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Jewish Art in the 20th Century

Antony Jolyon Hale. July 19, 2015

Contents

Synopsis Introduction page 2

1. The relationship between art and religion: a Christian standpoint page 3 2. The image of Christ in modern art page 7 3. Reflections on Jewish identity: in the Jewish Museum, New York City page 11 4. Reflections on Jewish identity: Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ page 12 5. The Holocaust (The Shoah) page 17 6. 20 Jewish artists of the 20th Century page 19 7. Is there Jewish art? Page 38 8. Mark Rothko page 47 9. Key themes page 55

Bibliography page 55 Appendix A: Overview of the main movements in Western art 1900-1960 page 56

Synopsis

The survival of the Jewish Diaspora, and the Jewish belief that ‘Jews are the memory of the nations’, gave to Jewish artists in the 20th Century a purpose and a meaning in painting. Jewish artists also acted as prophet and as peacemaker to the nations. Chagall is noteworthy in this respect.

Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust meant that many Jewish artists in the 20th Century were either displaced migrants learning to be American, or were imprisoned and put to death by Nazi Germany, or they found themselves compelled to witness to the Holocaust as it took place or to find meaning in the Holocaust subsequently. Newman in particular sought post-Holocaust meaning in the USA.

In the post Holocaust era, identity was the primary theme for Jewish artists, but because of the great displacement of populations that took place in the 20th Century, and the sense that ‘God is dead’, Jewish concerns about identity also spoke to all peoples.

We cannot say that Rothko’s mature style colour-field paintings were a direct specific response to the Holocaust. Rothko’s concern since at least the early 1930s had been the fragmentation that afflicted individuals and society as a whole. He wanted to achieve paintings that would be new ‘anecdotes of the spirit’ which would provide ‘resolution of an eternally familiar need’. With his mature style he was successful in this.

The Jew’s status as ‘outsider’ stimulated artistic creativity. The displacement and uncertainty about identity meant that the Jewish artist ‘had a great schooling in grief’. The creativity that was thus generated contributed fundamentally to 20th Century art. Particular Jewish artists in this regard were Epstein, Weber, Soutine, Chagall, Rothko, Guston, Newman and R B Kitaj.

At various points in the 20th Century Jewish art engaged directly with Christianity. Much of 20th Century art that used Christian iconography was too literal and too derivative to be effective. Notable artists who were effective in producing Christian art were Roualt, Spencer, Sutherland, Epstein and Chagall: the last two of these were Jewish.

Jewish artists of the late 20th Century challenged Christians. Bak is a Holocaust survivor artist who continues to do this. Since the Holocaust, Jew and Christian are both at ‘a corrupted place of our shared humanity that leaves us even more uneasy before the divine’.

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Introduction

This extended essay is about Jewish artists in the West in the 20th Century. The essay begins with two sections about Christian art in the 20th Century. Christianity was the dominant religious milieu in the West in the 20th Century. At various points in the essay Jewish art engages directly with Christianity and Christian art.

The motivation for the sabbatical was a life-long commitment to art – including my own work as an artist – and in particular the desire to understand more about 20th Century art in the Western tradition. As a priest of the Church of England and having travelled in Central and Eastern Europe in the last five years, I wanted to make connections between the Holocaust, émigré Jewish artists from the Pale of Settlement who settled in the USA in the 20th Century, the Jewish history of the 20th Century and the history of art in the 20th Century.

My introduction to the study of art history was with my teacher at Caterham School - John Bleach – who tutored me in 19th Century French and English painting and enabled me in 1974 to obtain A Level Fine Art at B grade.

An early prompting to pursue the history of Jewish 20th Century art arose when I visited the exhibition ‘Cross Purposes – Shock and Contemplation in Images of the Crucifixion’ at Mascalls Gallery, Kent in 2010 in the company of my father Ken Hale, who died at the age of 85 in 2013, and my mother Dorothy Hale, who is very much alive. This exhibition was a joint venture between Ben Uri, the London Jewish Museum of Art and Mascalls Gallery.

As a priest of the Church of England, part of my task is to read and teach the Bible, the greater part of which by length is the Jewish scriptures that comprise the Old Testament. After 27 years of ministry, I decided it was about time that I learned more about the Jewish roots of Christianity.

The life and work of Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970) particularly interests me. Rothko – a Jew - was born Markus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia – now Daugavpils, Latvia. He emigrated to the USA with his family at the age of ten. By the age of twenty two he had chosen an artist’s life and he had moved to New York City where he taught art to children at the Brooklyn Jewish Centre – a job he maintained for 27 years until he was 49 years old. At the age of 55 Rothko was chosen – along with three other artists – to represent the USA at the XXIX Venice Biennale. Rothko died at the age of 67. His works in the Tate Modern in London are housed in their own room. Since I first encountered these works in the 1970s when they were in the Tate Gallery, I have been aware of the power of Rothko’s mature colour-field style and the fact that it has a great public appeal and sells for huge sums. And the mature-style works by Rothko are regarded by many as having a ‘spiritual’ effect on the viewer. The large size, the mesmerising wall of single colour and the sensitive ‘flickering’ edges of the colour field – as well as the luminous appearance of the colour field – all attract the observer in contemplation as of a great and deep mystery. In my curiosity about the meanings of abstract art painted in the 20th Century, and about the ways in which the Holocaust is commemorated and presented in the visual arts, I wanted to know what connections exist between Rothko’s Jewish identity, the history of 20th Century art and Rothko’s reaction to the Holocaust.

This essay is one of the outcomes of a sabbatical that I took from mid May until mid August 2015. I was permitted by the Bishop of Chichester to step back from my usual occupation as Vicar of the parish church of All Saints, Crawley Down in the Diocese of Chichester so that I could pursue interests in art. Grants from the Bishop of Chichester, Ecclesiastical Insurance and St. Matthias Trust; the hospitality of the House of the Redeemer – retreat house of the Episcopal Church of the USA on East 95th Street; and the generous understanding of my wife Kerry enabled me to stay in New York City for two weeks so that I could visit museums of modern art and become acquainted with the city. New York City was the centre of 20th Century art from the early 1940s and throughout the post war era.

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During the three months of the sabbatical I also visited art galleries in the UK in Norwich, Cambridge and St.Ives.

My very helpful tutor since April 2014 has been Dr Aaron Rosen, of Kings College, London.

Since August 2014 I have been studying 20th Century art. My essays on the subject are on my blog: http://abstractartc20.blogspot.co.uk/

As a Christian priest I begin in Section 1 of the essay by summarising the first two Chapters of George Pattison’s book of 2009: ‘Crucifixions and Resurrections of the Image’. The book is a ‘Christian reflection on art and modernity’.

Section 2 reviews the image of Christ in modern art. This summarises parts of Richard Harries’ book: ‘The Image of Christ in Modern Art’. Harries is a retired Bishop of the Church of England.

Section 3 presents the first of two reflections on Jewish identity. This summarises a videotape that was playing at the Jewish Museum, New York when I visited in June 2015.

Section 4 is the second reflection on Jewish identity: a summary of aspects of Saul Bellow’s novel ‘Herzog’ that I read whilst in New York City.

Section 5 concerns the Holocaust (the Shoah).

Section 6 describes twenty Jewish artists of the 20th Century. Amongst other things this shows the close interweaving of Jewish identity in art with Christian iconography and Christian identity, before, during and after the Holocaust.

Section 7 reviews a preoccupation throughout the 20th Century: the question “Is there Jewish art?”

Section 8 considers the case of Mark Rothko. It asks whether his mature style colour field paintings were a direct response to the Holocaust. I take into account the contents of Clearwater’s ‘The Rothko Book’ (2006), Lopez- Remiro’s ‘Mark Rothko: Writings on Art’ (2006) and a lecture dated 11 June 2005 given by Christopher Rothko about Rothko’s ‘The Artist’s Reality’ (probably 1940-41). I also take into account the preceding sections of this essay. I conclude that Rothko’s mature style colour field paintings were not a direct response to the Holocaust. Rothko’s concern since at least the early 1930s had been the fragmentation that afflicted individuals and society as a whole. He wanted to achieve paintings that would be new ‘anecdotes of the spirit’ which would provide ‘resolution of an eternally familiar need’. With his mature style he was successful in this.

At the end of the essay key themes and directions of future study are identified.

1. The relationship between art and religion: a Christian standpoint

A summary of the first two Chapters of: George Pattison. ‘Crucifixions and Resurrections of the Image’. SCM. 2009.

The Context and Inheritance

Since the Romantic era (late 18th Century to mid 19th Century) art and religion have had a conflicted relationship. Art defines itself against imagined or actual constraints of religion but at the same time art has also sought a ‘spiritual dimension’. The second tendency has seen artists serving the church and at the same time it has seen art become a substitute for religion. These two tendencies are ambiguous: discernment can be difficult. Religion is alternately suspicious of art as a repository of the sensual and attracted to art as a vehicle for communication and evangelisation. The book does not seek to resolve these tensions. We live in a complex, pluralistic world today and there is no easy synthesis of meaning to be found.

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Individuals – whether artists or observers - are similarly conflicted, contradictory and multi-faceted. The book assumes that artists working today are not subject to a simple secular paradigm, but that modern and post-modern artists show ‘a shifting pattern of smaller or greater crucifixions and resurrections of the (image of humanity), often reflecting the ebb and flow of larger societal events in which the image (of humanity) finds itself at risk’. The book encompasses the 20th Century.

Pattison discusses the work of Schleiermacher (19th Century German theologian), Benjamin (Marxist philosopher) and Malraux (French man of letters). This is to provide a benchmark for understanding the relationship between art and religion in the modern and post-modern world. Schleiermacher held a view of the relationship between culture and religion that was popular in the 19th Century but which was rejected in the 20th Century. He held that the church’s highest purpose was to shape the nation’s artistic inheritance. This was in order to enable the individual person to express his or her most profound feelings. In the 20th Century this standpoint was rejected as the church being unacceptably identified with ‘official’ bourgeois culture. Today’s world inherits not only the shift of attitude away from Schleiermacher, but also the trauma of two world wars and the technologization of society.

Benjamin argued that in the mid 19th Century the increasing use of processes of reproduction and publication caused a paradigm shift in the world of the visual arts. All art forms are now produced with a view to the possibilities of mass reproduction and marketing. This changes our view of the arts in a pre-technological age and it means that any single work of art is less special than in a pre-technological age. A work of art has an aura, but this aura is easily lost. Even so, when a unique work of art is displayed – or when several such pieces are displayed in an exhibition, the display exploits the tension between the specialness of a work of art and its vulnerability to easy reproduction.

The modern concept of a museum was created in the 19th Century: it displays an understanding of history by presenting a series of unique artefacts, even though when these artefacts are seen out of their original context they lose much of their essential nature and meaning. Malraux argued that the invention of photography compromised the concept and value of a museum: everyone now has their own imaginary museum. Prior to photography many artists would have knowledge of a relatively small number of other artists’ works. Despite the present power of photography to communicate powerful images, there is still a passion for an encounter with ‘the real thing’.

A major art exhibition depends financially on sales of reproductions, catalogues and books: a paradox which gives rise to a tension that has characteristics of a religious experience.

Christianity significantly influenced the content of paintings in the pre-modern era. When such works are now part of a contemporary exhibition there is a tendency in reviews to evacuate Christian meaning from the works by asserting that works from the past reflected the values of the culture in which they were painted. Pattison argues that despite this tendency, the current situation is not totally opposed to spiritual meaning. Previous eras had their own forms of reproduction and mass marketing in a religious setting: relics were frequently ‘discovered’, with profits to be made from pilgrims, so the commercialised pattern of art exhibitions is not new. And previous eras’ paintings can still evoke a response of faith from the faithful today. And even when an individual who is sceptical about faith views an explicitly religious painting, the manner of its presentation and its uniqueness can evoke a deeper consideration of the power of the past, together with contemplation of uncertainties about present values and the nature of the stability that they appear to provide. Pattison concludes that a vestige of Schleiermacher’s purpose for the church remains today.

Art, Modernity and the Death of God.

The Second Commandment has long had an effect on Western culture that is deeper than the puritan’s hostility to images.

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The Second Commandment was broken at the outset, and, ever since, worshippers have found it difficult to worship that which is not represented. Battles in Christian history arising from iconoclasm show, after Nietzsche, that ‘the spilling of blood lies at the basis of all great cultural phenomena’. The iconoclast affirms the power of art

But iconoclastic controversies also have positive outcomes because they heighten cultural sensitivity about the way in which images of God function. And Christianity has shown that there is a limit to the extent to which the church will accommodate iconoclasm: the church needs to speak about Christ as the image of God; Genesis 1 tells us that humanity is made in God’s image.

The complexity of the Gospel’s portrayal of Christ poses its own challenge: the ‘image of God’ who was Christ was himself destroyed on the cross. The death of God is therefore a profoundly Christian theme but it is difficult to distinguish what is authentically Christian from what is secular or nihilistic.

Pattison presents the reality of the dead Christ as a mutilated cadaver and asks, after Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ (1869), Holbein’s ‘The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb’ (1522) and Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ (1864), whether the disciples of Christ would have lost their faith before the dead body.

Edouard Manet

Pattison extols Edouard Manet (1832 – 1883) as the originator of modern painting. Manet makes paintings that have abandoned the attempt to present an illusion of reality and instead makes paintings that are knowingly two-dimensional artefacts. Manet’s paintings are made so that they can stand alone. His works are statements of fact and they eschew sentiment. This emphasises the significance of Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’.

Pattison reviews Manet’s career and the role that Charles Baudelaire played in recognising Manet’s talent and encouraging him. Baudelaire saw as early as 1860 that Manet recognised the necessity of engaging with the ‘here and now’ of the present: ‘its fashions, its morals, its emotions’. He wrote that art must show the ‘quality of modernity’: ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’. Baudelaire also observed that the ‘uniform’ for men of the age was the ‘frock coat’ because ‘all of us are attending some funeral or other’. Thus, Manet’s ‘The Concert in the Tuileries’ of 1860 shows the hubbub of the crowds in the Tuilerie Gardens in the centre of Paris: a scene of jollity, shot through with death by the presence of the many men in funeral attire. The critics considered Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ to be ‘audacious bad taste’. Pattison considers other representations of corpses painted by Manet. He concludes that Manet approached death in a ‘matter of fact’ way: his corpses were only corpses; his everyday Parisian scene of promenading was attended by men on their way to a funeral.

Pattison considers Manet’s portraits: he considers that in the way in which Manet painted their eyes Manet has the ability to paint ‘metaphysical shock’: Tillich’s ‘shock of non-being’, which is the deep understanding in all people that ‘the possibility of death, extinction, oblivion’ is our constant companion’. In Baudelaire’s words: ‘modern man’ is no longer sustained by religion but is an ‘infinitely suffering being’ in the midst of the mundane modern urban world. Manet shows this by his depiction of death and by the ‘inner shock’ shown by the eyes in his portraits. Manet should not be understood as a ‘religious’ painter, but in his ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ Manet shows us – after Baudelaire – ‘the funeral we are all attending’. Manet therefore confronts modernity’s unspoken assumptions.

The Death of God’ is not a negation of Christianity and neither is it a death that closes a chapter. The ‘unbearable secularity’ of a world without God carries its own memory and grief for that which has been lost, and it is this which both sustains an awareness of God and provides a remedy for despair.

Pattison compares Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ with his ‘Olympia’ of 1865. The prostitute Olympia gazes back at the viewer.

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Pattison writes, after Sartre, that Olympia’s gaze conveys resentment and indignation: she has been handed over to an existence that denies her a ‘higher life’ of ‘beauty, truth, goodness or religious transformation’.

Pattison again considers the characters and plot dynamics in Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’. He concludes that comparison of Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ with his ‘Olympia’ is valid because Dostoevsky also uses contemplation of Holbein’s ‘The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb’ and a portrait of a ‘fallen woman’ to ‘mark out the metaphysical space within which the action moves’. Pattison concludes that Manet’s choice of these two subjects and his treatment of them in his two paintings ‘establishes a force-field of extraordinary metaphysical potential’. Through these two works the ‘Death of God’ is ‘obliquely reflected’. Manet’s presentation through his paintings of ‘statements of fact’ strips away any pretence that the divine can be visualised.

