The old question, whether or not there is such a thing as Jewish art, receives a new answer here.

_____________

For half a century Jewish artists have played an important, even a pioneer, role in American art, yet the question whether there is anything specifically Jewish in their work has not been thoroughly explored. It has been evaded partly because it is an elusive question, leaning on other quicksilver questions: are there American Jewish characteristics at all? Can they be reflected in canvas and carving? If so, how do you recognize them? Partly, it is because American art as a whole was unsure of itself. Even the affirmation of the 1920’s that there was a truly American art based on the American scene was defensively shrill. If there was doubt about the whole, who could think about the part—about the possibility of there being a separate Jewish wing in a non-existent American school of art? Now that this country’s contemporary artists have secured a higher position in the world’s regard than their counterparts of any previous period, we can take their Americanism for granted, leaving the way open for consideration of the always waiting “Jewish question.”

The most complete answer could have been made if the year of the celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of Jewish settlement in the United States had provided a comprehensive review of the work of Jewish artists and craftsmen since Colonial days. But, though the time was opportune, apparently no organization was willing to sponsor, or perhaps had even thought of sponsoring, such a formidable study. Whether rewarding discoveries would have been made no one can say, but we might have had a fairly complete picture of the Jewish artists of the 20th century and at least a glimpse of the fifteen or twenty of the 19th whose names are no more familiar than that of Myer Myers, a master craftsman in silver of the 18th century. As it was, the two exhibitions of fine art formally presented in connection with the Tercentenary dealt only with contemporaries. But since it is only in the last fifty years that American Jews have advanced to a prominent place in painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts, these exhibitions, in conjunction with other accessible works, afford us a satisfactory basis for evaluating the Jewish quality of their art.

_____________

But first a brief survey to establish the fact of their importance in American art is necessary; and this has its implication as well for the question we are pursuing. It was at the historic Armory Show of 1913, arranged by a new association of artists in revolt against the National Academy of Design, that American Jewish artists first made their presence felt. This was the exhibition in which modern art made its debut in the United States to hisses, cat-calls, and groans which did not, however, quite drown out the curtain calls. In it flowed every current and cross-current, and, the whirlpool being a favorite Jewish swimming pool, the American Jewish artists, as eclectic as the rest of the American group, plunged in. They were also, incidentally, a typical mixture of the melting pot. There were the two Russian-born, Max Weber and Abraham Walkowitz, and the Italian-born Joseph Stella (whose “Brooklyn Bridge,” now in the Whitney Museum, remains a triumph of early semi-abstract painting in this country). Round about were the Bulgarian-born Jules Pascin, a superb draftsmen who was to create a sensuous, half-drugged realism; the Hungarian-born Bernard Karfiol, a poetic realist; and the native Walt Kuhn, a more stolid one. There were Jacob Epstein (as draftsman), William Zorach (as painter), Ben Benn, Maurice Becker, and even two members of the Academy against which the group was revolting: the New Yorker Leon Kroll, and the Norwegian-born Jonas Lie, who was one day to become president of the Academy. In all, the Jewish artists in the Armory Show numbered more than thirty, of whom, over the years, quite a few dropped out of sight; and some leveled off too soon to make a significant contribution. But fifteen or so kept on striving for the high goals they had first set themselves.

All of these artists, whatever their aesthetic ideals, sought to develop their individual gifts, and if they were conscious of a common bond it was the bond of their Americanism, of their being in the mainstream of American art. In 1929, sixteen years after the Armory Show, the Museum of Modern Art, after its epoch-making inaugural exhibition of modern French masters, presented a “deliberately eclectic” group of paintings by nineteen living Americans “who it is believed are fairly representative of the principal tendencies in contemporary American painting.” Included were Karfiol, Kuhn, Pascin, and Weber (who was to be honored by the Museum the following year with the first one-man show it gave to a living American), together with Eugene Speicher and Maurice Sterne. Six out of nineteen would justify some kind of flag-waving, but would the colors of that flag be other than the red, white, and blue? They were Americans, even the immigrants; their works were honored in this exhibition as American; and their Jewishness was “accidental” (even Weber’s was submerged). Who cared that Karfiol and Weber were Jewish? Who even knew that Speicher and Kuhn and Pascin were Jews?

