Harold Orlansky has been in England for the past year on a Social Science Research Council fellowship, studying the establishment of a new English town. Mr. Orlansky is an anthropologist who earned his doctoral degree at Yale University. Alfred Werner, who here discusses the work of the artist Yankel Adler, has written book reviews and art criticism in many magazines here and abroad. Mr. Werner has lived in America for the past ten years. An exhibition of Yankel Adler’s paintings is being held this month at the Jewish Museum in New York City.

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The reception given by the New York critics to Yankel Adler’s first show in America, at Knoedler’s, in the fall of 1948, was rather cool, if not hostile. The pictures composing the show were, perhaps, not too well chosen, and in any case Adler’s attempt to found a directly and violently emotional art on a cubist basis was calculated to puzzle the general run of New York critics. One reviewer damned some of his canvases with faint praise as “effective decoration,” and called the rest “disagreeably mannered.” Another, although admitting that Adler’s work was intense and frightening, characterized him somewhat glibly as “a cross between the whimsical Klee and the powerful Picasso.” Howard Devree of the New York Times did, however, concede to this Polish Jew a prominent place among those artists whose works best reflected the experience of the European upheaval. Adler’s paintings reminded Mr. Devree of “something molten churned out from the dark places of the soul,” and he said that “something of the Old Testament, of the majesty of Babylonian and Assyrian relief” came through the semi-abstract expression.

Now the Museum of Modem Art in New York has just acquired an important picture, “Two Rabbis,” that Adler executed in 1942. As far as I know, it is the only thing of his in the possession of an American museum. A pattern of variously colored quadrangles bodies forth the heavily bearded faces of two East European Jews sternly and sadly gazing at the spectator. One holds a piece of paper on which the word, misericor [dia], is written—a plea for pity. There is no need to explain, at least not in this magazine, the topical reference involved. The painting itself is perhaps not completely successful, but it does reveal the characteristic traits of Adler’s last style.

A further opportunity to see Adler’s art is now presented by a show of twenty-eight of his oils, gouaches, water colors, and drawings at the Jewish Museum in New York; this will run through October 3 and comprises several works that have not hitherto been seen publicly in America.

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It was only with great difficulty that I was able to get together any real information about Adler’s life. His portrait, painted about twenty years ago by a German Jewish artist named Arthur Kaufmann, shows a lean, bony man with serious “Semitic” features and melancholy eyes. The artist, who succumbed to a heart attack in London on April 26, 1949, seems to have been a quiet, unobtrusive person, not much concerned with publicity and reluctant to give interviews or make public appearances. Born in Lodz, the Manchester of Poland, in 1895, he belonged to the same generation of Jewish artists as did Kisling, Soutine, and Mané Katz.

His father is said to have been a miller, and a very pious man who devoted much time to religious observances. Yankel (it is the Yiddish for Jacob), was the seventh of twelve children and, like Soutine, grew up in an atmosphere hostile to the plastic arts, yet began to draw at the tender age of six. But whereas Soutine, when he demonstrated his first interest in art, was thrashed by his father and had at the age of fourteen to run away from his native shtedtl to attend art school in Vilna, Adler’s father, although he sent his son to a cheder and for a time hoped that he might become a rabbi, did not put any obstacles in the lad’s way when he at last declared his ambition to become an artist.

The information on Adler’s early strivings is incomplete and contradictory. He is said to have occupied himself first with engraving; but when he later turned up at Barmen in the Rhineland it was to study painting under Professor Gustav Wiethüchter. In 1912 he worked for a while as an engraver at the royal court in Belgrade, Serbia, but soon after returned to the Rhineland, where he settled in Duesseldorf. Reports of his whereabouts and activities during World War I are again contradictory. According to one source, Adler, being technically a Russian citizen, was interned in Germany. Another source claims that he was drafted into the Russian army but was soon captured by the Germans and spent the rest of the war as a military prisoner.

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It is, however, an established fact that after 1918 he returned temporarily to his native country, where he exhibited his works in Lodz and Warsaw, and where he also produced a series of paintings on the Baal Shem theme. At that time he was in contact with the poet, Moses Broderson, a book of whose poems, Shvartz Shabbes (on the recent pogrom in the Ukraine), he illustrated with expressionistic woodcuts, and with whom he edited a literary and art magazine, Yung Yiddish.

Restless by nature, Adler never stayed long in one place. But during the better part of the Weimar Republic period in Germany he had his permanent home in Duesseldorf, a city with an artistic tradition and with artistic aspirations. There he was commissioned to make a number of frescoes. During this time he also made trips to Paris, Mallorca, and Spain proper. Recognition came in time. His genius was praised by Martin Buber, who was moved by Adler’s Hasidic strain, and by Sholem Asch, who found in him the same intensity as in El Greco. Articles about him appeared in leading German art periodicals as well as in Poland’s great Yiddish weekly, Literarishe Bleter. At a Duesseldorf exhibition he was awarded a gold medal, and the German government included some of his works in a group of contemporary German paintings circulated in Latin America.