In the words of Simone Weil, Manet asks us to ‘refuse to believe in everything that is not God’.

Godlessness as an ‘indirect and ambiguous moment of encounter between faith and modernity’

Pattison then gives several examples of response to the Death of God in modern art ‘that we might also call a loss of belief in everything that is not God’.

He reviews the artists: Vilhelm Hammershoj (1864 – 1916); Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967); and Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987). These artists’ works show that the world is Godless, but they do so in a way that reminds us that the world is Godless and ‘not simply a neutral or value-free surface’.

We may either see Godlessness as a sign of complete secularization or as a way of presenting Christianity’s own narrative of the death of God on the cross. The latter mode is an ‘indirect and ambiguous moment of encounter between faith and modernity’.

Vilhelm Hammershoj was a Danish painter whose works are becoming better known outside his native country. His most frequently painted subject is the interior of his home in Copenhagen. Although the interiors are enclosed from outside, they are always lit by an unseen source within. These are works in which God is absent but in which signs of God are glimpsed.

Edward Hopper’s world has ‘pitted itself against the vastness of the North American continent and installed 24 hour a day lighting to keep its ancient darkness at bay’. The characters in his paintings are ‘living in a situation that exceeds their power of comprehension, and yet they know it’. He is painting Kierkegaard’s ‘anxiety and nothingness’. Pattison writes: ‘How could one depict nothingness? Perhaps by painting what there is to see in modern urban life – and nothing more’.

Like Edouard Manet, Andy Warhol was obsessed by death. Car crashes and the electric chair are part of his oeuvre. This, and other aspects of his works, was a presentation by Warhol of modern life being governed by death and no longer with a link to God who is the source of life.

Conclusion

Pattison concludes that ‘the god of death’ was successively ‘unmasked and critiqued’ throughout the Jewish scriptures and that the cross enacted the ‘final exposure’ because a god of death can only exist in concealment.

The Death of God theme in modern art likewise draws the god of death out of his hiding places within contemporary culture. Art shows that the gods that are worshipped today are ‘no-gods’. Even nihilistic art prompts us to consider what it is that ‘truly belongs to life and so to God who first truly begins to live when death begins to be undone’. Nihilism may in fact be iconoclasm.

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Christian theology asks of any work of art: “Does this work reveal death in such a way that it make us more powerless before the god of death, or does it help us name the god of death for what he is and so open up the possibility of the God who, through the cross, comes to us as the God of life and the living?”

2. The image of Christ in modern art

If it is true – after Schleiermacher, as described by Pattison – that the church still has a duty through art to enable individuals to engage with their soul and thus make a spiritual response, then Harries’ book ‘The Image of Christ in Modern Art’ may show how the church, working with artists, may fulfil this role.

In the introduction Harries discusses ‘four senses in which Christian faith might be said to relate to art’.

These are:

i. firstly, that ‘all genuine art has a spiritual dimension’; ii. secondly, that Christian art is art produced by Christian artists;

iii. thirdly, that Christian art is art that expresses or evokes certain characteristics associated with Christian faith; and

iv. fourthly, art which is ‘related in some way to traditional Christian iconography’ which may be the work of a painter of any faith or none.

Having chosen the fourth of these definitions as the one to which he will work, Harries writes that he is concerned with images of Christ painted from the first decade of the Twentieth Century until the date of the book’s publication in 2013. Harries will also consider paintings of characters who were associated with Christ or who ‘reflect him’.

Harries states that movements in art in the 20th Century have posed a direct challenge to art that engages with traditional Christian iconography, and that many works that use traditional Christian iconography in the 20th Century have been pastiche. He will consider the best of those works that are not pastiche.

The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985

Harries refers to an exhibition that was held in 1995 ‘The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985’. This showed ‘how many of the abstract expressionists brought a definite spiritual viewpoint to their work’ and he lists their sources as ‘Theosophy, Cabala, Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, Paracelsus, Madame Blavatsky, Zen, the Occult, Rosicrucianism, Swedenborg, Spiritualism and so on’. Harries concludes ‘this approach is outside the scope of (his) book’ and that his book is not concerned with ‘the concept of the spiritual in an even wider sense’, referring also to the book ‘100 Artists See God’ (ed. Baldersai and et al).

In the Aye Simon Reading Room at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York City I was able to look at the book ‘The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985’ ed. M Tuchman which is associated with the exhibition that Harries refers to. The book comprises seventeen illustrated essays and has the aim of showing the spiritual roots of the abstract art of the 20th Century. There is a glossary. The authors do not define ‘spiritual’ or ‘Christian’ or ‘Jewish’: there are no entries for these words in the glossary. In the foreword the editor makes clear that the occult and mysticism are his main interests. The editor presents the originators of abstraction as being Kandinsky, Kupka, Malevich and Mondrian, and he seeks to show in his book that each of these artists and many of their contemporaries were inspired by ‘mystical concepts’ and ‘esoteric thoughts’.

My primary concern is with Jewish identity in 20th Century art and secondarily with Christian identity in 20th Century art.

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It may be that Tuchman makes a good case for roots of 20th Century abstract art in the occult, mysticism and esoterica, but this is also outside the scope of this essay. Even so, I know as a parish priest that even those who most strongly profess a conventional, orthodox Christian faith are often also influenced by complex motivations that may include ‘unconventional’ or ‘unorthodox’ belief systems. Therefore the potentially unknown complexity of spiritual motivation of Jewish and Christian artists should not be discounted. Pattison observes that artists are as conflicted within themselves as society at large.

A simple definition of an artist as ‘Jewish’ or ‘Christian’ may therefore fail to do justice to human complexity.

The Break

In Chapter One of his book (entitled ‘The Break’) Harries discusses the awareness in the 20th Century that ‘the dominant cultural and religious ideology that had unified Europe for more than one thousand years no longer existed’, and that the arts had been marginalised by technology. Although the Nineteenth Century may be understood to have been the era in which this fundamental change occurred, others see the break occurring as far back as the Enlightenment (the 17th and 18th Centuries). Harries states that in 1935 Anthony Blunt wrote that for about 100 years ‘the great difficulty which has faced religious artists in Europe .... is that our natural tradition for expressing religious feeling is utterly used up and dead’.

Three questions

The question posed by Harries is: ‘How could artists who wanted to be fully of their own time and who also wanted to relate to traditional Christian themes, do this whilst retaining their integrity?’

Harries poses a further question which is enduring, which is how the invisible may be made visible in art. He rehearses the Islamic and Jewish prohibitions ‘in most ages’ against making images of God, and he celebrates the ways in which traditional Islamic mosque decoration conveys an overwhelming sense of the transcendence of God. He affirms that the Christian task is also to celebrate this transcendence whilst simultaneously using iconic art to convey the fact that the invisible has been made visible.

A further question is then put by Harries: that Christ’s humanity was authentically human and was therefore unremarkable, and indistinguishable from humanity at large. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition this was solved by establishing the codified style and tradition of icons.

Irony

It may be argued that despite the varied styles of the Western tradition, none succeeds unless the hidden human figure of Christ ‘makes a difference to what we see and how we see not only him but life itself’. Harries states that the element of irony has been identified by Rowan Williams as one way in which this truth may be stated in art. Thus, irony in a work of art can show ‘that the change associated with Jesus is incapable of representation’, but that ‘for the change to be communicable it must in some way be represented’. Without irony Christian art becomes banal. 19th Century art had Jesus ‘robed, calm and stately’, which is the opposite of ‘being transforming’: it fosters a casual reinforcement of shared piety, but it cannot bring about the reference-changing character of Jesus’.

The twin tyrannies of literalness and pastiche

Harries concludes that modern Christian art has sought to be set free from the twin tyrannies of literalness and pastiche.

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Harries’ review of the artists who engaged in the 20th Century with traditional Christian iconography in a way that is neither pastiche nor literal, and which may involve irony, begins with the German Expressionists (Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Jacob Epstein and Georges Roualt).

His subsequent chapters cover the work of Marc Chagall, Cecil Collins, Stanley Spencer, Leon Underwood, Eric Gill, David Jones, Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Ceri Richards and Henry Moore.

Harries writes that the theologian Paul Tillich asserted in 1964 that there are two forms of art that cannot serve Christianity: naturalism (ie. landscape) and ‘purely abstract art’. Tillich expected ‘some figurative expression’ to fulfil the need to ‘make visible the invisible’ and go show the transformational nature of the human figure of Christ’. Tillich favoured Expressionism. Harries states that this derived from Tillich’s experience as a chaplain in World War One, in which he saw ‘the alienation of humanity from its true being’. Tillich valued the work of the German Expressionists as antecedents of expressionist works painted in the mid 20th Century. Tillich is stated to have regarded Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece as ‘the greatest German picture ever painted’. Harries writes that critics of Tillich assert that his world view was too constricted by his familiarity with the art galleries of Berlin and with the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

I will summarise those artists that I consider the most significant for the purpose of this extended essay and I will introduce comment that I will take from other sources.

Jacob Epstein

Epstein (1880 – 1959) is noteworthy because he was Jewish. Harries writes at length about Epstein. He writes about the controversial nature of his 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’.

In Chapter 6 of her book ‘AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States’, 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.

A full account of Epstein in Harries and in Wolff is given below in Section 6 below.

Georges Roault

Roault (1871 - 1958) is commended by Harries for his finding Christ in the most marginal people.

Roualt said: ‘Behind the eyes of the most hostile, ungrateful or impure being dwells Jesus’. And he understood how a clown’s mask of gaiety represents the facade that all people wear. Roualt wrote that, when painting, he preferred to represent the harsh realities of human suffering – and he believed that ‘to call a work “sacred art” is not enough to invest it with religious significance’.

Marc Chagall

Harries describes Chagall (1887 - 1985) from a Christian standpoint. This differs from the perspective taken by Rosen, as summarised in Section 6 below.

For Harries, Chagall had a life-long affinity with Christianity. Harries shows how Chagall ‘began combing Jewish and Christian iconography early in his career’ but Harries does not show the subtlety and discernment about Chagall’s treatment of Old and New Testament that Harshaw shows, as referred to by Rosen. Harries rapidly moves to Chagall’s crucifixions as both evidence of Chagall’s Christian affinity and of the significance of Chagall uniting Christian and Jew.

In Rosen’s book: ‘Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the masters in Chagall, Guston and Kitaj’, Rosen writes incisively about Chagall’s purpose in painting.

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He does this in a way that shows Harries’ approach to be relatively superficial. Rosen’s account of Chagall is summarised below in Section 6 below.

Stanley Spencer

Harries asserts that the paintings of Spencer (1891 - 1959) fully meet the criteria that he has set out:

a) the artist’s authentic voice speaking clearly in the modern age;

b) a transformed understanding and presentation of New Testament scenes;

c) presentation of a vision of reality that is transformed by love in Christ;

d) celebrating transcendence whilst simultaneously using iconic art to convey the fact that the invisible has been made visible; and

e) art that has been set free from the twin tyrannies of literalness and pastiche.

Harries particularly celebrates Spencer’s ‘Christ in the Wilderness: the Scorpion’ of 1939: Christ holds a scorpion in his hand and contemplates the creature. This work is remarkable because of the fear induced by a scorpion. Harries reminds us of Luke 11: 11-12 (‘Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’) Harries also draws our attention to Ezekiel 2: 6 and Luke 10: 19 in which the Son of Man and the disciples will sit and tread safely among scorpions.

In the painting Jesus gently holds the scorpion and he is not afraid. This is the reverse of the disharmony in nature that was brought about by Adam.

And more than this: the vocation of the Son of Man is to die, and in the wilderness Jesus Christ accepts this vocation.

Graham Sutherland

Harries writes about the mood in Britain in the 1930s. The revival in the visual arts in Britain is described by Alexandra Harris in her book ‘Romantic Moderns’ of 2010. Harries states that Eliot’s poem ‘The Four Quartets’ expresses the era. When writing about Sutherland (1903 - 1980) and Piper (1903 - 1992), Harries describes them as two artists who established themselves before World War Two but who became more widely known after the war due to church commissions.

Harries describes the British post-war mood which lasted until the late 1950s, in which there was a growing and widespread acceptance of Christian faith until the early 1960s. Salvador Dali’s ‘Christ of St.John of the Cross’ of 1951 is described as having been in the possession – in reproduction – in the home of ‘every other devout Christian’. (It was hanging on the wall of the vestry of the parish church in south east England at which I was a choir member in the mid 1960s). The rebuilding of churches was an expression of this renewed national faith, and this led to commissions for Chagall (see Section 6 below), Epstein (see Section 6 below), Sutherland and Piper.

During World War Two Sutherland was invited by Walter Hussey (then Vicar of St.Matthew’s parish church, Northampton, subsequently Dean of Chichester Cathedral) to produce a crucifixion painting. Harries states that from 1944 until 1946 Sutherland painted images of thorns. In 1946 he began to paint a crucifixion ‘inspired by ..... photographs of the terribly emaciated bodies of people released from Belsen. They reminded him of the body of Christ on the cross painted by Grunewald for the Isenheim Altarpiece’. The resulting work is Sutherland’s ‘The Crucifixion’ of 1946. Harries states that this painting was immediately regarded as a success.

He writes that Sutherland went on to ‘mine its artistic possibilities and produced a number of crucifixions, experimenting with different forms’.

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3. Reflections on Jewish identity: in the Jewish Museum, New York City

On 13th June 2015 in the Jewish Museum, New York City – in the Milstein Family Gallery - I came across an audio-visual presentation in which rabbis, poets, writers, scholars, children and a psychotherapists spoke about their Jewish identity. I made notes and these are reproduced below.

a) “Jews learned to live in exile without concrete elements of sovereignty such as an army. Jews created a verbal environment as their concrete environment”.

b) “I am from Jerusalem but because Titus destroyed the Temple I am from Poland”.

c) “Jerusalem became an abstract place, and so Jerusalem lives in the Jewish heart as part of the Jews’ story. A Jew who lives in Jerusalem finds it a great privilege – and very demanding – I mean compulsory service in the army”.

d) “There is difficulty for Jews from different cultures coming together in modern Israel: Bukharan, Ashkenazi and Yemeni Jews”.

e) “The Diaspora is here to stay. Jewish survival is not despite the Diaspora but because of it”.

f) “The family dining table replaces the Temple altar that was destroyed: it infused Jewish life throughout the Diaspora”.

g) “The Talmudic tradition is one of writing poetry from poetry that’s already there – that is, the Law. The Law is poetry: it infuses your life”.

h) “Jews reach out for community and at the same time they find it hard to be in community. But there are always nine Jews looking for the tenth, and there is always one Jew looking for the other nine”.

i) “I am a Jew without any God in my life”.

j) “What use is it to be a Jew and not to know your history?”

k) “At the time of crossing the Red Sea, each tribe crossed separately through their own path through the water, with water on either side of each tribe, but all the tribes could see each other through the waters that divided them. It’s a parable of unity.”

l) “I am an elderly Jew from Galicia. Before the First World War I knew about Jerusalem before In knew about Lemberg”.

m) “Every writer is a Jew. There is something Jewish in the belief that we have to decode the world and create our own rules for survival; and in writing our memory we give significance to the past”.

n) “Maybe there is a Covenant. The left brain doesn’t accept it, but the right brain does.”

o) “God is the God of our ancestors, but there is no guarantee that the Covenant will continue”.

p) “In the Creation story the waters were separated but rules were broken and the Flood resulted. After that a Covenant was made – this is the first use of this word in the Bible – and that meant that there was once again a separation of the water; so there is to be some order in the madness; Earthlings won’t be smashed completely by God – but you are never secure before God – and that is very significant. God smashed us in the Holocaust.”

q) “The Christian empire tried to destroy us for two thousand years, but we survived.”

r) “We are spread among the nations and we are the memory of the nations.”

