Is Jewish Art Possible and Has it been Influential?
Some Transitional Words
In
my latest book, Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus
in the Phantasmagoria (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2013) I have discussed at length two related questions: one, the reason why
Dreyfus favoured the so-called traditional academic painter Meissonier over the
artists we take to be the great
transformers of taste and aesthetics, the Impressionists and the
post-Impressionists, and thus to show that despite what to us looks like a
lapse in judgment, nevertheless proves that the army officer was cultured,
sophisticated and knowledgeable about the arts; and second, whether such a
preference is a mark not so much of bourgeois tastes in a period shifting
sensibilities and technical revolution, but of Dreyfus’s Jewishness, his
assimilation into the mixed traditions of his own family, the Dreyfus in
Yiddish-speaking Alsace, his wife Lucie’s Hadamard education amongst
cosmopolitan Parisian Jews, more Sephardi in attitudes than Ashkenazi, despite
Lucie’s parents own departure from Alsace a generation earlier than the Dreyfus
clan, and the Valèbregue family into which Alfred’s older sister Etti (Yetta)
had married and where Alfred and later he and Lucie often sought refuge,
guidance and support. In this last of
three books so far published on the Dreyfus family and milieu, I explore the
possibility of a Jewish imagination and aesthetic, not as a unique or totally
distinct way of creating and evaluating works of art, but as a more nuanced and
dynamic set of tendencies which realign themselves in each generation vis-à-vis the mainstreams of
conservation and innovation in the surrounding and dominant cultures in which
Jews find themselves—or, as in the case of the Litvak artists in the School of
Paris—into which they insert themselves.
Moreover,
as is happening around me now in the midst of revising the old essay being
presented on this Blog, the other set of questions about Jewish patronage and
possession of modern art comes forward, this time in the matter of a huge trove
of modernist paintings found in Munich and identified as part of the exemplary
pieces displayed by the Nazis in the 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibitions.[i] Thus there are questions concerning what it
means to the history of western civilization and world patrimony that a large
proportion of the art most valued today once was sponsored, owned and put on
show by Jews.
A Question of Discoordination
By discoordination I mean a grouping or division
such that corresponding sets of elements include parts, relations, or
properties which negate that correspondence.[ii]
These
are, in fact, the two poles within which any determination of Jewish art must
be considered and we have to see these poles as something more and other than
static centres of positive and negative energy.
On the one side, an intellectual and historical survey and revaluation
of the Jewish experience of art in relation to the cultures of Christian Europe
and the vast empires of Islam, a survey which recaptures as much as possible
the actuality of Jewish attitudes towards art and the practice of the requisite
crafts, and a revaluation made without prejudice on the basis of what was
actually done and thought by the Jewish world over the past three to four
thousands of years. On the other side,
there must be a recognition of the deliberate steps taken to deny Judaism its
artistic heritage, to destroy its records and artefacts, and the counter-steps—conscious
and unconscious—initiated by historical Jewish communities to protect its
heritage and to avoid further persecution.
Meyer Schapiro’s notion of “discoordination” needs to be modified,
adjusted and given greater dynamic flexibility. But it offers a way to see
Jewish artists—from simple craftsmen decorating local synagogues through highly
trained artists studying in academies and conservatories—adopting, modifying
and being inspired by the traditions around them, reblling against the
attitudes of their parents and community-leaders, and yet drawing deeply from
those sources.
f
you define art as specifically Christian or Islamic terms, of course, there is
no way in which a Jewish art can exist, and whatever it produces is condescendingly
registered as folk or popular craft, destroyed or violated as threatening the
purity and stability of the contextual community, or, at best, confiscated and
redefined as already Moslem or Christian - or secular! - anyway. For even the so-called secular art of
Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe was, so long as Jews were denied full
emancipation, so far as most Jews were concerned, just a variant on Christian
religious art. Moreover, you cannot
expect a civilization to respond with equanimity to millenial persecution and
harassment without itself taking defensive measures, some of which, naturally
enough, are self-defeating, as when Jews shy away from any activities which
expose them to ridicule or violence, or exalt an attitude which plays down the value
of such activities and substitutes a series of others.
It
would be flying in the face of manifest evidence to suggest that Jews for the
past four thousand years had no visual or tangible artefacts with symbolic or
illustrative designs and decorations.
Nor is it fair or possible to allege that Jews have created no art
worthy of aesthetic consideration by asserting that they were so hedged in by
the Deuteronomic or Levitical sanctions against graven images and idol-worship
that they had no sense of beauty, no concept of aesthetic pleasure. Such an attitude would deny the imaginative
achievements of craftsmen and women who built and decorated the synagogues, the
instruments and objects attendant upon public and domestic worship, and the
adornments of enclosed space, its furniture, their own attire, implements,
utensils, and other tangible presences in their varies experiences of life.
We will have to distinguish then between
prohibitions and inhibitions, between what is proscribed within the sacred texts
themselves and what is specific to particular times and places before and after
the Jewish Dispersion. In this way, we
can see that there is no contradiction between the archaeological evidence of
the ancient and classical periods and the aniconic nature of Jewish spiritual
experience; and similarly no contradiction between the fluctuating presence of
richly adorned synagogue and domestic art and the generally negative view of
art in its Christian or Islamic context.
Tension, yes, but contradiction no.
Moreover, while we do not deny the fact that rabbinic Judaism tends to
favour moral acts and intellectual study over aesthetic and imaginative
display, the reality of a Jewish art, its concern for beauty, and even its real
achievement in the arts need to be accounted for. Not that there is a single mode of Jewish
art, but there can be in all Judaisms (more than just the larger groupings of
Sephardi and Ashkenazi, Italian and Middle Eastern, but all those nuances
occasioned by specific historical and geographical circumstances) a phenomenon
of art no matter how it is categorized from within or castigated from without.
It is true that Jews could not normally create on
the broad palette of Christian European experience. The state power, the wealthy patronage, and
the access to public space were denied to them.
Furthermore, the instabilities of life, with the threat of
expulsion and exile, matched by the
almost regular manifestation of violence and ridicule, ensured that most Jewish
communities could not indulge in ostentatious displays of its own presence in the midst of Christian
Europe—even if the local laws did not specifically proscribe the building of
synagogues larger or taller than churches, for instance; or that artistic objects created for public
and private delectation were subject to communal pressures to be translated
into commodity value for the payment of outrageous tax burdens, bribes, and
ransoms and hence unlikely to last very long as private or national heirlooms; or still further, that prohibitions on entry
into craft guilds prevented Jews from interacting with or influencing the
developments of the major, recognizable artistic movements throughout most of
European history, certainly not without losing their Jewish identities.
[i]
As the whole truth of the findings of what was hidden in Cornelius Gurlitt’s
flat in Munich remains to be revealed, each day new reports adding to the
details already known and raising further speculations on how and why this mass
of previously unknown masterpieces was acqauired and kept, I put off until a
later portion of this essay a list of newspaper and other online sources I am
referring to for my information.
[ii]
Cited by Cindy Persinger in “Reconsidering Meyer Schapiro and the New Vienna
School”. Journal of Art Historiography 3
(December 2010) p 10.
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