A Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Art Historian: Martin Buber’s Early Texts on Jewish Art, 1901–1903

Reviewed by: Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representation and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period Vivian B. Mann Frojmovic, Eva , ed. Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representation and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions 15. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Pp. xxii + 242. This composite volume is the fruit of a session on the representation of Jews in the Middle Ages presented at the 1999 Medieval Conference at Leeds University. It is noteworthy that although the conference traditionally draws a majority of its participants from Europe, the authors of these essays are all Americans with the exception of the editor. This fact may not be a coincidence but a reflection of the burgeoning interest in Jewish art history among American academics. Eva Frojmovic's introductory essay, "Buber in Basle, Schlosser in Sarajevo, Wischnitzer in Weimar: The Politics of Writing about Medieval Jewish Art," focuses on the historiographical treatment of medieval works in the context of recent discussions on the role of political discourse in the characterization of Jewish art.1 A brief review of Martin Buber's ambivalent attitude toward Jewish art opens the chapter: that which had been created in previous centuries demonstrated a lack of Jewish artistic skill; but what would be created in the future Jewish state would be equal to European models. Buber could speak from authority; he had completed his doctorate in art history and philosophy under the distinguished scholars Alois Riegl and Franz Wickhoff. Frojmovic proceeds to an interesting analysis of the Sarajevo Haggadah monograph, published in 1898 with essays by the Christian art historian Julius von Schlosser and the Jewish scholar David Kaufmann of Vienna. To Schlosser, Jewish art emerged from that of the church; he explained the style of the Haggadah as based on the late fourteenth-century art of northern Spain. Kaufmann saw Jewish art as emerging from synagogue decoration [End Page e014] but still a part of Western artistic traditions. Frojmovic ends her essay by considering the definitions of Jewish art offered in the 1920s and 1930s by Kurt Frey, Ernst Cohn-Weiner, and Rachel Wischnitzer, with an emphasis on their discussion of medieval works. She concludes that their essays on Jewish art are based on the same nationalist model that had been used by others to exclude Jewish art from the canon of art history. Most of the remaining chapters in Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other discuss a single manuscript or page of illumination prefaced by a theoretical discussion that appears to have been appended to the original talk given at the Leeds conference. Some dovetail nicely, for example, Marc Epstein's consideration of the Christian reformulation of the Hebrew Bible, which was transformed into an "Old Testament" whose narratives and prophecies "can only be fulfilled in the Christian community and in the life of the Christian savior" (p. 35). This preface precedes a discussion of an illumination in the Golden Haggadah (British Library, Add. MS 27210) of Moses and his family traveling to Egypt that is a reworking of the canonical Christian scene, "The Flight into Egypt." Epstein relies heavily for his interpretation on textual sources, principally midrashim, which presumes that which is not proved—namely, that the relevant literary sources were well known to miniaturists and their patrons in Catalonia where the Golden Haggadah was written and illuminated ca. 1320.2 Much more effective are the comparisons to similar iconography in other manuscripts of the period. Michael Batterman's essay "Bread of Affliction, Emblem of Power: The Passover Matzah in Haggadah Manuscripts from Christian Spain" is flawed in both its premises and its structure. Introductory material is repeated later and some of the text appears in other essays; more stringent editing of the volume would have helped. On the first page, Batterman asserts that Spanish Haggadot are the result of Jewish acculturation with Christians, an assumption that leads him to strained equations of the representation of the matsah and the host, and the attribution of Christian concepts to the Jewish symbol. As Batterman has demonstrated elsewhere, the narrative miniatures preceding the text of the Haggadah appeared after the development of...

Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.Lionel Trilling, notebook entry, 1928I know of no writer in English who has added a micromillimeter to his status by realizing his Jewishness, although I know of some who have curtailed their promise by trying to heighten their Jewish consciousness.Lionel Trilling, Contemporary Jewish Record, 1944DEFINITIONS AND HISTORIOGRAPHYSCHOLARSHIP ON MODERN JEWISH ART has developed critical mass only in the past two decades, after an uneven pioneer phase most often confined to museum exhibition catalogues and closely researched articles in the once indispensable Journal of Jewish Art (1974- 88). * From Israel (yet written in English), Jewish Art's successor, Ars Judaica (2005-), is now complemented by the first American-edited journal dedicated to Jewish art, Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture (2007-). Several anthologies have recently emerged, such as Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd's Complex. Identities (2001) and Barbara KirshenblattGimblett and Jonathan Karp's The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (2008).2 Much serious work still appears either as museum publications or articles, mostly in journals of Jewish art or Jewish studies.3 Yet Jewish art history continues to suffer from a lack of respectability outside Israel; indeed, the prevailing perception within the discipline of art history does not yet recognize Jewish art as a subfield, such as African American art, let alone Christian or Islamic art. Art history more typically is delineated by nationality, another of the definitions of Jewish difference, and a starting point for some current self-conscious Jewish art scholarship. This essay will discuss such recent contributions to the field of Jewish art, alongside three older landmark books- enduring models for interdisciplinary, historically grounded scholarship in modern Jewish art - by Richard Cohen, Ziva Amishai-Maisels, and Avram Kampf.4General historiographical problems concerning the assessment of Jewish art formed the subject of a 1999 anthology, edited by Catherine Soussloff.5 The first segment considers biases of the field of art history against the very notion of Jewish art, in part due to the widespread misimpression that the Second Commandment prohibited Jews from making pictorial imagery. lisa Saltzman, who also later devoted important books to the subject, tackles the issue of art after the Shoah, particularly for a gentile German like Anselm Kiefer.6 Soussloff's book also engages with how a historian or critic's identity shapes his (in all cases) approach to Jewish art/ Specifically, Margaret Olin examines nineteenth-century art history surveys and their exclusions of Jewish monuments from a dominant progressive narrative, conceived in national and racial terms. Remaining essays on early Jewish art historians and critics, from Aby Warburg to Clement Greenberg, evaluate emerging twentieth-century Jewish visions of the discipline of art history, whether Renaissance or modern.8The old canard about Jewish image-phobia remains widespread. Two recent books, however, have gone far to redress the commonplace that Second Commandment prohibitions inhibited, even prevented, Jewish visual culture. Kaiman Bland, also a contributor to Soussloff's volume, deconstructs the misperception. His 2000 book chronicles a history of ideas starting with German nineteenth-century stereotypes. Even Kant and Hegel regarded Jews as a verbal people who preferred abstraction and monotheism to the materiality and potential idolatry of art objects - hearing and the word dominated over sight and the image.9 But not only racist outsiders, including Richard Wagner, tarred Jews with this limitation. Prominent insiders, such as Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, conceded this (potentially self-fulfilling) historical truth as well. While the very existence of any tradition of Jewish art remained steeped in modern debates over the meanings of both art and Jewish identity, Bland also shows that a premodern consensus actually affirmed Jewish art amid lively discussion (as well as debate) by medieval and early modern rabbis. …

The main trends of the Russian classical studies which developed and gained its international recognition in the early 20th century. They are presented by the works of Vasilii Latyshev, Vladislav Buzeskul, Mikhail Rostovtsev, and Thaddeus Zielinski. These were historical-philological and cultural-historical studies, as well as those of social history. History of the art of antiquity represented by the names of Oscar Waldhauer, Vladimir Malmberg, Boris Farmakovsky, and Mikhail Rostovtsev evolved from description of iconography to the research of historical and artistic problems. Russia, following European countries, demonstrated gradual separation of the history of ancient art as an independent discipline from archaeology, philology, and history. A good example of this process is the research of antique portraiture. This topic became one of the key ones for Oscar Waldhauer. A student of Adolf Furtwängler and Ludwig Curtius, the representatives of German school in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Hermitage scholar created his sculpture catalogue based on the method of “Kopienkritik”. This method, which up to now underlies the attribution of monuments, was substantially supplemented with his studies. Logic of the research led Waldhauer to Heinrich Wölfflin’s thesis about “the history of art without names”. In the essays on the history of portrait, Waldhauer was guided by the concept that the history of art presents the history of spirit, as well as the concept of “Kunstwollen”. It was adopted by him from the works of Franz Wickoff and Alois Riegl, art historians of the Vienna School. In Waldhauer’s understanding, portrait style is an expression of “spirit of the times”. While in Germany Ludwig Curtius and Hans Delbrück adhered to a physiognomic interpretation, those who followed the Vienna school came to a conclusion that portrait had never imitated the appearance of a model. The evolution of portrait is a subject to its own laws, autonomous from social development. Another significant contribution to the study of ancient portrait, undertaken in this period was Mikhail Rostovtsev’s work, dedicated to the bust of the Bosporan Queen Dynamis. M. Rostovtsev compared attributes and symbolic signs that cover the bust with the iconography of statues of Iranian gods and rulers originating from the Nemrud Dag mound. Identification of the monument was carried out thanks to its historical interpretation. M. Rostovtsev’s discovery of the dual nature of the Bosporan monarchy, which was a symbiosis of Greek and Iranian elements, is a brilliant analysis of various historical materials that laid grounds to defining the personage. General interest in the portraiture characteristic of historiography at the beginning of the 20th century, rethinking of concepts and the search for new methods lead to several discoveries. Later, Russian historiography followed a different autonomous path. While for Western European and Anglo-American science the 20th century became the “century of portraiture”, Soviet art history returned to this topic many years later, only in 1970–1980s.