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4. Reflections on Jewish identity: Bellow’s ‘Herzog’

During my two week stay in New York City I was reading Saul Bellow’s novel ‘Herzog’. I am not well-read; the only other American novel that I have read is Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch 22’.

I had read a review of the recently published biography of Bellow (Zachary Leader’s ‘The Life of Saul Bellow – to Fame and Fortune, 1915 – 1964’) and in a bookshop I chose Bellow’s ‘Herzog’. I began to read it sitting on a bench in Central Park as I walked uptown to my lodgings. I read it slowly throughout my two week stay, and I finished the book on my homeward flight.

The experience of reading ‘Herzog’ was greatly rewarding: it was an integral part of my living in Manhattan.

Bellow’s ‘Herzog’

Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ was first published in 1964. This was one year before the New York Jewish Museum held an exhibition entitled ‘What about Jewish art?’ and two years before the publication of Harold Rosenberg’s essay “Is there a Jewish art?” In 1964 Newman was working on his ‘Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’ and they would be exhibited in 1966. Six years previously – in 1958 – Rothko had accepted the commission to paint murals for the Four Seasons Restaurant, and a year later, in 1959, he withdrew from the project.

As I walked Manhattan, rode the subway and took the Penn Station train, I had as companions Moses Elkanah Herzog and Marcus Rothkowitz.

This is a summary of aspects of ‘Herzog’ that speak of the Jewish identity of Moses Herzog and the author – Saul Bellow. I have not read on the subject of either Bellow or Herzog, other than a review of Leader’s biography. What follows is my own observation and speculation.

The story is set mainly in and around New York City, Massachusetts and in Chicago.

Moses Elkanah Herzog has found that he has been a made a fool by his neighbour and friend Valentine Gersbach. Moses had persuaded Gersbach and his wife Phoebe (and son Ephraim) that they should move to Chicago, at the same time that Herzog and his wife Madeleine (and daughter June) made the move to that city. But now Herzog has discovered – through his old friend Luke Asphalter - that Valentine and Madeleine are lovers.

Moses Elkanah Herzog

We are told that Herzog has a genteel, Yiddish accent. He ‘loves his relatives quite openly and even helplessly’. He wonders if this might be ‘tribal – associated with ancestor worship and totemism’. He is a ‘big-city Jew’ who is ‘peculiarly devoted to country life’.

He ‘was half elegant, half slovenly. If he knotted his tie with care, his shoelaces dragged …. Once it had perhaps been his boyish defiance, but by now it was an established part of the daily comedy of Moses E Herzog’.

Moses is troubled that his lover – the Argentinan Ramona – ‘does not recognize him as an American. She says: ‘You’re not a true, puritanical American. You have a talent for sensuality. Your mouth gives you away’. Herzog asks himself ‘what else was he?’ In the Services ’his mates had also considered him a foreigner’. No matter how well he could show he knew Chicago, he was suspected of being a spy. But ‘he believed his American credentials were in good order’.

On one occasion Herzog muses on ‘the philosophy of this generation’. ‘God is dead – that point was passed long ago. Perhaps it should be stated Death is God. This generation thinks – and this is his thought of thoughts – that nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have any true power. Death waits for these things as a cement floor waits for a dropping light bulb’. ‘You think history is the history of loving hearts? You fool! Look at these millions of dead.

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Can you pity them, feel for them? You can nothing! There were too many. We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers. History is the history of cruelty, not love, as soft men think’. ‘If the old God exists he must be a murderer. But the one true God is Death. This is how it is – without cowardly illusions’.

Madeleine Herzog

Madeleine was Jewish but she had converted to be a Roman Catholic when she and Herzog met. Soon after they married, Herzog resigned his position as Professor and they moved to the country – the Berkshires in Massachusetts, where Herzog planned to write an incisive history of the 20th Century. But after a year or so Madeleine resented being out in the sticks and Herzog was struggling with his writing. The move to Chicago – where Herzog had grown up – was made, but the house in the Berkshires was not sold. After a year Madeleine asked for a divorce. Herzog ‘had to give it, what could he do?’ Madeleine tells Herzog that he is insane.

When Herzog talks with his psychiatrist Edvig, Herzog expresses the view that Madeleine has the Christian view that ‘we have to recover from some poison, need saving, ransoming’. At this time Madeleine was studying for a PhD in Russian religious history. Herzog’s reaction to this, when speaking to Gersbach – Madeleine’s lover – is to say, of Madeleine’s Russian books: ‘She’s built a wall of Russian books around herself .... It’s not enough they persecuted my ancestors!’ Lately, Madeleine has lapsed from Roman Catholicism: ‘culture – ideas – had taken the place of the Church in Madeleine’s heart’.

Herzog travels to Europe for respite. He returns to Chicago to arrange to live in New York City. Madeleine considers Herzog’s behaviour ‘so strange and to her mind so menacing that she warned him through Gersbach not to come near the house on Harper Avenue. The police had a picture of him and would arrest him if he was seen in the block’.

Herzog’s first wife Daisy, and his lover Ramona

We learn about Herzog’s first wife Daisy (‘a country girl’ and ‘a conventional Jewish woman’) with whom he has a son Marco.

Ramona is his lover now: she lives in the West Side and owns a flower shop on Lexington Avenue. She is Argentinian and in her late 30s. Writing to himself about Ramona (‘a true sack artist’), Herzog states: ‘Do I see myself to be after long blundering an unrecognized son of Sodom and Dionysius – an Orphic type? (Ramona enjoyed speaking of Orphic types). A petit-bourgeois Dionysian. He noted: Foo to all those categories’.

Herzog’s letters

In his current anguish Herzog writes letters to people in the public eye, to friends, to himself and to members of his family. These letters lay bare his neuroses. They are never sent.

One such letter is addressed to the New York Times. It concerns the risk to human health from atmospheric nuclear fallout. Herzog is a sceptic: ‘People greatly respected in their generation often turn out to be dangerous lunatics’. He reminds the editor of the newspaper that Mr. Truman, concerning Hiroshima, ‘calls people Bleeding Hearts when they question his Hiroshima decision’. Since Hiroshima ‘life in civilised countries (because they survive through a balance of terror) stands upon a foundation of risk’. He asserts ‘Ours is a bourgeois civilization. I am not using this term in the Marxian sense. In the vocabularies of modern art and religion it is bourgeois to consider that the universe was made for our safe use and to give us comfort, ease and support ....... De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can’t be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse .....

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Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlours of indignation the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil’.

Herzog’s family

We meet other associates of Moses Elkanah Herzog, and we learn about and meet his wider family including his sister Helen, and his brothers Alexander (‘Shura’) and Willie.

We meet Herzog’s aunt Zelda, who lives out in the suburbs, with whom he discusses his divorce. Zelda is the wife of Uncle Herman – Herzog’s psychiatrist. Herzog’s aunt has heard Madeleine’s side of the story: she stands her ground and tells Herzog some home truths. This leads Herzog to distrust his aunt and to reflect on ‘female deceit’ and the affair between Madeleine and Gersbach: his thoughts turn to murdering the couple with his late father’s antique revolver.

Herzog’s psychiatrist, lawyers and physician

Herzog’s psychiatrist is Dr Herman Edvig: he lives in Chicago; Herzog refers to him as ‘uncle’. His wife is Herzog’s Aunt Zelda. Herman is ‘calm, Protestant Nordic Anglo-Celtic’. Herzog had first seen Edvig because Madeleine made it a condition of their marriage continuing that Herzog see a psychiatrist of his own choosing. Herzog chose Edwig because he had ‘written on Barth, Tillich, Brunner etc’. Herzog finds himself in an emotional and religious vortex between Madeleine and Edwig – his psychiatrist. He feels that Edwig has become preoccupied by his accounts of Madeleine and that Madeleine and Edwig are oppressing him with Christian theology. He feels that Madeleine is trying to usurp him as an intellectual heavyweight.

Herzog’s lawyer in New York is Simkin who respects Herzog: ‘Simkin had a weakness for confused high-minded people, for people with moral impulses like Herzog. Hopeless! Very likely he looked at Moses and saw a grieving childish man, trying to keep his dignity’. Simkin is a ‘ruddy, stout Machiavellian old bachelor’ who lives in an large apartment on Central Park West with his mother, a widowed sister and several nephews and nieces. The walls of his room ‘were covered from top to bottom by abstract-expressionist paintings, unframed’. Herzog recognises ‘the peculiar notes of Jewish comedy that Simkin loved, his elaborate shows of dread, his cosmic mock dismay’.

Herzog’s lawyer in Chicago is Sandor Himmelstein, who had suffered a disfiguring war wound in Normandy. Sandor had taken Herzog into his own home at the time that Madeleine left him. Sandor and his wife Beatrice try to console him. Sandor knows Herzog’s brothers who live in Chicago. Willie is a ‘fine fellow: very active in Jewish life too’. There is ‘always some scandal about Alexander’: he is suspected of being a racketeer. Sandor opines that the end of the marriage is Herzog’s ‘own frigging fault. Somewhere in every intellectual is a dumb prick. You guys can’t answer your own questions’. But Sandor encourages Herzog that he is ‘not like those other university phonies: You’re a mensch’. Sandor then insults Herzog, telling Beatrice ‘’Moses can take it’, but Herzog is ‘incoherent with anger’. Sandor becomes more emollient and says to Herzog: ‘Well, when you suffer you really suffer. You’re a real, genuine old Jewish type that digs the emotions. I’ll give you that. I understand it’. The next day Sandor antagonises Herzog because he suggests he takes out insurance against ‘having a mental breakdown and having to go to an institution’. Sandor faces Herzog down: he knows where Herzog came from, and Herzog falls silent: he agrees to take out a policy on his life for the sake of his children. Sandor makes him breakfast but he begins to break down: he pleads Herzog to counsel his teenage daughter – ‘her chance to know an intellectual – a famous person – an authority’. Sandor urges Herzog to come back and live in New York, as he is a ‘West Side Jew’. He urges Herzog to sell his house in the Berkshires and Herzog says ‘I might’. Sandor takes it as good as settled. He urges Herzog: ‘Get yourself a housekeeper closer to your own age. Or we’ll find you a gorgeous brownskin housekeeper. Or maybe what you need is a girl who survived the concentration camps and would be grateful for a new home’.

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Sandor urges Herzog to join him in going to the Russian bath on North Avenue and in finding an orthodox shul. He sings ‘You and me, a pair of old-time Jews’. But Herzog does not trust Sandor: he remembers old betrayals and he regrets his own vulnerability.

Herzog’s physician is Dr Emmerich who lives on Central Park West. He is elderly and ‘a refugee’. He recommends that Herzog takes a holiday. This leads to his very short stay in Vineyard Haven with Libbie Vane and Sissler.

‘Father Herzog’, ‘Grandfather Herzog’, ‘Mother Herzog’ and aunt Zipporah

Herzog’s father (‘Father Herzog’ – Ilyona Isakovitch Gerzog in his Russian origins) is described in some detail. He ‘did everything quickly, neatly, with skilful Eastern European flourishes: combing his hair, buttoning his shirt, stropping his bone-handled razors, sharpening pencils on the ball of his thumb, holding a loaf of bread to his breast and slicing towards himself, tying parcels with tight little knots, jotting like an artist in his account book. There each cancelled page was covered with a carefully drawn X, the 1s and 7s carried bars and streamers. They were like pennants in the wind of failure’. As a child Father Herzog’ was ‘put out at four years old to study, away from home, eaten by lice, half-starved in the Yeshivah as a boy. He shaved, became a modern European’. Starting with ‘failure in Petersburg, where he went through two dowries in one year’, his life story is a catalogue of decline and descent into petty criminality. He emigrated to Canada where his sister Zipporah Yaffe was living. Business failures led to bootlegging. ‘He could calculate percentages mentally at high speed, but he lacked the cheating imagination of a successful businessman’.

Grandfather Herzog ‘wrote long letters in Hebrew’. Soon after the Russian Revolution he had predicted that the Revolution would fail: he sought to build up reserves of Czarist currency, hoping to become rich. These ancient ruble bills were now in the possession of ‘Father Herzog’ and his family, who treated them as objects of wonder.

‘Mother Herzog’ is described as ‘encountering the present on the left but sometimes seeming to avoid it on the right’. She had descended from ‘linens and servants in Petersburg, the dacha in Finland. Now she was cook, washerwoman, seamstress on Napoleon Street in the slum’.

Zipporah’s husband ‘Uncle Yaffe’ runs a junkyard where ‘kids, greenhorns, old Irishwomen, Ukrainians and redmen from the Caughnawaga reservation came with pushcarts and little wagons, bringing bottles, rags, old plumbing or electrical fixtures, hardware, paper, tires, bones to sell’; Zipporah had bought real estate: she and her husband were rich. Zipporah taunts her brother that he is too gentle a creature to ‘make a fortune out of swindlers, thieves and gangsters ….. You can never keep up with these teamsters and butchers. Can you shoot a man?’

‘Mother Herzog’ in contrast has a mind that is ‘archaic, filled with old legends, with angels and demons’.

Zipporah’s prediction is realised: ‘Father Herzog’ is betrayed by his accomplice – the Ukrainian Voplonsky – and the two men are ambushed on the road to the Canadian border with a lorry load of bootleg whisky.

Herzog reflects: ‘I had a great schooling in grief. I still know these cries of the soul. They lie on the breast, and in the throat. The mouth wants to open wide and let them out. But all these are antiquities – yes, Jewish antiquities originating in the Bible, in a Biblical sense of personal experience and destiny. What happened in the War abolished Father Herzog’s claim to exceptional suffering We are on a more brutal standard now, a terminal standard, indifferent to persons. Part of the programme of destruction into which the human spirit has poured itself with energy, even joy. These personal histories, old tales from old times that may not be worth remembering. I remember. I must. But who else – to whom can this matter? So many millions – multitudes – go down in terrible pain. And, at that, moral suffering is denied, these days. Personalities are good only for comic relief. But I am still a slave to Papa’s pain’.

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Herzog underground

Herzog takes the train from the underground station of Grand Central to stay at the coast with Libbie Vane – a former student – and her new husband Sissler. In the tunnel he notes: ‘in dusty niches bulbs burned. Without religion’. The train eventually emerges into the light at Upper Park Avenue and runs ‘on the embankment above the slums’ in Harlem. As he heads to the coast he reflects on the pain to his ‘Jewish family feelings that his children should be growing up without him’. He ‘fights his sadness over his solitary life’. On his way to the railway station Herzog remembers childhood holidays: his father ‘peeling fruit with his Russian pearl-handled knife’. He resists the desire to meditate on his own mortality: ‘To him, perpetual thought of death was a sin. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead’. When he reaches the home of Libbie Vane and Sissler in Vineyard Haven he has no sooner arrived than he slips out the back door and heads for home. The note he leaves behind states: ‘Have to go back. Not able to stand kindness at this time’.

On one occasion when Herzog is travelling to see Ramona we are with him on the subway. The underground journey is described in a way that presents the subway as a parallel world. It is one in which the contradictions and confusions of the modern world may be contemplated by means of advertising posters and graffiti. It is a world with its own smells and rituals. It is a world in which Herzog is aware of the ‘innumerable millions of passengers (who) had polished the wood of the turnstile with their hips. From this arose a feeling of communion – brotherhood in one of its cheapest forms’.

A ‘Christian lady’

He remembers a stay in hospital when he was 8 years old, when a ‘Christian lady came once a week and had him read aloud from the Bible’. The passage that he remembered was from the New Testament. He describes the ‘Christian lady’ thus: ‘She seemed to him a good woman. Her face, however, was strained and grim’.

Herzog cannot remember whether or not he told her that his father was ‘a bootlegger. He has a still in Point-St.Charles. The spotters are after him. He has no money’.

A clergyman and his wife

During his first marriage, Herzog and Daisy lived in rural eastern Connecticut. Their nearest neighbours were a clergyman and his wife – Reverend and Mrs Idwal. They got on excellently ‘until the minister started to give him testimonials by orthodox rabbis who had embraced Christian faith’. Herzog was shown photographs of these rabbis: he ‘thought them crazy’.

