Historically, the Jew is a comparative latecomer to the world of art, and encouragement of art by the organized Jewish community is an even more recent phenomenon. No wonder then that no subject is more debatable—and debated—than what Jewish art is and what the best course is to stimulate its creation and appreciation. Heinz Politzer, who has written art criticism in Vienna, Tel Aviv, and, most lately, in this country, here gives his personal appraisal of perhaps the most ambitious effort yet undertaken on behalf of Jewish art, the Jewish Museum of New York, founded two years ago. This article has been translated from the German by Ralph Manheim.
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The permanent collection of the Jewish Museum consists largely of liturgical objects, from arks of the Torah to spice-boxes. These include rare specimens, more precious than ever since the destruction of the great European centers of Jewish culture.
The arrangement, which reveals taste and method, is according to external considerations: liturgical objects, for example, are arranged according to the holidays on which they are used. Other objects are classified under such categories as “synagogue architecture” and “Jewish music”; and the labeling is careful and informative.
The general principle seems to be that of the Volkskundemuseum (museum of folklore): to show the greatest possible number of typical or unusual (i.e. valuable) objects, arranged in such a way that the visitor will take home a maximum of knowledge in return for a minimum of intellectual effort. Schools like to send groups of students to museums of this sort; plain people visit them in the hope of absorbing a little painless education.
The influence of such a collection on the average contemporary city-dweller can hardly be great. To the modem Jew, liturgical objects usually represent little more than a memory of the strange customs of his ancestors. In the mind of the American, these memories tend to be identified with the customs of the “old country,” best cast off if one wants to live in modem America.
But one wonders what actual value such a collection can have even for those Jews who remain religious. In a sense, there is one essential contradiction in an exhibition of Jewish sacred objects. In the Jewish religion, these objects were created to serve the needs of worship rather than to represent. This is in contrast to the situation in Catholic art, where the liturgical object transcends the place assigned to it in the service and achieves an independent aesthetic value; and may even, in fact, come to serve as a semi-political instrument, designed to impress the non-believing onlooker with the aura of the Catholic faith. Important and highly creative as these tendencies proved in the European art of past centuries, they have no parallel in Judaism.
A collection of Jewish sacred objects is perforce little more than an imitation of similar exhibitions undertaken with much greater legitimacy by other religions or denominations. For Jews, the most such a collection can do is to surround objects that are already familiar to the believer with the aura of history; and whatever hints of an original artistic achievement may be found here and there among these liturgical objects is submerged, both for the religious and the non-religious Jew, in the thought of the ritual purpose they serve in the traditional service of worship. As art, they have only the most secondary interest or value.
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Even for the religious, how likely is it that the path to a renewal of Jewish art will be found in the production of modem ritual objects? Numerous such objects have been produced in the New Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem, some of them in excellent taste; a short while ago some examples were on exhibit in the Jewish Museum. Nevertheless modem ecclesiastical art, regardless of denomination, faces a paradoxical situation in the modem world. Undoubtedly, even in our day, liturgy retains a certain force, from the quality of the ancient and venerable, of the historic, and sometimes even of the magical, that clings to it. However, the religious revival we have been witnessing in recent times, whether in Kierkegaard, in “crisis theology,” or in Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, is, for the most part, either out-rightly anti-liturgical or hostile to the sectarian character of any specific liturgy. The contemporary attitude highlights the direct personal confrontation of the modern believer with the divine, Buber’s “dialogical situation.” This carries with it either a rejection of liturgical trappings or an indifference to the form of religious ceremonial, which may just as well be that of one denomination as of another, provided only it serves to re-create the fundamental relation between man and God. This is the essential implication, for example, when Franz Rosenzweig says, “Bring Bach into the synagogue!” Thus for the modern believer liturgical paraphernalia have little meaning: the historical objects are largely of sentimental value, while the modern ones have only aesthetic interest.