The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual, by Kalman P. Bland. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. The Nation Without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art, by Margaret Olin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Twentieth-century visual cultures would be impoverished without the ground-breaking contributions made by Jews in a variety of media. Think Chagall, Soutine, Modigliani, Rothko, Arbus, Spielberg, and Spiegelman, to name a few. In spite of the work of Jewish artists, the powerful ideological assumption and often antisemitic perception of Jews as "artless," or as an imitative people without their own style, and hence "parasitic" upon the national cultural styles in which they have found themselves, has persisted in textbook art historical surveys at least through the 1980s. Only in the last few years have art historians begun to interrogate the history, not so much of Jewish art, but of the idea whether the Jew has, historically, been artless. Kalman Bland and Margaret Olin reveal the origins of the "history" of Jewish aniconism-or the resistance to the making of idols or images-to be a fiction of comparatively recent (that is, 19th century, European) vintage. Jews of ancient and medieval times would not have recognized themselves as aniconic. Bland shows that Maimonides, the medieval philosopher, wrote in praise of beauty as a physical pleasure unrelated to manifestations of divine power, and so not in conflict with the Second Commandment. Bland also documents how Jewish travelers in the medieval period attended mindfully [End Page 140] to the visual treasures gazed upon in Egypt and in Palestine. Olin reminds us that the Torah describes the work of Bezalel of the tribe of Judah, who, during the biblical flight from Egypt, crafted the ark of the tabernacle out of acacia wood, and of Hiram, the Jew who built the Temple of Solomon. The Sarajevo Haggadah (Spanish, 14th c.), the mosaic floors with Jewish figural art at Beit Alpha, an ancient synagogue, and the "elaborate representational murals in the third-century synagogue at Dura-Europos in Syria," are compelling artifacts that document Jewish artfulness (Olin, p. 131). In "Jewish Art Without a Question Mark," an essay in Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, another groundbreaking study in Jewish art history, Elisheva Revel-Neher argues that visual culture became a rare forum through which Jewish "outsiders" could define themselves: Without autonomy, without a land of their own, without the right to decide and choose for themselves where and how to live, work, and die; persecuted, exiled, converted by force, marked as cattle, burned at the stake along with their books, Jews nevertheless found in artistic expression a way to emphasize their contested identity. In the architecture of synagogues and their décor, and in the illumination of handwritten texts, the Jews used the styles and forms that were commonly available. Particular styles were not the issue, only the means of expression. The central characteristic of Jewish art was in its language, the visual vocabulary formed by Jewish iconography. 1 Other historians have not always pledged allegiance to material artifacts or read their Bible to create accurate narratives about the existence of Jewish art throughout the ages. Instead of fidelity to fact, the erasure of Jews from art history has been part of a project to retroactively create an unflattering image of Jews. Since the development of art history as a scholarly field coincided with the rise of the nation state, Jews were categorically denied a place within that history: Jewish artists could be described as possessing a strange and Oriental sensibility, as devoid of artistic sensibility or as antagonistic toward art altogether. Jews were written out of art history either as marginal to it or as a people defined by deficiencies: a lack of history, a lack of land, and a lack of art...

