The Green and Blue Shadows
of Impressionism
One of the great discoveries
of Impressionism in the nineteenth century was that shadows have different
colours, and thus are part of the light itself that shapes, substantiates and
projects meaning in painted scenes. But
more than that, as we shall argue, the discovery of shadows as both part of the
otherness of light and the spectrum of colours opened the possibility of
depicting world that was neither chiaroscuro nor registered in classical
schemes of tone and value. There could
now be subjective and psychological impressions, with the artist as the metaphorical
lens through which physical sensations passed before being painted on canvas
and images that filled the picture that were composed of colour, light and form
without undue regard to representation, symbolism or existential reality.
The European painter no
longer depicted the world as it ought to be according to academic traditions
and scientific positivism. The space of
the canvas did not contain harmoniously arranged representations of objects and
actions discretely set forth as they were supposed to be by rules and
regulations, but rather now as the sweep of reflected and refracted light
passed through the organic apparatus of perception and registered as a
subjective image, it embodied an inner state of aesthetic sensibility.
Yet while learning to paint
what was felt in the mind in response to the stimulation of the retina through
perception of things seen en plein aer, the artist and the spectator no
longer had to validate the accuracy of the representation of reality, whether
in terms of a historical moment or of an imitation of previously produced works
of art. Instead, they would respond to the work with their own aesthetic sensibility.
The Shadows of History
A second great discovery at
the same time as Impressionism in France and other nations of western Europe in
the second half of the nineteenth century is that Jews—despite everything that
Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and other racist, volkisch
and similar modern anti-Semites had to say—could be artists, composers, performers
and critics of the same calibre as non-Jews in various movements of art, thus
no longer standing in the shadows of art history or even outside of the
development of art altogether, and they could do so with the capacity to draw
on their own rabbinical and family traditions just as Christian artists did
from their ecclesiastical traditions and national cultures, that is, sometimes
directly in accord with the feelings and needs of the community and sometimes more
obliquely in opposition.
This second discovery about Jewish
art, however, is still contested by many, including many Jews. One can see this,
for instance, in Chaim Potok’s two novels about Asher Lev,
where the title character, as he grows up feels and is told by his new advisers
in the art world, that he has to move away from the Chasidic community and
special practices and beliefs if he wishes to make mark for himself. In these
two American post-War novels, this is shown to be a matter, on the one hand, of
Lev proving himself as an artist through copying the great tradition of
European painting that is based on Christian iconography and, on the other, of manifesting an individual
expression based on nineteenth-and twentieth-century notions of a secular, romantic
and even non-religious self, the very opposite of the spiritual, Talmudic and communal identity of
all Judaism, but especially of Chasidismus as taught on Eastern Parkway in
Brooklyn.
Thus,
even when it is recognized that individual Jews, on their own and in small
groups could develop their own unique and personal modes of expression as
artists, sometimes even as leaders in their fields, it is presumed that they
either had to leave the shadows of Jewish life altogether or, if they wish to
remain to some degree Jews in their own eyes and those of their own parents and
other community members, they would have to live like aesthetic and psychological
Marranos. In brief, they had to learn to exist in two separate parts of their
experience, as artists in the full light of day—that is, in terms of what they
paint and how they pursue their public careers—and as Jews in the shadows—that
is, in terms of the private, inner and domestic, even intellectual and
spiritual, portions of their minds and souls.
This kind of split-personality and style of living is unacceptable for
Asher’s parents and most of the pietistic community, with only the Great Rebbe
showing some sympathy, but confirming to the young man that what he is choosing
in deciding to become a painter is one that is always going to be painful for
him and try his soul to an intolerable level. Compromise, at best, must be kept strictly in
private, as with the uncle who collects objets d’art for his own
pleasure but must keep them secret from his own family. Any attempt, further, to express his
Jewishness in works Lev puts on sale
However, Chaim Potock’s two novels
on the fictional artist Asher Lev, for all their other values as a literature
and as social commentary,
contain two essential historical flaws, perhaps now more evident in the
twenty-first century than all those decades ago when the two novels first
appeared. In the first place, the strict
norms of hasidism into which the boy with artistic talents and genius was born
are not completely comparable to other communities of Jews, just as the
specific time and place of the fictional settings of these books represents a
crucial period in the development of post-Holocaust Judaism, but again only in
regard to American Ashkenazi Orthodoxy and not necessarily to other ways of
living and believing oneself as a Jew in the modern world, whether in
non-American areas of the Diaspora or in Israel in the decades following
Independence, within different branches of Sephardic tradition, and with
varying degrees of religious intensity or commitment, if any at all.