The dénouement

The dénouement takes place when Herzog goes to Chicago ‘to see his daughter, confront Madeleine and Gersbach’. In Chicago he drives to the house in which his father had died a few years previously: the house is now occupied by Taube - Herzog’s ‘very ancient stepmother’. In the house he removes his late father’s antique revolver and some of the Russian currency that he marvelled at as a boy.

Herzog has a minor traffic accident and the police are suspicious of the unlicensed old gun – which contains two bullets – wrapped in old foreign money, in his inside coat pocket. Herzog is accompanied by his daughter June: through the mediation of Luke Asphalter he has been allowed by Madeleine and Gersbach to have June for the day.

Madeleine is summoned to the police station where interrogation ensues. Madeleine admits that she has never made a complaint to the police about her former husband. When Madeleine suggests to Herzog that one of the bullets was for her, he leads the conversation towards Madeleine’s situation with Gersbach. Madeleine leaves, taking June with her.

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Herzog hopes that his explanation that he had taken the gun and the money from his late father’s house as sentimental keepsakes, and that he didn’t know about the bullets because ‘he didn’t know much about guns’ will persuade them of his innocence. Herzog is granted bail. His brother Will pays, and the two of them leave the police station together.

Despite Will’s best efforts, Herzog will not be committed to an institution. Instead, he moves back to the house in Massachusetts, which he restores to good order and where he is joined by Ramona.

Reflections on Jewish identity

I suggest that the following characteristics of Herzog indicate some aspects of Jewish identity in New York City in 1964.

a) Personal inner conflict about Christianity and the demands that Christianity makes upon the Jew and upon Jewish identity.

b) Anxiety as to whether one’s ‘American credentials were in good order’.

c) A high value placed on the Western tradition of history, philosophy, theology, literature and psychology.

d) Personal and collective inherited memory of persecution by Christians in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

e) Nostalgia for Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

f) ‘A great schooling in grief’: the collective memory of the struggles of Jewish people leaving the Old World and making a new life in North America, which must be kept alive for the sake of those who suffered and for the sake of Jewish identity; and the placing of this memory within the context of the Jewish scriptures’ account of suffering and salvation.

g) The Holocaust as a persistent challenge to the existence of God and thus as a challenge to Jewish identity.

h) The constant presence of people and ways of thinking that keep alive the Holocaust as a recent event.

i) The way in which the Holocaust ended the significance and nobility of human existence: ‘We are on a more brutal standard now, a terminal standard, indifferent to persons’.

j) Anxiety about nuclear physics and the threat of nuclear war.

5. The Holocaust (The Shoah)

It is difficult to discuss the Holocaust – the Shoah, ‘calamity’ in Hebrew. Any attempt to discuss the Holocaust is in danger of being subverted by prior convictions. Langer writes in his ‘Pre-empting the Holocaust’ of 1998 that ‘the unshakable conviction that the Holocaust contains a positive lesson for all of us today’ is unacceptable. He gives three examples of ‘pre-empting’ of the Holocaust, which is the use – or abuse – of the facts of the Holocaust to ‘fortify a prior commitment to an ideal of moral reality, community responsibility, or religious belief that leaves us with space to retain faith in their pristine value in a post-Holocaust world’.

Before he makes his case, Langer sets out briefly ‘starkest crimes’ of the Holocaust from eye- witness testimony: a one year-old child taken from its mother’s arms and torn in two; making prisoners selected for death dig their own grave before being shot, and charging the Jewish ‘leaders’ in the camp for the bullets used; shootings taking place in large ‘actions’ on such a scale that burial did not take place properly, and neither was the shooting always successful, so that a heap of the dead and the dying resulted.

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Langer analyses three pieces of writing: Tzvetan Todorov’s ‘Facing the extreme – Moral life in the concentration camps’ (1996); Judy Chicago’s ‘Holocaust Project – From Darkness into Light’ (1993]; and Frans Jozef van Beeck’s ‘Two Kind Jewish Men: a sermon in memory of the Shoah’ (1992). Langer condemns all three because they ‘pre-empt’ the Holocaust. Todorov argues that the Holocaust was little more than a drastic example of the conflict that takes place within all people and all societies: the conflict between ‘ordinary virtues’ and ‘ordinary vices’. His aim is to draw universal lessons from the historical events of the Holocaust that can serve humankind for the future. Langer argues that, despite the virtues in Chicago’s work, her stated desire to present ‘ a window into an aspect of the unarticulated but universal experience of victimisation’ fails to do justice to the ‘particularity of the Holocaust as a historical event’. Langer writes that van Beeck’s sermon is written in the style of Christian preaching and that it ‘testifies to the deficiency of certain language for analyzing the Holocaust when it is imposed on the topic with little consideration for its adequacy’.

Langer can offer no ‘corrective vision’ to the tendency to ‘pre-empt the Holocaust’ other than ‘the opinion that the Holocaust experience challenges the redemptive value of all moral, community and religious systems of belief’.

We may also conclude, from Langer, that ‘pristine values’ of moral reality, community responsibility, and religious belief ‘ are no longer tenable in a post-Holocaust world’.

In his ‘On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War’ (2012) Wasserstein states in Chapter 2 – The Christian Problem – that ‘in its essence, after all, anti-Semitism was a phenomenon that arose out of the failure of European Christendom to live up to the most fundamental teaching of its Jewish founder : ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’.

In Chapter 1 – The Melting Glacier - Wasserstein summarises the circumstances of the ten million Jews who lived in Europe in the late 1930s. In western Europe, emancipation meant that Jews enjoyed civic equality, though Jews remained subject to anti-Semitism. In Germany and the parts of Central Europe that were occupied by Germany, Jews were stripped of citizenship, deprived of most of their possessions and under pressure to emigrate. In Eastern Europe outside the Third Reich and the USSR, in most places anti-Semitism was incorporated in public policy and law. In the USSR Jews had been emancipated, but under Stalin they came to be severely restricted. In many places Jews aimed to assimilate with the national culture and be ‘less Jewish’. In the 1930s throughout Europe anti-Semitism held that the Jew was ‘a Christ-killer, a devil with horns, subversive revolutionary and capitalist exploiter, obdurate upholder of an outmoded religion and devious exponent of cultural modernism ... and alien presence’. There was a ‘Jewish problem’. Jewish culture varied across Europe: the diversity of Jewish culture hindered a co-ordinated response to oppression. When Jews assimilated they still found that they were persecuted. By 1939 democracies such as France and the Netherlands had established camps to house Jews: in the summer of 1939 more Jews were held in camps in these two countries than in camps within the Third Reich.

The Holocaust was the methodical killing by Nazi Germany of 11 million non-combatant civilians during World War Two (1939-1945). The main target for killing was the Jewish population of Europe. 6 million Jewish people died in the Holocaust. Others who were targeted and who died in the Holocaust included non-combatant civilians in Central and Eastern Europe, Soviet prisoners of war, Romani, black people, disabled people, the mentally ill, homosexuals and socialists. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

Auschwitz – at the town of Oswiecim in Poland – is the best-known of the death camps of Nazi Germany. ‘Auschwitz’ has become a symbol of the Holocaust. Auschwitz I – a former army barracks - was brought into use to gas prisoners in 1941. Auschwitz II was a specially built camp of 150 hectares at which people were gassed in 1943 and 1944. A total of about 1,100,000 people were killed at Auschwitz I and II.

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6. 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 sources are:

Paintings on display in the Jewish Museum, New York

Van Voolen. E. ‘50 Jewish Artists You Should Know’. 2011.

Harries. R. ‘The Image of Christ in Modern Art’. 2013.

Hepburn N. ‘Cross Purposes: Shock and Contemplation in Images of the Crucifixion’. 2010.

Langer. L. ‘Pre-empting the Holocaust’. 1998.

My blog: http://abstractartc20.blogspot.co.uk/

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; the hospitality of the House of the Redeemer – retreat house of the Episcopal Church of the USA on East 95th Street; and by the generous understanding of my wife Kerry.

1. Camille Pissarro’s ‘Self Portrait’ of 1875 is reproduced in van Voolen’s ‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’.

Pissarro was born into a Sephardic Jewish family: he moved to Paris in 1855 and by 1873 had become a founder of the Impressionist School. He considered himself to be not religious but he did not deny his Jewish ancestry. Pissarro was affected by anti-Semitism in France in the 1860s and again in the 1890s during the Dreyfus Affair. Some of the Impressionists did not want to be associated with Pissarro ‘the Israelite’. Impressionists in general and Pissarro in particular were accused by some critics of being colour-blind, a disease believed to afflict Jews in particular. Pissarro supported Dreyfus during his imprisonment and trial. Pissarro lived from 1830 to 1903.

2. 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.

Klein and Brown on Modigliani

The paper ‘The Faces of Modigliani: Identity Politics under Fascism’ by Klein, M. & Brown, E. (in Klein. M. (ed) ‘Modigliani beyond the myth’ (2004)) 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.

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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’. 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 – disapprovingly - that this diaspora was responsible for disseminating modernism. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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. Schoenberg’s ‘Red Gaze’ is an Expressionist portrait: Kandinsky showed this work in the Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich.

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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’.

5. 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 on Epstein

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’.

Wolff on Epstein

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’.

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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’: 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’.

6. 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.

Cogniat on Soutine

Raymond Cogniat’s book ‘Soutine’ (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.

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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 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.

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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.

Schama on Soutine

In his book ‘Hang Ups’, (BBC Books; 2005) Simon Schama has a chapter on Soutine entitled Chaim Soutine: Gut Feeling.

Schama asserts 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 Lipchitz (see below in this Section) and Marc Chagall (see below in this Section), 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 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.

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In the early 1940s, as Soutine’s death approached, he had already come to the notice of Mark Rothko (see below in this Section and in Section 8) and Adolph Gottlieb (see below in Section 8) 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’.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

Section 8 below discusses Rothko at greater length.

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10. Emmanuel Levy’s ‘Crucifixion’ of 1942 was in the exhibition: Cross Purposes.

In this painting Levy shows Christ as a contemporary Orthodox Jew being crucified in a cemetery where the graves are marked with crosses. Christ is wearing phylacteries and a prayer shawl. Hepburn writes: far from being responsible for Christ’s death, the Jews are presented as synonymous with Christ as the scapegoat of Christian Europe. He is seen as the archetypal Jewish martyr’.

11. 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.

12. 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.

Rosen on Chagall

In his book: ‘Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the masters in Chagall, Guston and Kitaj’ (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.

Chagall and the Christian tradition

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.

Chagall and the Jewish scriptures

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.

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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.

Chagall and the crucifixion

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 in this section) and R B Kitaj (see below in this section and in Section 7). 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.

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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.

‘Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation’ (1937 – 1952)

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 (see Section 2 above) 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.

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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.

13. 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.

14. 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. 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’.

15. 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.

16. 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’.

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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.

17. Philip Guston’s ‘Paw’ of 1968 is an early example of his ‘object drawings’ – his ‘making a golem’.

Rosen on Guston

Chapter 2 of Rosen’s book: ‘Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the masters in Chagall, Guston and Kitaj’ (2009) 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 in this section) and Rothko (see above in this section and below in Section 8) 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.

Guston’s family history

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.

Guston exploring his Jewish identity in the 1970s

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.

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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’.

Guston’s ‘late dilemma’

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’.

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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’.

18. 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 on Newman

Godfrey. M., in his essay of 2007, ‘Barnett Newman’s The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’, from ‘Abstraction and the Holocaust’ 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 in this section) 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.

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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. 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.

Newman as a ‘post-Holocaust Jewish subject’

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.

Painting in the wake of the Holocaust

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.

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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?’

Newman’s ‘The Stations of the Cross’

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’.

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American Jewish artists used Christological symbolism in the 1940s, and Amishai-Maisels writes that by the late 1950s this had become a mannerism, although its use continued in the early 1960s at the time of the Eichmann trial. In the 1940s Christological symbolism for the Holocaust was also being used in the USA by writers: this was continuing in the early 1960s at the time of the Eichmann trial. Eichmann referred to himself at his trial as Pontius Pilate.

Godfrey writes, quoting in part from Hannah Arendt in the New Yorker: ‘The Holocaust posed the unanswerable question of human suffering, and the idea of Christ’s Passion (the single moment when he posed that question), could be used to address the Holocaust’.

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

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

Asking the unanswerable question: the question imposed by the Nazi death camps

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’.

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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’.

Tragedy that has been made real

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’.

The responsibility of continued life

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’.

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19. 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 in the section) 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. R B Kitaj is discussed at greater length in Section 7 below.

20. Samuel Bak’s ‘Family Tree’ of 1995 is reproduced on the cover of Langer’s ‘Pre-empting the Holocaust’.

The trunk is severed and the tree hangs vertically in mid-air: it has the form of a tree; it looks dead but it might be alive. Langer writes: ‘Hidden among the fading golden leaves shaped like Stars of David in ‘Family Tree’ is a rising limb with two horizontal branches, a cruciform echo that the murder of the Jews has been a calamity for Christianity, too. The landscape of Jewish experience shares its terrain with its coreligionists, though responsibility for the atrocity is evenly divided. The degree to which the Christian spirit may have been morally tainted by the physical uprooting of the Jews is a muted theme in several of Bak’s paintings’.

Bak grew up in Vilna (now Vilnius) in what was then Poland: Vilna was one of the main European centres of Jewish learning. In 1939 the city was transferred to Lithuania and in 1940 it was occupied by the USSR. In 1941 Nazi Germany took the city and they began to extinguish Jewish life. When the Soviet Union re-took the city in 1944, Bak and his mother were two of the few thousand Jews to survive of the 57,000 Jews in the city before 1941.

Bak’s landscapes are devoid of human presence, but many are suffused with the haze of heat and smoke, and chimneys rise ominously across the barren scene. Bak has said that these works were painted to communicate the sense of the civilisation and culture that was destroyed. Bak’s images let us enter a world that is beyond imagination. It is characterised by broken elemental landscapes, ruined human edifices and habitations, some enigmatic semblance of a surviving Jewish culture, and an unsettling ambiguity as to whether hope or despair is dominant. Some works are so lacking in reference points for a landscape painting that they verge on the abstract or the surreal: they invert normal relative sizes or they combine figurative representation with symbolism. Many works present large areas that portray inert materials such as rock or cut wood with a patterning that is almost hallucinatory in its detail and its expanse.

Bak provokes a dialogue about the roots of Jewish meaning. What sense is now to be made of the foundation of Israel – Genesis, Exodus and the Torah - after the Shoah – the Holocaust?

Langer refers to the poet Nelly Sachs who explores similar themes. Langer discusses the wider issue of the purpose of artistic creation that is based on the Holocaust: do we gain insight or do we find absence of meaning? He argues that we are so led by Bak along paths of his own experience that we cannot help but find ourselves in a place that other genres of painting do not take us – a corrupted place of our shared humanity that leaves us even more uneasy before the divine.

Samuel Bak’s 81st birthday was on 12th August 2014.

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7. Is there Jewish art?

This question was a preoccupation throughout the 20th Century. In 1965 the New York Jewish Museum held an exhibition entitled ‘What about Jewish art?’. In the following year Harold Rosenberg had an essay published entitled: “Is there a Jewish art?”

The question is relevant because, as we have seen, throughout the 20th Century – before, during and after the Holocaust - enquiry has been made as to the specific characteristics of Jewish identity and Jewish meaning.

It may also be asked how Christian artists – and artists of other religions – and none – could be characterised at different stages of the 20th Century. Sections 1 and 2 of this essay present a Christian account. We have seen in Section 6 of this essay that some Jewish artists of the 20th Century used Christian iconography: the Christian account and the Jewish account come together at various times; at other times the two accounts are in contrast with each other. The Holocaust, and Wasserstein’s assertion about the origin of anti-Semitism, mean that the inter-relationship between Jew and Christian is of enduring significance.

