Chagall’s Humble Beginnings

Chagall, born in 1887, found inspiration for much of his work in his upbringing in Vitebsk, Belorussia. There, a folktale is told of an artist named Chaim, the son of Isaac Segal (Chagall’s family name was Segal before it was changed by Chagall). According to legend, Chaim Segal painted in three synagogues in three different towns, and when he completed painting, he fell off his ladder and died, with each of the three different synagogues claiming he had died in their synagogue. Chagall adopted this man as his fictitious grandfather in his autobiography. In reality, his mother was supportive of the artistic talent Chagall had discovered in himself, though his father was less so.

Chagall studied art in St. Petersburg on scholarship and counted among his most influential teachers the Jewish artist and magazine illustrator Leon Bakst. Chagall’s works from this time, like In Front of Father’s House (1908) and The Violinist (1910), show the familiar setting of his homeland.

In St. Petersburg, Chagall met Max Vinaver, who became his patron, sending Chagall to Paris and offering a monthly allowance. According to Susan Tumarkin Goodman, curator of the 2001 Jewish Museum of New York exhibition “Marc Chagall: Early Works from Russian Collections,” Chagall developed his unique style in these years prior to World War I.
Chagall took his homeland with him to Paris and created works that solidified the Russian identity found in his paintings, including Mother Russia (1912-1913) and I and My Village (1911). H. W. Janson notes, “Chagall here relives the experiences of his childhood, experiences so important to him that his imagination shaped and reshaped them without ever getting rid of their memories.”

Floating Above Reality

Chagall was in Russia at the start of World War I and was unable to return to Paris. Chagall’s work of this time reflects an interesting dichotomy between his personal life and the world at large. While the world was engaged in war, Chagall found–with his wife Bella, whom he had married in 1915–the ability to float above the world’s reality and portray a time of great love. This reality reflects in Chagall’s painting The Birthday (1915), which shows him and his wife seemingly elevated by the love between them, able to float above the world’s reality and experience a time of great love. This is in contrast to his painting, The Canopy (1912), a wedding scene painted during his time in Paris, where bride and groom are grounded under the huppah (Jewish wedding canopy).

Chagall remained in Russia until 1922, with positions in Vitebsk and Moscow. Works from this time are included his mural for Moscow’s Jewish Theatre. Encyclopedia Judaica notes that his work in Moscow showed the influence of artists like Picasso and this”did not please the artistically reactionary party officials.” In the summer of 1922, he left Russia with his family and returned to France.

In 1930, Ambroise Vollard commissioned Chagall to create illustrations to the Bible, for which he traveled to the Land of Israel. Chagall revisited Biblical scenes again over the years and Chagall’s Museum of the Biblical Message, opened in Nice in 1972, displays his Biblical Message cycle. The wings of the angels portrayed in these Biblical scenes, like The Dream of Jacob (1930-32) and Abraham Approaching Sodom with Three Angels (1929-30), extend nearly from head to toe, affirming the potential to soar, as is typical of many Chagall figures.

In 1937, the Nazis confiscated 650 works from German museums for an exhibit of “Degenerate Art,” to be mocked and disgraced by the millions who visited the exhibit. Chagall’s work was among this art, and again his life was changed by political circumstances, as he and Bella sought refuge in the United States. White Crucifixion (1938) portrays a pogrom scene that may have echoed what Chagall saw in the world at the time of this painting. Bella died in 1944, and after World War II, Chagall returned to France and married Valentine Brodsky.

Jewish Identity

As for Jewish identity, Chagall declared, “If a painter is Jewish and paints life, how can he help having Jewish elements in his work! But if he is a good painter, there will be more than that. The Jewish element will be there, but his art will tend to approach the universal.” Nevertheless, Chagall had a special tie to Israel, and in the winter and summer of 2003, the Israel Museum of Jerusalem exhibited Chagall’s works from Israeli collections with a special focus Chagall’s connection to Israel.

Chagall also maintained a powerful association with Israel through the stained-glass windows he designed for Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center.

At the dedication in 1962, Chagall stood under the windows that depict the 12 tribes of Israel and asked, “How is it that the air and earth of Vitebsk, my birthplace, and of thousands of years of exile, find themselves mingled in the air and earth of Jerusalem? How could I have thought that not only my hands with their colors would direct me in my work, but that the poor hands of my parents and of others and still others with their mute lips and their closed eyes, who gathered and whispered behind me would direct me as if they also wished to take part in my life?”

Chagall’s life spanned pogroms, two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the rebirth of the State of Israel. Chagall’s message in words and in works reaffirms that earth and air do co-mingle. The path of Jewish history flows through both earth and air and it is all these elements and more that Chagall portrays in his art.

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Answer: Well, color me excited, Lori. This gives me an opportunity to talk about one of my favorite subjects: art!

As you correctly pointed out, the second of the Ten Commandments has to do with creating artwork, idols, or icons that represent living beings or celestial objects. The text says:

You shall have no other gods beside Me. You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. (Exodus 20:3-4)

Over time, this commandment has been interpreted in a variety of ways. The most common prohibition, and the one that’s most obvious from the text, is against creating sculptures of people, animals, or planets for the purpose of worshipping them. One of the primary messages of the Torah is that worshipping idols is not allowed, so it’s not surprising that creating pieces of art that could be used as idols was prohibited.

You asked specifically about drawing the human form, so I’ll give you a bit more history on how that issue is treated in rabbinic literature. The Talmud comments on the second commandment, and takes a very strict stance against producing images of faces, ruling it forbidden, but sanctioning owning images of faces that were created by non-Jews. (Avodah Zara 43a) The prohibition comes from a concern that even two-dimensional images could be worshipped, or could represent idols. In some Jewish communities during the Middle Ages artists got around this prohibition by drawing human bodies topped with heads of other animals, including birds. The famous bird head Haggadah from 12th-century Germany is an example of this phenomenon.

In the 16th century, the Shulchan Aruch expanded the ban on creating sculptures, adding prohibitions against forming any three dimensional image that could be worshipped, including images that stand out in bas-relief (such as friezes). However, the Shulchan Aruch differs from the Talmud in that it allows one to create two-dimensional paintings and images of the human body, as long as the entire body is not shown. (Yoreh Deah 141-142)

Today most traditional rabbinic authorities go by the ruling in the Shulchan Aruch, sanctioning depictions of the human body that are somehow incomplete. For example, a sculpted bust would be acceptable, but not a full human form; a drawing in which part of the body is obstructed by a piece of furniture or another person would also be acceptable.

I thought it might be helpful to hear an artist’s interpretations of these rules, so I spoke with Tobi Kahn, an artist who has thought a lot about this issue. He said it seemed clear to him that the root of the law was idolatry, and because he doesn’t see people worshipping idols or images anymore, and because we don’t know what God looks like, he doesn’t worry much about the issue of graven images. He doesn’t see any problem creating an image of a full human body.

But, he said that he does see people obsessing over the price of artwork, and its monetary value, instead of over the artwork itself. This kind of “worship” concerns him. He reminded me that the Torah tells us about Bezalel, the artisan who was charged with creating the Tabernacle. Bezalel means “in the shadow of God,” and Kahn sees that as an important commentary on the function of artists. Just as God created the world, so artists of this world serve God by creating. And beyond just serving, they have the opportunity to redeem the world through their work. A good artist, Kahn thinks, produces work that helps to redeem the world.

It might be helpful to talk to your sister about exactly what kinds of things she draws, and how she thinks they are perceived by others. Does she feel there’s a risk of idolatry? How would she differentiate what she does from what the Torah seems to be referring to in Exodus? Ultimately, of course, it’s up to her to decide if she thinks what she’s doing is problematic, but it’s nice of you to do some research.

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Though the written word has been the primary vehicle for reacting to Hebrew scripture, Jewish culture offers another important–and frequently overlooked–modality for commenting on the Bible: visual art. Though many Jews and non-Jews alike mistakenly believe that visual images are prohibited by Jewish law, art has played a prominent part in transmitting biblical stories and making them meaningful for each new generation. By examining biblical images in Jewish art, we can grow to understand how generations past may have interpreted characters and stories that we still wrestle with today.

The Art in Dura-Europos

In 1932, American archeologist Clark Hopkins unearthed one of the greatest archeological discoveries of the 20th century: a synagogue located in what was the desert city of Dura-Europos (now part of present-day Syria). This remarkably well-preserved synagogue contains walls painted with images of people and animals from the Hebrew Bible.

An Aramaic inscription helps to date the synagogue to 244 C.E., when a group of exiled Jews would have formed a community of worshippers in what was then a Roman trade city, settling there with a melting pot of Greeks, Byzantines, Persians and Christians.

The large-scale art in the synagogue helps to dispel the myth that Judaism historically prohibited visual images. Indeed, the often-misunderstood second commandment–which prohibits “graven images”–refers specifically to the creation of idols, not to artistic pursuits in general. This commandment was interpreted differently in different times and circumstances–sometimes more literally and sometimes more loosely. The murals in the Dura-Europos synagogue lead us to believe that early rabbinic Judaism may have acknowledged and even celebrated visual art as a vehicle for honoring and transmitting sacred texts.

The 28 paintings in the synagogue include depictions from the Five Books of Moses (Torah), such as a painting of the akedah (binding of Isaac); a vine resembling the Tree of Life described in Genesis; the patriarch Jacob blessing his sons; and scenes from the Exodus. In addition, murals depict a lyre player, whom many scholars interpret to be King David, a portrait of the prophet Elijah, and scenes from the Book of Esther.

In examining the paintings, scholars have tried to deduce how the people who created them saw their connection to the text and its application to their lives as Jews. For example, four panels containing portraits of Moses show the Jewish leader in white robes with his palms open. Around the time these were created, Christian artists were painting portraits of Jesus in their churches, and so the Jewish artists may have been attempting to create a Jewish hero or leader of the same scale.

Sometimes the placement of the art also gives us clues about the practice of Judaism at that time. The portraits of the Book of Esther, for example, are on the wall where the women’s benches were located. The Babylonia Talmud records that it is compulsory for women to attend the reading of the Book of Esther each year–possibly explaining those paintings’ placement.

Scholars believe that the art of the Dura-Europas synagogue may have been used to connect a community living away from the center of Babylonian Jewish life to its sacred stories. Or, scholars theorize, the art may have even been used to compete with the other religious traditions found in this rather cosmopolitan city, whose emphasis on visual symbols may have attracted some of the Jews living there. We may never know conclusively why this representational art was created, but through the fortune of its preservation we can still experience its visual impact. (To see the images for yourself, look at Joseph Gutman’s The Dura-Europos Synagogue, published by Rowman & Littlefield.)

Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts

The scribal arts have long played a vital role in transmitting Torah. Fragments of manuscripts from as early as the ninth century show a distinct style of Hebrew script used to write holy books. But in the medieval period, the scribe was not the only person who worked on creating sacred Jewish texts; when his job was finished, the scribe would often pass off the manuscript to an illuminator, who painted detailed artwork around the text on each page. The illuminator would first draw the image on the page, and then, in many cases, would apply gold leaf to the text, making it even more ornamental.

When illustrating Hebrew Bibles, the artists might depict images and icons from the stories. In examining some manuscripts, we discover that many artists dealt with the prohibition against creating graven images by illustrating human bodies with animal heads. The preserved Bird’s Head Haggadah from Germany, dated to 1300, is a prime example of how the Jewish community struggled with the question of how to interpret the second commandment while recognizing the importance of illustrations.

The sheer number of illuminated manuscripts from this period shows how important the visual element was in conveying the biblical stories. Each manuscript reveals different interpretations of the stories by the artist, and some include depictions of midrashic stories–those created by the rabbis to explain or interpret a Biblical story.

Some of the art is very literal and true to the stories, while other artists render biblical subjects with romantic longings. Paintings of King David playing his lyre, for example, are often set in a very bucolic setting, with David depicted as both a shepherd and musician, blessed with an almost God-like aura. Moses also is sometimes painted as an almost-divine leader. In all likelihood, the artists’ interpretations of biblical characters mirrored the prevailing beliefs and understandings of Jews of the time.

Bibles were not the only manuscripts that were illuminated–siddurim (prayerbooks), mahzorim (High Holy Day prayerbooks), and other Jewish books were also laid out with visual illustrations. The most common illuminated books that remain are the Passover Haggadot, featuring different artists’ depictions of the Jewish people as slaves moving toward freedom. These books also frequently included illustrations of the Jewish people engaged in the many rituals and prayers that made up their daily life. This art conveys displays the artists’–and their communities’–emphasis on living a pious life whose focus was Torah, prayer, and mitzvot (commandments).

The Fine Arts

Jewish artists did not become part of the fine-arts tradition until the period of the Enlightenment, when they were permitted to leave the ghettos and enroll in secular universities and academies. In the 19th century, Jewish artists begin to emerge and receive attention from the larger communities around them.

Nineteenth-century artist Daniel Moritz Oppenheim is often thought of as the “first Jewish painter” because of his frequent depictions of the domestic life of the Jewish people around him. Many of his paintings focus on Jewish holidays and lifecycle events, and he earned his greatest recognition for painting portraits of prominent Jews and non-Jews of his time. Oppenheim’s art occasionally deals with biblical subjects. These include romantic paintings of Moses and the tablets and Moses passing his leadership to Joshua.

Many of the Jewish painters who came to prominence after Oppenheim did not explore Jewish themes or subjects in their art at all. The great exception is the painter Marc Chagall, whose work fused a folk style with a very modern sensibility. Imagery of Chagall’s youth in Russia–Jews in traditional clothing, farm animals, books and Judaic items–appear throughout his work.

