Chaos, Truth and Beauty
But if power grows and liberty declines,
if chaos spreads over the greater part of the world, as it does today, then
even out of that darkness the individual can speak in his still, calm
voice. And the substance of his message ?
From the mouth of the philosopher we call it truth, from the artist, beauty,
but the poet Shelley called it love…[i]
Unlike Herbert Read, who attempts
to conceive of the components of art and its functional aspects in society from
a general, secular and certainly not a Jewish perspective, the role of the
various types of creative individuals who constitute the « artist »
is to generate general truths and transcendant beauty or love. A very Romantic idea, as the citation from
Shelley makes evident. But when talking
about Jewish artists, works of art, and concepts of aesthetic beauty, something
else comes into play. The ancient
Scriptures and the ongoing discourses of the rabbis speak in terms of the Law,
Justice and then of Truth as dependent upon them and from which eventually flow
the notions of Love and Beauty. Where
the ancients saw their world emerging from a primal chaos, an anarchic swirl of
competing forcves, powers and energies, the Jewish sense of creation and the
resultant world order derive from an orderly, rational plan, conjuring forth
out of previously non-existing reality the materials that are gradually—day by
day, as the opening antiphonal hymn of Genesis describes it—put in place, each
new element dependent on what came before and providing the matrix for the
existence of what cos next. None of
these materials, energies or beings are autonomous or independent, and all take
on meaning, significance and function from the projection of the Divine
Mind. Yet they are also not determinate
and inert but rather free-flowing and dynamic, so that when the sixth day of
Creation comes to an end and there is a day of rest, everything is ready to
pick up and begin again : all is good, in the sense of good for developing,
improving and thinking about.
The human
participation in this creative endeavour is not just ongoing, but it also
allows for the secondary creation of what was not put into motion and
determined ; such a participation depends on processes of analysis,
logical organization by diverse forms of likeness and contrast, manipulation of
the elements into new configurations of meaning, and application to keep in
harmony with (shalom) and by
generating justice through measured responses to the ever-developing overall
patterns of reality. There is no danger
of an inevitable or likely lapse into chaos because the balance and harmony of
all these independent and yet interdependent aspects of the created world (ha’olam hazeh) keeps rediscovering
itself, as water finds its level eventually to fit with the patterns of
perfection in the primeval Torah from which God sent out his creative energies
(ha’olam ha-bah). Just as the rabbinical discourses of analysis
and application of the Law (Torah) is ongoing and seeking to keep all things in
balance from generation to generation (dor
v’dor), so the memory and affective representations in the various arts
seek to express themselves in patterns of apt, pertinent, and significant Justice
and Truth.
Crafts,
Arts and Art
Why are so many Jewish artists in
the past either overlooked or considered merely incidental to the development
of mainstream schools ? Is it that
too many were merely craftsmen or imitators, and thus there is no critical mass
of objects d’art by recognizably
Jewish geniuses or manifest influence on the non-Jewish works around
them ? What we need to consider is
not merely the quantity of Jewish art, but its quality. However, it is not simply a question of
aesthetic value in relation to prevailing standards in Christian or Moslem
civilizations. There are times when
Jewish artisans and artists come up to the standards of the contextual cultures
and other times when they play a minor or non-existent role in the
consciousness of these other societies, and that seems a matter of sociological
significance.
After all, many non-Jewish
individuals who left behind their family’s direction and support in
craft-guilds and small-scale decorating production—those who designed
wallpaper, crafted fans and pordcelaine dishes, painrted store-fronts and
prepared lithographs of museum art—grew up to become the very genieuses we
admire as founders of the great aesthetic movements of the second half of the
nineteenth century. The churches and
aristocratic mansions in the past were cram full of minor works, even
masterworks, creasted by workshop apprentices following a master’s lead and
learning from traditional design books, few of the artists venturing into
individual expression ; yet their total œuvre, as it were, preserving ancient models of excellence and
gradually shifting into new styles. In a
sense, the whole emergence and spread of aesthetic tastes and appreciation
throughout European history, from ancient through medieval and Renaissance
times, depends not so much on a single genius here or there as it does on the
steady competence of hundred or thousands of workers to provide the matrix into
which—and out of which sometimes—those geniuses will appear. If most wooden synagogues were burnt down, if
most Jewish homes were reduced to rubble or ashes during pogroms, and if many
budding young artists did not live through massacres and expulsions, surely
enough remains, fragmentary as is the evidence, to indicate that the
civilization they belonged to was not utterly bereft of artistic talent and
aesthetic sensitivities.