The Second Commandment

At the start of the 20th Century there was scepticism that there could be such a thing as a Jewish artist. We have seen in Section 6 above, that Pissarro was accused of being colour-blind because he was Jewish. Harries rehearses the ‘Jewish prohibition in most ages against making images of God’ though he does not acknowledge the complexity of the statement that he makes. Soutine fell foul of the Second Commandment but the compensation he received helped him on his way out of the shtetl.

It was held that Jews would not paint – and could not paint - because of the injunction imposed by the Second Commandment in Exodus 20:4-6:

‘You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments’.

The next four paragraphs are summarised from Rosen (2009).

The notion that representational art is anathema for Jewish artists is not borne out by the facts: indeed, it may be seen to be a product of the unhealthy relationship between anti-Semitic philosophies that gained popular credibility in the 19th and 20th Centuries and the desire of Jews to assimilate. Jews were thereby caught in a double bind by the Second Commandment, by which they believed that representational art was forbidden and they were simultaneously subjected to ridicule for being unable to attempt to represent that which they worshipped. Medieval sources show that Jewish artists did engage in representational art. In practice, the Second Commandment has been ‘much more elastic than frequently has been assumed in the modern period’.

When the Second Commandment is considered in context a number of issues are seen to arise. The two statements of the Commandment at Exodus 20:4 and Deuteronomy 5:8 differ slightly but not significantly. Both forbid the making of a ‘graven image’ or a ‘sculptured image’ and both state that a likeness of the specified subject matter is forbidden. The concern is clearly a precaution against idolatry. But accounts of the work of artists and craftsmen in the Hebrew Bible show a celebration of their work, even when, in the case of Solomon’s Temple in 1 Kings 6, its decoration is described as including images of ‘things from heaven above and the earth beneath’; ‘Solomon is never accused of transgressing the Second Commandment’.

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The conclusion that may be drawn is that there is no inherent attribute to a ‘graven image’ or a ‘sculptured image’ or a ‘likeness’ that constitutes an idol, but rather that all depends on the object’s ‘context and relationships’.

But this revisionist approach to the presumed iconoclasm of recent modern times is not the same as showing that there is a ‘Jewish visual tradition on a par with the artistic heritage of the Christian West’.

Until Jewish emancipation in the late 18th / early 19th Century Jewish visual creativity was suppressed by deliberate restrictions imposed by Christian authorities. In Eastern Europe poverty inhibited creativity. Prior to the mid 19th Century there are no significant Jewish artists that painters of the modern era can look back to: there is therefore no well-established tradition to feed and stimulate Jewish artists of the 20th Century other than the tradition of the West.

Rosenberg: ‘Is there Jewish art?’

In 1966 the art critic Harold Rosenberg asked in an essay: ‘Is there Jewish art?’

Rosenberg considered that ‘while Jews produce art, they don’t produce Jewish art’. In order to do away with anti-Semitic caricature some have said that only individuals exist and that no qualities can be attributed to people such as ‘American’ or ‘Jewish’.

To summarise Rosenberg - many people deny the reality of Jewishness because they do not want to be accused of prejudice or bigotry. But when those holding this viewpoint are challenged that they must recognise that there are marked Jewish facial characteristics they cannot disagree; thus, some will also argue that there must also be marked characteristics of art produced by Jews.

There is a parallel problem when one talks about American art. A recent attempt to identify characteristics of American painting was unsuccessful, and yet, despite this, it is recognised that ‘we know there is such a thing as American art’. ‘Jewish art is in an even more ambiguous situation’.

Rosenberg states six possible meanings to the term ‘Jewish art’.

i. Art that is produced by Jews. Jewish historical societies use this definition. A Jewish historical society will seek to identify Jewish American artists, for example, and then will show Jewish cultural identity in America and thus will demonstrate that Jews are an asset to America and should be respected. In this way, Jewish people ‘present their achievements as credentials entitling them to the status of ordinary Anglo Saxons’. A painting produced by an early European settler in America who was Jewish, for example, would be likely to have contained ‘some Jewish ingredient’ but it would be hard to say exactly what it would have been. Nevertheless, this hypothetical painting would have contributed in an unknown way to ‘Jewish American art’.

ii. Art depicting Jews or containing Jewish subject matter. In the 1920s in the Lower East Side of New York the Ash Can School (East Side Realism) studied the artist’s deeply familiar local environment, and the area had a Jewish population. The works of this school therefore include representations of contemporary Jewish street life and ‘other Jewish themes in the artist’s memory or imagination (‘Wailing Walls’ etc)’. But style characterises art, and not subject matter.

iii. The art of Jewish ceremonial objects. These are treasures that have been produced over the Centuries by Jewish craftsmen. They serve ritual purposes and display Jewish symbols. Ancient close regulation of symbolism has given way to ‘sophisticated modernist variations’. ‘This is what scholars usually accept as Jewish art’, but it is doubtful ‘that this priestly work is art in the sense in which the word is used in the late 20th Century’. General interest in this form of Jewish art is very limited.

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iv. Ephemeral ceremonial and semi-ceremonial folk-art. Rosenberg’s grandparents made miniature edible furniture pieces and animal forms, and his grandfather made Chanukah dreidlach out of lead. These, and similar contemporary works might be considered a Jewish art form.

v. ‘Metaphysical Judaica’: ‘perhaps a genuine Jewish style will come out of Jewish philosophy’. A contemporary artist (Ben Shahn – see no.16 in Section 6 of this essay) has ‘experimented with the Hebrew alphabet and has done reading in Jewish mysticism’ and another artist (Yaacov Agam) ‘desires to give plastic and artistic expression to the ancient Hebrew concept of reality, which differs in essence from that of all other civilisations’. There has been a reasoning by others by which Agam travels from a conception of the uniqueness of the Hebrew concept of reality through the Commandment against graven images to his own non-figurative works that Agam describe as ‘more reality than abstraction’, but Rosenberg is not convinced that these paintings herald a unique Hebrew concept of reality in art.

vi. The Second Commandment is usually introduced as a relevant consideration. Rosenberg’s theory is that ‘the Old Testament excluded carvings and paintings’ because ‘in a world of miracles, the fabrications of a human hand are a distraction’. The sense is that ‘art is anything that appears in the aura of the wonderful’. Unique elements of the story take on the status of art: ‘Joseph’s coat, Balaam’s ass, the burning bush, Aaron’s rod’. This is not to suggest that Israel was the originator of surrealism, but it is to say that within a sacred world, art is found and not made. The mind of the population of this sacred world is filled with ‘magical objects and events’ and all there is for the artist to do is to make ceremonial and ornamental objects. Jewish art might therefore exist negatively in the making of objects in the mind and banishing the possibility of their physical existence. The Second Commandment would therefore be the manifesto of Jewish art in that ‘Jewish art exists in not existing’.

There is therefore no Jewish art in terms of a specific style.

But Rosenberg argues that the contribution of Jewish artists in the 20th Century has been vital, and that these artists have worked as individuals, rather than as Jews or non-Jews. Identity is the primary theme for contemporary Jewish artists, although the great displacement of populations that has taken place in the 20th Century makes it also a primary theme in life for many other people. The chaos of the Century has stimulated metaphysical concern about identity - particularly since World War Two – and this is the setting that has stimulated Jewish artists.

Rosenberg writes that Jewish Americans are asserting their identity ‘in an independent and personal way’. Specific artists referred to are: Rothko (see below in Section 8), Newman (see above in Section 6), Gottlieb (see below in Section 8), Guston (see above in Section 6), Lassaw, Rivers and Steinberg. Their art is a ‘profound Jewish expression’ which is not ‘Jewish art’ but which ‘is loaded with meaning for all the people of this era’.

The Jew is now liberated above the need to ask whether or not there is a Jewish art.

20 Jewish artists of the 20th Century

Section 6 of this essay describes twenty Jewish artists of the 20th Century. In summary:

i. The entry for Pissarro shows how, in the late 19th Century, it was believed that Jewish people were colour blind and thus unable to paint. It also shows a Jewish artist’s solidarity with Dreyfuss.

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ii. The entry for Modigliani shows how, in the early 20th Century, it was held that the Jewish diaspora was rootless and thus unable to develop a distinctive Jewish artistic culture; simultaneously it was held that this diaspora was responsible for disseminating modernism. Modigliani painted the ‘European tribe’ in a challenge to the monolithic Christian perception of Europe.

iii. The entry for Minkowski gives background to anti-Semitic violence in Poland in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century and shows this to be Minkowski’s motive for painting.

iv. The entry for Schoenberg shows the personal price paid by a Jewish artist in the early 20th Century: rejection of his Jewish identity and adoption of Christian identity which did not protect him from anti-Semitism. The question is raised whether his status as ‘outsider’ – and by extension the Jew’s outsider status - was – and maybe still is - necessary for musical and artistic achievement.

v. The entry for Epstein illustrates Wolff’s assertion 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’. The reaction of a member of the commission set up to build the new Coventry Cathedral in the 1950s indicates that things may not have changed in this respect since the start of the Century. Nevertheless, the ‘outsider’ Epstein produced sculptured figures in the UK throughout the mid 20th Century that were regarded as significant.

vi. The entry for Soutine shows how Cogniat perceived that early in the 20th Century ‘Jewish artists from Central and Eastern Europe had introduced a new feeling for the pathos of daily life which he attributed to ‘Eastern fatalism’ – a term that he uses to describe ‘the state of mind resulting from political circumstances and the climate of permanent anxiety in which the Jews of certain areas live’. Schama asserts that the greater meaning in the history of 20th Century art is that in 1950, when Soutine’s works were shown for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he became ‘the patriarch of gestural abstraction’.

vii. The entry for Weber shows that he moved from Paris to New York in 1909, bringing with him admiration for the French artist Cezanne. The centre of gravity of modernism moved from Paris to New York during the Second World War, and Weber was in the vanguard of this change.

viii. The entry for Lipchitz shows how, in the first forty years of the 20th Century, he moved from Russia to Paris to New York, and that in 1940 he brought to New York his acquaintance with the Parisian avant garde. In New York he depicted the situation in Europe, and subsequently the situation in Israel including the moral dilemma for Israel of Palestinian rights.

ix. The entry for Rothko shows a Jewish artist painting the crucifixion in 1941/42.

x. The entry for Levy also shows a Jewish artist painting the crucifixion in 1942.

xi. The entry for Nussbaum shows a Jewish artist in 1942 painting a premonition of death: he had previously suffered a pogrom, and in 1944 he died in Auschwitz.

xii. The entry for Chagall also shows a Jewish artist painting the crucifixion in 1942. It also shows a Jew who knew Christianity from birth and who needed to become a member of the Western artistic family in order to see and understand his childhood and youth. It also shows an Jewish artist using the New Testament and the Western tradition of art as a source of stories and symbols into which Chagall introduced his own life-story. It also shows a Jewish artist using Old Testament subjects to provide hope for the future for the Jewish people. It also shows a Jewish artist who was influenced by Western Masters. It also shows a Jewish artist who believed 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’.

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Chagall’s triptych painted between 1937 and 1952 – ‘Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation’ – is shown to be an act of European peace-making.

xiii. The entry for Segall shows an artist’s response of 1947 to the Holocaust.

xiv. The entry for Shahn shows the response in 1948 of a Jewish artist to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

xv. The entry for Krasner shows the response of a Jewish artist in 1949 to the Holocaust

xvi. The entry for Louis shows a Jewish artist’s response in 1951 to Nazi book burnings, and to ‘the Jews in the European crematoria, about which Americans were by then fully informed’. It evokes the legendary martyrdom of Rabbi Hannanyah ben Teradyon: as he burned he said ‘I see the parchment burning but the letters are flying to heaven’.

xvii. The entry for Guston shows a Jewish artist who in the 1930s had rejected his Jewish name in order to impress his fiancee’s Christian parents – later bitterly regretting this, and who in the 1960s and 1970s rejected abstraction in favour of ‘making a golem’. It shows an artist who despaired of both art’s history and his personal history: by engaging with the myth of the golem – a being created by the faithful Jew – Guston found some grounding in the world.

xviii. The entry for Newman shows a Jewish artist who engages with Jewish mysticism to produce in 1969/85 a work that showed that the artist’s task is to be in parallel with God’s creative purposes. It shows a Jewish artist who, between 1954 and 1966 painted a series of abstract works (‘Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’) that may be read as specifically addressing the meaning of the memory of the Holocaust by reference to the Passion of Christ, although in 1966 Newman implied that these works had a more generalised meaning concerning human suffering.

It also shows a Jewish artist who reacted strongly in 1965 against a symposium at New York’s Jewish Museum entitled ‘What about Jewish art?’ Although Newman made the counter-claim – that Jewish art should not be specified as a category ten years later in 1975, the curator of an exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum entitled ‘Jewish experience in the art of the Twentieth Century’ 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’. Godfrey asserts that Newman’s actions should be understood as ‘the compromised position of the post-Holocaust Jewish intellectual’: ‘”yes” to Jewish intellectual-artist-architect’; “yes” to scholar; “no” to maker of Jewish art’.

xix. The entry for R B Kitaj shows a Jewish artist who, in 1980, also engaged with the myth of the golem. It shows an Anerican Jewish artist whose mother was Russian, whose Austrian stepfather was a Holocaust survivor, who studied art in Vienna and London. It shows a Jewish artist for whom, in 1980, the golem myth symbolised Jewish survival and ever-present danger.

xx. The entry for Bak shows the work of a Polish / Lithuanian Jewish artist who survived the Holocaust. Bak suggests that the Christian spirit may have been morally tainted by the physical uprooting of the Jews. He provokes a dialogue about the roots of Jewish meaning. He leads us along paths that other genres of painting do not take us along – a corrupted place of our shared humanity that leaves us even more uneasy before the divine

How does R B KItaj ‘speak Jewish’?

In 2009, in response to the perennial quest to define Jewish art, Rosen asked a different question: “How do modern Jewish artists ‘speak Jewish’ in their dialogue with the Western artistic tradition?” The entries for Guston and Chagall in Section 6 of this essay summarise Rosen’s writing on how these two Jewish artists ‘speak Jewish’.

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A summary of Rosen on R B KItaj ‘speaking Jewish’ follows.

Unpacking my library

Rosen describes the painting by R. B. Kitaj: ‘Unpacking my library’, from 1990-91.

Kitaj – the peripatetic artist – encounters his books afresh every time he moves, and for Kitaj literary allusions underpin his works. Kitaj was also a writer: in the last 20 years of his life he wrote ‘prefaces’ for his paintings. He had Adin Steinsaltz’s Talmud translations by his easel and he came to understand his prefaces as ‘Jewish exegesis’.

And Kitaj understood the close literary link of his paintings as being ‘bound up with his Jewish identity’. For Kitaj, Jewish texts stimulated visual art. Critics have been dismissive of Kitaj’s literary links. A retrospective of Kitaj’s works was held at the Tate Gallery in 1994. Janet Wolff, writing about criticism of this show, perceived three strands of ‘English sentiment’: anti-literary prejudice; anti-Americanism; and anti-Semitism.

Rosen asserts that in his work ‘Unpacking my library’, Kitaj was setting himself up as Walter Benjamin. In the painting Kitaj portrays himself as Benjamin. Specifically, Kitaj drew on an essay by Benjamin: ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting’ which was published in German in 1931, and was subsequently published in English in 1968. [Wikipedia describes Benjamin as ‘a German philosopher and cultural critic; an eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, historical materialism, and Jewish mysticism’.]

Rosen writes that by the early 1970s Kitaj’s immersion in the works of Benjamin led Kitaj to find ‘striking affinities between Benjamin’s allusive style and his own practice as a painter’. Rosen states that this is the time when Kitaj produced ‘some of his first major works’. Benjamin also inspired Kitaj to reflect on his Jewish inheritance: he was stimulated to re-read Kafka.

Rosen states that he will examine Benjamin’s ‘Unpacking my library’, and will then suggest that Kitaj worked with a variety of sources in the same manner as Benjamin when collecting books. Rosen will show how ‘the iconographical library which Kitaj thus assembled provides the key to understanding how the Jewish concepts of “assimilation, Diaspora and Homeland” intersected in his work’.