As for the modern nationalist-minded Jew, there is inevitably a basic falsity in his regard for Jewish religious symbols. Undeniably, the political developments of the last few years have led to an increased interest in Jewish objects, an interest which the Jewish Museum has fairly well exploited. But for the modern Jewish activist the value of the ritual object is something other than—something really diametrically opposed to—its liturgical character. In hoc signo vinces: whether the symbol is the Cross or the Menorah, it has, in the course of recent political struggles, lost all connection with the reality of faith; it is the symbol of a weapon. For the nationalist Jew to preserve liturgical objects, not to speak of creating new ones, is a fundamental contradiction—even a sacrilege.
It is too soon to say whether the newly awakened Jewish national consciousness will create a secular symbol that will be an artistic expression of Israel’s uniqueness as a nation. It is certain that such attempts as the model for a monument to the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto, to which an entire room in the Museum was devoted for quite a time, reveal all the worst features of sentimental nationalism: pretentiousness without backbone, shmaltz as a substitute for marble. Certainly this shallow symbolism, this feeble theatricality, contains no aesthetic quality. Beyond its supposed timeliness, there was no reason for showing such a work; it had as much place in a Jewish museum as the cheap bust of a Greek irredentist in a museum of Hellenic art.
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The room devoted to synagogue architecture and its history is an exception amid this general lifelessness. At certain times in the past the synagogue was what modem architects are apparently trying to make of it again, a kind of community center (although the place of women, and consequently of the family, in modern synagogues will have to be re-defined according to modern conditions and the standards of Western civilization). Undeniably, both as an institution and as an architectural entity, the synagogue maintains an intimate relationship with modern Jewish life, on ordinary days as well as holidays; and this offers ample scope for discussion and creativity.
It is therefore regrettable that one of the most significant among present-day Jewish architects, Eric Mendelsohn, is now represented in the Jewish Museum only by a single sketch. (Other examples of his work were on exhibit earlier.) To this writer, Mendelsohn seems a specifically Jewish artist insofar as landscape has little or no meaning for him; he forces his intellectual will upon it. Those of Mendelsohn’s buildings that I have seen in Palestine are all imposed on the landscape, not wrested from it; their character is dominating, sober, expressive of clear strength. In his gift of invention, his articulation, his simplicity, Mendelsohn strikes me as a modern master who is soundly and powerfully based on tradition.
The Museum has a children’s section, and this should surely have something to say about the future. If we think of such large exhibitions of children’s art as the drawings by French children shown last year at the Museum of Modem Art, we realize how very much these spontaneous little works have contributed to the interpretation and sometimes even to the development of modern art. In addition, the art of American Jewish children would afford us excellent evidence for reading the relation between tradition and adaptation to environment in their group identification. For the moment, unfortunately, the children’s rooms are taken up with old stage sets and “historical” costumes for a children’s play, and also with children’s books that owe their present popularity far more to their nationalist and religious subject matter than to any artistic value of their make-up, which is completely old-fashioned. (However, as I write, a children’s art show is in prospect as the next exhibit in the rooms on the street floor.)
In this section, devoted to temporary exhibits, a number of paintings and sculptures donated to the state of Israel by American artists have recently been on exhibition. Political art exhibits are always wretched: non-artistic purposes cannot help but negate and blur aesthetic value, and the result here is academicism, and petty personal ambition run wild. The “American Artists for Israel” show revealed the indirection and shapelessness of a random cross-section of the studios of New York and its environs. It was a miniature Tower of Babel of modem artistic production, ranging from good old impressionism all the way to the abstract symbol. The only connection between this show and the state of Israel or the Jews was the adventitious fact that it consisted of pictures that would some day no longer be in New York but in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, or Ain Harod. Although the exhibition presented Gentile as well as Jewish contributions, a Palestinian art student or enthusiast could learn no more from it about his American contemporaries than the beholder on this side of the ocean would learn about the integration of the Jew in modern American art.