Visualization of biblical narratives and characters has a long and valued history, attested to both in Jewish synagogue art (e.g., Dura Europos from the 3rd century ce) and in early Christian catacomb and funerary art (See the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Biblical Studies article “Early Christian Art” by Robin Jensen and Lee Jefferson). Indeed, in many centuries, the visual has been the primary mode by which ordinary Christians engaged the Bible. The legitimacy of visual art has not been uncontested, whether in Judaism, given Mosaic strictures against images (Exod 20:4; Deut 5:8), or in Christianity (e.g., the iconoclastic controversy in the East; Reformation debates over images in the West). Nonetheless, the dynamic relationship between biblical text and image is reflected in the work of artists across the centuries and into the modern period. Visual media include fresco, icon, altarpiece, sculpture, tapestry, and illumination. Much scholarly treatment of biblical art in the 19th and 20th centuries has come from art historians, whether through iconographic surveys or treatment of specific artists and artistic movements. More recently, an appreciation of visual art as scriptural exegesis (various described as “visual exegesis” and “graphic exegesis”) has been taken up by biblical scholars. This is part of a wider movement interested in biblical reception and Wirkungsgeschichte (“the history of effects” or “effective history”), which has encouraged interdisciplinary scholarship and dialogue between biblical exegetes, theologians, historians, and art historians. Global perspectives are gradually balancing the overemphasis on western European medieval and Renaissance art, while interfaith perspectives have renewed interest in Jewish art (ancient, medieval, and contemporary) and in biblical influence on Islamic art.

Reviewed by: The Art and Artists of the Fifth Zionist Congress. Heralds of a New Age Ezra Mendelsohn The Art and Artists of the Fifth Zionist Congress. Heralds of a New Age, by Gilya Gerda Schmidt. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003. 269 pp., 41 illustrations. $49.95. This book deals with a rather narrowly defined subject—the exhibition of Jewish art held in conjunction with the fifth Zionist Congress in 1901. This was, to be sure, a significant event, an expression of the importance that some Zionists assigned to the creation of a new Jewish national culture. Prominent among these Zionists was, of course, Martin Buber, on whom the author is an expert, having written a monograph on his early activities and having translated some of his early writings into English. At the Congress Buber made a well-known speech on Jewish art and referred to the exhibition as a sign that a new Jewish national art was in the making, although its final triumph could take place only when the Jews would succeed in establishing a national homeland in Palestine. The works of eleven artists were displayed at the Congress, and Schmidt's book is chiefly devoted to biographies of these artists and discussions of their artistic achievements. There are separate chapters on the careers of Jozef Israëls, Hermann Struck, Lesser Ury, and Ephraim Moses Lilien. Eduard Bendemann and Maurycy Gottlieb are lumped together in a chapter entitled "Forerunners," while Solomon Kischinewski, Oskar Marmorek, Alfred Nossig, [End Page 134] Jehudo Epstein, and Alfred Lakos are dealt with in a section on "the other artists in the exhibition." The author has done a commendable job of collecting material on all these artists, ranging from encyclopedia articles to contemporary critical comments. She registers her regret that the subject of "Jewish art" has been somewhat neglected by Jewish scholars, emphatically denies the infamous accusation that the Jews are a people with no art, makes no secret of her ardent support of the Zionist movement, and lavishes praise upon the artists whom she has chosen to discuss. All, or almost all, are seen as both good Jews and fine craftsmen. She quotes with approval an appraisal of Maurycy Gottlieb that classifies him as a "national artist" (p. 43), a judgment which I regard as ill-founded. Israëls was "a proud Dutchman and a proud Jew," who refused to paint on the Sabbath (p. 67). Struck is especially favored, since he was that rara avis—a strictly orthodox Jewish artist of whom "it is said that [he] worked on art the way he studied the Talmud—with great care and precision" (p. 94). As for Ury, "As far as we know [he] was true to his Judaism as he knew it from Poznan" (p. 131). Lilien, along with his great artistic gifts, was not only a Zionist but the right sort of Zionist, since he was free of the negative views of the Jewish people in the diaspora that occasionally informed the world outlook of such men as Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau. One black sheep here is Bendemann, who "did not remain a faithful son of the ancient people"—that is, he was a convert to Christianity (p. 33). But even he, despite his act of betrayal, "remained lodged in the Jewish tradition" (p. 37). As for Nossig, whose sad end in the Warsaw ghetto is mentioned (he was executed by Jewish underground fighters who accused him of collaborating with the Gestapo), he too in his early years was "a proud Jew, and a Zionist" (p. 215). The author's heart is obviously in the right place, but her book suffers from a surfeit of enthusiasm and a lack of critical analysis. Why, for example, did Buber, the advocate of cultural Zionism, select Bendemann's work for exhibition at the Congress, given the artist's sin of apostasy? This question is not discussed here. The author does consider, in her concluding chapter, the issue of what constitutes "Jewish art," but she does not add anything new to this debate, which has been going on for a least a century. Her not terribly helpful conclusion is that the eleven artists, despite their...