In his essay ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting’, Benjamin revels in the power of collected books and their meanings which transcend their content: ‘the library is a refuge, a home’.

Firstly, Rosen states that Benjamin had an idiosyncratic approach to the purchase of books, and of the books’ meanings. Rosen states that Kitaj also had personal and profound attachment to the iconography that he brought out of his own past. And both Benjamin and Kitaj valued the opportunity to bring new life to the past by unpacking their library.

Secondly, Kitaj sought to paint ‘the human clay’: to re-engage with ‘the depictive stream in art’ which Kitaj considered to have ebbed after the first quarter of the 20th Century. Thus, Kitaj frequently returned to the work of Degas and Cezanne. Whilst Kitaj revelled in the art of Cezanne and his contemporaries, he also sought to be relevant to his own era, and to respond to Jewish concerns. In the 1970s Kitaj read to fully acquaint himself with the Shoah: ‘the central experience both uniting and challenging modern Jews’. Kitaj stated his ambition was to: ‘do Cezanne and Degas and Kafka over again, after Auschwitz’. Rosen states that Kitaj’s aim was ‘the creation of a specifically Jewish art’ in a ‘broader category which he called Diasporist Art’. Kitaj’s definition of Diasporist Art in his manifesto of 1989 is that it is ‘one in which a pariah people, an unpopular, stigmatised people, is taken up, pondered in their dilemmas’. Kitaj included others – ‘blacks, homosexuals, Palestinians, Armenians’ as diasporists, and he asserted that Diasporist paintings were ‘modulated pictures of the mind at work’. Kitaj asserted that the diasporist ‘scrounged and improvised’: that ‘there are no traditional Diasporist procedures [for painting].’ But Kitaj did identify Piacsso’s ‘Guernica’ as an antecedent of Diasporist art. In neither Kitaj’s 1989 manifesto, nor his

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second manifesto of 2007, did he make clear how a Diasporist art of scrounging and improvisation should actually work. Comparison with Benjamin sheds some light on this question.

So, thirdly, Rosen observes that Kitaj’s library of ‘assimilationist aesthetics’ functions in the same way as Benjamin’s library – that is, as a ‘conceptual landscape and refuge’ because a diaspora painting ‘feels like the last days in a transit camp, with your thin mattress in a roll at the foot of the bed’. Kitaj explicitly identified the portability of painting with the ‘refugee’s suitcase’ and ‘the Ark of the Covenant’. As the Ark embodied the hope of a future home, so, for Kitaj, painting became the hope of security in the midst of the Diasporic life.

Rosen writes that he will describe how Kitaj’s hope of a future home is expressed in two of his paintings: ‘Amerika (Baseball)’ of 1983-84 and ‘Los Angeles No.1’ of 2000–01. Before doing this Rosen will describe Kitaj’s life and the development of his artistic and Jewish identity.

R B Kitaj

Ronald Brooks Kitaj was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932. His mother – American-born – was of Russian-Jewish parents, and his father – who left home when Kitaj was 2 years old – was Hungarian. Kitaj’s mother brought up her son without any Jewish education. When Kitaj was 9 his mother married a Viennese Jewish refugee – Dr Walter Kitaj – whose name Ronald Brooks adopted. In 1941 the family moved to New York State and were joined there by Walter’s mother – Helene – who had been able to escape from the Nazi occupation. Most of Helene’s family were murdered. Kitaj wrote that Helene’s arrival changed his life. In the early 1950s Kitaj served as a merchant seaman, travelling around the Caribbean and South America. After a brief time in Vienna he returned to New York to study, and to marry Elsi Roessler in 1953. He then served with the United States Army. When he was discharged he studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, by virtue of the G.I. Bill, and in 1959 he moved to the Royal College of Art in London where he became friends with David Hockney.

Kitaj’s first solo exhibition was in London in 1963: these were ‘collage-based paintings with explanatory texts pasted directly onto the canvas’. By the mid-1960s Kitaj had dispensed with the inscriptions and he painted in dry layers, presenting ‘a wide range of discreet images “into scenes combining apparent spatial integration with a flagrant illogicality”’. ‘If Not, Not’ of 1975-76 is probably the best known of his works from this period and from his whole oeuvre: ‘the gatehouse of Auschwitz ominously presides over a swirl of imagery culled from Matisse, Gauguin and Giorgione’.

Kitaj’s first wife died in 1969.

He met the American painter Sandra Fisher in the 1970s and they married in the 1980s in the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London.

R B KItaj in London in the 1970s

In the 1970s Kitaj began to draw from life and to focus on the human figure. In the ‘Human Clay’ exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, Kitaj brought together other artists working in London at the time: Michael Andrews; Frank Auerbach; Francis Bacon; Lucian Freud; David Hockney; and Leon Kossoff. Together with Sandra Fisher and himself, Kitaj proposed that these artists be known as the ‘School of London’. Auerbach, Freud, Kossoff, Fisher and Kitaj were Jews, but of the five only Kitaj pursued Jewishness as a ‘great obsession’ comparable with his pursuit of drawing the human figure at this time.

Kitaj stated that by the mid-1970s ‘relative silence about the Holocaust began to break into print and my head would spin. I slowly decided I wanted to be some kind of new Jew’. In the early 1980s Kitaj visited Israel for the first time and he visited the Nazi concentration camp at Drancy. He also devoured Jewish texts and histories, advised by Isaiah Berlin.

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In the 1980s Kitaj’s content and style changed: Jewish interests were introduced into the subject-matter and his brushwork became thicker and looser. ‘There was organization without composition’ in Kitaj’s work at this time. This is when ‘Amerika (Baseball)’ was painted.

‘Amerika (Baseball)’

Throughout the 1980s Kitaj was self-consciously painting ‘Diasporist’ works. Kitaj’s first Diasporist manifesto of 1989 quotes from Philip Roth’s novel ‘The Counterlife’: ‘The poor bastard had Jew on the brain’. In this year Kitaj suffered a heart attack. This was an intimation of mortality which led Kitaj to start to explore his ‘old-age style’ as Kitaj referred to it: conte stick beneath thin colour.

In 1994 the Tate Gallery held a retrospective exhibition of Kitaj’s work, and, as referred to above, this sparked skirmishes between Kitaj and his critics. Kitaj’s wife died at this time, and in 1997 he left the UK for Los Angeles. ‘Los Angeles No.1’ was painted in this, last phase of Kitaj’s life.

Kitaj died in 2007 in Los Angeles, just after publication of his Second Diasporist Manifesto.

Rosen considers Kitaj’s painting ‘Amerika (Baseball)’. When Kitaj painted ‘Amerika (Baseball)’ in 1983-84 he was homesick for the land of his birth. Kitaj took the title ‘Amerika’ from Kafka’s unfinished novel of the same name: it begins by describing the enforced emigration of a young man from Europe to the USA for personal, family reasons, and the man’s feelings upon arrival in New York. In contrast, Kitaj had emigrated from the USA of his own volition. Rosen writes that despite these differences – or because of them – Kitaj projected his own ‘Amerika’ onto Kafka – a man who never visited the USA. Kitaj wrote that his painting ‘Amerika (Baseball)’ enabled him to ‘register my American self from afar’. The act of painting was a partial cure for his homesickness: ‘Amerika (Baseball)’ was, for Kitaj, a safe home that nurtured his Jewish identity.

Velazquez’s painting of 1632 – 37 ‘Philip IV Hunting Wild Boar’ was the model for Kitaj as he created the work. Rosen writes that Kitaj placed ‘a distinctly American breed of royalty’ in what Kitaj called the ‘vast metaphoric field’ of the painting. In the painting Kitaj is celebrating the pleasures and achievements of his childhood.

In the early 1980s David Hockney took Kitaj to the British Museum to show him a 70 foot long Chinese scroll dating from the 17th Century: this shows a royal progress along the Yangtse River. KItaj was stimulated to consider how to depict time in a painting. Rosen observes that baseball culture comprises memories of past games, the progress of a game, and the records achieved by individuals and teams: it is a culture that is a ‘process of remembrance’; it is ‘saturated with memory’. For Kitaj, baseball provides a ‘unique imaginative capacity for reconnecting to the USA’.

The ‘aqueous blue sea’ of the baseball field in ‘Amerika (Baseball)’ is, for Kitaj, an ocean at the heart of America. Kitaj’s ocean-baseball field is the Atlantic across which diasporists sail westwards in search of a new home, fleeing persecution. Kitaj wrote that as he worked on the painting he came to see that he must leave the centre of the field open to evoke both the danger of the sea, and the sea as the path of salvation described in Exodus. But the waters of the Red Sea in Exodus eventually returned to their usual place, signifying that even in the safety of the USA there may be still be trauma for the diasporists. There is no orderly play in Kitaj’s baseball painting: no ‘home plate’ and no bases. The players are all equally at risk. Rosen writes that ‘Amerika (Baseball)’ is Kitaj’s meditation on homelessness.

‘Los Angeles No.1’

Rosen considers Kitaj’s painting ‘Los Angeles No.1’. As stated already, the last stage of Kitaj’s life was in Los Angeles from 1997 to 2007. In his Second Diasporist Manifesto (2007) Kitaj stated that even though the diasporist may one day settle down in a place he/she calls home, nevertheless he/she will always be a diasporist. The sad circumstances of his departure from the UK made Kitaj feel as if he had been exiled, despite the USA being his birthplace.

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Kitaj associated his late second wife Sandra with the Jewish notion of Shekhinah – the female presence of God. He understood that, as in the Talmud the Shekhinah followed the people of God into exile, so Sandra was accompanying him in his exile to Los Angeles – his personal Babylon.

Several eminent Jews had settled in Los Angeles in the exile from Europe before and after the start of the Second World War. Kitaj wrote, of Los Angeles: ‘Hollywood is its own Diasporist Manifesto’.

‘Los Angeles No.1’ is derived from Cezanne’s paintings of bathers. Kitaj had been influenced by Cezanne since the early 1970s. Cezanne’s ‘Large Bathers II’ (c1900-06) in the National Gallery in London is the primary influence on ‘Los Angeles No.1’. It is Cezanne’s ‘aesthetic of unfinish’ that Kitaj aspires to. All three of Cezanne’s large ‘Bathers’ were left by him ‘in ambiguous states of completion’, and Kafka left three unfinished novels. Kitaj wrote about the way in which both Picasso and Matisse had been inspired by the Cezanne’s ‘aesthetic of unfinish’. For Kitaj the sense of something not fully attained or completed echoed his sense of longing for the Promised Land in which the diasporist would be satisfied in this life. Kitaj’s ‘Los Angeles’ paintings are creations by him of an intimate place in which he and Sandra can be at home. ‘Los Angeles No.1’ shows Kitaj and Sandra in a state of embrace as if he is an earth-bound angel and she is an angel destined for the heavenly realms. For Kitaj Los Angeles is a place literally ‘of the angels’, and his understanding is that the angels visit during the day but depart at dusk: this is the scene painted in ‘Los Angeles No.1’.

Life in the Diaspora

Rosen concludes with the question posed by Martin Buber in 1901 in the journal Ost und West: ‘Is Jewish art possible today?’ Rosen states that Buber argued that in the absence of a Jewish ‘homeland’ Jewish art would not appear. Rosen argues that Kitaj serves as a counter to Buber. Life in the diaspora is the subject above all that Jewish art should address: ‘Kitaj follows the intuition of Benjamin’s book collector that it belongs to the imagination to create a true home’. But Kitaj also insisted that an imagined Jewish home could ‘exist alongside the existence of a “real” home’.

Rosen argues that the more positive attitude of Kitaj’s Second Diasporist Manifesto reflected the ‘generous diaspora’ that Kitaj found in Los Angeles. Even though Jews may have learned in times of persecution to find their true home by means of the imagination, this learning may also be applied in other ways. Thus, the imagination may continue to construct a true homeland despite the presence of the ‘problematic’ state of Israel. Rosen concludes that ‘the ability to construct a dwelling place out of books or to draw boundaries out of paint, may – in its very abstraction – provide an ethical counter-balance to the exigencies of political life.’

Conclusion

The summaries of the twenty Jewish artists and the summary of Rosen’s essay on R B Kitaj show a number of characteristics of art by Jewish artists of the 20th Century.

a) It shows the extent to which, as Rosenberg put it in 1966, the primary theme for Jewish artists in the 20th Century was identity. This means Jewish identity as well as personal identity.

b) It shows the ways in which the ‘profound Jewish expression’ of these artists ‘is loaded with meaning for all the people of this era’.

c) It shows the ways in which anti-Semitism manifested itself.

d) It shows the ways in which – in the words of the audio-visual presentation in the Jewish Museum, New York – Jews are spread among the nations and are the memory of the nations.

e) Epstein’s purpose in making Risen Christ of 1917 – 1919 shows the Jewish artist as a prophet to the nations: ‘the Jew – the Galilean – condemns our wars and warns us that “Shalom, Shalom” must still be the watchword between man and man’.

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f) It shows how the Jew’s status as ‘outsider’ contributes to the creation of works of art that ‘insiders’ regard as significant.

g) It shows the ways in which ‘the state of mind resulting from political circumstances and the climate of permanent anxiety in which the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe lived in the late 19th and early 20th Century’ contributed, through Soutine in 1950, to Abstract Expressionism in New York in the 1950s and 1960s.

h) It shows how Jewish artists were in the vanguard of the centre of gravity of modernism moving from Paris to New York during World War Two.

i) It shows Jewish artists using Christian iconography – specifically the crucifixion. Jewish artists who are shown to have used the crucifixion include: Epstein; Rothko; Levy; Chagall; Newman; and Bak.

j) It shows Jewish artists as migratory people and a Diaspora: a nation and a scattered people who, despite the establishment of the nation state of Israel, still puts into practice strategies of survival. The act of painting is itself part of this strategy and a source of hope.

k) It shows Jewish artists responding to the moral dilemma for Israel of Palestinian rights.

l) It shows a Jewish artist (Chagall) who asserted 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’.

m) It shows a Jewish artist (Chagall) whose purpose after World War Two was peace-making.

n) It shows Jewish artists for whom the word written on paper or parchment has its own intrinsic eternal value. This includes both sacred texts and the wider body of established literature. The ‘portable written word’ gives meaning to a migratory people.

o) It shows, in the 1960s, the ‘compromised position of the post-Holocaust Jewish intellectual’: ‘”yes” to Jewish intellectual-artist-architect’; “yes” to scholar; “no” to maker of Jewish art’.

p) It shows Jewish artists engaging with the Masters and with the established tradition of Western art in the 19th and 20th Century.

q) It shows artists for whom the Shoah was ‘the central experience both uniting and challenging modern Jews’.

8. Mark Rothko

Introduction

Rothko – a Jew - was born Markus Rothkowitz in 1903 in Dvinsk, Russia – now Daugavpils, Latvia. He emigrated to the USA with his family at the age of ten. His father died when Rothko was 11 years old. By the age of twenty two he had chosen an artist’s life and he had moved to New York City where he taught art to children at the Brooklyn Jewish Centre – a job he maintained for 27 years until he was 49 years old. Rothko married Edith Sachar in 1932; the marriage ended in divorce in 1944 when Rothko was 41 years old. He married Mary Beistle a year later: the marriage produced a son Christopher and a daughter Kate. Rothko’s mother died when Rothko was 45 years old – in 1948. At the age of 55 – in 1958 - Rothko was chosen – along with three other artists – to represent the USA at the XXIX Venice Biennale. Rothko and Mary separated in 1969 when Rothko was 63 years old: he moved into his studio on 69th Street in New York City. Rothko died at his own hand in 1970 at the age of 67.

What is the origin, significance and the meaning of Rothko’s mature style? Why are Rothko’s mature style works described as having a ‘spiritual’ effect on some of those who view them? May we say that Rothko’s mature style works were painted in response to the Holocaust?

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Using three sources and the content of this essay I go to the heart of the matter.