Though he came from a traditional Jewish upbringing, Chagall’s paintings seldom explore biblical themes as subjects. The major exception occurred late in his career, when Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem commissioned Chagall to create 12 stained glass windows representing the 12 tribes of Israel. In them, he fully explores a different biblical theme in each window. Here, his work is much more interpretive and symbolic than any of the artistic Jewish Bible imagery that had come before him. Chagall uses color, animals, and even symbols from the zodiac to depict the emotional and spiritual quality of each tribe of Israel.

Contemporary Biblical Art

The Hebrew Bible comes back as a subject to be reckoned with by many artists in the latter half of the 20th century and into the beginning of the 21st. For the first time, Jewish women artists began to add their voices and visions to the interpretation of biblical texts by creating art that not only depicts but clearly comments on the text.

This kind of interpretive art is sometimes called visual midrash–using visual imagery to create an imaginative language that interprets biblical texts through contemporary eyes. It remains a popular endeavor for Jewish artists of widely different backgrounds.

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In the fine arts, there has also been a desire to create an “Israeli” art. From the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when significant numbers of Jews began fleeing Europe and settling in the Land of Israel with Zionistic dreams, the fine arts have occupied a prominent place in Israeli life. Artist Boris Schatz came to Jerusalem in order to establish the Bezalel School–named for the Biblical figure chosen by God to create the first tabernacle. A university-level academy known today as the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, the flourishing of the school typifies the country’s support of its artists.

Unlike the United States, where the virtue of public art continues to be debated, the Israeli government makes clear its support of visual artists and their contributions to society. In Israel, the role of public art helps to express and define the concerns of a common, yet diverse, culture. In a country that struggles daily to protect its inhabitants, art is considered to be a necessity, rather than a luxury. Perhaps it is the distinct Israeli-style “live for today” philosophy that makes the appreciation of art more vivid than in other, “safer” countries.

Not that Israel’s artists have always had an easy time defining themselves in relation to the rest of the art world. Early Israeli painters like Nahum Gutman tried to create a unique “Hebrew” style of art–capturing the excitement of establishing a Zionist state–while maintaining his influences from Modern European art. Other great Israeli artists such as Reuven Rubin had to leave Israel for periods of their life in order to receive the recognition that they desired; Rubin’s first major exhibit was held in the United States, thanks to his friend, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

Not all successful Israeli artists have portrayed Jewish or Zionist themes in their work. One of Israel’s best-known artists, for example, Yaacov Agam, is known for his unique expression of optical art. Indeed, as life in Israel became more established, the diversity of Israeli artists increased. As Israeli artists became accepted into the international art scene, their work took on the various styles and aesthetic approaches reflected in the wider art world.

Just as the politics of two Israelis can be as far apart on the spectrum as imaginable, so are the political ideologies of its artists, whose works might include everything from anti-war statements to paintings of national pride. Israeli art has matured to express the range of opinions and emotions circling in Israeli life; therefore, there is no one style, ideology or medium that defines an Israeli artist today.

But what each Israeli artist has in common is that they are fortunate to come from a culture that values the work of artists and continues to support creation of the arts as an integral part of its unique social fabric.

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READ: My Obsession With Buying Abandoned Jewish Objects

Beauty enhances the mitzvot by appealing to the senses. Beautiful sounds and agreeable fragrances, tastes, textures, colors, and artistry contribute to human enjoyment of religious acts, and beauty itself takes on a religious dimension. The principle of enhancing a mitzvah through aesthetics is called Hiddur Mitzvah.

The concept of hiddur mitzvah is derived from Rabbi Ishmael’s comment on the verse, “This is my God and I will glorify Him” (Exodus 15:2):

“Is it possible for a human being to add glory to his Creator? What this really means is: I shall glorify Him in the way I perform mitzvot. I shall prepare before Him a beautiful  lulav, beautiful sukkah, beautiful fringes (tzitzit), and beautiful phylacteries (Tefillin).” [Midrash Mechilta, Shirata, chapter 3, ed. Lauterbach, p. 25.]

The Talmud [Shabbat 133b] adds to this list a beautiful Shofar and a beautiful Torah scroll which has been written by a skilled scribe with fine ink and fine pen and wrapped in beautiful silks.

“In keeping with the principle of hiddur mitzvah,” Rabbi Zera taught [Bava Kama 9b], “one should be willing to pay even one third more [than the normal price].”  Jewish folklore is replete with stories about Jews of modest circumstances paying more than they could afford for the most beautiful etrog to enhance their observance of Sukkot, or for the most delectable foods to enhance their observance of Shabbat.

The Midrash suggests that not only are mitzvot enhanced by an aesthetic dimension but so is the Jew who observes it:

You are beautiful, my love, you are beautiful, through mitzvot . . . beautiful through mitzvot, beautiful through deeds of loving kindness, . . . through prayer, through reciting the “Shema,” through the mezuzah, through phylacteries, through Sukkah and lulav and etrog… [Midrash Song of Songs Rabbah 1.15].

There seems to be reciprocity of beauty through the agency of mitzvot: the Jew becomes beautiful as he/she performs a mitzvah. “But, conversely, Israel ‘beautifies’ God by performing the commandments in the most ‘beautiful’ manner…”

There are many ways to apply the principle of hiddur mitzvah. For example, one might choose to observe the mitzvah of kindling Hanukkah lights with a cheap, stamped tin Hanukkiyah (Hanukkah menorah) or one might make an effort to build one by hand or to buy a beautiful one. Some families might prefer an oil-burning Hanukkiyah, rather than one that uses the standard candles, in order to relate their observance of the mitzvah more closely to the times of the Maccabees, Certainly the mitzvah of lighting Hanukkah candles is fulfilled with any kind of Hanukkiyah, but by applying the principle of hiddur mitzvah, one enriches both the mitzvah and him/herself.

Various companies distribute free Haggadot (the plural of Haggadah, the Passover seder guide) to their customers before Passover. These Haggadot generally contain the entire traditional text and of course may be used at the family seder. But a family who is motivated by the concept of hiddur mitzvah will want to use one of the beautifully edited and illustrated Haggadot readily available today. Similarly, beautiful matzah covers, seder plates, and Kiddush cups should be used. These may be family heirlooms, or ones created by contemporary artists, or ones designed and executed by the children in religious school. The whole celebration is enriched when care is taken in the selection or creation of ceremonial objects.

Hiddur mitzvah means taking the time and making an effort to create or acquire the most beautiful ceremonial objects possible in order to enrich the religious observance with aesthetic dimension.

Excerpted from “Hiddur Mitzvah: The Aesthetics of Mitzvot.” Reprinted with permission from Gates of the Seasons: A Guide to the Jewish Year (Central Conference of American Rabbis).

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But even the poorest Jew had access to the humble materials and tools — paper, pencil, penknife, watercolors and colored crayons — with which he could express his own form of hiddur mitzvah [beautification of the commandments and rituals] by making a papercut. Of all Jewish ritual and folk art, papercuts (and also some calligraphic sheets) lent themselves to the freest expression of religious spirit. Unlike metal, wood, or textiles, paper was so cheap and so easily replaceable that the artist-craftsman was never afraid of spoiling it. He could be bold and inventive within the simplest of technical means. And indeed, he took full advantage of the medium and let his imagination run to fanciful extremes.

History of Jewish Papercuts

The earliest known reference to a Jew who created cut paper work dates to 1345, when Rabbi Shem-Tov ben Yitzhak ben Ardutiel composed a witty treatise in Hebrew entitled The War of the Pen Against the Scissors. He relates that when the ink in his inkwell froze on a cold winter’s evening, he resorted to cutting the letters out of the paper–apparently in keeping with a conceit fashionable at the time (and later) in Spain. To students of Christian Spanish literary history, Rabbi Shem-Tov is better known as Santob de Carrion de los Condes (1290-1369), the courtly Castilian troubadour who composed the Proverbios morales for Pedro the Cruel.

Individual Jews (including an apostate) proficient at making papercut images are mentioned here and there in Dutch and German writings of the 17th and 18th centuries. Later, a notice of 1853 tells of Jews in Amsterdam selling cut out pictures of Catholic prelates hanging from a rope, as part of Protestant opposition to the reestablishment of a Catholic hierarchy in the Netherlands. At most, such incidental bits of information indicate that some Jews also engaged in papercutting–not an unusual practice at the time. It provides no meaningful clues as to how the making of devotional papercuts started and spread through the Jewish world.

From around the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries we have Italian — or at least, Italianate — ketubot (marriage contracts) and megillot Esther (scrolls of the Book of Esther read during Purim), in which the parchment or paper of the border design or of the illustrative vignettes was cut out in three parts But here, too, we cannot conclude that these inspired the Jewish folk tradition of paper cutting that was practiced concurrently.

Among the earliest known or recorded Jewish papercuts as such, very few can be dated with certainty to the latter part of the 18th century. Most of the items known today range from the early 19th century to the first decades of the 20th and were made in Central or Eastern Europe — Alsace, Germany, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary, Galicia, Poland, Lithuania, White Russia, the Ukraine, Volhynia, Podolia, Rumania; in Turkey and parts of the Ottoman Empire, French North Africa, Syria, Baghdad and Palestine; and also migrants to North America and Western Europe.

Since the earliest, datable, surviving Jewish papercuts of the late 18th century already reflect a distinct folk-art genre, they attest an older tradition. That so few items remain is not really surprising considering the extreme fragility of their construction and the vulnerability of the material. Some of the simpler designs were made for special occasions, and because of their ephemeral character were little valued and discarded after being used only once or twice. The Holocaust marked the disappearance of much Jewish ceremonial and folk art; the more so of such frail items as papercuts.

Why Jews Cut Paper

Among a highly literate people like the Jews, paper was always on hand, even among the poor, and especially after the introduction of cheap wood-pulp paper in the mid-19th century. The more we learn about Jewish papercuts in one form or another, the more reason we have to believe that they were once exceedingly common, at least in Ashkenazic-Jewish homes. They served daily religious and other ritual needs, such as indicating the direction of prayer (mizrach, shivitti, menorah), decorating the home for holidays (omer calendars, shavuosl/roisele, ushpizin, etc.), warding off the evil eve (shir hamalos/kimpethrivl, menorah), remembering family deaths (yahrzeit) and the like.

These papercuts feature most of the traditional symbols and inscriptions found in Jewish ceremonial objects and amulets —many of them kabbalistic [mystical]— characteristic of the various Diaspora communities. The real or fantastic animals and birds, vegetation, utensils, urns, columns, the menorah, tablets of the law, stars of David, the signs of the 12 tribes and of the zodiac, yadayim/hamsas (an upside-down hand), eternal lights/lamps-in-niches, and the like, which appear and reappear in the compositions, had almost all meanings that were wide; if not universally understood in the community.

They were supplemented with calligraphic inscriptions in Hebrew (and sometimes in other languages), mainly passages from the Bible, the interpretive and homiletic texts, the prayerbook, cryptograms, acronyms, wise sayings, and magic formulas and incantations. Personal dedicatory and memorial inscriptions commemorating special family events were sometimes included as well. And occasionally — to the delight of those of us who crave to know more about them— the name of the maker of the papercut, the date and place, and the name of the owner are indicated.

The Statistical Basis

Before launching into more detailed characterizations of this intensely parochial Jewish folk art, we must establish an important criterion for assessing Jewish papercuts: the statistical basis for drawing generalized conclusions. Or, in other words, how many old Jewish papercuts are known to exist today, or are at least recorded photographically.

Here we must define the term “classic” that we have adopted for our discussion: We distinguish “classic” Jewish papercuts and papercut compositions from simple— generally small cutouts such as were made by children to paste on windowpanes for Shavuot and for the sukkah, and also from ketubot and megillat Esther with cut-out decorative borders. However, size is not a criterion, for “classic” Jewish papercuts can vary from very small to huge, from less than 10 centimeters to over one meter in height or width. All of these were intended to serve the purposes outlined above and reflect religious or apotropaic concepts representing extensive knowledge of Jewish lore. They bear appropriate inscriptions, many of decided esoteric purport, and show meticulous planning and painstaking execution.

Thus — not counting possibly several hundred smaller, plain, shavuosl/roisele-type of paper cutouts, many of them made by young boys, or the relatively few ketubot and megillot Esther with cut-out decorative elements — we know of no more than about 250 or so “classic” Jewish papercuts, both existing ones and photographs of lost items, to give us a glimpse into the widespread Jewish paper cutting tradition, from the earliest known ones of the mid-18th century to the 1950s.

Accounting for the Surviving Papercuts

Of these, more than 80 can be ascribed with fair certainty to Galicia and the adjacent Carpathian Mountains regions; some 30 to 40 to Poland proper and the Russian Pale of Settlement; at least as many to Central Europe, from Alsace in the west through Germany to western Poland, Bohemia-Moravia, and Germanic Austria-Hungary; 25 or so to the United States; and about 30 to 40 Sephardic papercuts, of which about one-third stem from Ottoman Turkey and two-thirds from the lands of the Maghreb in North Africa. A few come from north Italy, Palestine/Syria, and Baghdad. Others are of indeterminate, varied provenance.

Since most of the Jewish papercuts from the United States, and the few in England, were the work of Polish and German immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe carrying on their traditions, many of these show and match affinities with the Jewish work from German-speaking, Galician, and Polish/Russian regions.

Among the relatively small number of known and recorded Sephardic papercuts are several items made by the same persons, and their dating is also largely concentrated within a few decades around the end of the 19th and the turn of the 20th centuries.