This article takes a minimalist approach to the designation of “Jewish” in the category of “Jewish art,” focusing primarily on works that directly engage the modern Jewish experience and the role that Jews have played in the development of new visual media in the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time, this article takes a maximalist approach to what is meant by the term “art” by including a wide range of visual mediums. The academic study of Jews in the arts can be traced to Germany in the mid-19th century, when both art history and Jewish studies were relatively new academic disciplines. While art history devalued Jewish art as derivative in the context of the development of modern national identities, Jewish studies devalued non-textual sources for academic study. It was the interdisciplinary field of Jewish art that would serve to negotiate biases from both academic branches, proving influential in the development of iconographic interpretation by promoting critical attention to the narrative function of a wide variety of mediums. This article traces the extent to which Jewish studies scholars have compensated for earlier disciplinary tensions by questioning the premise of nationalist models for art history and how they have broadened the criteria for visual analysis in the study of Jewish art. Although some of the most recognized modern artists are Jewish, the focus here is more narrowly dedicated to those artists and visual media that have secured a place within Jewish studies. In recent decades, scholars of Jewish art have forged an accessible path by adopting more of a “visual culture” approach that considers production and consumption of Jewish content in the plastic arts in non-hierarchical terms. Because Jewish studies touch on a wide range of disciplines, the study of Jewish art has come to include the material aspects of vernacular life (decorative art and handicraft) and popular media (stage design, photography, film) as well as the traditional fine arts (architecture, sculpture, and painting) within schools of style (Impressionism, Futurism, Abstract Expressionism). Scholars of Jewish art have largely avoided the high/low debate typical of other branches of art history by emphasizing the experiential aspect of Jewish objects of all types. This article is a survey of modern and contemporary Jewish art from approximately 1850 to 1990, when Jews participated in the artistic mainstream, and points to the considerable scholarly attention Jewish studies have placed on art as a comprehensive experience rather than a purely aesthetic one. The article opens with second-order categories, then moves to scholarship devoted to issues that are central to the field, such as nationalism and Jewish/non-Jewish relations, and closes with scholarship devoted to diverse media.

