionists. Rosen traces the course of Guston’s abstract
period through the ‘delicate cadmium red cross-hatchings’ of his ‘Zone’ of
1953-4, through the ‘lumpy duodenal shapes’ of ‘Fable 1’ of 1956-7, to Guston’s
‘dark paintings’ of the early 1960s which begin to show the ‘emergence of a
new, tactile language of things’, such as his ‘The Light’ of 1964 and his ‘New
Place’ of 1964.
In 1960 Guston had commented that
the notion that abstraction is pure and autonomous is wrong because painting,
by its nature, is ‘impure’, and its impurities ‘force painting’s
continuity’. Rosen asserts that this
statement by Guston was a provocation to the prevalent abstractionist aesthetic
that had been defined by Greenberg’s essay of 1955: ‘American-Type Painting’,
in which the artist should be engaged in a ‘process of self-purification’. Guston feared that, rather than achieving
purity and perfection, the process commended by Greenberg would lead to art
‘without any essence at all’.
In 1966 the Jewish Museum in New
York City exhibited a collection of Guston’s ‘dark paintings’: this confirmed
in Guston his desire to ‘go on and deal with concrete objects’. But the next two years were a time of crisis
for Guston. On the one hand Guston was
producing ‘pure drawings’: simple black brushstrokes on paper at the
conjunction of abstraction and the depiction of objects. On the other hand, in 1967 Guston produced a
drawing (‘Prague’) of a barred window that evoked imprisonment and the golem
legend. It is in the latter genre, which
Guston called his ‘object drawings’, that Guston’s golems would appear. Guston’s ‘pure drawings’ were gradually
supplanted by his evolution of his ‘object drawings’, which were Guston’s
re-establishment of his ‘faith in the figurative tradition’ – ‘solid forms in
an imagined space’.
Guston then came to develop his
own ‘visual alphabet’ which provided the content of his works: books, buildings
shoes etc. ‘Paw’ of 1968 is an early example:
its animalistic left hand, apparently drawing a line ‘the wrong way’ announced
that Guston’s second career as a figurative artist would be ‘clumsy, backwards,
even bestial’. Guston went on to cherish
the quality of awkwardness. Inspired by
Isaac Babel’s address to the Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, he sought to
‘paint badly’ so as to, as Corbett put it, ‘negotiate a path between the
imperatives of non-representational art on the one hand, and the tradition of
illusionistic painting on the other’.
Babel had said that writers in the Communist state had been given
everything by the party and the government ‘but have deprived us of one
privilege: that of writing badly’. Rosen
observes that Guston was seeking to escape from two illusions: the fantasy of
his own artistic past which no longer had any meaning for him, and the fantasy
of art’s path of the distant past that he could not allow himself to
believe. Thus he adopted the methods
that he admired in Renaissance painters, and he did so ‘badly’. Rosen asserts that, while Guston’s late
period works did not come to life in the manner of paintings that pre-dated
this time, by ‘breaking down the enchantments of illusionistic space’ - by
yielding to the urge to use ‘the stuff – the matter’ of paint, and to use it
badly - Guston achieved a reality in the objects that he depicted that brought
them to life as if they were a Golem. And
in his last years, as he adopted this method, he engaged in dialogue with the
Renaissance masters.
The concept of the golem lets
Guston engage with the past. Guston
could not believe in past artistic illusions: this may have been part of a
broken Jewish faith for Guston. Guston
was also preoccupied with his own parental roots in Odessa, but he could not
recreate any of these lost realms. In
the tradition, a golem was a means of drawing closer to God. For Guston there was neither irony nor piety
in his pursuit of ‘making a golem’: he was simply providing forms of paint
within the Jewish tradition that would capture the ‘breakdown of tradition’ and
leave ‘something to hold on to’.
Barnett Newman’s ‘Zim Zum II‘ of 1969/85 is a steel construction, coloured red which
is 0.5 metres wide, 0.3 metres high and 0.2 metres in depth. It is reproduced in Van Voolen’s ‘Fifty
Jewish Artists You Should Know’.
Newman was
born in 1905 to parents who had emigrated to New York from Russia (now
Poland). Newman gave his Abstract
Expressionist paintings titles from the Jewish mystical tradition such as
‘Onement’ and ‘The Name’: the title ‘Zim Zum’ comes from the same
tradition. Van Voolen writes ‘Jewish
monotheism prides itself on being abstract.
If God is completely abstract, how can he be engaged in creation? To this question, Jewish mysticism gives an
answer. According to 16th
Century Kabbalah, the world and humanity are not the result of a positive
creative act by God as described in the Book of Genesis, but a negative step of
withdrawal (zimzum), in which the
infinite God broke his wholeness to make room for a descending order of ten
divine spheres. The sixth of them – the
male aspect – created the world, whereas the tenth, its female counterpart,
accompanies mankind in it and enables man to ascend again to higher levels’. The process is called tikkun, literally meaning ‘the completion of an unfinished world
and repair of the original unity with God’.
Van Voolen writes that Newman understood the artist’s task to be in
parallel with God’s creative purposes.
Newman died
in 1970.
Godfrey. M., in his essay of 2007, ‘Barnett Newman’s The Stations of the
Cross: Lema Sabachthani’, from Abstraction
and the Holocaust. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press) 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?’
In 1953 Morris Louis (see above) 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 mysticism, 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’.
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 Museum in New York City 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?’
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’.
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.
20th 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’. 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 two 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’.
R B KItaj’s ‘Jewish School (Drawing a Golem)’ of 1980 is reproduced in Van
Voolen’s ‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’. R B Kitaj was born in Cleveland, USA in
1932. His mother – Jeanne Brooks - was a
Jew of Russian descent. Ronald Brooks
took the surname of his step father – Walter Kitaj, who was a Holocaust refugee
from Vienna. R B Kitaj studied art in
Vienna and then moved to London where he worked as an artist alongside Francis
Bacon and Lucian Freud. Van Voolen
writes that R B Kitaj ‘shares the guilt of postwar Anglo – Saxon Jews
“surviving” without ever being in danger’.
‘Jewish School (Drawing a Golem)’ shows a school room in which the
teacher has lost all control. The
painting is based on an anti-semitic illustration that R B KItaj had found: a
schoolchild in class drawing a Jew kneeling behind a pig – the Judensau of German anti-semitic
tradition. Instead, R B Kitaj has the
schoolboy drawing a golem. See Philip
Guston (above) on the background to the golem.
Van Voolen writes that the golem myth may be understood as symbolising
Jewish survival. But in the painting the
golem is coming to life and is a source of danger. Van Voolen writes that ‘no classroom, no
image, is innocent after Auschwitz’. R B
Kitaj died in 2007.
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