The Problem Set Out [i]
With the
recent—albeit two years delay in announcement—of so-called “degenerate art” in
a Munich apartment, the whole question of Jewish arts and aesthetics comes back
into the centre of our attention. We
know that the Nazis, from Hitler and his top cronies down, were not just
murderous thugs and vandals, but that they pretended to be connoisseurs of art,
if not sometimes artists and architects themselves. They confiscated paintings, statuary and
others objects of art from museums, private galleries, and the personal
collections of Jewish families, held them up publically to ridicule as
degenerate, and then either transhipped them to the so-called Museum of Jewish
Memory in Linz (Austria), diverted them to their own private collections, sold
them off for huge sums to help fund the Holocaust, or destroyed them in orgies
of self-righteous purification of Aryan culture. While not all—in fact, most—paintings and
statues showed off in the 1937 traveling circus of displays on degenerate art
were by Jews or had belonged to Jews originally—the big lie was the Wagnerian
myth that the Jewish race is incapable of any true creative talent or
originality and was only interested in promoting certain forms of decadent and
primitive art for the money they could gain—or, as part of the same slanderous
myth—that Jews sought to poison the wells of Germanic civilization and spread
their pollution amongst the Aryan peoples.
Such nonsense persists when critics puzzle over how Jews could create,
judge and possess any truly worthwhile works of art when they have, on the one
hand, the anti-iconic commandment at the heart of their religion, and, on the
other, have for so long been excluded and, what they see as amounting to the
same thing, self-excluded themselves from the main streams of European taste
and iconography.
In this somewhat
older essay, which shall be partly updated as I place it on my Blog, I am not
going to argue for some essentialist version of halachic or kosher aesthetics
or artistic body of knowledge but for certain tendencies that reappear over
centuries, if not milennia, that makes Jewish art distinct. We must remember
that though there have always been Jewish artists, sometimes working for and
with ecclesiastical and aristocratic Christian commissions, the great flowering
of modern art from the mid-nineteenth century was made possible by Jews who
acted as patrons and art dealers, as collectors and museum directors, as
scholars and revue critics. Their
influence was way out of proportion to their actual numbers in European
society, partly because emancipation led to an explosion of pent-up talent,
partly because almost all other places where participation in the upper
echelons of culture was still cut off, and partly because they saw finally a
way of shaping and enhancing western civilization.
Introductory
Remarks
At
the opening day of a Seminar on Jewish Art held at the Jewish Museum in New
York City in 1985, under the auspices of the Jewish Theological Seminary, a
consensus was reached on what they called a "working
characterization" of Jewish art, which I cite here in full:
Jewish art is an art which reflects the
Jewish experience. The
italicized phrase was understood to include many of the following elements and
perhaps some others as well: Jewish ritual objects related to cult and
religious practice (which can be made by Jews and non-Jews); Jewish cultural artefacts
related to particularly Jewish experience;
secular objects and works of art made by Jews (and non-Jews?) which
reflect the Jewish experience; sometimes
also specifically Christian liturgical art made by Jewish craftsmen; and
finally, secular art in the mainstream of Western tradition made by individuals
of Jewish origin not strongly identified as Jewish.[ii]
The
tentative definition which the scholars came up with in New York is about as
broad as one could wish, in fact, so much so, that it does little more than
affirm that there is such a thing as Jewish art. Of course, that is important since there
still remains a tendency by Jew and gentile art historians alike to ignore the
presence of Jews at all as a category worthy of entry, to relegate the
discussion of Jewish art to a few sentences of dismissal in the opening section
of the chapters on Islamic art or to state fairly categorically that the Old
Testament strictures against the making of graven images ensured that there
never was and could never be such a thing as Jewish art -- some renegade individuals,
yes, but no specifically identifiable category of art history called Jewish.