Reviewed by: Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875-1905: An Institutional Biography by Diana Reynolds Cordileone Sarah McGaughey Diana Reynolds Cordileone, Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875-1905: An Institutional Biography. London: Ashgate, 2014. 314 pp. A central figure of both twentieth-century Western art history and the Vienna School of Art History, Alois Riegl expanded and refined the focus of the discipline, posing questions of materials and objects previously considered unworthy of study and developing a formalist method. His pursuit of a new understanding of the aesthetic and cultural value of objects culminated in his work on historical preservation, a body of work that continues to be the subject of historical study. Published in the 1990s, the monographs of Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory, and Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, formed a core of major English-language studies on Riegl and contributed to a body of scholarship focused primarily on analyzing and exploring Riegl’s theory of art. In 2010 a shift appears in Riegl studies toward cultural, disciplinary, and institutional politics with the publication of Peter Noever, Artur Rosenauer, and Georg Vasold’s edited volume of essays, Alois Riegl Revisited, as art historian Matthew Rampley notes in his review of the volume. Included in this significant volume is an essay by Diana Reynolds Cordileone in which she introduces previously unknown archival material to show Riegl’s scholarly interest in the Museum für Kunst [End Page 133] und Industrie. It is this focus on Riegl’s institutional experience and commitment that also informs her monograph Alois Riegl in Vienna, 1875–1905: An Institutional Biography. Cordileone presents Riegl’s work in the context of national and regional politics of the Museum für Kunst und Industrie as well as in the context of his years as a student and his state appointment in historic preservation. As the title of Cordileone’s book implies, this study is as much a biography of Riegl as it is of the institutions within which he worked. In the first of three parts of the study, the reader is introduced to the institutional histories of the University of Vienna and the Museum für Kunst und Industrie. Cordileone begins with the Leseverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens, of which Riegl was a member in his early student years, and then explores the theoretical and methodological focus of the Institut für österreichische Geschichtsforschung, where Riegl was trained in historical methodology. Next Cordileone turns to the establishment of the Museum für Kunst und Industrie as a national project in the tradition of the South Kensington Museum. These three chapters allow Cordileone to present the differences in regional and national German-language cultures of higher learning and the politics and marketing of national design. While this section forms the historical backbone to her work, it is the influence of Nietzsche that shapes Cordileone’s presentation of Riegl’s biography in the next two sections. Cordileone presents the central ideas of Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen and Die Geburt der Tragödie via a reception of Schopenhauer, the same order in which the Reader’s Society approached the work of the two philosophers. Thus, Cordileone’s study can later show the Nietzsche-inspired development of Riegl’s historical methodology and cultural criticism as well as trace an underlying irrationalism in his work that, she argues, informs the introduction of the central concept of Kunstwollen into his theory of art. This Nietzschean reading of Riegl is the work’s first major element that contributes to the shift in Riegl studies. The second section turns to Riegl’s own intellectual development, and Cordileone’s reader finds a comprehensive reading of Riegl’s works with a review of secondary literature, which in combination with Cordileone’s institutional approach of the first section brings the political contexts and undertones to the surface. For instance, the development of networks of schools and the object collection in the early years of the museum and the shifts in policies concerning folk art and national art here function as a backdrop to [End Page 134] Riegl’s Stilfragen (1893) and the economic definitions presented in Volkskunst, Hausflei...

The influx of Jewish artists of Russian origin into the modern fine arts in the beginning of the twentieth century was remarkable in its magnitude, lack of historical precedent, and an ex-nihilo quality. The list only begins with Marc Chagall, Boris Aronson, El Lissitzky, Mane-Katz, Robert Falk, Abram Manevich, Chaim Soutine, Issachar Ryback, Joseph Tchaikov, and Osip Zadkine, and can be supplemented many-times fold. How do we explain that a generation of Jewish artists from Russian and Eastern Europe, like none before, suddenly developed an interest in making fine art? This question is usually answered in broad strokes by reference to demographic and social changes, including the loosening of restrictions, mass migration, growing secularisation and the rise of Zionism and Bundism. The two nineteenth-century precursors in Russia, Marc Antokol'sky and Isaac Levitan, are also mentioned and several in Germany, including Moritz Oppenheim, Maurycy Gottlieb, Samuel Hirsenberg, Isidore Kaufman, and Ephraim Moses Lilien. Researchers do not have a complete picture, however, of the textually embedded ideational environment out of which Jewish art in Russia emerged. In contrast, we know a substantial amount about this intellectual context in Germany and Austria, with its anti-Semitic, political and academic debates on Jewish art. This essay aims to help correct the imbalance, whereby the inquiry into the genesis of Jewish art historiography relies overwhelmingly on Germanand English-language sources. While gauging the interaction between the various discourses on Jewish art across the continent is a task for future study, here I follow Avram Kumpf's hunch that in Russia 'the concept seemed at one point to have a stronger foundation than in Western Europe'. By focusing exclusively on Russian texts, I am not assuming that they were produced in a vacuum. Certainly, there was a lively intellectual exchange taking place in Jewish journals and conferences across the Russian?German border in the years leading up to World War I. Still, it is important to acknowledge the degree to which the concept, as it developed in Russia, was locally anchored. My aim is to appreciate the unique ways in which ideas about Jewish art evolved from about 1880 to 1920 in the writings of Vladimir Stasov, Nikolai Lavrsky, Ilya Gintsburg, and others and provided a foundation for later scholarship. I also suggest that early Russian criticism, i.e. 'the word', laid the groundwork for the 'deed', or the artistic praxis of Russian Jews starting in the 1910s. The texts help fill a lacuna in our understanding of where Jewish art came from in Russia. As I contend, it is not enough to attribute Chagall's success to practical circumstances, i.e. his study at Yehuda Pen's (mostly Jewish) art school in Vitebsk and to fortuitous and generous sponsorship. The conditions that made Chagall possible were also ideational and more specific to art than political nationalism. They were set in motion decades before his first painting, 1 Overviews of this generation are provided in Avram Kampf, Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in Twentieth Century Art (Lund Humphries: London, 1990 [1984]); Kenneth E. Silver and Romy Golan (eds), The Circle at Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905-1945 (The Jewish Museum: New York, 1985).