These pictures were collected both by Jewish and non-Jewish friends of Israel, as a token of solidarity “with the creative forces of Israel who, while fighting violently to achieve their goal, have not in this struggle forgotten the verities of life, and have laid the foundation of an integrated art and culture.” The pictures to which these inflated words refer constituted an equally inflated gesture. But admittedly, the exhibition was not really designed to prove anything but the good will of some more or less progressive American artists toward the new state of Israel. It was not meant to advance artistic ideas or a cultural program. It was a political gesture; simply that; and nothing more.
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The next exhibit at the Museum, sponsored by the American Jewish Historical Society, was also a political gesture—intended “to record the role played by the Jewish people in the historical development of America from the time of discovery to date.”
Taken together, and compared with each other, these two exhibitions clearly revealed a deep insecurity on the part of those who had arranged them. The first presented to the new state of Israel a gift whose actual value to the young nation was never taken into serious consideration. It was a formal bow and, on the part of the Jewish contributors, a sort of ticket of indulgence. The second show tried to assure America of the loyalty of her Jewish citizens by stressing their historical share in the upbuilding of the commonwealth.
Though this writer is a newcomer to America, he cannot help but consider this latter kind of effort thoroughly un-American. To his mind America does not ask of the groups that constitute her that they bring to attention the contributions they have made to the general welfare. I do not even know whether America asks of her minority groups that they do something for America; rather she seems to expect them to do things for themselves, and thereby for all Americans. To exhibit “the original astronomic tables compiled by Abraham Zacuto and used by Columbus,” or “the manuscript of the dedication exercises of Congregation Mikve Israel of Philadelphia, Pa. (1782), in which is offered a prayer for George Washington” implies a claim for an equality that is conceded anyway and only made questionable by being claimed. To harp on contributions to the nation that are of necessity as accidental as they are self-evident reminds us of the sense of inferiority that European Jews used to reveal in their attitude to state authorities: “Since we are so useful you ought to tolerate us.” If it does nothing else, this exhibition exposes to view the distance some American Jews still have to cover between their fears and the concept of democracy plainly offered them by America.
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Both exhibitions at the Jewish Museum were then pseudo-political displays in the guise of history, and some art. There still remains the question of Jewish art per se, a question the Jewish Museum was intended originally to raise—if not to answer.
A year ago the Museum showed some pictures by the Palestinian painter Mordecai Ardon-Bronstein. Here we had the work of a gifted artist who applied the orientation and technique of modern art to the Palestinian landscape and his own free vision; an analytical artist, self-conscious, suffering from his self-awareness. His work was full of questions without answers, problematic and for that very reason representative. Freud had played a part in producing these paintings—yet they did not portray the unconscious, but adhered even in their visions to an object. Kierkegaard played his part—yet this was not religious painting, but painting entirely for the sake of painting; and Kafka played his—yet it was not literature, but loneliness, rebellion, lamentation turned to color. The Palestinian locale seemed divested of all national accent; to the painter it represented only the problems of painting, the question of Mediterranean light and shade, the problems of color transitions and form. His portraits represented human characters and situations, Jewish solely in the tragic irony with which they were portrayed. For behind the cultural heritage, the craftsmanship, the problem, stood a man who had suffered the history of our days On his own skin, a man hunted over the face of the earth but unbroken, and this man had come from a little city in Eastern Europe, where from his father and his neighbors he had absorbed Jewishness into his being. All this was hidden in his work, it never became explicit but could be surmised in the curve or breaking of a line, in this form or that high-light; it was an essential part of Bronstein’s human substance, not merely something said in the catalogue.
Modern Jewish art is no more limited to the representation of Jewish themes than to the revival of Jewish ritual accessories. Max Lieberman was a great Jewish artist; he did not seek out Jewish subject matter and his work still retains its freshness. Marc Chagall, who translated Eastern Jewish subjects into the language of post-expressionism, is beginning to lose his impact precisely because, seduced by the charm of his subject matter, he has evaded the strictly artistic problems raised by his own pictures. The exotic, anecdotal element in his work helped more than a little to make Chagall famous; but today he is losing his hold on the more discerning public because he has failed to continue that exploration of the inherent problems of painting to which his art owed its essential originality in the beginning.