My sources are:

A summary of a podcast by the National Gallery of Art: a recording of a lecture dated 11 June 2005 given by Christopher Rothko about Rothko’s ‘The Artist’s Reality’, probably written in 1940-41 and published in 2005. The summary is mine and is at http://abstractartc20.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/mark-rothko-artists-reality.html

Ed. Lopez-Remiro. M. ‘Writings on Art’. 2006.

Clearwater. B. ‘The Rothko Book’. 2006.

Rothko in 1945

Writing in 1945, Rothko wrote in a Personal Statement that he ‘quarrels with surrealist and abstract art only as one quarrels with father and mother .... the Surrealist has uncovered the glossary of the myth and has established a congruity between the phantasmagoria of the subconscious and the objects of everyday life. This congruity constitutes the exhilarated tragic experience which for me is the only source book for art ..... the Abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi. But I repudiate his denial of the anecdote just as I repudiate his denial of the material existence of the whole of reality. For art to me is as anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness’.

In a concluding statement to this, Miguel Lopez-Remiro writes, in his Introduction to Rothko’s ‘Writings on Art’: ‘Rothko is in search of a symbol of permanence’.

Lopez-Remiro makes this statement in the light of Rothko writing to Barnett Newman in July 1945 saying: ‘I have assumed for myself the problem of further concretizing my symbols, which give me many headaches but make my work rather exuberating. Unfortunately we can’t think things out with finality but must endure a series of stumbling toward a clearer issue’.

As Clearwater puts it, Rothko was painting by ‘a process that led to such well-resolved surrealist paintings as ‘Phalanx of the Mind’ and ‘Ceremonial’. Clearwater reminds us that in ‘The Artist’s Reality’, Rothko clarified why he wanted to make his symbols more concrete: Rothko praises the ability of children and ‘primitive’ artists to create symbols that ‘represent the unseen power of their environment’.

We may conclude that in 1945 Rothko was in search of a ‘symbol of permanence’. His ‘source book’ was ‘the exhilarated tragic experience’. His works were to be ‘anecdotes of the spirit’. It would be in 1949/50 that Rothko’s mature colour-field style began to appear.

Clearwater writes that by 1947 Rothko realised that he must free himself from surrealism ‘in order to create a truly transcendent art’ (Clearwater’s words).

What else was going on in 1945?

World War Two ended in 1945.

a) Godfrey, writing about Newman (in Section 6 above), states: ‘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 Rosenberg 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.

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b) Van Voolen writes of Krasner’s ‘Composition’ of 1949’ (Section 6 above) that it includes hieroglyphics devised by Krasner, and that 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.

c) Godfrey, writing about Newman (Section 6 above), records a symposium in Philadelphia in 2002 when 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’.

d) van Voolen writes of Louis’ ‘Charred Journal Series’ (see Section 6 of this essay) that was shown in an exhibition of 1953, that Louis began working in an abstract style because Louis considered it ‘the only appropriate medium to express the haunting and unrepresentable nature of the Holocaust’.

Was Rothko’s art of the late 1940s and early 1950s a direct response to the Holocaust?

In the context of what we know about Newman, Krasner and Louis in the late 1940’s, is there any evidence to show that Rothko’s art of the late 1940s and early 1950s was a direct response to the Holocaust?

Clearwater writes about Rothko’s work ‘Sacrifice of Iphigenia’ of 1942. This was painted at the time when Rothko was shedding the widely-held conviction that figure painting should dominate: he was moving into paintings such as ‘Sacrifice of Iphigenia’ which contained abstracted symbols that had a surreal presence. The abstracted symbols in this painting are one of Rothko’s earliest uses of ‘morphological forms’. The myth is based on Aeschylus’ play ‘Agamemnon’, in which Agamemnon was forced to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to appease the goddess Artemis who had caused winds to blow that prevented Agamemnon’s fleet sailing to Troy to join battle. The various ‘morphological forms’ in the painting can be read as each being representative of players and actions in the myth: some of these forms had previously been used and developed by Rothko in earlier paintings.

Rothko included ‘Sacrifice of Iphigenia’ in his first solo exhibition at Art of This Century in 1945.

Clearwater writes about the parallels between the circumstances of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter and the sacrifice of young lives in World War Two ‘for the sake of humanity’.

When reading Rothko’s letters and notes from the period January 1st, 1940 to 31st December, 1950, there are some allusions to World War Two but nothing that can be understood as being a direct reference to the Holocaust.

These are the two relevant entries.

In June 1943 Rothko and his fellow modernist Adolph Gottlieb wrote to the New York Times in response to a negative review by Edward Alden Jewell. Barnett Newman also assisted in editing the text of the letter. Six preliminary drafts are published in ‘Writings on Art’, together with the text of the letter as sent and as published by the New York Times in full on June 13, 1943.

In the first – and longest – draft, Rothko and Gottlieb have asserted that ancient and ‘primitive’ art contains timeless truths that can be presented by the artist as being relevant to every age.

They then assert that the artists of the past may have been prophets who ‘saw the potentiality for carnage which we know too well today. But why press home this point? The artist paints and what he must’. This direct mention of current carnage is not in the letter as published.

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The published letter includes a paragraph that had not appeared in any of the drafts. This new paragraph provides a simple explanation of Gottlieb’s ‘The Rape of Persephone’ of 1943 (which Edward Alden Jewell had described as unintelligible) that states: ‘”The Rape of Persephone” is a poetic expression of the essence of the myth; the representation of the concept of seed and its earth with all its brutal implications; the impact of elemental truth. Would you have us present this abstract concept with all its complicated feelings by means of a boy and girl lightly tripping?’

[In simple terms, the Rape of Persephone is the myth of the abduction of Persephone – a goddess of nature - by Hades, the feared, powerful god of the underworld, of the dead, and of riches. (The riches of mineral wealth and of agriculture emerge from under the ground). Hades takes Persephone as booty. Persephone became the goddess of the underworld who caused Spring to break, plants to flower and creation to be fertile. Thus, Persephone was abducted into the realms of death, but she made herself known each year in the vitality of growth before descending once more. As Queen of the Underworld, Persephone was also understood to carry into effect the curses of the living on the souls of the dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persephone ]

In 1946 Rothko wrote an Introduction to a catalogue for an exhibition of works by Clyfford Still in which Rothko wrote: ‘For me, Still’s pictorial dramas are an extension of the Greek Persephone Myth. As he himself has expressed it, his paintings are “of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated”’.

It is unclear whether, in 1943, Rothko, Gottlieb and Newman would be fully aware of the Holocaust, so their reference to contemporary carnage may well have been to the war in general. We may conclude that Rothko, Gottlieb and their editor Newman decided that allusion by means of Greek myth was more attuned to the general thrust of the letter, which is that the ancient myths speak directly to the present.

On October 13, 1943 Rothko and Gottlieb took part in a radio programme. They answered questions about modern art that had been submitted by listeners.

Rothko and Gottlieb are insistent that art changed with Picasso and Braque and that the modern world demands that artists make new art. The two artists explained their use of mythological characters. Gottlieb says that these are myths that Rubens, Titian, Veronese and Velazquez used, and he asks why modernists are challenged about working to the same myths.

Rothko explains that their works are not ‘abstract paintings with literary titles’, as a questioner had suggested. He says that modernists’ representation of ancient myths ‘must be in our own terms, which are at once more primitive and more modern than the myths themselves – more primitive because we seek the primeval and atavistic roots of the idea rather than the graceful classical version; more modern than the myths themselves because we must redescribe their implications through our own experience. Those who think that the world of today is more gentle and graceful than the primeval and predatory passions from which these myths spring, are either not aware of reality or do not wish to see it in art’.

In reply to a final question about subject matter, Gottlieb states that ‘in times of violence, personal predilections for niceties of colour and form seem irrelevant. All primitive expression reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear, a recognition and acceptance of the brutality of the natural world as well as the eternal insecurity of life. That these feelings are being experienced by many people throughout the world today is an unfortunate fact, and to us an art that glosses over or evades these feelings, is superficial or meaningless. That is why we insist on subject matter, a subject matter that embraces these feelings and permits them to be expressed’.

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Conclusion

The greater part of Rothko’s writings in ‘Writings on Art’ are characterised by: Rothko’s writings on the teaching of art to children; autobiographical and personal notes; letters about exhibitions and reviews; notes for exhibitions; and personal letters to Barnet Newman.

Therefore we may conclude that throughout the 1940s, as Rothko moved from figure painting, to abstracted symbols (morphological forms representing ancient myths) to multiforms (the precursor to his mature colour-field style) he did not make any written statements about his work being a direct specific response to the Holocaust or to the events of World War Two, other than acknowledging that the ancient myths speak to contemporary tragedy.

Instead, we see in Rothko a deep commitment to discover a way of painting that does justice to the tragic nature of humanity, as a contemporary complement to the ancient myths. This tragic nature is shown to Rothko in contemporary events. It is likely that, as Godrey writes of Newman, in the immediate post war era the Holocaust and Hiroshima would have been both too painful and too obvious to address explicitly by Newman and his contemporaries.

The process that led to Rothko’s mature style

Rothko’s desire to engage with human emotion to achieve unity

We have already seen in Section 6 above, in the description of Rothko’s ‘Crucifixion’ of 1941/42, that since at least the early 1940s, Rothko’s concern had been the fragmentation and compartmentalism that afflicted individuals and society as a whole.

In the lecture given by Rothko’s son Christopher on June 11, 2005 concerning his father’s ‘The Artist’s Reality’ (probably written in 1940/41), Christopher Rothko states that in ‘The Artist’s Reality’ his father was critical of modern art for lacking the warmth of human emotional engagement. Christopher Rothko said, paraphrasing his father: ‘unlike the scientist, the artist cannot have separate truths, separate unities and separate fragments of the universe: the artist must always resolve his fragment in man’s subjectivity’. His father expresses his distress at the atomisation that is prevalent around him: artificial separation and lack of inter-communication’.

Rothko expresses the view in ‘The Artist’s Reality’ that the artist, like the philosopher and the poet, needs to resolve all the various laws and systems into one picture: ‘a unity’.

Rothko’s ‘multiforms’

In 1947 Rothko wrote an essay for the first and only edition of the journal ‘Possibilities’. The essay was entitled ‘The Romantics were Prompted’. Clearwater writes that in this essay Rothko described his ‘transitional abstract paintings’: his ‘multiforms’ as they are now referred to. He stated that the ‘forms’ in these paintings were ‘performers’, each painting being a ‘drama’. Three ‘multiforms’ are illustrated in Clearwater’s book: ‘No.18’ (1946-7); ‘No.1 Untitled’ (1948); and ‘No.9’ (1948).

In ‘The Romantics were prompted’ Rothko writes ‘I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers ...... Neither the action or the actors can be anticipated, or described in advance ..... Ideas and plans that existed in the mind at the start were simply the doorway through which one left the world in which they occur .... The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need’.

Rothko concludes by writing of the essential loneliness of humanity; he writes: ‘It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breaching and stretching one’s arms again’.

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Tactile space, illusory space and ‘space intuition’

In a commentary on the ‘multiform’ ‘No.18’ (1946-47), Clearwater writes that in his ‘The Artist’s Reality’ Rothko had described the tension between the two kinds of ‘space intuition’: the tactile and the illusory. Tactile space presents objects that could be measured and touched. In contrast, illusory space involves the use of perspective: the illusion of a three-dimensional world is created within the bounds of the painting. Tactile space accords with the way in which we see things. The conventions of illusory space must be learned: space recedes to a vanishing point; colours recede through greys to make them muted.

Since an early stage in his painting career, Rothko had tended to paint in tactile space rather than illusory space: his backgrounds were part of his foregrounds. He used colour to express emotion; he did not want to be restricted by the conventions of perspective.

Rothko had long been interested in ‘space intuition’: the way in which colour is recognised and read by the brain. Clearwater refers to the article by Douglas MacAgy – who was the Director of the School of Fine Arts in California - in his ‘Magazine of Art’ of 1949. MacAgy had engaged Rothko to teach at the School in the summers of 1947 and 1949. MacAgy writes about Rothko’s desire to unify tactile and illusory space. MacAgy affirmed that the ‘multiforms’ were a continuation of Rothko’s surrealist representations of ancient Greek myths. Clearwater writes that in the period 1947 – 49 Rothko was preoccupied by the myth of the battle between Dionysius and Apollo: this myth ‘represented the conflict between the objective and subjective comprehensions of reality. Transformation and tension were the means for conveying it’. The tension between objective and subjective may be read as also the tension between tactile space and illusory space.

Rothko’s desire to unify tactile space and illusory space within his paintings

By the mid 1940s, as he developed his ‘multiforms’, Rothko introduced an additional dimension to tactile space: his ‘forms’ – ‘performers in the drama – are painted in a way that suggests that the forms exist within a surrounding atmosphere which impinges on the ‘forms’. This is the beginning of Rothko wanting to unify tactile space and illusory space within his paintings. In ‘No.18’ Rothko moves in this direction by using warmer colours (which appear to come forward) and cooler colours (which appear to recede). Each of the ‘forms’ is painted in a way that lets them ‘breathe’ and ‘move’: none of them is represented by a flat unvarying colour; instead they are made of modulated colour.

Many ‘multiforms’ were produced by Rothko between 1946 and 1949: these were experiments in a new territory.

In his ‘Writings on Art’ there is a letter from Rothko to Clay Spohn (a Professor at the California School of Fine Arts with whom Rothko established a friendship) dated September 24th, 1947. Rothko writes this statement, which Lopez-Remiro considers ‘an important statement’: ‘Elements occurred (in San Francisco) which I shall develop, and which are new in my work, and that at least for the moment stimulate me – which gives me the illusion – at least – of not spending the coming year regurgitating last year’s feelings’.

Lopez-Remiro writes that Rothko is referring to his first ‘multiforms’.

The transition from ‘multiforms’ to Rothko’s mature style

Clearwater shows that Rothko’s transition from ‘multiforms’ to his mature style was gradual and that there is not a painting that can be said to be the first of his mature style.

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For example:

i. ‘No.17’ of 1949 shows the edges of the ‘forms’ to have a similar style to the edges of the blocks of colour in his mature style works: the composition has four blocks of colour, each rooted in a corner of the canvas, and there is a fifth block interposed between two of the corner blocks.

ii. ‘No.11 / No. 20’ of 1949 has a small number of large ‘forms’ grouped on the canvas in a manner similar to the mature style, but the blocks are still rooted in the corners and the edges on one of the blocks are hard, and this block is painted in unrelieved, flat colour.

iii. ‘No.8’ of 1949 has a light-coloured block above a red-coloured block in the mature style, but there is also a continuous bar of light colour running down the left had side of the composition.

But ‘No.3 / No.13’ [Magenta, Black, Green on Orange] of 1949 has six horizontal blocks of colour on a red ground in a composition very near to the mature style. Clearwater writes that this was exhibited at Rothko’s one-man exhibition in 1950 in the Betty Parsons Gallery and that ‘it came close to his classic painting’. Clearwater analyses how this painting works, and how it demonstrates the functioning of a mature work by Rothko. The dimensions and proportions of the bands of colour are made in a way that they complement the colour of each band and its place in the canvas.

Rothko achieves the illusion that the bands of colour are moving against each other in position and depth: dramatic tension is achieved, and the viewer is transfixed by her/his heightened senses as they watch and examine the painting, and enter into its depths. She concludes: ‘For Rothko, the manner in which a successful work materialised would be as mysterious to him as to the viewer’.

In a transcript from a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, published in ‘Interiors’ in May 1951, Rothko is recorded as having said: ‘I would like to say something about large pictures and perhaps touch on some of the points made by the people who are looking for a spiritual basis for communion. I paint very large pictures, I realise that historically the function of painting large pictures is something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them however – I think it applies to other painters I know – is precisely because I want to be intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint a larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command’.