Being true folk creations, Jewish papercuts were made for a closed group or society. Just as Chinese or Mexican papercuts and Turkish or Greek shadow theater figures are unmistakable and can be spotted at a glance among any international selection of cut-out work, so traditional Jewish papercuts are also readily identifiable — not only because of specifically Jewish symbols and inscriptions, but also by their special character. And this is true despite any non-Jewish influences.

Reprinted with permission from Traditional Jewish Papercuts: An Inner World of Art and Symbol (University Press of New England).

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What Is Jewish Art?

Words and ideas have always been a focal point in Jewish life, but fine arts and handicrafts have played a prominent role as well. The Jewish attitude toward art has been influenced by two contradictory factors: The value of hiddur mitzvah (beautification of the commandments) encourages the creation of beautiful ritual items and sacred spaces, while some interpret the Second Commandment (forbidding “graven images”) as a prohibition against artistic creations, lest they be used for idolatry.

With the age of Enlightenment in Europe, Jewish artists left the ghetto to become prominent artists worldwide. In their visual arts, Jewish artists displayed varied relationships with their Jewish identities, and some Jewish artists did not incorporate their Jewishness into their artistic work at all. With the rise of such artists came the question of what constitutes “Jewish art,” a question still debated today. Some artists, such as Marc Chagall, clearly drew upon their Jewish heritage for their work. For others, such as Camille Pissaro, Judaism was tangential or even irrelevant to their work. Regardless of how one might define “Jewish art,” Jewish artists — painters, sculptors, and others — have flourished in North America, Europe and Israel.

Jewish folk art has pervaded Jewish homes and synagogues for centuries. This has included the mizrach, an emblem placed on the eastern wall of the home to remind family members which way to direct their prayers; the shiviti, an adornment in the synagogue intended to focus attention; and the art of micrography, which uses sacred words and texts to create drawings. Artistic ritual art has included kiddush cups, mezuzot, candlesticks, and more. These art forms were once an expression of folk-piety by Jews who worked without the benefit of artistic training. Today Jewish folk art has grown in sophistication as trained artists focus their skills and sensibilities on these traditional crafts.

Israeli Art

From the beginning of the 20th century, visual arts in Israel were emblematic of the unique encounter between East and West in Israel. Artistic visual expression was enhanced in Israel in 1906 with the founding of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem. The school aimed to create an “original Jewish art” by blending European artistic techniques with Middle Eastern influences. Artists from this school — along with other artists who were part of the burgeoning visual arts movement — created paintings of biblical scenes depicting romanticized perceptions of the past linked to utopian visions of the future. Examples of such artists include Shmuel Hirszenberg, Anna Ticho, Nachum Gutman, Mordecai Ardon, and Reuven Rubin.

As the State of Israel has matured, so too have its visual arts. Yaakov Agam has attracted international attention for his unique use of shape and dimension. As Israel has continued to attract Jewish immigrants from around the globe, they have brought with them their artistic training and sensitivities shaped by their host culture. Throughout Israeli history, the visual arts have been used to interpret and make meaning of the difficulties of Israeli and Jewish history.

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Since the identification tags that hang beside his landscapes, cityscapes, and pointillist figures in museums do not usually include his full name–Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro–many people do not realize Pissarro was Jewish. His decision to use his French rather than Hebrew names reflects some of the struggles he and his family had with their faith.

Pissarro Family vs. St. Thomas Rabbinate

The Pissarro family came from a long line of Spanish and Portuguese conversos. Joseph Gabriel Pizzarro, Camille’s grandfather, moved from Portugal to Bordeaux, France toward the end of the 18th century, and his son Frederic (Camille’s father) relocated to the island of St. Thomas (which is now part of the Virgin Islands). As a port that was a major commercial center, St. Thomas was known as a place where people could practice their faith freely, and was home to a small Jewish community.

In 1826, Frederic married Rachel, his uncle’s widow. The announcement in the St. Thomas Times declared the union “by license from His Most Gracious Majesty King Frederick VI, and according to the Israelitish ritual.” But the editors had not checked their facts. The next day, the rabbis of St. Thomas sent a letter to the paper declaring that the wedding transpired “without the knowledge of the Rulers and Wardens of the synagogue, nor was the Ceremony performed according to the usual custom,” since the Book of Leviticus prohibits sexual relations between a man and his aunt.

In 1830, when Camille was born to this religiously-suspect union, he was officially registered at the town’s synagogue, but it took three years after Camille’s birth for the rabbis to accept his parents’ marriage. This might explain why Frederic and Rachel sent Camille to a school that was part of the Moravian Church. When Frederic died, his will granted large and equal parts of his fortune to the local synagogue and church, no doubt a slap in the face of the rabbis.

More Than an Impressionist

In his early 20s Camille traveled with a friend to Venezuela, where he started painting. There he produced representational works–more or less attempts at photo-realism.

Pissarro returned to St. Thomas in 1854 and moved to France the following year. He painted there until his death in 1903. In France, Pissarro developed his Impressionistic style. Responding in part to discoveries in the field of optics in the late-19th century, the so-called Impressionists (an originally derogatory name applied to the group of painters based on Claude Monet’s “Impression Sunrise”) placed special emphasis on the ways varying light affected landscapes and objects.

The Impressionists applied their paint thickly, and used a process called optical color mixing, in which contrasting colors, when viewed from a distance, appear to blend together. The French art establishment, which at the time believed that painting ought to be “realistic,” like a photograph, criticized the Impressionists’ out-of-focus techniques and also decried their departure from artistic traditions of depicting only important subjects (such as royalty and renowned historical figures, or characters from mythology and the Bible).

Many of the Impressionists considered Pissarro a mentor, and he was the only artist to exhibit at all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions in Paris, which spanned from 1874 to 1886. Paul Cezanne said of him, “As for old Pissarro, he was a father to me, a man to consult and something like the good Lord.”

Most of Pissarro’s paintings depict landscapes. But he also painted laborers, making the statement that simple people were worthy of being painted, in keeping with his anarchist and libertarian views. These works include “Peasant Woman Digging” (1882), “Two Young Peasant Women” (1892), and “A Washerwoman at Eragny” (1893). Pissarro’s politics also surfaced in the 1890s when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain, was tried for treason in notoriously anti-Semitic proceedings. Whether for political or religious reasons (or both), Pissarro broke off his close friendship with Degas, who became anti-Semitic in light of the Dreyfus affair.

A Jewish Painter?

In 1859, Frederic sent Camille a letter on the eve of Yom Kippur reminding him about the holiday. “Your mother asks me to write to you to come and have dinner with us today,” Frederic wrote. “Because this is the evening when we celebrate ‘la fete de Kipur’ and on this solemn occasion the whole family should be together–and tomorrow not work, we should pass that day together.”

Camille’s parents must have felt their son was so disengaged from his religion that he needed a reminder about the High Holidays. But it seems he did not abandon faith completely. Years later, when Camille wrote to a cousin in St. Thomas about his father Frederic’s death, he included the religious sentiments: “God is great, He took away what was dearest to us in the whole world; we have to bow and believe in His providence.”

Camille married Julie Vellay, the non-Jewish helper to his mother’s cook, and their son Lucien, also an artist, inherited his father’s religious struggles. When Lucien became engaged to Esther, the daughter of a Jewish man named Jacob Bensusan, Lucien’s father-in-law-to-be demanded that Lucien be circumcised and convert to Judaism, because his mother was not Jewish. With Pissarro’s support, Lucien and Esther resisted Jacob’s pressure and married without his blessing. Like the St. Thomas rabbis, Bensusan eventually relented and welcomed Lucien into the family.

None of Pissarro’s paintings refer to the Bible or Jewish rituals or include Hebrew inscriptions. However, the art historian Stephanie Rachum has pointed out references to Judaism in three pen and ink drawings that Pissarro created in 1890 for his nieces. In “Capitol,” Pissarro drew a smartly-dressed man with a hooked nose amidst throngs of needy people. In a letter to his nieces, Pissarro identified the “vulgar and ugly” figure as a portrait of a rich Jew, “of an Oppenheim, of a Rothschild, of a Gould, whatever.” The hooked noses appear in two other illustrations in the series, which also depict the Golden Calf.

Although some might consider Pissarro a self-hating Jew for drawing these pictures, it is significant that they were not intended for publication. They reflect the complicated way in which his anarchist political views confronted his Jewish identity; to Pissarro, a rich Jew seemed to have been primarily a rich man and coincidentally Jewish.

Joachim Pissarro, an art scholar and Camille’s great-grandson, suggests that Camille’s complicated relationship with Judaism impacted his work. The artist’s religious struggles helped him develop, according to Joachim, “a critical stance which he could apply to the system of taste and to the conventions that governed art teaching at the time of his arrival in France in 1855.” 

By asserting his own relationship to religion, Pissarro developed the confidence and the tools to carve out his own approach to art, without simply accepting what he was told. Surely that too makes a Jewish artist.

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Anna Ticho was born in Brno, Moravia (Czech Republic). In her early teens she moved with her family to Vienna where she took her first drawing lessons, later enrolling in art school. At the age of eighteen, Anna emigrated to Palestine and settled in Jerusalem. In November 1912 she married her cousin Dr. Abraham Albert Ticho (1883–1960), who had accepted an offer from the Frankfurt organization Lema’an Zion (For the Sake of Zion) to establish and head an eye clinic in Jerusalem. The couple had no children.

From the moment she arrived in the city in 1912 till the day she died in 1980, Anna Ticho lived in Jerusalem and lovingly portrayed it in paint, pen and ink, charcoal, pastel and pencil.

“I came to Jerusalem when it was still ‘virgin territory,’ with vast, breathtakingly beautiful vistas … I was impressed by the grandeur of the scenery, the bare hills, the large, ancient olives trees, and the cleft slopes … the sense of solitude and eternity,” she wrote to a friend in one of the few Ticho letters that have been preserved.

Beginnings in Art

Her first tentative pencil and pen-and-ink drawings were delicately linear renderings of the landscape that so captivated her. Customarily, she set out mornings, her easel slung over her shoulder, for the Old City, where she spent the day painting. This was a departure from the approach of the artists of the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, who were bound to the old images of the city and to the orientalist trend.

Up to the 1920s Jerusalem was shown as the lofty site of the Temple and the focus of pilgrims’ and orientalists’ aspirations. Depicted from the east, it was a world arising from the desert, celestial and elusive. Jerusalem was seen from the Mount of Olives facing the Temple Mount, the Western Wall or the Dome of the Rock. During the twenties, artists began to turn a more prosaic eye on the city, viewing it from the Sultan’s Pool, Mount Zion and a variety of vantage points. These artists lived in the city and lived the city.

Anna Ticho, too, began to focus on the urban landscape and the intricacies of its stony textures, uninhabited–in her work thus far–by any human forms. Her line during this period is short and fine, each detail accented, with an expressiveness evoking some of the artists whose work she had encountered during her early years in Vienna: Albrecht Dürer and Pieter Brueghel, and her contemporaries, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka.

True to the Romantic tradition Ticho continued to treat subjects such as dissolution and abandonment, depicting trees, houses, and aging people. She drew the maze of rooftops of the houses of the Old City stretching to the horizon above their opaque windows, creating a delicate interplay between stones and windows interwoven with domed roofs, all executed with academic, Viennese precision. Light and shade sketch intriguing passages between the different parts of the picture.

Subject Matter

Anna Ticho’s vision of Jerusalem is singular and personal rather than historical-symbolic. Yet she adheres to a long tradition of Temple Mount paintings in her cypress trees, which sometimes stand in for towers and minarets. The timeless symbol of the Wall fades away as Ticho melds tradition with personal vision and feeling.

Anna Ticho’s Jerusalem works link her to an age-old tradition of artists who depicted the city as a sacred ideal. In addition to its holy sites, many artists went on to paint its landscape, vegetation and inhabitants in their various styles of ethnic dress, way of life, and religious practice.

In the mid-nineteenth century artists began to go beyond the formal system of symbols rooted in religious-folk tradition. The city–and its vistas–began to expand.

In the thirties and forties Ticho turned to trees and foliage, meticulously delineating the precise textures and convolutions of each rough, gnarled tree ring, trunk and branch. And above the treetops, with each leaf lovingly portrayed, rose the surrounding landscape.

So specific is each leaf that although these works are done in black-and-white, there is a strong sense of the vivid green of the young leaves and the deep green of the thick, mature ones. Many of these trees spring up from among the stones which were to become one of the trademarks of Ticho’s work.

Anna Ticho’s relation to Jerusalem is vividly expressed in her landscapes: bare, rocky hills, stones, old trees and faces–the lined topography of its people, all comprise her picture of the windswept, rocky, inexorably terrestrial city.

In Jerusalem, the young European artist found a world apart from the one she had left behind in Vienna. The meeting with the East–its landscape, colors and smells–enchanted her. In the faces of the people she encountered–beggars on the street, or patients who came to the clinic of her husband, the renowned ophthalmologist, she saw the city that was now her home. Faces like cleft rock or tree trunks ringed with age became one with nature in Anna Ticho’s personal vision.

Changing Tactics

The 1960s marked a turning point in Anna Ticho’s art. Jerusalem remained its central theme, but its depiction changed noticeably. Precise black-and-white drawing yielded to large-format renderings in rich pastel tones of warm brown. Short, tentative, detailed delineation gave way to bold, sweeping lines and color patches. The young, aspiring Viennese seeking her way through the strange streets and winding alleyways became the confident, seasoned, worldly artist. Ticho stayed in the studio, executing her views of Jerusalem from memory and from the landscape etched in her own heart. Moving beyond the houses of the city, she soared over its outlying hilly expanses into the infinity of the horizon. In nearly abstract terms, she conveyed Jerusalem’s timeless quality.