But if Jewish art is not measured
in terms of masterpieces, of high art, then, does it exist at all? Joseph Brill, the school teacher in Cynthia
Ozick's novel The Cannibal Galaxy,
makes his first visit to Louvre in Paris
Let us leave this matter
for the moment. We shall come back to
the phenomenon of the so-called School of Mountparnasse, the Circle of Montmartre
and the Litvak Group, and thus to the breakthrough of Jewish art into the
consciousness of the West later in the twentieth century. The point we are concerned with now is more
intellectual or aesthetic than historical.
Is there a specific, identifying Jewish mentality articulated in the
realms of the plastic and the visual? We
certainly know about the vital contribution of rabbinical sensibilities to the
verbal and the intellectual in general.
Benedict S. Isserlin, in his study of "Israelite Art During the
Period of the Monarchy," suggests that "[ancient] Israelite art does
seem to have developed certain attitudes which to some extend distinguish it
from the art of the neighboring nations, and also from that of the
Canaanites..."[ii] These
are "a fairly strong sense for the flowing and elegant line, a tendency
also exemplified in the Judaen script," and, out of this, a tendency to
reduce complexity to a "naturalism" achieved "not through the
accumulation of detail, but by 'split second' observation." He sums up in this way
A sense for elegancy, and a sharp gift
for observation, combined with a liking for simple but gracious forms; these things seem somehow not out of place in
Judah and particularly in Jerusalem which we can sense from the very strictures
of the prophets. Their words seem to evoke
a city active, noisy, alert, and curious of things foreign; skeptical and witty; brilliant, gay, and profoundly worldly. It seems in some ways a little Athens rather
than a Heavenly Jerusalem...[iii]
We can recognize in this
tension between Athens (the thought among the nations or Epikoros) and Jerusalem (the rabbinical
mentality), not only the question of the pagan Greek exaltation and worship
of beauty, form and sculpture, which to a Jewish mind were concomitants of the
triple dangers of the otherness of the gentile societies—idoltary, sexual
licence, and bloodshed—but also the talmudic debate between the rigidities of
The House of Shammai and the liberalism of The House of Hillel. In such intramural controversies, the
question was not so much whether the visual arts should be excluded from Jewish
precincts, but the extent to which representational and symbolic images were
permitted.[iv] The exclusion need not be complete because it
was not the image that was false or degrading but the intention. A rabbinical gloss on the name of Noah's son
Japhet, who appears in Genesis 9:27, as a progenitor of the Greeks and their
arts and aestheticism, reads his name as meaning "beautify", and
hence "Simeon ben Gamliel, the president of the Sanhedrin in the first
century AD, interprets the blessing to mean: `May the beauty of Japhet be found
in the tents of the Semites' (Bab. Talmud Megillah IX:B)". In other words, according to Michael Koniel,
who cited the passage, when the spirit of Judaism prevails over the Greek,
beauty is stripped of its pagan sensuality and stands revealed in its pristine
glory."[v] Another
interesting talmudic passage which shows the liberal attitude of the rabbis to
art and their position vis-à-vis the pagan world of Rome is apropos here. It also is cited from the Talmud by Michael
Koniel as follows:
When a Roman
official taunted Rabbi Akiva, the great second century Talmudist, that the
Jewish rite of circumcision is evidence that God created man as an imperfect
creature, Rabbi Akiva readily agreed that according to Jewish tradition this
was a God-given opportunity for men to complete God's work. He then placed a sack of wheat and a row of
pastry before the Roman official and asked him to make his choice.[vi]
This moshel or rabbinic exemplum
raises a more incisive aesthetic question in how a Jewish artist, like any Jew,
can complete and continue God's work. It
is related to the implications of what Isserlin takes as a peculiar vision and
insight in ancient Judea for subsequent
Judaism. Is it a specific aesthetic
trait, this penchant for the quick, graceful line and the focus on the process
of being? Does this sense of Jewish
enhancement of God's created world, moreover, match with the "victory of
the conceptual over the perspective and of the optical over the
plastic"? Maximilian Cohen,
speaking of "Jewish Art at the Time of the Second Temple",
categorizes Jewish art as a "separate style within the art of the Near
East" by its "attempt to combine the structure logic of the
Occidental composition with the visual-emotional tendency of the Orient...a
tendency to leave a plain and unadorned surface as background for the outline
of the element or combination of elements."[vii]
I think we can begin to
see analogies between these characteristic aesthetic features picked up by art
historians and what we know of Jewish tendencies within the narrative and
interpretive commentaries of the text.