The “nineteen” provoked many challenges, friendly or bristling: everybody had his own preferred list. The magazine The Arts held a contest to see who would come closest to the nineteen best artists in the country on which the judges selected by the editors agreed. Both prize-winning lists were headed by Speicher and included Kuhn and Karfiol, with Sterne, Weber, Kroll, and Alexander Brook appearing once on either list.

One could go on with the new names of Jewish artists that cropped up every year—with those, for example, in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1930 show of painters and sculptors under thirty-five. But this would only show, like the roster from the Armory Show, that they continued to integrate themselves in American art unconsciously. For more concrete insights into the possible Jewish qualities of the work of American Jewish artists, we can now profitably skip to the present, to examine the two exhibitions which marked the Tercentenary.

_____________

A local New York exhibition of oil paintings and a few prints was held at the 92nd Street YM and YWHA. Theoretically, it had a broader base, for it was called “Jewish Motifs by American Artists.” But this epistle to the Gentiles was not productive: only four of the forty-seven artists represented were not Jewish. In quality the exhibition was disappointing, especially since the selection was made by Alfred Werner (whose writing is familiar to the readers of COMMENTARY). Of its forty-seven items, not more than half a dozen were of outstanding merit, and not more than half rose above mere competence. From a purely qualitative point of view, the show hardly justified singling out the American Jewish group for separate display.

That justification was provided, however, by a much larger show held under the auspices of the American Jewish Tercentenary. “The Contemporary Fine Arts Exhibit,” as it was called, included oils, water colors, and sculpture. It was installed at the Riverside Museum in New York in October 1954, and scheduled to circulate through June 1955 in art galleries and museums in Philadelphia, Rochester (N.Y.), Dallas, Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Washington, D. C. This show (I’ll refer to it hereafter as the “Contemporary”) contained one hundred and ten items representing as many artists out of some seven hundred works submitted to the jury. Both exhibitions largely ignored the conservative wing, While yet favoring middle-of-the-road artists above the advance-guard. With ampler representation from both extreme wings and a few more inclusions from the middle camp as well as from among the recent dead (such as Karfiol, Elie Nadelman, and Arnold Friedman), both exhibitions would have more satisfactorily called the roll of the Jewish participants of some account in the American art of our time. The total would have come to about two hundred and fifty names, as compared with fifty-odd artists mentioned in George S. Hellman’s article in the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia in 1939, of whom only a handful (for a variety of reasons) would be included in the two hundred and fifty.

By contrast with the “Y” show, the “Contemporary” was a collection of masterpieces, and by any objective standard it was a group show of unusually sustained quality. Not only were most of the older and invited guests represented by good examples, but there were some thirty to forty meritorious pieces by artists whose names are known only to assiduous gallery-goers.

What, now, do all these artists mean as a Jewish group (since I am not concerned here with their relative merits)? For myself the blunt answer must be that they have no meaning in this sense, whether they are judged by the idiom in which they work, their subject matter, or the Jewish feeling they may—or may not, as I think—display. This last factor is of necessity highly subjective and elusive; and there may be those who perceive some kind of Jewish accent in more of the artists than I do. In any case, since whatever there is of it is expressed through the subject matter or the artist’s manner of painting, I shall confine my discussion to these two factors.

Someone once developed the thesis that Jewish artists have come into their own in this era, not because of historic, political, or economic circumstances, but because the supposedly rationalistic abstract art of our time is so close to their spirit. I do not recall how he fitted Chagall and Soutine into his thesis, or what he made of the Jewish artists in this country who work over the whole gamut from literal naturalism through simplified realism to pure abstraction. To name only a few examples in each category: in the literal-naturalist group there are, in sculpture, Jo Davidson and Victor D. Brenner¹; in the simplified-realism one, Chaim Gross, Minna Harkavy, and William Zorach; among the abstract and semi-abstract, Ibram Lassaw and Jacques Lipchitz. In painting, William Auerbach-Levy and Ivan Olinsky are in the first category; Sidney Laufman, Adolph Dehn, and Joseph Floch in the second; Louis Schanker and Adolph Gottlieb in the third. Outside these categories there are “Cubist” Expressionists (Abraham Rattner), Surrealists (Peter Blume), and unclassifiables (Paul Burlin). So it goes in every medium; and in the use of the medium there are painters like Jacques Zucker for whom the working of the paint itself is a means of enriching the canvas, while for others paint is color pure and simple.