Every line she drew conveyed Anna Ticho’s love of Jerusalem. She felt an obligation toward the city she had grown up with, arriving as a young woman and ending her days there at the age of eighty-six. The Jerusalem she had come to was a sleepy backwater of the Ottoman Empire that became a cosmopolitan headquarters of the British mandatory government and finally the capital of the reborn State of Israel in 1948, growing dramatically with an impetus that has hardly subsided to this day.

From her first small, hesitant sketches to her forceful renditions in her own special earthy coloration, Anna Ticho’s art, like Jerusalem itself, hovers between symbol and reality.

Her works were first shown at the historic exhibition of local artists at David’s Tower in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1922 and later in many solo exhibitions in Israel and abroad where they have been widely acclaimed. She was a co-founder of the New Bezalel School, today the Bezalel Academy of Art, Jerusalem and the recipient of many honorary titles and awards, among them the Art Prize of the City of Jerusalem, 1965; designated an Honorary Citizen of Jerusalem in 1970; the Sandberg Prize of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and, shortly before her death in 1980, the Israel Prize. She bequeathed her beloved home, Ticho House, to the Israel Museum to be used as a museum and site for exhibitions and cultural events for the benefit of the citizens of Jerusalem.

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A Shipwrecked Ancestry, a Rootless Identity

The history of Benjamin’s ancestors, the Bene Israel Jews of India, has been disputed. Legend has it that they were shipwrecked in India, either fleeing the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C.E. or Antiochus IV Epiphanes 600 years later. According to one version of the story, most of the refugees drowned, but a few swam to safety, where the local non-Jewish population welcomed them. The survivors, who lost their holy books at sea, remembered just the Shema prayer. Cut off from extra-biblical writings and Jewish customs, this community borrowed traditions from the native culture.

Much like the stories about the Bene Israel, Benjamin’s life has featured a great deal of cross-cultural exchange. Born in 1961, she grew up in a largely Hindu and Islamic culture, and received her education as a child at Catholic and Zoroastrian schools. She was trained in fine arts in Bombay and Illinois, and married a Connecticut native–a man who was raised Russian Orthodox, has Judaism as part of his “family mix,” became a Buddhist in the 1970s, and studied Indian classical music in California. She lives with him in New Jersey.

Given her past, it is not surprising that Benjamin has called the anxiety of finding home, both spiritually and physically, the perpetual preoccupation of her life and career. But she has also described her “rootless” heritage as “seductive,” and indeed her unique story has informed her large body of critically-acclaimed works.

Benjamin’s work has appeared in more than 30 solo shows and more than 60 group shows. She has been reviewed in major U.S. dailies and in Indian-American publications, and has been featured in scholarly articles and books by Jewish art historians Ori Soltes and Matthew Baigell.

Delicious “Miniature-Inspired” Paintings

Benjamin’s art is always eclectic, including Sephardic images, Byzantine icons, and styles derived from Jewish and Christian illuminated manuscripts, all blended with contemporary Pop Art imagery.  She combines these diverse elements in very small paintings, following the technique of Indian/Persian miniatures.

Largely developed between the 14th and 19th centuries, Indian and Persian miniatures are illuminations on paper, generally two to four inches in size. According to miniature painter Ambreen Butt, who taught at Massachusetts College of Art and studied miniature painting in her native Lahore, Pakistan, Benjamin’s works are “miniature inspired” but not technically miniatures, since they do not use traditional materials.

Butt uses the word “masala” (a blend of spices) to refer to the collage of diverse elements in Benjamin’s work. “That’s what I’d call her paintings,” Butt says, “delicious food.”

“Blue Like Me”

The flavorful blend of elements is apparent in Benjamin’s “Finding Home No. 56 (‘Zakhm’).” This painting shows a sleeping blue-skinned (like the god Krishna) woman in a forest. Two angels and 10 gold scimitars hover above the figure and flank a green circle with the Hebrew word “Shema” (Deuteronomy 6:4, the prayer the Bene Israel remembered), surrounded by elaborate floral patterns. Benjamin also embedded text which seems to be Arabic, but in fact is the English phrase, “It’s unfortunate.”

The blue woman is a self-portrait, and the blue skin symbolizes Benjamin’s alienation as a Jewish woman of color, the artist has explained. In her essay “Blue Like Me,” published in the recent book From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s Aesthetic Production, Benjamin reflects on this alienation, and says that she has come to the conclusion that there is no perfect “place” or “home,” either for herself or for anyone. She believes her “nonbelonging” allows her to create a temporary home-like abode and “also to celebrate in art the impossibility of fixedness in any single ‘home.'”

It is not clear what exactly is unfortunate about “Zakhm” (which means wound in Hindi). The vulnerable figure seems to be unaware of the scimitars, and perhaps the weapons are harbingers of unfortunate circumstances.

“Finding Home No. 74 (Fereshteh) ‘Lilith,'” from Benjamin’s Fereshteh (“angels” in Urdu) series, shows another blue-skinned woman. This time she is named Lilith (in Hebrew, at the bottom of the painting)–who is, in Jewish folklore, the queen of the demons. In the painting, Lilith wears a tallit (prayer shawl), and declares (via cartoon bubble), “A thousand of years have I waited keeping the embers of revenge glowing in my heart!”

Burning embers (which look rose-like) burn behind Lilith, and the hamsa (which is a Jewish and Islamic symbol) makes an appearance in her necklace. Around her arm is a snake-shaped band (serpents symbolize rebirth in Hindu and Buddhist thought), and she has a bullet wound on her chest, which Benjamin has said resembles Saint Theresa’s stigmata (the saint’s experience of divinely-inflicted pain which correspond to Jesus’ wounds on the cross). Benjamin says that her figure represents not only the character of Jewish lore, but also “the woman targeted, the sacrificing mother, the mourning war victim, the brave woman soldier, the rape victim in war.”

Siona Benjamin’s work brings together a wide array of sacred and secular images: Lilith, the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, Indian comic books, lotus flowers, American flags, ballerinas, tanks, IV needles, phylacteries, gas masks. But she does more than just collage American, Jewish, and Indian symbols together. She also rethinks the context and symbolism of those references.

For example, in “Finding Home No. 46 (‘Tikkun ha-Olam’)” Benjamin shows a self-portrait of the artist as a seven-branch Menorah, no doubt a Jewish play on the multi-armed Hindu gods. The candleholders are hamsas, and the figure dances beside a snake (the evil inclination?) and a sphinx blowing a horn (shofar?). In casting herself as Shiva–a major Hindu God–Benjamin achieves the same sort of religious nuance that Chagall attains in his “White Crucifixion” (1938), where Jesus’ loincloth is a tallit. By stressing Jesus’ Jewishness, Chagall shows that Jews can “own” the symbol of the crucifixion and it need not only appear in Christian contexts. Benjamin’s Jewish Shiva blends the imagery of the menorah’s arms (representing the days of creation) with the symbolism of Shiva’s arms (which also may have to do with creation).

In so doing, Benjamin is perhaps also presenting the artistic version of the talmudic declaration that there are 70 perspectives (literally panim, or faces) to the Torah. By presenting her personal Jewish identity, Benjamin exposes some of the Western stereotypes about Judaism and reminds her viewers that just as there are 70 equally valid interpretations of the Torah, there are dozens of ways to make a Jewish painting. The rabbis did not necessarily have Benjamin’s interfaith enterprise in mind, but just as Jewish art has so often borrowed aesthetic forms from Christian and pagan culture, Benjamin establishes herself as heir to that tradition and adds her own personal touch by using contemporary symbols and references.
 

Images courtesy of Siona Benjamin.

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One of his wartime cartoons was so liberal that it proved too hot for any publisher to handle. Veering away from his usual Axis targets, Szyk depicted two GIs, one white and one black, escorting German prisoners. The white soldier asks his comrade, “And what would you do with Hitler?” The black soldier replies: “I would have made him a Negro and dropped him somewhere in the US!” Not one American magazine or newspaper printed it.

A soldier in the Polish army during World War I, Szyk fell prisoner to the Germans but received lenient treatment because his captors admired his artistic talents. After the war, Szyk traveled to Ukraine, where he witnessed pogroms that devastated Jewish communities. Deeply moved, Szyk returned throughout his career to Jewish themes and struggles for freedom.

In 1934, Szyk created a series of thirty-eight paintings depicting the American Revolution that were exhibited at the Paris World?s Fair. They caught the eye of visiting Polish officials, who purchased and presented them as a gift to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Szyk’s most famous work was his illuminated Haggadah (1939), found to this day on Passover seder tables throughout the world. Although hailed by the Times of London as “among the most beautiful books that the hand of man has produced,” intimidated European publishers refused to print it, fearing that his graphic allusions to the Nazis might provoke German wrath. Finally, Szyk found an English publisher who agreed to publish the work if Szyk whittled down the anti-Nazi content to only two depictions of Hitler as the “wicked son.”

When the Nazis overran Poland in September 1939, Szyk was in London. He immediately began contributing illustrations to the war propaganda campaign. A colleague described Szyk’s political art as “powerful as a bomb, clear in conception, definite, and deadly in its execution.” The British authorities dispatched Szyk to the United States in 1940, hoping his work would sway American public opinion to join the struggle against Hitler.

Living in Connecticut, Szyk became the editorial cartoonist for the New York Post and contributed a steady stream of anti-Nazi cartoons and illustrations to major magazines. He also designed military badges and “Buy War Bonds” billboards. Szyk thought of himself as “Roosevelt’s soldier with a pen.” He wrote, “I consider myself as being on duty in my cartoons.” While he would have preferred to continue doing illuminated manuscripts and other forms of art, he observed, “We are not entitled to do the things we like today.” Eleanor Roosevelt once remarked, “This is a personal war of Szyk against Hitler, and I do not think that Mr. Szyk will lose this war!”

Szyk’s devotion to the Allied war effort was matched by his growing concern for Jews trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe. In 1941, Szyk joined forces with the Bergson Group, a band of Jewish activists who lobbied the Roosevelt Administration to rescue endangered Jews. After the war, the Bergsons rallied American public support for the Jewish underground’s revolt against the British in Palestine. Szyk’s dramatic illustrations were featured in the full-page advertisements in American newspapers.

Ben Hecht, who wrote the text for many of the Bergson group’s newspapers ads, called Szyk “our one-man art department”:

Arthur Szyk . . . worked for eight years without a pause. Nobody paid him anything and nobody thought of thanking him…Szyk’s art lent a nobility to the Irgun cause. His Hebrews under fire, under torture, exterminated in lime pits and bonfires . . . remained a people to be loved and admired. Their faces fleeing from massacre now, were tense and still beautiful. There was never slovenly despair or hysterical agony in Szyk’s dying Jews, but only courage and beauty. If there was ever an artist who believed that an hour of valor was better than a lifetime of furtiveness and cringe, it was Szyk.

Szyk died in 1951 at the age of 57. His life was indeed that “hour of valor” to which Ben Hecht alluded, an artist whose brush was truly his sword.

Chapters in American Jewish History are provided by the American Jewish Historical Society, collecting, preserving, fostering scholarship and providing access to the continuity of Jewish life in America for more than 350 years (and counting). Visit www.ajhs.org.

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Indeed, many of Olitski’s titles tackled large narrative topics, often biblical–like his paintings Belshazzar’s Feast, Play of Daniel, Susy and the Elders, Rapture of Angels–but he never allowed himself to become a slave to those literal stories.

Instead, like a child finger painting or smearing icing on a cake, Olitski–who died on February 4, 2007–redefined painting as an act of mark making. He boldly abandoned the traditional mode of painting (an action done to a canvas with a brush) and used a spray gun to stain his canvases, in search of “a spray of color that hangs like a cloud, but does not lose its shape.”

Like few painters before him, Olitski attached himself to biblical themes and narratives. In 1959, he painted Bathsheba II, and his most recent body of work contains many references to the Bible. But one critic argues that the most Jewish aspect of Olitski the painter was his “stylistic joie de vivre” with a “characteristically Jewish” blend.

The Young Dyer

If Olitski’s painting career was an effort in cloud making, he was born into a tragic storm. Jules Olitski was born Jevel Demikovsky in Snovsk (now Ukraine) on March 27, 1922, just months after the Bolsheviks executed his father. In 1923, he immigrated with his mother and grandmother to New York. His mother remarried, and young Jevel took his stepfather, Hyman Olitsky’s name in 1926 (the name was later misspelled on a document, which yielded “Olitski”).

Growing up in New York, Olitski sold papers at age 11 and was shocked that people ignored the news trickling out from Europe about the Holocaust. “I was living in this community of decent people, but most of them had never seen a Jew. My teachers thought I was Irish,” he told one reporter at age 68 at the dedication of his seven-paneled Star of David sculpture commissioned by the Beth Tzedec (Toronto) congregation’s Holocaust Memorial Committee.

“Why was nothing said or done about the Holocaust? This terrible silence has haunted me all my life.” Olitski called the sculpture Elyon (heavenly) to evoke “all the lights that God created.” He said the project represented the first time “I could speak through my art as a Jew” and told the reporter, “I hope my work is imbued with this light. As an artist, I feel for a work of art to be any good it must be alive. It must be a work that lifts the spirits.”

Olitski studied at the National Academy of Design and Beaux-Arts Institute in New York between 1939 and 1942. He served in World War II and subsequently traveled to Paris on the G.I. bill in 1949, studying with Ossip Zadkine in the Zadkine School of Sculpture (1949) and in the Academia de la Grande Chaumiere (1949-1950). He returned to New York in 1951, where he earned his bachelor’s (1952) and master’s (1954) in art education from New York University.