‘A leap of faith to create unprecedented gestures’

In relation to his 1942 work ‘Sacrifice of Iphigenia’ (see above in this section) Clearwater observes that Rothko had had an enduring interest in sacrifice, having painted crucifixions in the 1930s and the early 1940s (see Section 6 above). Clearwater writes that Rothko was still interested in sacrifice in 1958, when he spoke about Kiekegaard’s ‘Fear and Trembling’ in a lecture to the Pratt Institute. Specifically Kiekegaard writes about the near-sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. In 1958 Rothko equated the un-understandable act by Abraham with the act of faith made by an artist who ‘takes a leap of faith to create unprecedented gestures’.

In 1958 Rothko also spoke about the question that Kiekegaard raises: ‘Should Abraham tell his wife Sarah and Isaac that God had commanded him to sacrifice Isaac?’ Kiekegaard concludes that Abraham could not do this because he would not be able to explain himself. Rothko then spoke about artists who ‘want to tell all like at a confessional’ and said that he preferred reticence.

Clearwater concludes that in retrospect Rothko concluded that his paintings of the early 1940s ‘gave too much specific information’. He concluded that to achieve ‘universal symbols of permanence’ which were to be ‘anecdotes of the spirit’ he must ‘sacrifice the figure to make a unique gesture’. Rothko concluded that there was ‘more power in telling little than in telling all’.

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The Seagram murals

In 1958 Rothko accepted a commission to produce a series of paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant at the Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York City, between 52nd and 53rd Street. In 1958 and 1959 Rothko produced about 30 paintings for this commission. In these works Rothko employed a new style of composition which had vertical and rectangular shapes. In simple terms, these echo the architectural shape of the room in which they were to have been hung, but the ‘doorways’ and ‘gates’ of colour that result also tend to invite the viewer to visually enter the painting and so they set up an additional tension in an already ‘moving’ picture.

Clearwater writes: ‘The Seagram paintings should be seen as his continued drive to contain, reflect and generate light, and to create an infinite space that would provide viewers with the experience of the human condition’.

Rothko subsequently withdrew from the commission: he was allowed to retain the paintings.

Clearwater discusses the influences on Rothko in the composition and colour of the ‘Seagram murals’. Rothko was interested in the effects of projected light. And he visited Italy in 1959 and was impressed with the architectural effect within Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence: the blind windows create a reversal of expectation; they are windows that one looks to, but through which one sees nothing. The murals are all very large. Their ‘doorways’ and ‘windows’ and the brightness with which they are painted make them glow enticingly. The manner in which Rothko painted the fields of colour allows the background colour field to shine through and create an illusion of movement.

Clearwater identifies a painting by Rothko of 1939 in which he depicts a group of people gathered on a stairway at an entrance to a subway station. The viewer stands below ground looking up to the figures, who are enclosed by the walls and ceiling of the stairs, and by the stairs on which they stand. And there is a small rectangle of a differently modulated light which stands behind and above the people: the sky. Clearwater states that Rothko made the sky ‘look simultaneously opaque and infinite’. The tension between the two different kinds of light, and the disorientating effect of looking upstairs is similar in effect to Rothko’s Seagram Murals.

Some of the Seagram Murals were subsequently donated by Rothko to the Tate Gallery, and it is these which now hang in the Tate Modern.

Conclusion

We may conclude that Rothko – a Jewish artist who had arrived in the USA from persecution in Russia in 1913 when he was 10 years old, and who, we may imagine, carried within his psyche the same kinds of memories, anxieties and visions as Moses Elkanah Herzog (see Section 4 above) - followed a consistent path throughout the 1940s to achieve a new style of art in 1950: the mature colour field union of tactile and illusory space.

We cannot say that the ‘miraculous’ art that Rothko produced was a direct response to the Holocaust. Rather it was the gift to humanity of a man who was troubled by atomisation within the individual and within humanity as a whole, who suffered the archetypal suffering of the Jew in the 20th Century, and who wanted, through art, to reach out and provide healing and hope to a broken humanity.

Mark Rothko was a great artist.

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9. Key themes

The essay has brought many themes to the fore.

These are the key themes that indicate where future study could be directed.

1. The Christian theologian Tillich is mentioned as a significant figure in 20th Century technology by Pattison, Harries and Bellow.

2. Kierkegaard is part of the story for both Pattison and Rothko.

3. The ‘Isenheim altarpiece’ appears to have been ubiquitous in the 20th Century. When was this work first advanced as relevant to the 20th Century, and by whom?

4. Jewish artists’ engagement with the crucifixion ran throughout the 20th Century and had differing meanings as the Century progressed.

5. The questions raised by Newman and Bak, amongst others, about the meaning of the Holocaust, continue to be asked today.

Bibliography

Bowers . A. et al. ‘100 Artists see God’. 2004. Independent Curators International.

Bellow. S. ‘Herzog’ 1964. Penguin.

Clearwater. B. ‘The Rothko Book’. 2006. Tate Publishing.

Cogniat. R. ‘Soutine’. 1973. Crown.

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

Harris. A. ‘Romantic Moderns’. 2010. Thames & Hudson.

Harries. R. ‘The Image of Christ in Modern Art’. 2013. Ashgate

Hepburn. N. ‘Cross Purposes. Shock and Contemplation in Images of the Crucifixion’. 2010. Mascalls Gallery & Ben Uri Gallery, The London Museum of Jewish Art.

Klein, M. & Brown, E. ‘The Faces of Modigliani: Identity Politics under Fascism’ in Klein. M. (ed) ‘Modigliani beyond the myth’. 2004.

Langer. ‘Pre-empting the Holocaust’. 1998. Yale.

Lopez- Remiro. M. (ed) ‘Mark Rothko: Writings on Art’. 2006. Yale University Press.

Pattison. G. ‘Crucifixions and Resurrections of the Image’. 2009. SCM.

Rosen. A. ‘Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the masters in Chagall, Guston and Kitaj’. 2009. Legenda.

Rosenberg H. ‘Is there a Jewish Art?’. 1966. Published in ‘Commentary’.

Schama. S. ‘Hang Ups’. 2005. BBC Books.

Tuchman. M. (ed) ‘The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890 – 1985’. 1986. Abbeville.

Van Voolen. E. ‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’. 2011. Prestel.

Wasserstein. B. ‘On the Eve. The Jews of Europe before the Second World War’. 2012. Profile.

Wolff. J. ‘AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States’. 2003. Ithaca, New York; Cornell University Press.

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APPENDIX

Overview of the main movements in Western art 1900 – 1960

In 2011 the Tate Modern had a graffiti-style timeline of 20th Century art written on one of its internal walls: the first floor landing and circulation area. This was a temporary installation which is now gone. I photographed the timeline of artists whose names were classified under the headings of the various schools and styles and movements. It was difficult to take the photographs and some names are unclear.

The story begins in the first decade of the 20th Century with: Fauvism; Photo-Secession; die Brucke; Cubism; and Futurism.

Between 1910 and 1920 we find a greater number of schools and artists: School of Paris; Orphism; Blaue Reiter; Vorticism; Suprematism; Constructivism; De Stijl; Dada; and Bauhaus.

Between 1920 and 1930 there are fewer names on the wall: Mexican murals; New Objectivity; and Surrealism.

Between 1930 and 1940 some of the photos are too hazy and distant to read any of the names until we get to the mid 1930s when we find: Harlem Renaissance; Unit One; Socialist Realism; Realist Photography; the British Surrealist Group; and Photo-journalism.

Moving on to the 1940s, we find: the St.Ives School; Spatialism; Art Informel; Abstract Expressionism; and Cobra.

The 1950s give us: New York Photography; African Studio Photography; Happenings; Pop Art; Neo Dada; Neo Concrete Group; Situationist International; and Hard Edge Painting.

This is a somewhat haphazard approach to describing the main movements in Western art from 1900 to 1960, but it serves as a springboard. The six most significant movements, schools and styles of these sixty years are: Cubism; School of Paris; Dada; Surrealism; Abstract Expressionism; and Pop Art.

Any classification is a crude generalisation that may not do full justice to individual artists. Nevertheless, for the purposes of art history, this classification is a necessary aid to understanding.

The Tate Modern’s website has a glossary of artists and ‘styles or isms’: the entries for the six movements, schools and styles are copied below.

The Tate Modern website on Cubism:

‘Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907/08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque who aimed to bring different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted.

Cubism was one of the most influential styles of the twentieth century. It is generally agreed to have begun around 1907 with Picasso’s celebrated painting Demoiselles D’Avignon which included elements of cubist style. The name ‘cubism’ seems to have derived from a comment made by the critic Louis Vauxcelles who, on seeing some of Georges Braque’s paintings exhibited in Paris in 1908, described them as reducing everything to ‘geometric outlines, to cubes’.

Cubism opened up almost infinite new possibilities for the treatment of visual reality in art and was the starting point for many later abstract styles including constructivism and neo-plasticism.

By breaking objects and figures down into distinct areas or planes, the artists aimed to show different viewpoints at the same time and within the same space and so suggest their three dimensional form.

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In doing so they also emphasized the two-dimensional flatness of the canvas, instead of creating the illusion of depth. This marked a revolutionary break with the European tradition, which had dominated representation from the Renaissance onwards, of creating the illusion of real space from a fixed viewpoint using devices such as linear perspective.

Cubism was partly influenced by the late work of Paul Cézanne in which he can be seen to be painting things from slightly different points of view.

Pablo Picasso was also inspired by African tribal masks which are highly stylised, or non-naturalistic, but nevertheless present a vivid human image. ‘A head’, said Picasso, ‘is a matter of eyes, nose, mouth, which can be distributed in any way you like’.

Cubism can be seen to have developed in two distinct phases: the initial and more austere analytical cubism, and later phase of cubism known as synthetic cubism’.

The Tate Modern website has this on the School of Paris:

‘In the early years of the twentieth century, Paris became a magnet for artists from all over the world and the focus of the principal innovations of modern art – the term School of Paris grew up to describe this phenomenon.

During the nineteenth century Paris, France, became the centre of a powerful national school of painting and sculpture, culminating in the dazzling innovations of impressionism and post-impressionism.

As a result, in the early years of the twentieth century Paris became a magnet for artists from all over the world and the birthplace for some of the principal innovations of modern art, notably fauvism, cubism, abstract art and surrealism. The twin chiefs (chefs d’école) were Pablo Picasso, who settled in Paris from his native Spain in 1904, and the Frenchman Henri Matisse. Also in 1904, the pioneer modern sculptor Constantin Brancusi arrived in Paris from Romania, and in 1906 the painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani from Italy. Chaïm Soutine arrived from Russia in 1911. The Russian painter Marc Chagall lived in Paris from 1910–14 and then again from 1923–39 and 1947–9, after which he moved to the South of France. The Dutch pioneer of pure abstract painting, Piet Mondrian, settled in Paris in 1920 and Wassily Kandinsky in 1933.

The heyday of the School of Paris was ended by the Second World War, although the term continued to be used to describe the artists of Paris. However, from about 1950 its dominance ceded to the rise of the New York school’.

This is the Tate Modern website on Dada:

‘Dada was an art movement formed during the First World War in Zurich in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the war. The art, poetry and performance produced by dada artists is often satirical and nonsensical in nature. Dada artists felt the war called into question every aspect of a society capable of starting and then prolonging it – including its art. Their aim was to destroy traditional values in art and to create a new art to replace the old. As the artist Hans Arp later wrote: “Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might”.

In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-bourgeois and had political affinities with the radical left.

The founder of dada was a writer, Hugo Ball. In 1916 he started a satirical night-club in Zurich, the Cabaret Voltaire, and a magazine which, wrote Ball, ‘will bear the name ”Dada”. Dada, Dada, Dada, Dada.’ This was the first of many dada publications.

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Dada became an international movement and eventually formed the basis of surrealism in Paris after the war. Leading artists associated with it include Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Kurt Schwitters.

Duchamp’s questioning of the fundamentals of Western art had a profound subsequent influence.

This is the Tate Modern website on Surrealism:

‘Surrealism was a movement which began in the 1920s of writers and artists (including Salvador Dalí and René Magritte), who experimented with ways of unleashing the subconscious imagination. ‘As Breton says, surrealism is not just an art movement. It is a way of thinking, a way of transforming existence.

Surrealism was launched in Paris in 1924 by French poet André Breton with the publication of his Manifesto of Surrealism. Breton was strongly influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud identified a deep layer of the human mind where memories and our most basic instincts are stored. He called this the unconscious, since most of the time we are not aware of it. The aim of surrealism was to reveal the unconscious and reconcile it with rational life.

Surrealism also aimed at social and political revolution and for a time was affiliated to the Communist party.

Surrealism became an international movement, widely influencing art, literature and the cinema as well as social attitudes and behaviour. Surrealist groups formed around the globe including, in 1936, the British Surrealist group with artist Paul Nash and critic Herbet Read among its founding members.

There was no single style of surrealist art but two broad types can be seen. One was the oneiric (dream-like) work of Salvador Dalí, early Max Ernst, and René Magritte. (Freud believed that dreams revealed the workings of the unconscious, and his famous book The Interpretation of Dreams was central to surrealism).

The other was automatism of later Max Ernst and Joan Miró. Automatism was the surrealist term for Freud’s technique of free association, which he also used to reveal the unconscious mind of his patients’.

Abstract Expressionism is described thus by the Tate Modern website:

‘Abstract expressionism is the term applied to new forms of abstract art developed by American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 1950s, often characterized by gestural brush-strokes or mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity. The abstract expressionists were mostly based in New York City, and also became known as the New York school.

The name evokes their aim to make art that while abstract was also expressive or emotional in its effect. They were inspired by the surrealist idea that art should come from the unconscious mind, and by the automatism of Joan Miró.

Within abstract expressionism were two broad groupings, action painters and colour field painters.

The action painters were led by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, who worked in a spontaneous improvisatory manner often using large brushes to make sweeping gestural marks. Pollock famously placed his canvas on the ground and danced around it pouring paint from the can or trailing it from the brush or a stick. In this way, the action painters directly placed their inner impulses onto the canvas.

Colour field painters included Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still. They were deeply interested in religion and myth and created simple compositions with large areas of a single colour intended to produce a contemplative or meditational response in the viewer’.

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And this is the Tate Modern website on Pop Art:

‘Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s in America and Britain, drawing inspiration from sources in popular and commercial culture such as advertising, Hollywood movies and pop music. Key pop artists include Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake and David Hockney

Emerging in the mid 1950s in Britain and late 1950s in America, pop art reached its peak in the 1960s. It began as a revolt against the dominant approaches to art and culture and traditional views on what art should be. Young artists felt that what they were taught at art school and what they saw in museums did not have anything to do with their lives or the things they saw around them every day. Instead they turned to sources such as Hollywood movies, advertising, product packaging, pop music and comic books for their imagery.

In 1957 pop artist Richard Hamilton listed the ‘characteristics of pop art’ in a letter to his friends the architects Peter and Alison Smithson: “Pop Art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big business.”

Modernist critics were horrified by the pop artists’ use of such ‘low’ subject matter and by their apparently uncritical treatment of it. In fact pop both took art into new areas of subject matter and developed new ways of presenting it in art and can be seen as one of the first manifestations of postmodernism.

Chief pop artists in America were Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol; in Britain, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Allen Jones, and Eduardo Paolozzi. In Europe a similar movement was called nouveau réalisme (new realism).

Although they were inspired by similar subject matter, British pop is often seen as distinctive from American pop. Early pop art in Britain was fuelled by American popular culture viewed from a distance, while the American artists were inspired by what they saw and experienced living within that culture.

In the United States, pop style was a return to representational art (art that depicted the visual world in a recognisable way) and the use of hard edges and distinct forms after the painterly looseness of abstract expressionism. By using impersonal, mundane imagery, pop artists also wanted to move away from the emphasis on personal feelings and personal symbolism that characterised abstract expressionism.

In Britain, the movement was more academic in its approach. While employing irony and parody, it focused more on what American popular imagery represented, and its power in manipulating people’s lifestyles. The 1950s art group The Independent Group (IG), is regarded as the precursor to the British Pop art movement’.