_____________

But these different uses of the medium, which all but determine a man’s art, are not the only sign that the artists have no common Jewish bond. Another, more obvious sign is their subject matter—their lack of concern with Jewish life. This view would seem to be refuted by the “Y” show, since it was based entirely on Jewish motifs; but that proved no more than that artists can occasionally work with Jewish themes if they want to or have to, just as, with a little more research, they could turn to Moslem or Buddhist themes. The real point is how often do they want to use Jewish subjects? The “Y” exhibition literally forced the issue: without a Jewish theme you couldn’t get into it. It is therefore more significant to focus on the subject matter of the paintings and sculpture in other exhibitions.

In the 1955 Annual of the Whitney Museum there were some two hundred exhibitors of whom one-fourth were Jews. Yet there was not a single work of recognizable Jewish derivation in it—unless one can so classify a sculptured portrait of Franz Kafka by Sahl Swarz, and one of Dr. L. G. (Greenstein) by Helena Simkhovitch. In the “Contemporary,” which imposed no theme but to which it may be presumed that the artists submitted such of their work as had some kind of Jewish association, “Talmudist” by Samuel Sigaloff, “Rabbi” by Rubi Roth, and “Man of Judah” by Zorach consorted with “Johnny Appleseed” by William Gropper, “The Clam Digger” by Joseph Hirsch, and “William Tell” by Ruth Vodicka. Sigmund Menkes contributed a richly painted “Torah,” but Hyman Bloom did an equally sumptuous “Female Leg.” There was Ben Wilson’s “Sabbath,” but Walkowitz’s “Rest Day” derived, not from Genesis, but from Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte.” Even a Jewish title—“Jeremiah,” “Rachel,” “Saul”—when it is not the name of a contemporary, may be no more than a convenient, or opportunistic, reference. A studio visitor likes a portrait of a dark soulful man. Job-like, he calls it. Why, that’s a strange coincidence: it is called Job, this head of a resident of Fiesole or Gloucester. Only one-fifth of all the works in this exhibition were even nominally concerned with Jewish motifs.

Not surprisingly, most of the works of art that are really Jewish in content in (and outside) these exhibitions derive from life in the Old World. Generally, they have been done by artists who were born abroad but came here as children, and who were recalling or reconstructing early experience. Recollection could be grim, as in Walkowitz’s expressive drawings of ghetto faces; reconstruction was more likely to be nostalgic. That nostalgia can yield products of a higher emotional, and aesthetic, level than the sentimentalizing pictures by an Abel Pann, of der alter heym, or of the Holy Land, was demonstrated in both shows by Samuel Rothbart’s “My Earliest Memory,” Nahum Tschacbasov’s “Friday Evening,” Belle Golinko’s “Chanukah Prayer,” and Hannah Moscon’s “Ritual Dance.” In no theme is controlled nostalgia more apparent than in the thoughtful and warmly felt portraits of rabbis by Weber, Samuel Adler, Ben-Zion and others—owed to the happy influence, perhaps, of Marc Chagall. Even a satirical artist like the Boston-born Jack Levine showed a vigorous, straightforward portrait of the late Professor Alexander Marx. (Marx was not a rabbi, but from his connection with the Jewish Theological Seminary, his piety, and his Jewish learning, he was as good as one to Levine. This artist, given to steam-rollering the faces of the profligate in his canvases, has invested with charm the miniature “portraits” of King David, King Solomon, and other Biblical figures he painted in memory of a good Jew, his father.)

Hyman Bloom’s many portrayals of rabbis or other Jews with Torahs whom he recreated from memory are done in essentially the same manner as his other paintings, with a strongly defined composition and a dazzling, even razzle-dazzling, surface of brilliant broken color. The smashed-spectrum glitter of “Chandelier” becomes, in “Corpse of Elderly Male” and “Corpse of Elderly Female,” a mass of iridescent putrescence. While the faces of his rabbis are also bedizened masks, they are less violent texturally and sometimes a face emerges as a face. In his most simple approach to this subject, in his drawings, Bloom’s rendering is more in the spirit as well as the technique of Rembrandt. Here the artist reveals his probing for values deeper than those he has achieved in the morbidities, however brilliant, of a considerable part of his canvases.²

Why do these artists of diverse temperament and direction exercise such restraint, display so much sympathy, in the treatment of the rabbi? Clearly because he is not an individual, but a symbol of the Judaism which they no longer profess and can hardly understand, but to which they are paying their last respects.