In 1956, Olitski began teaching at C. W. Post College of Long Island University, where he taught and served as chairman of the fine arts division until 1963. In 1963, he began teaching at Bennington College in Vermont, where he taught for four years. In between, Olitski met art critic Clement Greenberg, who helped launch him to stardom and would later call him “the best living painter.” Olitski eventually showed his work in more than 150 one-man exhibits, and he was only the third living artist to earn a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

A New Kind of Paint Surface

Olitski did not always paint with the thick surfaces of With Love and Disregard. In the early 1960s, he began staining his canvases with dyes of thinned paints. But it was not until 1965 that Olitski used a spray gun, which he rented from a hardware store in Bennington. He credited the discovery to a dream, “lying in bed, imagining a painting.”

In a catalog essay for Olitski’s work at the 1966 Venice Biennale, Greenberg called Olitski’s “grainy,” sprayed surface “a new kind of paint surface,” which “offers tactile associations hitherto foreign, more or less, to picture-making; and it does new things with color.” Greenberg noted the sprayed paint became flat, yet managed “not to violate flatness.”

Flatness was a hobbyhorse of the second generation of American abstract artists, like Olitski, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler. Where the Old Masters had banished the flat from their works and replaced it with illusive “tricks” that created depth, Greenberg and company embraced flatness, which they held as intrinsic and inextricable from the canvas.

Olitski’s Chinese Dinner Girl (1965) is a vertical canvas (just more than three times as tall as it is wide) with a misty temperament, composed of reds, blues, and purples. Although the paint in Chinese Dinner Girl fills the entire canvas, in other works from this period like #9 Green (1966) and Steamed (1968), Olitski painted opaque, thick lines in a corner of the painting, almost acting like a frame. At first glance, the brush strokes seem like errors, as if Olitski had forgotten to paint up to the edges of the canvas, but the strokes ultimately served to ground the cloudy colors and to introduce tension between the two elements.

Like Chagall’s kissing couples and Rothko’s rectangles, Olitski’s clouds appear to soar out of the picture, and yet they convey weight which grounds them. One writer referred to Olitski’s colors as seeming to “float in a spatial vacuum.”

Judging the Monoprints

Although his work diverges greatly from Picasso’s cubist works, Olitski’s evolution of styles and constant redefinition of his artistic vision recalls Picasso’s career, which is best described as fashion art. Perhaps like no other artist before him, Picasso kept his finger on the market’s pulse, and gave the buying public just what it wanted. Often, Picasso proved quite adept at predicting trends before they began.

Olitski certainly did not sell as well as Picasso, but following his staining and dying phase, he began creating thicker, textured works like Noble Regard (1989), which looks like a bronzed intestine cropped to look like a maze. The textured works gave way to Olitski’s final body of monotypes, mostly of landscapes depicted in soft pastel colors. A monotype is a painter’s print, or a print that yields a one-of-a-kind image. Olitski scraped into the paint with his fingers and other tools before printing them.

The 2004 monotypes include Amid Sailboats an Angel, a “sea” of orange, pink, yellow, and blue with triangular boats and a wading figure. A circular form which surrounds the boats could either represent a whirlpool that will swallow them up or an upward, spiral motion that could launch the boats into the clouds. Moon Ravished is framed by four pink strokes, with an orange ground and green sky containing a white moon.

Amid Sailboats an Angel

Courtesy of Lauren Poster Olitski.

Many of the monoprints are biblical. Jakim’s Dream probably references Jehoiachim, and After the Fire (an Elijah reference from 1 Kings), Dancing Hannah, and Reumah Waiting also derive from biblical tales.

Although the media overwhelmingly responded positively to the monoprints, some writers pointed to a sunken reputation and Olitski becoming “a victim of the rise of conceptual art.” The criticism hardly bothered Olitski, who often said, “Nobody asked me to be an artist.”

Moon Ravished

Courtesy of Lauren Poster Oliski

But many will remember Olitski as a Jewish artist, who quoted Isaac Bashevis Singer in artist’s statements, and wrote of his work in Genesis terms: “I ask the Almighty for help. That frees me. Look at what He is able to do with a handful of dust and a rib, and here I am with all this paint and a brush and my life in my hands, and all I need is to make a good work of art.” At an opening of Olitski’s work in Washington, D.C. in May 2006, his third wife, Kristina, added, “When my husband sells a painting, he gets down on his knees and thanks God.”

Perhaps it is no coincidence that Olitski’s model of a color spray that hangs like a cloud, but does not lose its shape so evokes the bush Moses encounters in Exodus, burning with flame but not consumed.

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The Early Years

Born in 1893 outside of Minsk, Belarus as the 10th child in an Orthodox Jewish family, Soutine rebelled against his tradition during adolescence and enrolled in the art school in Vilnius. At the age of 20, after showing much promise in his early work, he moved to Paris with two of his art school friends, Pinchus Kremegne and Michel Kikoine. There he studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts under Fernand Cormon and took a room in the notorious artists flat, La Ruche, in Montparnasse.

In his 20s, Soutine live the life of a Parisian bohemian, spending late nights drinking in bars with other artists and his afternoons recovering and working madly in his studio. Soutine relished the freedom of his new French life and made friends with several of the notable artists of the time. Yet his closest companions were always other Jews. Soutine and Amadeo Modigliani, a Sephardic émigré from Italy, shared not only a flat, but stylistic innovations, models, and the same dealer.

During this early period, Soutine was known for his still lifes. Freed from the restrictions of salon-style classicism, in which artists were expected to paint historical tableaux, Soutine and his peers were experimenting with shape and texture and pursuing new visions of everyday objects. Still Life with Fish  (1921) shows how Soutine was playing with the application of paint, allowing it to thicken into an almost sculptural expression.

Raw and Primitive

Many of his still lifes reject the bourgeois taste for traditionally beautiful objects; he became fixated on fish and meat carcasses, the visceral intensity of putrefying flesh. His paintings (and his personality) were raw and primitive. Indeed even his painting method had a bit of savagery. At one point while painting Carcass of Beef (1924), his neighbors called the police because of the stench of the decaying animal in his studio. When police arrived, they received a lecture from an irate Soutine, who admonished them about disturbing him as he did his greatest work.

Soutine’s temperament and capricious character, certainly exacerbated by the company he kept, was always sabotaging his work, which he seldom showed publicly. In furious rages he would destroy his paintings, lash out at his friends and console himself with thoughts of suicide–which he once attempted (he was saved by his friend Kremegne). When his best friend Modigliani died prematurely in 1920, Soutine was gravely affected. Many critics attributed aspects of his temperament to his Jewish background and his experience with poverty and persecution in the shtetl. 

Soutine’s landscapes communicate his depression and anguish, with their twisted, sinewy trees, distorted houses and tempestuous expanses. From 1918 to 1923, Soutine traveled frequently to the south of France and remained for a couple of years in Ceret, a small town in the Pyrenees. His apocalyptic visions of the town (seen in Houses of Ceret, 1920), show a row of houses leaning away from the wind and black sky as if in the clutch of terror. The surrounding greenery is twisted and thick with paint; the viewer senses Soutine’s pervading sorrow and anxiety. The Road at Cagnes (1922-23) is a classic of this period: its stark navy and chartreuse coloring dramatically contours a picturesque road that has become foreboding and tormented under Soutine’s brush.

Fame Arrives

When Soutine returned to Paris, he shifted his focus to portraits. He was particularly fascinated by maids and valets, and one of his best known portraits is the Little Pastry Cook (1921), which takes a pitying glance at a comical, diminutive chef whose body’s wavy elongation had become a signature of Soutine’s style.

An impromptu studio visit in 1923 from Albert Barnes, the wealthy American collector, was the windfall of fortune that Soutine had been waiting for. Barnes foresaw Soutine’s work as the next movement in European painting and bought 52 of his paintings in one trip. The Barnes Collection, located outside of Philadelphia, now has the largest collection of Soutines in the world, and it was Barnes who helped bring world renown to the artist. He introduced Soutine to French taste-maker Madeleine Castaing, who became the artist’s patroness. She and her husband, Marcellin, bought most of his works and made their residence near Chartres a Soutine atelier. From their home, Soutine was afforded the luxury to paint anything he wanted, free from the pressures of making a living and living in cramped Parisian quarters.

It was during this period in the late 1920s and 30s that Soutine’s reputation advanced. His initial naïve outsider primitivism had morphed into critically acclaimed work hailed as the inheritance of the European painting tradition. His career trajectory mirrored his life’s arc. Soutine had transformed from a shtetl yeshiva boy into an assimilated French painter.

A Tragic End

In 1937, just before the Nazis took over France in the Vichy regime, Soutine’s works were exhibited in the show of Independent Art held in Paris. Here he was at last acclaimed in the press and public opinion as a great painter. But shortly after the show ended, Soutine was forced to flee Paris and stay wherever he could to avoid arrest by the Gestapo. He often had to sleep outdoors in the forests and farms surrounding Paris. At that time he was romantically involved with a woman he called Mademoiselle Garde, who accompanied him in his fugitive pursuit. She was tragically captured and interned in a camp in the Pyrenees; he was never to see her again.

It was during this stressful period of persecution that a life-long health problem that had kept him out of military service re-emerged. With an increasingly painful stomach ulcer, Soutine sought medical help from a doctor who insisted that he immediately get an ambulance to Paris. Unfortunately the ambulance was delayed and on August 9, 1943, Chaim Soutine died after emergency surgery. He was buried in Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.  His funeral was attended by Pablo Picasso, the playwright Jean Cocteau, the poet Max Jacob, and other cultural luminaries of the time.

After his death, Soutine’s reputation as one of the foremost Expressionist painters was established, and his works were bought up by top collectors. They now sell for prices between $180,000 and $2,500,000. Today Soutine’s emotionally-tinged landscapes and misshapen portraits adorn the walls of several prominent museums in the US, Europe, and Israel. He has had career retrospective exhibitions at both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Jewish Museum in New York. Next to Marc Chagall, Soutine is considered one of the 20th century’s premier Jewish artists, though none of his work explicitly addressed Jewish themes. But in the wake of his tragic death, Soutine became a symbol of the Holocaust. Despite the fact that he died of natural causes and was never placed in a detention camp, his story of emigration, assimilation and destruction outlines the tragedy of European Jewish life.

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Mediating the Past

The Holocaust is a powerful inspiration for many artists working today. Many have translated their emotional response to trauma and tragedy into the visual language of abstraction, as both a pure expression of spirit and as an adherence to the biblical prohibition on representative images. As abstract expressionism gained favor in Europe and America, its innovations were harnessed by Israeli artists for cathartic, rather than formalist, purposes.

Moshe Kupferman (1926-2003) employed muted colors and geometric formations in his paintings to conceal and reveal aspects of his experience as a survivor of the Polish camps. Moshe Gershuni (b. 1936) began his career as a conceptual performance artist, singing prayers at galleries and museums, but gained renown as an expressionist painter whose works deal with biblical themes and religious belief. Michael Gross (1920-2004) also took up the task of translating religious pathos in his sculpture and painting, with great sensual effect. Considered one of the greatest painters and sculptors of modern Israeli art, Gross developed a type of minimalism strongly influenced by natural form and the ethos of the Israeli landscape.

Figurative Painting

There is still a strong school of figurative painting in Israel that builds on the rich landscape tradition of early Zionist artists, who linked the beauty of the terrain to their destiny to occupy the land of their ancestors.

Israel Hershberg (b. 1948) is a supreme naturalist, painting highly detailed landscapes infused with Mediterranean light and a patina of desert dust. His close examination of cypress trees creates portraits of iconic green sentinels on the horizon. Menashe Kadishman (b. 1932) has painted a great range of subjects, but his consistent use of images of sheep, often in a colorful, pop style, have become symbolic of the Israeli identity struggle–between a pastoral, nomadic heritage and a sad history of victimhood.

Tsibi Geva (b. 1951) uses everyday symbols and ornamentation of Arab and Israeli life in a style that is both abstract and figurative. In the 1980s, his paintings depicted the names of Arab and Jewish cities in Israel, asserting an overtly political message about authority and territory. His more recent works manipulate patterns from everyday objects signifying Arab identity such as backgammon boards, kaffiyehs, and floor tiles. David Reeb (b. 1952) also addresses Arab and Israeli opposition, perhaps more overtly than other prominent artists, employing irony and the tactics of advertising in his beautifully rendered paintings. The monochrome Let’s Have Another War (1997) was his entry for Documenta X in Kassel, Germany and was based on photos of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

New Media

A younger generation is eagerly embracing new media and developments in art practice to explore a variety of themes. Many successful artists from Israel train initially at the renowned art school in Jerusalem, Bezalel, but leave the country to pursue graduate fine arts training in Europe or the US. Some then stay in their adopted countries, representing Israel from an expatriate position.

Ori Gersht (b. 1967) photographs Israeli landscapes with an eye more for poetics than photojournalism. His smeary, blurred depictions of olive trees and the Judean desert also seem to draw forth the mystified past of the land.  Adi Nes (b. 1965) takes up the same subject matter, but focuses his lens more with the precision of a documentarian, often posing subjects in elaborate tableaux. In Untitled (1999), Nes recreated Da Vinci’s Last Supper using Israeli soldiers as models.  Sharon Ya’ari (b. 1966), winner of the 2006 Israel Prize for outstanding visual art, photographs ordinary landscape scenes that hint at an undercurrent of anxiety always present in Israeli society during precarious times.

Addressing the Occupation

In the wake of the second intifada, several young artists have begun to critically address the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Part of the generation disillusioned with the practices of conscription military service, Yael Bartana (b. 1970) addresses militarization as a way of life that all Israelis know. Her video works, Trembling Time and Disembodying the National Army Tune play with notions of allegiance and national remembrance of military victories.