Moreover, before political
and social emancipation in Europe during the course of the nineteenth century,
there was not just a Jewish tradition of art—despite what Chaim Potock rather
disparagingly still saw as merely the craftsmanship of folk art or liturgical
decorations through to more refined and accomplished achievements in
performing, structural and expressive art forms—and a thick body of aesthetic
thought: thick in the sense of having historical depth and intellectual
diversity. For Potock, as for the art
historians he relied on, such as Cecil Roth or E.R. Goodenough, Jewish art in
its millenial forms—in its cultural origins going back into medieval, antique,
biblical and probably pre-biblical days was dismissed as a mere shadow of the
“real” art discovered in non-Jewish civilizations. At best, from their dismissive point of view,
ancient and later Israel could only imitate what the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines
or Christian cultures created as part of their material and spiritual
identity. With both the production of
“graven images” interdicted by the Law to prevent the return or influence of
idol worship and the aesthetic sensibility repressed and denied as a valid mode
of experiencing a spiritual relationship to the deity, Jews merely made
decorations and useful objects, any “beauty” inhering in them taken as
incidental or a diversion of the study of the sacred Writings and performance
of other mitzvoth.
For that reason, Jewish
craftsmen might indeed produce objects for their pagan, Christian or Muslim
neighbours but without regard or consideration of what the art might mean to
these others in their private and public devotions;
and, similarly, wealthy Hebrews might commission non-Jewish artists to
construct small cult objects for use in their homes, such as hannukiot,
incense containers and calendar pictures. Some of these
craft-workers—silversmiths, weavers, dancing masters, performing
musicians—probably would have superimposed on the product made for others in a
purely mechanical way a sense that they were anticipating a time when they
would be called upon to refurbish a restored Temple in Jerusalem or infusing
the work with a Jewish meaning and spirituality. Nominally, the non-Jewish aspects
to the objects they created would not be recognized, even though hindsight lets
us now see that Christian motifs were incorporated into Church frescoes,
emphasis re-arranged so that New Testament scenes contained Jewish persons,
actions and ideas and “Old Testament” prototypes looked more like contemporary
rabbinical scholars than ancient priests and peasants.
When Christian architects,
designers and artists were commissioned to create Jewish cult objects for
domestic use or public display by Jewish families, the modern art historians
tend to dismiss any negotiations between the patron and the manufacturing
workshop or individual as purely commercial, with any discussion of what the
objet d’art might mean or function as within the Jewish ambit of sensibilities
as merely incidental to real meaningful.
This is partly because it is assumed that rich merchant or banking
families who hired the services of gentile craftsmen and artists did not fully
appreciate their own rabbinical traditions and only sought to imitate the
tastes and pretensions of the dominant society around them, and also that the
non-Jewish workers could not understand or respect the specific qualities of a
Jewish aesthetic—mostly because such an aesthetic did not and could not exist.
Even if there had been some
mutual discussions of how to fuse the two sensibilities and traditions, the
commentators usually do not take seriously
the possibility that the non-Jewish artist might have his own intellectual or
spiritual reasons for wishing to explore the creative potentials of Jewish
tradition, whether as a means of satirizing or more subtly criticising his own
Christian metier and the restrictions imposed in ecclesiastical contracts, or
following his own intellectual or spiritual attractions to Judaism itself.
However much these may be mistaken or misguided, as when the Florentine
Neoplatonists engaged with Italian Jewish kabbalists to advance their own
understanding of mystical thought. On
the Jewish side, just as when we know there were rabbinically-trained musicians
who composed orchestral pieces and operas attempting to merge Jewish motifs and
insights with Renaissance developments in art , there well may be room for
investigating the Jewish intellectual and aesthetic input into the hiring
practices of Jewish intellectuals of goyish painters, sculptors and
metal-workers.
This was all, strictly
speaking, avoda zara, idol
worship both in the sense of service to alien cultures and gods, but more
significantly it was a misapplication of Jewish thought, feeling and worship,
especially when the craftsman or woman attempted to rationalize their labour as
a production of beauty on behalf of the Hebrew cult. In reality, however, when
we remember that not all of Jewish life in Europe was framed by the harsh,
cramped conditions of Ashkenazi life in Eastern or Central Europe, but there
were small communities of Sephardic and Italian Jews who attempted to maintain
continuity with their own more liberal past and to remain open to interaction
with the Christian culture around them, then we should be prepared to examine
sympathetically the illuminated manuscripts of Haggadot, rabbinical
debates, philosophical discourses, love poetry, kattubot, and megillot, as well as other
non-liturgical documents, both when painted by Jewish artists and by Christian
workers as examples of fertile inter-faith or cross-cultural creativity.