_____________

Of Jewish life in this country the artists have had even less to say. Those of the older generation had the memories of a much more vivid form of Jewish life to draw on if they had a mind to, but, like most other immigrants, they preferred to go American, to be an artist like other American artists. For the second generation, the land of nostalgia is New York’s East Side. But, however exotic it appeared to a sympathetic outsider like Hutchins Hapgood, who wrote The Spirit of the Ghetto, or to a bewildered one like Henry James, who wrote some of his most elaborately opaque pages about it, the East Side was a Minsk or Shnipitshuk in process of constant dilution; and the nostalgia for it is diluted in the same measure. Those who were born there lived a largely American sort of life; they “lost” very little by moving away. Theirs is an incomplete, a half-hearted and half-humorous nostalgia for the more superficial Jewish aspects of the East Side, not for such of its roots as took in the new soil. And humor blunts the ache of nostalgia. Presumably what they yearn for on old Suffolk Street is obtainable in the more spacious Flatbush and West Bronx. The East Side itself is still there. If you want another look at the stands of herring and pickle barrels, if you would like to hear juicy Yiddish or see a Jewish compositor setting Jewish type, if you must plow your way through the narrow streets where pushcarts used to be (and which cars now traverse at a pushcart’s pace), the subway will get you there in no time.

For this reason in part, memories of the East Side and of American Jewish life generally do not give many artists the feeling which the Old World ghettos did. Of the older generation, an Arnold Friedman painted “The Peddler”—once; and Jerome Myers, in drawing, etching, pastel, and oil, did endless scenes of children playing in the streets, of bearded elders (all “patriarchs”), and women marketing, along with processions in honor of saints. For the whole East Side was picturesque to Myers, who was born in Virginia and did not go out of his way to state that he was Jewish, who in fact evoked the same sort of charm from the Italians, Russians, and Chinese of the East Side as he did from his Jewish subjects. Characterization was not Myers’s forte. That ability the young Jacob Epstein had. Born on Hester Street, he went back and rented a room there when his parents prospered and moved uptown. From his window he made drawings of the people and activities below; and he was a natural to illustrate the book on the East Side that Hapgood wrote. If his drawings of both personages and plain folk lacked the vigor and bite we associate with his later work as a sculptor, they abound in accurate observation, and their gentleness is in keeping with the text. “Wherever one looked there was something interesting,” Epstein himself wrote in his autobiography, Let There Be Sculpture, “—a novel composition, wonderful effects of lighting at night, and picturesque and handsome people. Rembrandt would have delighted in the East Side, and I am surprised that nothing has come out of it. . . .”

The art which has come out of American Jewish life is altogether rather scanty. In the exhibitions held in connection with the Tercentenary there were such paintings as Philip Reisman’s “The Garment District,” William Meyrowitz’s “The Rooster and the Book,”³ and Raphael Soyer’s “The Seamstress.” There have been many others, but not nearly so many as one might expect, and especially in the field of portraiture. Long ago Soyer did a moving double portrait of his parents that epitomized a whole generation of immigrants. But few artists emulated him: it is as if they were trying to forget the world their parents symbolized. Ben Shahn, in the apprentice work of his teens, used all the members of his family as subjects, but in maturity never painted a portrait of his wonderfully Jewish father, of whom he was very fond. (Only recently was he moved by nostalgia to do the clever drawings of Old World types for the program of one-acters called “The World of Sholom Aleichem.” His broken, seemingly casual but expressive line is very different from what it was in the drawings he made long ago of old Jews in skullcaps and related subjects: he himself recalls them now as “slick, Ingres-like.”)