Michal Rovner’s films present a critique of military dominance over Palestinian territories. Employing a sentimental, self-involved narrative style, Rovner (b. 1957) documents her perception of injustice along state borders. Sigalit Landau (b. 1969) broadens the debate about difference and dominance with her conceptual and sculptural works. She transforms cargo containers into provocative spaces of refuse and refuge, underscoring themes of nomadic desert life and homelessness–both Bedouin and Jewish. Growing up in a Bedouin village in Galilee, Ahlam Shibli (b. 1970) documents Bedouin communities that the Israeli government has relocated from their traditional lands into public housing. She has also documented the potentially paradoxical service of young Arab men in the Israeli army.

Working with raw news footage and special effects, Doron Solomons (b. 1969) is at the forefront of video art. His works address the violence of everyday life in Israel along with the heartfelt wish for a better, magical future. He and other emerging video artists work in a “no-frills,” low budget style, often using their own homes and family members to set the scene. Guy Ben-Ner (b. 1969), chosen to represent Israel at the 2005 Venice Biennale, creates imaginative worlds from home-made materials, and often casts his young children as characters in his absurd make-believe mini-movies. Tamy Ben-Tor (b. 1975) adopts the amateur video style as well, inserting cutting cultural commentary through the articulate voices of various controversial characters–all of them played by herself.

The Scene

In the past two decades, several non-profit institutions have emerged to support contemporary Israeli art. In Israel, the national museums in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Herzliya regularly feature shows of contemporary artists, while in the US, many metropolitan Jewish museums have developed specific galleries and programs to display and encourage dialogue about today’s Israeli art.

Yet the contemporary Israeli art scene is still firmly rooted in secular Tel Aviv, where artists work in studios located in the city’s southern industrial districts and dealers establish galleries near fashionable shops and restaurants downtown. 

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“Is there a Jewish art?” he began. “First they build a Jewish Museum, then they ask, Is there a Jewish art? Jews!”

The good ole’ Jewish humor belies the radical shift that was unfolding at precisely the time and place that Rosenberg spoke. Modern Jewish art had quietly taken shape in America over the prior two decades. But now, in the mid-1960s, just as Rosenberg would finally pronounce its name, modern Jewish art would become something else entirely.

Action Painters

What did modern Jewish art mean to Rosenberg, the man who championed Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and the other American Action Painters (to use Rosenberg’s term; today we call them Abstract Expressionists)? The final paragraphs of Rosenberg’s talk proclaimed the newfound dominance of American art and also gave voice to an American-Jewish dream dominant at mid-century:

“Artists like Rothko, Newman, Gottlieb, Nevelson, Guston, Lassaw, Rivers, Steinberg and many others helped to inaugurate a genuine American art by creating as individuals.”

Amazingly, all of these artists were Jewish. So why did Rosenberg call their work a genuine American art? Why not Jewish art?

“This work, inspired by the will to identity, has constituted a new art by Jews which, though not a Jewish art, is a profound Jewish expression, at the same time that it is loaded with meaning for all people of this era.”

If it’s not a Jewish art, what makes it a profound Jewish expression?

“In the chaos of the 20th century, the metaphysical theme of identity has entered into art, and most strongly since the war. It is from this point that the activity of Jewish artists has risen to a new level…American Jewish artists, together with artists of other immigrant backgrounds–Dutchmen, Armenians, Italians, Greeks–began to assert their individual relation to art in an independent and personal way.”

Concord, 1949
Barnett Newman (American, 1905–1970)
Oil and masking tape on canvas; 89 3/4 x 53 5/8 in. (228 x 136.2 cm)
George A. Hearn Fund, 1968 (68.178)
© Barnett Newman Foundation

Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Prototypical Individuals

Rosenberg was of the opinion that as foreigners  somewhat independent from the mainstream, Jewish and immigrant artists could better create as individuals–and create artworks loaded with meaning for all people. And by creating as individuals with universal appeal, they helped inaugurate a genuine American art. For what could be more American than being ruggedly individual?

The beauty of Rosenberg’s argument is that the authentic American individual, creating genuine American art, turns out to be none other than the Jew. Without saying as much, Rosenberg is fulfilling a great American-Jewish dream: not complete assimilation but total acceptance as universal individuals.

“To be engaged with the aesthetics of self has liberated the Jew as artist by eliminating his need to ask himself whether a Jewish art exists or can exist.”

Mark Rothko (American, born Russia, 1903–1970)
No. 13 (White, Red on Yellow), 1958
Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation Inc., 1985 (1985.63.5)

Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

From the Universal to the Particular

Rosenberg’s universal individual is also his model Jew, and this insight helped shape the world of art for an entire generation. But already, as Rosenberg declaimed these words, the universal individual was slipping away. In its place rose an individual deeply tied to his or her roots, individuals whose unique identities trumped a universal one. In place of the melting pot, we got the salad bowl. And instead of the universal American, we were bequeathed a litany of hyphenated identities: African-, female-, homosexual-, Jewish-, etc.

Post-modern art was born, in part, when the universal dreams of modernism came crashing down. Once again, the Jew was at the vanguard of this new conception of identity, culture, and art. As the world of art shifted from the universal to the particular, so too did Jewish conceptions of the self. Indeed, it was at this time that the Jewish Museum where Rosenberg had lectured took on its current form with its emphasis on the particular history of the Jewish people.

The museum’s shift toward a particularly Jewish story coincided with the end of its reign as a leading venue for contemporary art.  The museum had mounted the first major exhibition of Ad Reinhardt’s work in 1966 and was among the first museums to display the works of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg (none of them Jews). Now Reinhardt, Johns, and Rauschenberg were out, and Camille Pissarro, Chaim Soutine, and Amedeo Modigliani were in. But aside from their Jewish birth, what makes these latter artists Jewish? Surely Jewish art must be more than art created by Jews.

Toward a Post-Modern Jewish Art

Rosenberg seemed to offer a compelling account of modern Jewish art: a genuine American art created through a universal individuality to which Jews, in particular, had access.

So is there a postmodern Jewish art?

Truth be told, postmodern art, like postmodernism generally, has fought too stringently against definitions  to concede a simple answer to this question. There is no single postmodern Jewish art just as there is no single postmodern art. Pluralism is the order of the day.

Yet postmodernism also fought to free the narratives of minorities from the universal claims of dominant majorities. That Rosenberg’s modernist Abstract Expressionism was practiced almost exclusively by white males of European descent betrays the true identity of his “individual.” Of the artists, Rosenberg cited in his speech– Rothko, Newman, Gottlieb, Nevelson, Guston, Lassaw, Rivers, Steinberg–all aside from Nevelson were white men. Postmodernism opened the door to stories and peoples outside the mainstream, and the strongest and most pervasive such voice came from feminism. Remarkably, feminist artists and critics were also overwhelmingly of Jewish origin.

Pioneers of Feminist Art

Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Nancy Spero, Hannah Wilke and, more recently, Barbara Kruger were the pioneers of feminist art (and of many other strains of contemporary art) and are all Jews. Many of them have even addressed Jewish content directly–but that is beside the point. The question is not what type of art Jews were practicing but why feminist ranks were filled so disproportionately by Jews. The answer–and this is my attempt to define a postmodern Jewish art–is that Jews, having been accepted into mainstream America, began questioning mainstream America from within.

Women, like Jews, are tentatively part of the mainstream: outside enough to question, inside enough for those questions to resonate significantly. The assertion of a female voice in feminist art–deeply human in its collective particularity, not in its universal individuality–is perhaps the greatest model for a Jewish voice in contemporary art. If we shift Rosenberg’s emphasis from an individual who speaks universally to one who speaks for and as part of a multifaceted, collective minority–from Abstract Expressionism to feminism–we might arrive at a definition of postmodern Jewish art.

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The Early Years

In the late 19th century, communities immigrating to Israel replicated the building styles of their homelands. In Jerusalem, the wealthy Jewish philanthropist Moses Montefiore established the first neighborhood outside of the Old City in 1860. The hillside settlement of Mishkenot Sha’ananim (translated as “tranquil dwellings”) is made up of terraced rowhouses with red roof tiles–a style that was influenced by a Mediterranean vernacular and became a prototype for Jewish residences all over Israel.

Nearby, wealthy Arab families began building European-style mansions and villas that integrated Islamic decoration. West Jerusalem is still a reflection of how various groups carved out separate neighborhoods–the Bukharan Quarter, the Russian Compound, and the German colony–each using the city’s signature Jerusalem stone, but adding on distinct architectural elements. Jerusalem stone, a white or cream-colored marble, is found in the hills surrounding the city and became a required building material under the British mandate.

Far less eclectic in its influences, the “white city” of Tel Aviv was built initially as a reproduction of Eastern European cities like Odessa, Moscow, and Warsaw. The architects of the city’s first buildings did not consider the climatic conditions of a warm-weather sea-side town and retained the wide windows, attics, turrets and towers of a more temperate environment. But later, during the early 20th century, Jewish builders and craftsmen of all kinds became influenced by Orientalist style. Local Arabic ornament, desert motifs and images of Bedouins conjured up the ancient Biblical Mediterranean for the immigrant Jews who were trying to re-establish their autonomy in the land of their picturesque past.

Notable buildings from this period paired European monumentality and function with Orientalist motifs in a style occasionally termed “Eclectic Romanticism.” Tel Aviv’s first public building, the Herzliya Gymnasium designed by Yosef Berski, looks like a stately imperial building, but its colorful interior is enhanced with Arabic ornamentation. Haifa’s old Technion building, designed by Alexander Baerwald, along with the Beit Bialik in Tel Aviv and the YMCA in Jerusalem combined eastern elements into western exteriors, creating a new fusion style with Byzantine domes, Moorish arches, Islamic tessellations and art deco elements added to multi-story concrete buildings.

At the same time, the rural communities of Jewish kibbutzim and moshavim were sprouting up all over Israel. These settlements were characterized by small houses with white walls and red roofs, laid out in geometric plans with surrounding gardens. These settlements stood in stark opposition to traditional Arab villages which were not centrally planned and grew organically as populations expanded.

The Bauhaus

In a further negation of Arab influence, in the 1930s, architects who had studied in the German design academy known as the Bauhaus brought their particularly modernist approach to building to Israel. Tel Aviv and some neighborhoods in Jerusalem became laboratories for the development of the Israeli Bauhaus style characterized by streamlined structural elements, the absence of ornamentation and a strict adherence to the international style dogma of “form follows function.” Architects like Arieh Sharon, Zev Rechter, and Dov Carmi were influential in building up Tel Aviv with efficient, healthy, light-filled structures that reflected the sunlight and the active lifestyle of urban Zionist youth.

The adoption of international modernism also expressed the desire of the young state of Israel to link itself symbolically with Europe, rather than the surrounding Arab states. In Jerusalem, the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University became a showcase for the elegant minimalism of the international style of the 1950s.

Local Concerns

In the late 1960s, when the International style started to lose favor because of its monotony and lack of integration into local context, Israeli architecture returned to a fusion of local and international styles. The Bat Yam municipal building designed by Eldar Sharon, Zvi Hecker, and Alfred Neumann best exemplifies this era. Shaped like an ancient ziggurat, the structure integrates colorful abstractions of Islamic lattice-work patterns on its façade while maintaining an iconic monumental presence.

As in other Western countries, the 1970s in Israel ushered in an era of “brutalist” architecture influenced by the American architect Paul Rudolph. The style emphasized muscular, imposing forms made of unaltered industrial materials–an aesthetic that dovetailed with Israel’s need to project military strength after its defeat in 1973. On Mount Scopus, the Ram Karmis faculty of humanities building appears almost like a fortress, with interior courtyards and look out towers along its imposing outer walls. This decade also saw the construction of many of the multi-story hotels and resorts in the country, as tourism became one of Israel’s primary industries.

Moshe Safdie & Co.

Through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Moshe Safdie became Israel’s first internationally-known star architect. He designed many monumental and public spaces including the Hebrew Union College, The Holocaust Museum at Yad Vashem, the David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem, and the Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv. Safdie’s structures elegantly express the perennial tension between past and present in Israeli architecture, creating a unique formal language of white stone, rounded arches, and dynamic soaring exterior walls.

Postmodernism dominated global architecture in the 1990s, characterized by playful references, disjointed structural elements and multiple layers of meaning. The style was all but abandoned because of its frivolity towards the end of the decade, but in Israel, many postmodern buildings demonstrated a great deal of gravitas and significance. The Supreme Court Building in Jerusalem, designed by Ram Karmi and Ada Karmi-Melamede, references not only all of the preceding eras of the city’s architecture with elements taken from Herodian, Crusader, Greek, and British buildings in the old city, but it also illustrates several passages in the bible relating to justice. The site of the building is further invested with metaphor because of its position in the city–pointing both toward the Knesset (the parliament) and to the city (the people).

Today most architectural design in Israel is influenced by the steel and glass towers of New York and Tokyo, and its infrastructure mimics the car-based urban and suburban sprawl of Europe and America. The Azraeli towers in downtown Tel Aviv have become a symbol of the city’s successful hi-tech industries in the 21st century.

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Painter, sculptor, ceremonial artist Tobi Kahn received his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute in New York. His work has been exhibited in over 40 solo exhibitions and 60 museum and group shows throughout the United States, as well as in Europe, Latin America, and Israel. Kahn has taught painting at the School of Visual Arts since 1985. He is co-founder, with Carol Brennglass Spinner, of Avoda Arts, which published Objects of the Spirit: Ritual and the Art of Tobi Kahn in 2004. Kahn and his wife, writer Nessa Rapoport, live in New York with their three children.