Reviewed by: Jewish Art: A Modern History by Samantha Baskind and Larry Silver Paul B. Jaskot Samantha Baskind and Larry Silver , Jewish Art: A Modern History. London: Reaktion Books, 2011. Pp. 311, 149 illustrations (51 b&w; 98 color). Paperback, $35.00. ISBN 978-1-86189-802-9. What is, after all, "Jewish art"? It can't be merely art made by Jews, since for every Jewish artist who has depicted a scene from the Torah there are just as many if not more Jewish artists who have worked with subject matter and in stylistic trends indistinguishable from their non-Jewish brethren. Particularly in the early modern and modern period, talking about a Jewish artist is often as relevant as talking about a Munich artist or an Irish artist: the ethnic, religious, or geographic distinctions are, of course, important for a social history of art, but they vary in terms of whether and when they are determining factors. The great president of the Prussian Academy of Art, Max Liebermann, certainly painted portraits of Jewish members of the Wilhelmine and Weimar German social world he occupied, but these portraits are not visually or iconographically distinct from his depictions of Christian members of this same Berlin world. And yet, clearly, at times, the status of the artist, patron, or society for which a work is done as Jewish makes a difference. How, then, should a scholar discuss the conundrum of Jewish identity and art? Such is the task that Samantha Baskind and Larry Silver take upon themselves in Jewish Art: A Modern History. On the surface, the book follows the trajectory of prominent Jewish artists and Jewish tropes in art since the French Revolution. Baskind and Silver's contribution at this level should not be underestimated, as we have needed an eminently readable overview of themes and contributions by Jewish artists in the modern period. This satisfying volume comes complete with lavish illustrations of known and not-so-familiar works, most reproduced in color. More analytically, Baskind and Silver also aim to offer a new interpretation of what constitutes Jewish art. These authors argue that the diasporic nature of the Jewish experience has made Jewish artists distinct from their dominant Christian colleagues, and that living with this and other differences has marked these artists explicitly or implicitly in ways that insist upon a separate critical analysis. (10-11) In this sense, Jewish art must be approached like feminist or African-American art as a prominent entity unto itself that at times engages seamlessly with the dominant culture, while at other times radically asserts—by intent or default—its difference. The authors don't downplay in the least the diversity of Jewish experience, instead [End Page 89] emphasizing that the variety of experience has led to a wide field of Jewish expression in art. On the contrary, for Baskind and Silver the instability of Jewish biographies as tied to a fluctuating and unstable concept of religious and ethnic identity requires exactly such a broad view of difference as constituted through and in artistic expression. The book is organized in chapters distinguished chronologically and geographically, with an emphasis on Europe, the United States, and Israel. While modern in focus, the authors have added a particularly useful excursus on pre-modern Jewish artists and Jewish themes in art (including by Christians, such as the prominent example of Rembrandt, one of Silver's areas of expertise). From the French revolution, they cover the "invention" of the Jewish artist in the nineteenth century, the intersection of art and Judaism in the revolutionary and political upheavals of the early twentieth century, Jewish artists in America (again, predominantly twentieth century, dovetailing with Baskind's main research focus), art and the Holocaust, and Jewish artists in Israel. Placing such weight in particular on the Holocaust and Israel is not without its political pitfalls, although the critical perspective employed by the authors strikes the right note on the whole. For this book, they limit themselves to fine arts, that is painting and prints with the occasional sculpture. Certainly, the authors could have added other geographies (such as Canada, Australia, or South America) and other media (above all, architecture and decorative arts...