The new world has offered too many provocative vistas, in city and country, for the artists to be willing to stay long in their own backyards, physically or spiritually. Walkowitz was as much haunted by the new skyscrapers as by the old ghetto faces, and couldn’t stop drawing them as lyrical visions. Like many other artists here and abroad, Louis Lozowick felt a challenge in industrial structures, shaping them into abstract forms that expressed their nature more truly than their actual appearance. In recent years the city as city and the factory as factory are being taken for granted more, and the artists who are not completely subjective in their work find their themes in all the variety of the forty-eight states, and abroad. It is harder to distinguish the color and shape of American Jewish life as something apart, and the East Side, aesthetically, goes on shrinking in dimension.

_____________

Whether from a lack of continuous and unconscious Jewish sustenance, or from intellectual conviction, few of the artists reveal a more pervasive Jewishness that goes beyond mere subject matter. They may say with Weber: “I am proud to belong to a race that was civilized when the French were still barbarians.” But they have largely left it up to Weber to demonstrate it in his art—which was thoroughly influenced by the art of the French. Weber has been able to translate his affirmation into paint many times. After his 1923 exhibition, Lloyd Goodrich wrote: “The something that has happened to him since his last appearance as an artist and that has made him Jewish has also made him doubly important. It is an immense thing to have a background and to speak for a race.”

What had happened to Weber as an artist was that he had stopped painting in the then new post-Cubist abstract idiom because he had come to feel that it did not suit his temperament. To fill the void, the experiences of his early impressionable years rushed in, taking hold of him and his brush. But one can exaggerate the Jewish elements in Weber’s work: he has done great things in still life and landscape, too. Born in Bialystok, living there till he was ten years old, Weber was exposed long enough to Jewish ceremonial and to Jewish types to have a store of memories. But his subsequent exposure to and ardent quest for Western culture had so overwhelming an effect that these memories not only became deeply buried, but faded. By the time Weber was twenty-four, with $2,000 saved for a sojourn in Paris, he was all wrapped up in the religion of painting. He studied with Matisse for a year; he was an intimate friend of Henri Rousseau; and the great experience of his life was the Cézanne memorial exhibition of 1907 (not a single painting of that master had yet been seen in America at that time). The result was that Weber had to have refresher contacts to bring his Jewishness to the surface. Thus, in writing of his “Talmudists” (1934), he declared that he “was prompted to paint this picture after a pilgrimage [italics mine] to one of the oldest synagogues of the East Side in New York.”

Does one use the word “pilgrimage” when one attends a synagogue as a matter of course? And how old is the oldest synagogue on the East Side that it should be an object of veneration? It is a tourist who makes such pilgrimages; if he is deeply sympathetic like Weber, call him an observer. If he is not an outsider, he has at best only one foot in the door when he can write: “I find a living spiritual beauty emanates from, and hovers over and about, a group of Jewish patriarchal types when they congregate in search of wisdom in the teaching of the great Talmudists of the past. Their discussion of the Torah is at times impassioned, inspired, ecstatic, at other moments serene and contemplative. . . . to witness a group of such elders bent down and intent upon nothing but the eternal quest and interpretation of the ethical and spiritual significance and religious content of the great Jewish legacy—the Torah—is for me an experience never to be forgotten.”

Possibly some of Weber’s extreme distortions are dictated, not by considerations of design, but by his attempt to regain his Judaism by storm. Having lived away from Jewish customs, he invests them, when he turns to them in his art, with an excess of emotion. Not born in a Hasidic environment but having the temperament of a Hasid, he views the Talmudic wranglers in emotional terms more appropriate to Hasidim blessing the moon.

_____________

As I indicated before, Weber’s fame does not rest exclusively on his achievement with Jewish themes. But there is one artist, Ben-Zion, who is fanatically Jewish in his work, and it is not the Old World or the New World but the world of the Bible which is his constant, almost only stimulus. Opinion differs on the merit of his work. I for one find a great deal of freshness and originality in both his paintings and etchings: they have the special vigor of a self-taught artist of talent. A certain rigidity of approach may also be the mark of the autodidact, or it may be a matter of temperament. Years ago Ben-Zion used to make ink drawings of harsh prophets on every sufficiently smooth stone that came to hand—reminiscent of prophets in the wilderness? He is also that mizzi yahudi (so named by Arab stonemasons) of which Jerusalem is literally built—the stone called the “stiff-necked Jew.”