That Anti-Semitism is alive and well in
the art establishment may be attested by the following remarks in the Larousse Encyclopedia of Modern Art
by Bernard Champignelle on the so-called Circle of Montparnasse or School or
Paris which flourished from the turn of
the century to the mid-1920s and which included such artists as Marc Chagall,
Jacques Lipschitz, Amedeo Modigliani,
Jules Pascin and Chaim Soutine. Champignelle writes:
From
the work of these painters comes a sense of morbid despair, of aversion to
life, with, however, an undertone of nostalgic compassion. But if we compare this contempt for the real
world with the full-blooded vehemence of Rouault, who flogs vice and fustigates
hypocrisy, we realize how far Christian compassion is from Messianic melancholy
and to what degree Oriental pessimism is diametrically opposed to the
Occidental tradition in art.[iii]
The
distaste for and distortion of Judaism here is patent. The French critic assures us that Jew, by
their very nature, are exotic, Oriental weak-blooded whiners and whingers,
incapable of participating in the dynamic, full-blooded, manly traditions of Western, Christian art.
And if
this were not enough, a dismissal of the achievement of a whole generation of
Jewish artists, from the shtetls and ghettos of Eastern Europe, as well
as from the more assimilated and sophisticated cities and towns of Italy,
France, and America, a group of painters and sculptors who, as a recent exhibit
at the Jewish Museum in New York has shown[iv] not
only fully participated in the creation of modern art--friends and colleague of
Picasso and Brancusi--but were very much in the forefront of those
developments. There is something disturbing
in the remarks Champignelle makes concerning the fates of these artists of
Montparnasse:
A singular contribution was made by
these acutely sensitive painters of unrest, for whom the instability of life
seems to have been a perpetual source of grief.
Apart from Chagall (himself a Wandering Jew) they met with tragic fates,
dying young without having tasted success.[v]
The
French critic lists a few of the artists who committed suicide in the late
1920s, but hardly touches on the actual situation of the bulk of these men and
women. Their sense of "instability
of life" derived not only from their experiences, either at first hand or
through the reports of close relatives, of the massacres and pogroms carried
out in Russia and Poland before and after World War I and of increasing
victimization of Jews in Germany and elsewhere in Central and Eastern
Europe. And their actual fates came not
through some fashionable or aesthetic malaise but through betrayal by their
would-be civilized Christian French compatriots to the invading Nazis, most of
this group of artists being rounded up, herded into the holding pens in Drancy
outside of Paris; and, if they lived through the filth and degradations there,
they were not long afterwards exterminated in the gas chambers to the east.
But
the story and the argument must begin with the successes and the great
influence of Jews on European art in the last years of the nineteenth and the
opening decades of the twentieth century.
I have argued elsewhere about how the first individuals and groups of
Jews came to Paris as outsiders, but different kinds of strangers than almost
all the native Frenchmen, Belgians, and even Germans or Russians, insofar as
they were not seeking to breakaway from their parents and religious traditions,
but rather to find ways of both integrating or assimilating themselves into
European ideologies and then adapting themselves to the rebellious ideas of
their peers. Though many of the Jews
also had to cut away attachments to rabbinical, shtetl and ghetto traditions
and personalities, they did not always make a clean break or were even aware of
how much of the old baggage they still carried around with them. Nor were these young enthusiastic Jews arriving
in France with a clean slate—with no cultural traditions of their own in the
various arts or with no familiarity of what had been happening in Impressionism
and post-Impressionism. As Antanas Andrijauskas
exclaims:
…I
was amazed to learn that most of the famous Jewish artists came from the famous
Vilnius School of Drawing, from Yehuda Pen’s School of Painting and Drawing in
Vitebsk, and from the Kaunas School of Art.[vi]
In
other words, these young East Europeans come to Paris ready to engage with one
another and the men and women from elsewhere in a great endeavour they see as
one that enables them finally, after centuries of isolation and repression, to
create something that is at once part of the mainstream and also indicative of
their own specific backgrounds. This
was so much in evidence, that what is now usually only known as the School of
Paris, was in its heyday also called the Ecole
juive, the Jewish School. But
despite their hard work and their talent, so clear to us in hindsight, their isolation
and sense of repression did not end completely:
Most of these artists who came to Paris from the
Jewish ghettos in the Pale of Settlement, from Vilnius or Vitebsk, spoke the
Lithuanian dialect of Yiddish among themselves and had a poor command of any
other language….As a result, even though they lived in Paris for a long time,
the Litvaks were not able to fully adapt there.