Kahn co-facilitates with Rabbi Leon Morris, director of the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning at Temple Emanu-el in New York, an artists’ Beit Midrash at the Skirball Center. They spoke at Kahn’s studio where the artist’s projects-in-process attest to his unparalleled creative force and abundant energy.

What Is Jewish Art?

LEON MORRIS: You are a traditionally observant Jew who, as an artist, is translating the ritual of kaddish [the mourner’s prayer] into art.

TOBI KAHN: When my mother, Ellen Kahn, died last June, I decided that during my year as an avel [mourner] I would create works of art that relate to her life. I say kaddish three times a day because my rabbi, Saul Berman, told me it is my obligation as a Jew. But here in my studio I’m saying kaddish visually. English is my second language; art is my first.

Since I was a child, I attended Jewish day schools and yeshivot. There I learned that a text reveals itself differently not only to different students but even to the same person, depending on age and experience. When you look at my work, you may see one element the first time; six months later, because you have changed, you will see the painting or sculpture differently. One day you could be falling in love. The next week, you’re very tired; it’s your birthday; you’ve just lost somebody. If you’re at your favorite beach, the sea and sky will look different each time you are there. That’s what I want for my work– not to be static.

And that is very Jewish. As a people, Jews are not at all homogeneous. I really treasure that. I want you to look at my work as it changes, and changes you. Two summers ago, for a solo exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art, I made a wall installation of 80 sky-and-water images, each one distinct.

MORRIS: You’re saying art is Jewish because it’s nuanced and because it defies simple categorization or compartmentalization. But is all the work we do Jewish art?

KAHN: I don’t believe in labels: feminist art, white art, Jewish art, gay art. I would never want to be called a Jewish artist, although I am very proud to be an artist who’s Jewish. I’m very proud to be a father and husband artist, a child of survivors artist. An artist brings all of his or her experiences into the studio. The biggest single influence on me by far is not that I’m Jewish or that I’m male, or that I’m married or that I’m a father; it is that as Tobi Aaron Kahn I am named for my uncle Arthur, Aaron in Hebrew, who was one of the first three Jews murdered by the Nazis in 1933. My uncle died so tragically young. An excellent draftsman and a medical student, he would have been an artist and a doctor. At the end of my life I want to leave a body of work that comforts people. I believe art can be healing and redemptive.

Sacred Space

MORRIS: Talk to me a little bit about space. You were just mentioning that space plays an important role in your life as an artist–sacred space. Judaism is primarily about time, but for you space is essential.

KAHN: I think Judaism is as much about space as about time. We have the concept of a makom kavua [a set place]. We get married under a symbolic space, a huppah [canopy]. After a cemetery visit, we place a stone as a remembrance on the space where the body was buried. My new paintings are of sky and water–space that’s amorphous. I’m working now on a Jewish hospice, as well as a meditative interfaith building. In the hospice I’m creating a room that will look much like a sukkah with 12 panels. The benches are low, so that for the visitor nothing obscures the space or light. Artists are supposed to change the way we think. And someone who can make us change the way we think about space and light–like James Turrell–is a genius.

I used to love making very small meditative spaces or small, sculpted objects that people could hold in their hands. But now I want to hold you, the viewer, visually and conceptually within a created space.

MORRIS: What part of the process of creating do you love most?

KAHN: I love the beginning, and I love the ending; the middle is the hardest part. At the start, the idea feels boundless; it could go anywhere. In the middle, I have to rein it in, to limit it to its essence so that the viewer will have the most powerful experience. And yet I cannot constrain the idea so much that it becomes dogmatic, without room for the viewer’s interpretation. I really want my work to be like manna, the food for the children of Israel in the desert that could taste like whatever they desired.

A Visual & Sensual People

MORRIS: The second commandment states that Jews should not make carved images. What does that mean for Jews as an aesthetic people?

KAHN: The second commandment forbids making–that is, worshipping–any graven images. I don’t think Jews are meant to worship graven images, but in truth we’re not supposed to worship anything at all, except for God. More people worship money than worship a piece of art. And they may worship the art, but very often they do because it’s worth money. I think that the reason Jews have not made art is because we were not allowed to join the guilds of the majority cultures, not because the visual element is forbidden.

We are a deeply visual people, which comes, in part, from how diverse we look and how diversely we live. Jews come from so many different places, each of which shaped us in how we see the world and each other. There is no one Jewish “look.”

Our stories are visual, our historical images are visual, and as soon as we were permitted to join the art community, we soared. Jews are a very small percentage of people in the world, but we’re a huge percentage of the world-renowned architects, painters, sculptors, glass blowers, ceramicists.

When I take Jewish groups to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I begin with the art of the Cyclades. These small objects, including figurines and functional art, were made around 2800 B.C.E., the era of the Jewish exodus from Egypt. I then show the group a hammered gold gravy boat that was made at the same time as the Golden Calf was being fashioned in the desert. The household idols our foremother Rachel hid or the Golden Calf are no longer ancient, remote abstractions when we see their analogues in the art of the surrounding cultures.

And Jews are very sensual. We breathe in spices; we shake the lulav [the palm branch used on the festival Sukkot]; we put blood on the door fronts; we kiss the Torah. We were performance artists. I am passionate about retrieving Jewish visual knowledge and helping people become better visual learners.

I do not want to be known only as an artist who creates ceremonial objects. It’s important that I’m an artist who makes painting, sculptures, set designs, photography, and also makes Jewish ceremonial objects. My paintings and sculpture embody and reflect my personal vision. The premise behind my role in the Avoda Institute is that when I make a ceremonial object it bears my meaning, but when I help other people make ceremonial objects, they have a ritual object that is uniquely their own. It will mean something different to them, enhanced by their using it. When I teach, I am a guide, not a director.

I’m working on a series of projects with UJA-Federation of New York. In one, all people who work in the building will make a mezuzah for their office. I am certain that they will not enter their office in the same way they did in the past. They are making themselves sacred spaces.

Art is not separate from life; it is like breathing. Not everyone can be an artist, but everyone can try to understand what it means to think like an artist, just as not everyone is an opera singer but everyone should sing.

Our society is about quickness. I want my work to slow the viewer down, so that seeing becomes a medium for understanding the world. We’re all here as guests on the earth. Why just take from it? Why not give to it?

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Midrash is a literary genre that uses allegory and imaginative narrative to fill in those places in the text where the stories do not feel complete. In the last several decades, many artists, clergy, educators, and scholars have been creating what they refer to as “contemporary midrash.” Their work uses the process of investigating biblical and other scared texts to draw out meaning for people today; to re-animate biblical stories and characters and to add contemporary voices, visions, and concerns to the legacy of commentary.

Unlike classical midrash, which is a purely literary form, contemporary midrash takes many forms, including dance, drama, literature, theater, and the visual arts. Because the visual arts have not always been widely embraced by Jewish religious culture, contemporary fine artists working in this genre are often charting new territory in using visual images to comment on sacred texts.

Unique Artists, Unique Styles

Visual midrash can be found in a number of contemporary places: displayed in Jewish art galleries and museums, illustrating Jewish books, and sometimes as part of a lesson in a Jewish school or adult-education program. This movement to integrate visual imagery into a dialogue about our texts and our reactions to them is a deliberate attempt to recognize the power of art to combine our emotional, intellectual, and spiritual understandings of text.

An example is the work of artist Archie Rand. Rand’s expressive paintings depict biblical characters–such as Eve, Moses, and King David–in comic-book style frames, with Hebrew text written in cartoon balloons and boxes. He creates a new visual language that integrates pop-culture sensibility with serious investigation of biblical dilemmas, challenging the viewer to imagine how these ancient texts relate to our own moral and spiritual predicaments.

Rand’s biblical characters appear in modern dress, and his juxtaposition of contemporary and ancient symbols forces the viewer to think about biblical text in a metaphorical manner. One of his paintings, for example, quotes from Genesis, “And the man gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam no fitting helper was found for him”; it portrays Eve wandering in a barren land, surrounded by dinosaurs.

Another artist creating visual midrash is Tobi Kahn. A painter and sculptor, much of Kahn’s work has explored Jewish religion and identity, some of which comments on biblical texts. Kahn says of his work: “Although Judaism has emphasized words, language, and interpretation, I have found the visual elements of the tradition equally illuminating. For me, the life of the spirit is integrally bound up with the beauty of the world, with the rituals and symbols that are a Jewish medium to transcendence. Like language, what we see can be a benediction.

A 2003 exhibit at the Yeshiva University Museum called “Microcosmos” featured a series of Kahn’s abstract paintings inspired by the first chapter in the Book of Genesis. Evocative of the cosmos and elements of the earth, Kahn interprets Genesis in a meditative, minimalist series that invites the viewer to think about his or her own place in the vastness of creation. His paintings are metaphors for creation, examining the simplicity and beauty that begins with each a single cell.

Adding Women’s Voices

As best we know, the sages who created our classical midrashwere all male and many of their commentaries reflect an understandably male-centric view. In many cases, it is only in the last 50 or so years that Jewish women have been given equal opportunities to learning sacred texts, and many have started to create commentaries of their own. A number of prominent female fine artists and sculptors have added their voices and visions to the midrashic process by creating contemporary work commenting on the Bible.

Suzanne Benton is a sculptor, mask performer, and print maker who has traveled the world exploring myth, ritual, and archetypes in many cultures. Her mask-making series includes one of Jewish women from the Hebrew Bible, including the matriarch Sarah and her handmaiden Hagar. Benton is both a visual and performing artist, using her mask performances to examine the complex tale of these women and their struggles around fertility and motherhood. Benton has taken this performance to countries around the world, using this particular biblical story to explore universal issues.          

Renata Stein is an artist who works in mixed media, especially using everyday found objects to create a new visual language the reflects images of ordinary life. Her midrashic works include mixed media art commenting on the stories of the Akedah (Binding of Isaac), Leah and Rachel, and Jacob’s ladder. Using stones, branches and other found materials takes her work out of the literal realm and into the symbolic one, which opens the viewer to his or her own imaginings about the stories.

One of Stein’s mixed media pieces, called “Jacob Set up a Pillar (Tree of Life),”recalls the moment in Genesis when Jacob–fleeing from his brother, Esau–stops in a new place to rest and sets up a pillar, before having his auspicious dream of angels climbing up and down a ladder from heaven. Stein’s envisioning of the pillar is a mixed-media piece that uses found objects to create a tree with branches stretching toward heaven and roots dangling down toward earth.           

Artist Ruth Weisberg’s drawings can be found in The Open Door, a New Haggadah, edited by Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell (CCAR Press). The book that accompanies and guides Jews through the order of the Passover seder, Haggadot have been illustrated at least as far back as the Middle Ages. Weisberg depicts humanistic, figurative images that reflect the Open Door Haggadah’s sensitivity to gender-inclusive language. Her rendering of the story of the Exodus from Egypt includes aspects of the story that have not always been emphasized before, including the bravery of the midwives Shifra and Puah. Her midrash is an example of how art can affect ritual and prayer, in this case aiming to deepen the spiritual experience of the seder.          

Artist Beth Grossman has taken the idea of exploring biblical texts into a new direction; her work is about recontextualizing history and mythology–creating art that can turn assumptions upside down. While studying art in Italy, she found herself surrounded by images of an idealized, iconic Mary–the virgin mother. That experience, along with her interest in interfaith dialogue, inspired Grossman to explore the Jewish roots of this Christian icon. Grossman chose to revisit Mary’s story and create art that portrays her as an unidealized, very human Jewish woman.

When her Mary works have been exhibited, she has invited both Jewish and Christian groups to view and discuss the meaning of her artwork. As an artist, she is interested in finding common threads among groups; in this case, she feels it is significant for both Jews and Christians to remember that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus were known, historically, to be Jewish.

Her piece “Mary of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” for example, features a  painting of a modern-looking Mary shielding baby Jesus. Mary is wearing a yellow star, as if she was a Jew in Nazi Germany. The painting is enclosed in a suitcase, filled with yellow stars. Written on the stars on the left side of the suitcase are stereotypes that the Nazis pinned on Jews, such as “greedy” and “useless.” The stars on the right are qualities traditionally attributed to Mary, who is also a Jew, such as “angelic” and “blessed.” The  piece’s message or intention is to show the duality of human beings, how the same woman could have been worshipped or reviled simply by the time she lived in and the perceptions of those around her.

Not Just for Professionals

Visual midrash is not a form of expression limited only to professional artists. Educators are recognizing the importance of using the visual arts in Jewish education and their value in enlivening biblical texts for students. Scholar and artist Jo Milgrom wrote the pioneering book Handmade Midrash (published in 1999), which offers simple, clear instructions for Jewish expression through the visual arts; it was embraced with enthusiasm by many Jewish educators. In classrooms and Torah study workshops, teachers started using Milgrom’s techniques to inspire students to express through art emotions and reactions to biblical stories. Recognizing the value of visual learning as one of many multiple intelligences, the visual arts–and contemporary midrash specifically–are gaining a mainstream place in the Jewish classroom.       

Visual art offers a different way of thinking and knowing, and by adding visual midrash to our literary commentaries, we are turning sacred texts in new ways, with new language, creating new visions.

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Reprinted with permission from the website of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Yaacov Agam is one of the very few living Israeli artists who have attained international status (he is the only Israeli artist included in H. H. Arnason’s voluminous “History of Modern Art” and in the recent “Dictionary of Art and Artists,” edited by Sir David Piper). As early as the mid-1950s, Agam was considered one of the most important artists of the post-World War II period and a leading pioneer of optic and kinetic art. He is still internationally acknowledged as a major contemporary artist.