Strangely enough, neither Weber nor Ben-Zion has as yet participated in the decoration of the modern synagogues which have been built in recent years and which have been the strongest stimulus to the creation of a Jewish art this country has ever known. Possibly Weber’s painting, so powerful even in his relatively small canvases, would not “stay” on the wall, but it is worth letting him try to make it do so. Ben-Zion, I know, detests specifications; he likes to decide for himself the size and shape of his pictures; but I think he can be persuaded to learn the facts of mural life. In a coming series of articles to appear in COMMENTARY, I shall discuss the work of Adolph Gottlieb, who is one of the most gifted of the abstract artists and who is most likely to do his greatest painting with symbols of his own creation: whether these will be felt as Jewish remains problematical. There, also, I will consider the work of A. Raymond Katz in many mediums. He, too, is an easel painter, and not only on Jewish themes. But there is a mural feeling about the best of these canvases, and especially those which are based on the free elaboration of Hebrew letters, such as his canvas shown in the “Contemporary” called “Patriarchs and Matriarchs.” This is a field of design Katz has made peculiarly his own. It suggests that this artist could also completely realize himself in Jewish art. If the synagogues continue to multiply at the rate they have in postwar years (which remains to be seen), if they continue to favor modern design (which is likely), and if these synagogues make full use of advanced painters and sculptors for their decoration (which is still uncertain), some kind of specifically American Jewish art may emerge.

Outside the synagogue, I can only see the persisting, irreversible integration with American art at large. In an article on Israeli painting (COMMENTARY, June 1953), I pointed out that it still had no Jewish quality because it was not sufficiently rooted in its own soil. Most of the Israeli artists were immigrants; the oldest of them were in the country not much longer than a generation. This, as we have seen, is true of many of the leading American Jewish painters; and these did not come to an aesthetic wasteland: if American art did not have a firmly settled tradition, it did have a past; and it had a present Academy to work for or against. Like the American environment generally, American art absorbed the newcomers to strengthen itself, and in return gave them a stimulus and the courage to strike out in whatever direction their talents turned. If they had first been under the influence of a Jewish art tradition, it might have modified the pull of the American magnet, but there was no Jewish tradition. Jewish personal traits were not strong enough to form one.

Today there is another factor making the emergence of a Jewish quality still more unlikely in American painting and sculpture: the abstract idiom dominating contemporary art. In the past a characteristic national quality in art was not easily transplanted, Vine cuttings from Bordeaux set in California soil produce California, not French, wine; but look at a Glackens and you cannot help thinking of Renoir. In the advance-guard idiom of today, an American canvas painted under a French influence may not show it to the same degree. The works of Piet Mondrian’s disciples in any country have as little Dutch feeling as his own:⁴ the apotheosis of the right angle is a unitarian rationalism. In any kind of abstract art there is little possibility for the expression of even the strong national quality which marked the previous art of a France or Germany or Italy. How then should it have a specifically Jewish quality in countries where the Jews are largely immigrants, in America—or Israel?

Abstract art is not the final word in art. We can expect the return, sooner or later, to an art more visibly related to nature. So far as the “Jewish question” is concerned, however, that will only bring us back to where we started. All that we can say in the end is that American Jews have played as worthy a role in American art as they have in science, law, medicine, and merchandising; and the younger generation in art seems talented enough to sustain that high role.

_____________

¹ For a sample of Brenner’s work you have only to put hand in pocket or purse: he designed the Lincoln penny. Some people demurred that a Jew (born in Lithuania) should presume to such an honor, but then, the man born in a log cabin had presumed to migrate to a White House.

² The attention of the interested reader is directed to Hilton Kramer’s article on Bloom and Jack Levine (“Bloom and Levine: The Hazards of Modem Painting”) in our June 1955 issue.—Ed.

³ This (like Meyrowitz’s “The Ram’s Horn”) could be Old World or New World in origin but, anyway, how many people got the point of the story part of the picture? For its title merely suggests the whimsical phrase from which it derives: er kukt vie a hon in b’nai odom, which cannot be translated and can be explained only tediously.

⁴ There are critics who would disagree with Mr. Schack and hold that Mondrian’s art is very, very Dutch in its neat brightness.—Ed.

_____________