In the case of Asher Lev,
who is made typical of the Jewish artist, genius, talent and a “gift” can be
successful only by separating oneself from the rabbinical community, with the
achievement recognized by the surrounding culture through adaptation of its
aesthetic ideals and its formal principles of beauty. Like the young violinists and pianists who
became star performers in nineteenth and twentieth century concert halls and
who were praised for anything but their Jewish identities, the Jewish painters
and sculptors who were at the heart of modern art did so, in Potock’s now
outdated view, not only in spite of their Jewish heritage, but brought nothing
particularly valuable from their backgrounds to the performances or products of
their work—that is, other than their diligence and concentration. The Jewish community, or at least the more
liberal and secular sections that emerged during the same period, were proud of
the achievement and basked in its reflected glory, but also did not perceive
anything essentially or specifically Jewish about the art. It was presumed that their success was a
useful riposte to the anti-Semitic charge that Jews could be neither creative
nor aesthetically sensitive, and that just as Jews could excel in mathematics,
science or medicine what they contributed was an individual talent and
energy—but that there is nothing Jewish about Einstein’s theory of relativity
or Jonas Salk’s discovery of the polio vaccine.
Sigmund Freud was worried that his new psychoanalysis would be mistaken
for a Jewish science if he could not enlist sufficient goyim into the movement,
such as Karl Jung.
That Jewish reality of art
and aesthetics, to be sure, has seemed dominant throughout the twentieth
century in art historical studies, in social analysis, and in literature and
the popular mind. We also must concede
to Potock his views in terms of accepting the lack of general recognition
outside the places where Jews were marginalized and restricted in their direct
influence on the mainstreams of European and Mediterranean civilizations, and
so indeed an occluded and hence unseen area of creativity—and in due course in
the centuries of ghettoes and shtetls in Eastern Europe and repeated
persecutions and expulsions in Western Europe overlooked by most Jews
themselves and therefore all but forgotten by the time when modernity dawned.
By the start of the twentieth
century, among intellectuals and other cultured persons, Romanticism,
Impressionism and Symbolism, had all been movements developing variations on the
ideas of creating art forms, art places, and artists away from the older places
of Church and aristocratic courts, through the previous hundred years of
revolution and restoration were over. A
few artists might follow the new techniques and styles of these named schools,
but they could no longer think feel or experience the world as the nineteenth-century
innovators did—that is, as acts of rebellion and separation from the past. Whether defiant post-Christians already or
reluctant secularists, these men and women of the fin de siècle reacted now
less against society at large—the bourgeois monster states that had replaced
the ecclesiastical and feudal monarchies—than against the art traditions
generated by their forbears in painting, music, architecture, sculpture and
poetry. Indeed, one of the ways they
could spit in the face of their predecessors—either specifically older artists
themselves, or those agents and dignities of the new order created along with
them, such as art dealers, museum directors, teachers in the academies,
impresarios, newspaper critics and rich patrons of the arts—was to become
reactionary secessionists of various sorts.
More often than not, though, they assumed to be true and real the
intellectual and aesthetic territories created by the schools of
nineteenth-century arts, and built vast new edifices of theory and practice on
them, embracing the new sciences and technologies, with their enriched palettes
of colours impossible to see or imagine before, new dimensions of sound, and
malleable materials artificially produced by chemists and physicists. Thanks to telegraphy, telephones, photography
and cinematography, time and space gained new vistas, depths and heights of
experience. While hindsight may allow us
today to follow the unfolding of these new dimensions and vistas, developing
from the interaction of science, philosophy and aesthetics in technology, social
relations and structures, and practical accomplishments in various creative
arts, in the years immediately leading up to the Great War of 1914-1918, it
often seemed to people that something radically new had been created, some
unexpected border had been crossed, and some vast and frightening realm of
experience had as within and without the other dimensions of art. been entered.
It is in this matrix of
experiences that Jewish artists as Jews began to be recognized and to recognize
themselves. When a Jew had entered the
company of art, he or she saw that move as a way of assimilating into European
society and culture, finding some comfort and welcome in the fact that the
others, the non-Jews, were also in a state of rebellion and rejection of their
own religious, social, and cultural traditions.
No matter how real or illusory these sensations of joining together
without any concern for prior differences of language, national identity or
religious affiliation may have been, there was always something different about
the Jew, and this difference became more and more marked as the underlying
tensions between various parts of Europe became irritated by the very forces
creating modernity and which finally exploded into the gigantic world-wide conflagration
of a world war. The more older national
identities asserted themselves, the more the Jew was excluded. The more people returned to some sort of
religious faith, whether reactionarily into the arms of one church or another
or into the other arms of politicised nationalisms based on racial superiority
and historical mythology, again the more Jews could not find an acceptable
place. At this point of
breaking—sometimes a few years before and sometimes a few afterwards—the Jew
had three choices: (1) he or she could try to bluff it out and throw his or her
own self into the illusion of being French or German or Austrian or Italian,
for example, sometimes through formal conversion or some other patriotic act of
commitment, including a seemingly defiant act of becoming a socialist or
anarchist opposed to nationality altogether; (2) he or she could join the
emergent movement of political Zionism and thus assert a language, nationality
and historical mythology exclusive to Jews and supposedly equivalent to any
other; or (3) he or she could re-discover in him or herself the value of
ancient rabbinical traditions of art and aesthetics, transform them into
secular, modern theories, and pursue a career and identity in art outside of
the conflicted areas of European civilization.