Agam (Yaakov Gipstein) was born in 1928 to an Orthodox family in Rishon Lezion in the coastal plain south of Tel Aviv, then a small, semi-rural settlement. His father, Rabbi Yehoshua Gipstein–who devoted his life to Jewish religious learning, meditation, and fasting–refused to register his son in a school, because no place in a religious school was available.…

Consequently, the boy grew up without any formal education and almost without the company of other children. At home, however, Agam absorbed the heritage of Jewish spiritual values and thought and was particularly attracted to Jewish mystic lore and kabbalistic studies as practiced by his father, the learned rabbi. Agam considers himself as his spiritual continuant in his devotion to the study of these values. As we shall see, this heritage remained at the core of much of Agam’s artistic philosophy throughout his career.

Agam began painting as a self-taught teenager. In 1946, he moved to Jerusalem and studied for about two years at the Bezalel Academy of Art. Following the advice of his teacher, the painter Mordecai Ardon, Agam left Bezalel in 1949 and went to Zurich. The stay in Zurich, although of short duration, constitutes a phase of crucial importance in the formation of his style as well as in that of his artistic theory. For it was in Zurich that the young Agam met three men who left their mark on his art and thought for many years to come.

Three Major Influences

The first of them was Johannes Itten (1888-1967), under whom Agam studied at theKunstgewerbe Schule. Itten, a former teacher at the Weimar Bauhaus and of Ardon, was a renowned theoretician of form and color. In his lessons, Itten advocated the use of pure colors and carefully studied coloristic compositions inspired by constructivist ideas. The rational, quasi-scientific basis of Agam’s theoretical approach to the creative process, as well as his constant preference for geometrical forms, pure, bright colors and multi-colored compositions, may thus be traced back to his studies with Itten.

“Jacob’s Ladder,” by Agam. Image used with permission from the Robert Roman Gallery.

The second formative influence on Agam was the Swiss painter, sculptor, and designer, Max Bill (b. 1908), who may have inspired Agam’s artistic ideology and work no less than Itten. Bill was one of the leaders of geometric, non-figurative, or abstract art, which he entitled “Concrete Art.” In his theoretical writings, Bill was much concerned with the relationship between aesthetic and mathematical theories, and his ideas appear to have deeply impressed Agam. In addition, it was from Max Bill’s metal sculptures, with their polished, shining forms and precise, geometric style, that Agam inherited his particular approach to sculpture.

The third important source of inspiration was the architectural historian and theoretician, Siegried Giedion–the author of a well-known book, Space, Time and Architecture–whose classes Agam attended at the Zürich Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule.

Giedion advised Agam to continue his studies in Chicago. However, on his way to the United States, and after an intensive study-tour in Italy, he settled in Paris in 1951. In Paris, despite many hardships and utter lack of any financial means, Agam worked and studied indefatigably, also becoming familiar with the contemporary artistic milieu. …

The Element of Time

We have seen that Agam had already been attracted by geometric abstraction when he was studying in Zurich. In Paris, he was equally fascinated by kinetic art, and he soon began to investigate the possibilities of merging the “element of time” into his art, and finally created his own particular version of abstract kinetic art.

In 1952, Agam created his first transformable works with parts that could be moved and change place and position on a panel, thus offering the viewer the possibility of creating innumerable new abstract compositions. Later, in his metal sculptures, Agam applied the same principle of allowing the spectator to take an active part in the creation of new compositions.

In 1953, Agam created his first “polyphonic paintings.” In these works, two or more different abstract compositions are painted on both protruding sides of a relief of a zigzag section, in such a way that one composition is seen when the panel is viewed from the right side, and another when viewed from the left. The frontal view of the panel presents a series of varied compositions which result from the merging–or the “fusion” as Agam calls it–of several main compositions.

Agam transformed this simple device into rich and complex works of art by applying it to his highly developed geometric compositions. Moreover, the spectator perceives not only the gradual merging of one composition into the other but may also comprehend each successive view as a perfectly independent new composition. This way of achieving variety and multiplicity of artistic content in a single work has been constantly developed by Agam throughout his artistic career.

Big Break

Agam’s great opportunity came in 1953, when he exhibited his new creations at the Galérie Craven, Paris, in his first one-man show. This exhibition, the first one-man exhibition ever held totally dedicated to “Art in Movement” and described by Agam as his “artistic birth,” immediately made him a focus of public interest, and he soon became acknowledged as one of the pioneers of the new kinetic art and the greatest virtuoso of the group.

During the following 40 years, Agam created numerous works which can be seen in all parts of the world. Although his works show a great variety of artistic content, form, style, technique, and materials, all of them are marked by the same constant features, which are characteristic of his creative mentality.

The guiding principle of Agam’s artistic works is multiplicity of form and content. In this, he is in sharp contrast to artists belonging to several contemporary currents, who may be grouped under the common denominator of “minimal art,” and who tend to reduce to a minimum the structure, form, color scheme and texture of their work, in order to achieve a perceived perfect unity of its content. Agam, in contrast with such minimalist artists, is a maximalist, for he has always striven to make the content of each of his works richer in structure and content.

The wealth and complexity of artistic content in Agam’s creations can be seen at their best in such polyphonic works as the “Salon Agam” in the Pompidou Centre in Paris (1971), where not only a single panel but the whole space of the Salon is continuously in fluid motion as the observer walks through it.

The artistic content of a work by Agam is thus not that of a single composition but the sum total of innumerable forms and compositions that result from its endless transformation. In other words: Transformation and multiplicity go hand in hand. This is why the artist has also been attracted to polyphonic music. He has even composed his own experimental polyphonic music, which he called “Musical Transforms” (1962).

Between 1959-1962, Agam also experimented in the application of multiplicity to a particular kind of theater equipped with several stages upon which different scenes of the same play took place simultaneously. In 1958, Agam even began experimenting with a new kind of “simultaneous writing,” which dissociates speech from reading, and in which several verbal expressions are written one above the other so that they may be grasped at the same time. He demonstrated some of these ideas in a didactic illustrated book in Hebrew, published in Israel in 1989: Agmilim (“Agamwords”). …

Agam’s works from the 1970s onwards sometimes include, in addition to abstract geometric compositions, elements which carry symbolic meaning–like the combined elements of fire, water, and sound in his fountain in the Zena-Dizengoff Square in the center of Tel Aviv (1986). Some of his works even include clear iconographic messages, such as his holographic medallion (1985), which has a combination of the symbols of the three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

In a similar category are other works which were designed as Jewish ritual objects (synagogue lamps, a candelabrum for the Hanukkah festival, his mezuzah– the amulet placed in the door-frame of a Jewish home). The inclusion of such works is an important and critical aspect of Agam’s Jewish background, to which he has remained deeply attached. In publications on the history of modern and contemporary art, Agam’s works are usually appraised in purely artistic terms, however, he himself has always stressed the spiritual Jewish background, not only of his iconic and ritual Jewish works, but also of his entire oeuvre, including the purely abstract works. …

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A Long Tradition

While many Judaica artists create cutting-edge work in both content and style, their work does not stand in a vacuum. It emerges from a long tradition of Jewish folk art.

Today, many of these artists are professionally trained and bring a fine arts sensibility to their Judaica work. This is a relatively new phenomenon. Only in the last few centuries have Jewish artists trained in the fine arts. For the greater part of Jewish history, most Judaica artists were untrained, and their art was not their life’s work, but was simply one form of devotion to God. Known today as “Jewish folk art,” the tradition of Jewish visual expression includes paper-cutting, creation of the mizrach and shivitti (two forms of decorative signs), and the art of micography (using words to create images). Looking with contemporary eyes at these primarily self-taught forms of expression offers inspiration and assurance that the visual arts hold a prominent place in Jewish civilization.

At first glance, any work of “folk art” may at first seem childish or naïve; what makes it great art is that at second glance, the art reveals depth and substance. Jewish paper cutting was, for centuries, more or less of a hobby of a primarily male, religious population. These men included rabbis, yeshiva teachers, and students, people who had time to use their hands even as they focused on study and discussion.

Paper-Cutting

Paper-cutting was an inexpensive art — no fancy materials were needed, just a scrap of paper, a pencil, a knife. At the same time, some artists used more expensive materials, such as parchment, resulting in paper-cut art better able to be preserved. The tradition of Jewish paper-cutting was borrowed by the Jews of the Middle Ages’ Christian and Muslim neighbors. It can be traced as far back as the 14th century, and it continued to play a major cultural role in Jewish tradition through the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The craft takes a simple art–cutting paper to create a design (think of making a snowflake in grade school)–and transforms it into an expression of devotion. The artist would take a line of text, from Psalms, for instance, and would strive to bring the imagery of the text alive in the paper-cut.

As time went on, paper-cutting became more esteemed, and soon paper-cut designs became connected with certain lifecycle events and holidays. Artists used paper-cutting to illustrate ketubot (marriage contracts), for example, and would create certain designs for the Jewish festivals of Sukkot and Shavuot. While Jewish literary tradition focused on the importance of words, the folk art tradition brought visual representations of words and ideas to life.

Using Art to Focus Attention

Artists often used paper-cutting to create a mizrach (which literally means “east”). The mizrach was a wall hanging for the most eastern wall of the Jewish home, reminding them which way to face while praying–toward Jerusalem–and directing the family’s thoughts to that holy city during prayer. In Eastern Europe, the mizrach was frequently an object not just of devotion, but also of beauty. Elaborate mizrachim (plural of mizrach), created by paper-cutting techniques adorned many Jewish homes. Though the intention of the mizrach was to serve a simple, religious function, the art of the mizrach shows the high regard that was paid to good craftsmanship and beautiful aesthetic sense.

Another example of Jewish folk art, dating back to the Middle Ages, was the creation of the shivviti (meaning “awareness.”). Similar to the mizrach in that its function was to focus attention, the shivviti would hang in the synagogue. Inspired by a line from Psalms, “Shivitti Adonai Lanegdi Tamid”– I am ever aware of the Eternal One’s presence”–the shivviti employed the Hebrew letters “yud, hay, vav, hay” which together symbolize God’s name. It is interesting to note that while it was forbidden to try to utter the name of God, the shivviti used these letters in an artistic design to represent God’s presence. The shivviti might include other Biblical phrases or lines from Psalms, but the focus of its design was always the letters “yud, hay, vav, hay.” The shivviti, like the mizrach, was often created by paper-cutting, although examples of shivviti created by embroidery, drawing, and other media do exist.

Micrography

Hebrew micrography takes the scribal art of calligraphy–used by scribes to write Torah scrolls and other sacred books–and creates images and symbols made up of words. Dating back to the ninth century, micrography uses a minute form of writing to create abstract patterns or form shapes, such as ritual objects or animals. Scribes in ancient Israel and Egypt were trained to write in very small letters–especially to create the scrolls that go inside a mezuzah or to write notes of commentary in the margins of Hebrew Bibles–and so used their specialized ability to create an original art form.

Micrography spread from the scribes of the Near East to the Jewish communities of the Diaspora–to the Sephardic communities of Spain and Portugal, as well as to the Ashkenazic communities of Eastern Europe. It was an art form that was taught from one scribe to another, each scribe adding his own innovation and mark. By the 17th century, micrography was used to embellish all kinds of Judaica: ketubot, omer calendars (used to count the days between Passover and Shavuot, a period known as the omer), decorations for the Sukkah, and wall-hangings for the home. Later, as the Jewish world spread overseas–to North and South America and returning to the Land of Israel–scribes took the art of micrography with them and spread their work in the new lands.

As with paper-cutting, micrography’s emphasis is on sacred words. The art of micrography is about playing with those words–beautifying those words, illuminating them, drawing the eye to them in a fresh way. Also like paper-cutting, it is an art form keeping the importance of Jewish sacred literature in tact. In fact, many scribes have used micrography as a kind of internal art–creating small samples of micrography within Bibles, ornamenting such scriptures as the Psalms. As the art of micrography continues to grow today throughout the Jewish world, it is still most often sacred words that are used to create the visual patterns or designs.

The Jewish folk arts provide a fascinating look at the values of Jews of yesteryear. While much of Jewish culture focused on the world of books, law, and worship, the existence of folk arts indicates that creativity and visual expression were also valued and appreciated. Though contained within a narrow framework of religious devotion, these art forms can nonetheless inspire both the observant and secular person today. That this art was created by untrained artists–who used simple tools to create works of deeply-felt expression and faith–is especially inspiring.

When many parts of a vibrant, thriving Jewish culture were decimated in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, the tradition of Jewish folk art became part of that vast cultural loss. However, in recent years, there is a growing renewal of interest in Jewish folk arts, similar to the revived interest in Yiddish language and klezmer music. Israeli scholars Joseph and Yehudit Shadur have written two definitive guides about Jewish paper-cutting: Jewish Papercuts: A History and Guide and Traditional Jewish Papercuts: An Inner World of Art and Symbol. Their work inspires Judaic artists today, many of whom are reclaiming this lost art and incorporating it as part of their creative process in making ketubot and other sacred art.

Likewise, the art of making mizrachim and shivviti are also experiencing a renaissance as a form of artistic expression. Artists are exploring these forms with mosaic, fiber art, collage, and other techniques. Micrography is also a thriving art, with calligraphers using this form of word-art in fresh and surprising ways.

No longer seen as “outsider” or “simple” art, these forms of Jewish folk art are respected and regarded as part of a long-held Jewish aesthetic tradition. These art forms now live on with a new generation of Jewish visual artists world-wide, evolving with each new artist who works with them.

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