They came into direct contact with many of the leading figures of modern
art, but they stayed away from noisy groups and remained secluded in a world of
their own inner experiences.[vii]
The
door to Paris, as Andrijauskas puts it, “was locked.” The situation was not as bad for other Jewish
artists, such as Pissarro (a Sephardi from the Caribbean) or Modigliani (a Jew
from Italy). Nevertheless, even as they
thought of themselves as working away from the rabbinical traditions and
emotions they had grown up, as well as the training in Talmud and midrash they
had studied as integral parts of their education, they remained a subset of
Jewish artists within the larger sweep of developments around them. To see this we do not look for obvious or
explicit signs of Jewishness, such as paintings of rabbis, scenes of shtetl life, or placement of various
ritual objects amidst the usual geometric forms or symbols of European
traditions; rather it is necessary to look out peculiar takes on the styles,
techniques and motifs that constitute modern art in general. At the same time, the very thruist of modernization
in aesthetics, as in psychology, at the close of the nineteenth century made it
possible for Litvak and other Jewish creators to feel they were able to
contribute to the movement, whereas they would have felt and been treated as
outsiders in the formal and academic trends of the pre-modern period. As we shall see later, some of this
peculiarity in emphasis and application can be understood in what Meyer
Schapiro calls “discoordination.”
[i] A version of this essay appeared
as Norman Simms, “Jewish Symbolism and Art” Journal
of Literature & Aesthetics 7:2 (1999) 7-13. But see also “Art, Criticism and Psychiatry” review of Les Cahiers Henri Ey. Numéro Spécial 12-13 “Psychiatrie et arts plastiques: la
psychiatrie devant le surréalisme” in Mentalities/Mentalités 19:2 (2005)
81-83 ; “Art
and Neurosis: A Myth” Clio’s Psyche 18:4 (2012) 442-445; “The Artist and
the Soul of Genius: A Sidelong Glance” Clio’s Psyche 18:4 (2012)
442-445; Review of Christian Witt-Dörring and Paul Asenbaum, curators. Vienna Art & Design: Klimt, Schiele,
Hoffmann, Loos in Shofar 31:2 (2013) pp.
172-174; review of The Mad Square: Modernity in
German Art 1910-1937, eds. Jacqueline Strecker(Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW,
2011) Shofar 31:3 (2013) 161-163; “Art, where art
thou? What art thou?” Family Security
Matters (30 August 2013) at hhtp://www.
familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/print/art-where-art-thou-thou-what-art-thou;
“Art
for Art’s Sake or for Sale? Art History is not for Sale” Family
Security Matters (7 September 2013) at hhtp://www.Family securitymatters.org/publications/detail/print/art-for-arts-sake-or-for-sale-art-history-not-for-sale; “Maecenas
was Part of the System,” in 5 parts (September 2013) jointly on the blogsites Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations and
East European Jewish History online
at eejh@yahoogroups .com; “Jewish Faces of Jesus in Christian Art”
East European Jewish History (23 October 2013) online at eejh@yahoogroups .com;
and posted on the blog site “Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations.”
[ii]
“The Nature of Jewish Art," a session chaired by Vivian B. Mann, in Proceedings: The Seminar on Jewish Art,
January-September 1984, eds., Vivian B. Mann and Gordon Tucker (New York:
The Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the Jewish Museum, 1985),
pp.10-11.
[iii]
Bernard Champignelle,
"Art After the First World War. I. The Exploitation of the Earlier
Discoveries," in René Huyghe, gen. ed., Art and Mankind: Larousse Encyclopedia of Modern Art. English
version by Emily Eweshed et al. (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1965), p. 275.
[iv]
Kenneth E. Silver and Romy
Galan, eds., The Circle of
Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris 1905-1945 (New York: Universe
Books, for the Jewish Museum, 1985). Nowe
to be supplemented by Antanas Andrijauslas, “Litvak Art in the Context of the
Ecole de Paris” Bernardinai.It (13
November
2012-antanas-andrijauskas-litvak-art-in-the-context-of-the-ecole-de-paris/80460.)
online at www.bernardinai.It/straispsnis/2012-04-13.
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