There may be more or less use of representational figures in an
illustration but the dominant feature is its action, and also very much its
stylization of a movement caught in a moment of history. This kind of approach, rather than a postured
symbolic stance meant to evoke worship or delimit the boundaries of theophany,
offers the viewer and the reader—for in Jewish terms there is no absolute
difference—leads towards a sense of the beautiful as something that is at once
an enhancement of the world as it is perceived and recollected by all those
invoilved in the world of art and as it is understood through processes of
analysis, recontextualization, decoordination of the constituent elements, and
subject to displacement, replacements and allusive connectors. Simon Appelbaum thus can speak of "the
quality of movement" found in animal and human figures in the art of the
Talmudic period as "surely something specifically Jewish."[viii]
The fullness of the scene is less important than the moment of its depiction,
of what Appelbaum calls "the idea he was seeking to express", just as
in the Talmud there is little regard to contextual history; but a stress on the interactive, dialogic
moment. This fits with what Koniel finds
in the pre-Christian Byzantine-like narrative paintings in the Dura Europos
synagogue:
They
mark altogether a singular, significant and dramatic divergence from the
sensuous realism of the Hellenistic painting of Greece and Rome towards a new
spirituality. The emphasis on physical
beauty and the perfection of the human body and form, so characteristic of the
three-dimensional representation of Hellenistic and Roman art gives way to a
lofty spirituality as expressed in the delicacy and grace with which the
figures are drawn.
While human figures
abound in all the scenes, they are subordinate to the story or action depicted
in the scene. The distinctively Jewish
style of art of the Dura painting, emphasised by the continuous narrative
sequence of scenes, was homiletical...[ix]
There is thus a leaning
away from perspective and depth, insofar as they imply a forced imitation of
reality, and instead a conceptualizing of the archetypical situation, its
intellectual and ethical status above its sacramental timelessness or its
ethereal or numinous presence, or what Koniel calls "their soaring
spirituality". [x]In
these pre-modern types of Jewish representational Jewish art, the naturalism
which is evident derives from a non-mediated sense of the sanctified grounds of
the world's existence. No one is waiting
for a saviour from outside the world to wrap a community of the faithful into
another realm of supernatural cult.
Instead the community itself is studying its way towards sanctification
of this world so that a saviour may come into it. In fact, the Messiah is constituted by the
sanctified achievement of Israel
[i] Herbert Read, The Grass Roots of Art: Lectures on the Social Aspect of Art in an Industriual Age
(London: Faber and Faber, 1955) p. 33.
[ii] Benedict
S. Isserlin, "Israelite Art During the Period of the Monarchy," in
Roth, Jewish Art, p. 76.
[iv] The questions concerning other
arts, such as music and dance, sculpture or even architecture, have a different
dimension; as they were eschewed partly out of deference for the loss of the
Temple and the Land of Israel as a viable political identity or under pressure
from the contextual societies.
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