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The Jewish art of the present is an expression of the situation in which the Jew finds himself today. Accordingly, it is a question rather than an answer, a questioning of the social, intellectual, and even religious contexts from which the modern Jew has fallen, or fears to fall. The safeguards of tradition are shattered or stretched to the breaking point: the modern Jewish artist finds himself utterly alone with himself and his work. Thus he has become the prototype of the modern artist, or one might say, the modern artist has become a Jew. For modem man, if he has been awake in this period, has suffered the fate of the Jew in foreboding and anxiety, if not in reality: the isolation, the vain search for the right way, the persecution without cause, the closed door, the collapse of authority, the lost years. Everyman has become a Jew, the Jew has become Everyman.
It is in this equation of the creative city-dweller with the modern Jew that the opportunity of the Jewish Museum lies. It is understandable that an institution devoted to the study of traditional doctrine should wish to preserve tradition. On the other hand, it is characteristic of Jewish religious thought that it has always subjected its object—man and his relation to the powers around him and over him—to questioning. And today it is quite possible, now that the existence of the thinking man as such has become a question, that a good many modern men will enter a Jewish Museum simply in order to seek the counsel of their fellow-sufferers and the sustenance of beauty. I have in mind modem men who have nothing in common with Jewry but their precarious position as individuals amid mass forces, the knowledge of this precarious position and the desire to overcome it.
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The Jewish Museum is situated on Fifth Avenue, a few steps away from the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Non-Objective Art, and not so very far from the Museum of Modern Art. The building that houses it is a 19th-century mansion, some fifty years old, in an amiably neutral upperclass neighborhood, highly respectable and very conscious of its own respectability. Put another way: the Museum is a Jewish bridgehead located in one of the “best” neighborhoods in New York, one that is also a museum quarter. Here Jewish culture can hope to obtain a hearing both from the Jewish and non-Jewish world.
The Museum’s rooms are moderately large, moderately light, well laid out, and susceptible to further alteration. The Gothic gewgaws and other ornamentation in art nouveau style, dating from the period in which the building was erected, have in part been adroitly concealed and can be fully eliminated in time. There is a lecture hall well suited to discussion of the problems raised by the exhibits. Here modern Jewish music might well be performed and modem Jewish literature read and discussed. Such an institution is suited to a living exchange with the outside world. Too bad that we have had as yet only what is by and large a complacent—at least on the surface—exhibition of Jewish conservatism.
The very tension inherent in a living exchange with the outside world offers a subject well suited to a museum. Particularly because it was so decisively interrupted, the history of German-Jewish relations is deserving of a comprehensive exhibit that need not be limited to paintings and sculpture. And the dialectical relation that is now beginning to develop between American and Palestinian youth might also be illustrated and interpreted by exhibitions; and as far as its artistic expression is concerned, this relation might even be significantly influenced.
In the interval between the end of the recent world war and the termination of the mandate, the interest of young Palestinian artists was mainly attracted to the great European centers, Rome, Paris, London. There can be little doubt that, under the impact of recent history, some of this interest could be easily turned toward American Jewish institutions—that is, if they were in existence, and if they were willing and able to compete with European culture. At the same time, there are quite a few young Palestinian artists who deserve to be publicized by the American Jewish Museum, for their own art’s sake as well as for the enlightenment of Americans. The Museum could easily bring about a legitimate rapprochement and a genuine discussion between American and Israeli artists, if only it abandoned its clumsy pseudo-political level and dealt with art on the basis of aesthetic values.
In its Jewish Museum, the Theological Seminary possesses a great opportunity, but it cannot be said as yet to have shown full appreciation of its possibilities. If it is true that the specific problem of the modem Jew and the problem of modern man are closely related—and the American reputation of a Jewish writer like Franz Kafka argues for the truth of this supposition—this is the time and place for an experiment that may lead to a new interpretation of Jewish as well as modern art. And in the course of time the experiment might even go further and lead to the emergence of a Jewish art that is both modem and American.
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