Appointed to a teaching position with the Duesseldorf Staatliche Kunstakademie, Adler there became a colleague and friend of Paul Klee. The young man formed a great attachment for the Swiss artist, who was sixteen years his senior and had a studio on the same floor in the Akademie building. Around that time Adler also met the surrealist painter and sculptor, Max Ernst. Those were years of hard work, but also of increasing success. But in 1933 Adler lost his post with the advent of the Hitler regime. In that same year he saw with his own eyes how a Jew was forced into a sack and thrown into the Rhine! Later, his works were honored by inclusion in Hitler’s exhibitions of “degenerate” art.

Adler went to Paris, where he arrived almost penniless. He worked hard in the French capital and made journeys that took him to several countries, including the Soviet Union. Despite its official or semi-official anti-Semitism, his native Poland had Adler’s paintings repatriated from Duesseldorf, and they were exhibited in Warsaw, with the artist himself attending, in 1935. Then, in the years just before the outbreak of World War II, Adler took up his residence in Cagnes-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera, where Renoir had painted. Of the paintings he made and left in Cagnes, many were irretrievably lost during the war.

In 1939 he volunteered for service with the Polish army units in France, and he was among the soldiers who were evacuated from Dunkirk to Scotland in the summer of 1940. Demobilized, Adler spent the remaining nine years of his life first in Glasgow, then in London, gaining a foothold in British art circles and influencing important members of the latest generation of British painters such as Colquhoun and MacBryde. As Denys Sutton has said, this last fact gave him practically the status of a chef d’école. In time he was hailed as a great and original painter by such an authority as Herbert Read.

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Among all the artists he knew, Klee seems to have been closest to him. Eulogizing his friend, who died in 1940, Adler wrote in Horizon in October 1942:

Klee made the background which reflects the intricate moving of our different lives. Here in the quivering of a leaf he experienced the violence of a thunderstorm. Sometimes it would seem that his pictures extend to the other side of the canvas. We connect with his pictures not only with our eyes, but our whole skin becomes a sensitive surface of eyes. We become the awareness of the barometer. Our sensibilities have been buried by the waste products of this life. Klee took those crippled senses back to the air and the light.

These lines are significant, for they reveal Adler himself just as much as they characterize his mentor. Klee had a considerable influence on him, but he never moved as far away from the reproduction of nature as Klee himself did. The latter is, in general, lighter, more poetic, more melodious, and less cerebral than the Polish Jew. Klee fills you with joie de vivre, his paintings are of the kind you’d wish to “live with,” whereas Adler’s work is earthy, heavy, somber, reminding you, whatever the subject he chose, of a Jew’s burden in the crazy and brutal 20th century.

It is fairly easy to detect the “influences” in Adler’s work of Picasso and Braque too. But if there is a great artist among his contemporaries to whom Adler is essentially related, he is not to be found among the producers of nearly or purely abstract art, but only among the Expressionists. Superficially, Chaim Soutine and Yankel Adler would seem to have little in common. But take another look at their pictures—and then the differences between them appear to be limited simply to the different ways they had of reacting to pain. Soutine’s world is that of bleeding, twisted flesh; Adler reminds us of the horror that must have come into the eyes of Lot’s wife when, disobeying the angel, she looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt. Soutine used almost orgiastically strong colors and Adler, too, seems to have squeezed tube color right onto the canvas. But Adler, unlike Soutine, was not devoid of a consciously healing philosophy. If Franz Kafka was a “realistic writer of myths,” Adler, the Hasid, decorated a church of his own with stained-glass windows that showed rabbis and Jewish soldiers and also women and still-lifes inhabiting a world that resembled the outer world yet was not identical with it. Just as Kafka escaped from the tyranny of the world-maker by becoming his own demiurge, so Adler thrust his colors on canvas to make a timeless mirror of this hateful and mortal world, but a mirror more permanent and satisfying, because outside nature, than that which it reflected. Soutine ran away from Judaism—Adler, who lived chiefly in large cities of the West, had his most real and most constant existence in the very heart of Judaism.

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Those who still seek “pretty” reproductions of nature will be repelled perhaps by the “untruthfulness” of Adler’s canvases. Those, however, who realize that life goes on under the surface of outward appearances will, with Herbert Read, agree on how well and how often Adler was able to pierce through the “epidermis” of matter and attain to that more substantial life. Quoting Martin Buber’s dictum that “It lies with yourself how much of the immeasurable becomes reality to you,” Read pointed out that Adler’s was an intuitive world in which “means and comparison have disappeared.” He warned the onlooker against expecting this intuitive world to sustain him in life: “It only helps you to glimpse eternity.”

Adler did not fully succeed in the task he set himself. Sitting rather uncomfortably somewhere on the borderline between abstraction and representation, he was, at times, unable to reconcile the extremes. At times we feel that he wanted to express too much on one canvas—and remained frighteningly silent, his lips trembling and his eyes wide open in mortal fear. But he must be given credit for having tried—harder than most 20th-century artists—to penetrate to the deeper significance of men and things. He was not an imitator, but a real person. What he once wrote about Klee can be fully applied to himself :

He had the courage to walk this clean-swept platform of the 20th century and not to continue in the shades of Renaissance standards. He did not try to make a new shadow. He made a survey of this place for others who will come.

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