Between 1890 and 1918 the city of evolved into a commercial and industrial hub that also became an international center for radical new ideas in the visual, performing, and literary arts. Jews were key leaders in developing this unique cosmopolitan culture. Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890-1918 vividly documents the many ways that Jewish artists and entrepreneurs participated in this burst of artistic creativity and promoted the emergence of modernism on the international scene. The book and exhibition at The Jewish Museum highlight leading cultural figures such as Max Liebermann, a founder of the Secession, and Herwarth Walden, who founded Der Sturm; artists such as Ludwig Meidner and Jakob Steinhardt; pioneers of cabaret, theater, and film, including Max Reinhardt and Ernst Lubitsch; art dealers, publishers, and writers; and, leading intellectual and political figures such as Martin Buber and Georg Simmel. These and other fascinating individuals are represented by more than 200 diverse objects: paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, books, letters, posters, graphic arts, theater memorabilia, and film. The book includes eight essays by scholars of German and Jewish culture and art history that provide a truly interdisciplinary interpretation of the renaissance. The period represented in Metropolis was a time when Jews were traditionally restricted from participating in major areas of German public life such as the army, government, and the university. But by turning to the 'alternative public spheres' characteristic of urban society - galleries, cafes, journals, theaters, cabarets - they emerged as innovative cultural leaders whose intellectual and artistic impact is still felt today. The exhibition, Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890-1918, will be at The Jewish Museum, New York, from November 14, 1999, to March 5, 2000; and the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, from April 1 to June 11, 2000.

expressionist painters commonly given credit for founding the movement. 90.3pappas 7/10/03, 8:59 AM 230 A. Pappas: The Picture at Menorah Journal 231 Journal circle. The sculptures of Zadkine and Archipenko, Mourning and Moses Pleads with God, represent the extent to which magazine was willing to entertain abstract tendencies in the name of “Jewish” art. These figurative sculptures are abstracted in that the forms are blocky and lack the embellishment of detail. Yet the works remain strongly figurative and therefore narrative; their subject matter rescues them from possible non-Jewish readings. Archipenko’s sculpture represents Moses, complete with the tablets of the law, and Zadkine’s sculpture depicts a female figure leafing through a book held on her lap. The presence of the book in conjunction with the title, Mourning, suggests the comfort that religious texts may offer in times of grief. Zadkine’s work appeared as the frontispiece in the Summer 1943 issue, which also carried an “Homage to the Christian Poles and the Maccabean Jews of Warsaw” on the pages immediately preceding Zadkine’s sculpture.45 This positioning cast Mourning as explicitly referring to the dead heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, rather than as a generic allegorical figure. Artists whose work more closely approached abstraction, such as Adolph Gottlieb (later to garner fame as an abstract expressionist), at times received mention in print, but did not rate inclusion in the reproductions.46 The problem with abstraction lay in the need to have art within the magazine function as a carrier for Jewishness. Subject matter frequently took care of this, as we have seen. When the subject matter was secular, the imagery could be framed as Jewish by the way it was positioned relative to other works reproduced in the magazine. Abstract art could not be treated in the same way because, unlike secular images, say of Jewish neighborhoods, the viewers did not have a readily available way to insert themselves into the image. Simply put, abstract art could not support a visual narrative of Jewishness of any kind in America. Scholarly opinion at the time also subscribed to this view of “Jewish” art as essentially figurative. Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein voiced this directly in her 1944 essay, “Reflections on Jewish Art,” published in Jewish Review.47 Wischnitzer-Bernstein was a prominent scholar who focused on the cultural production of Jews; among other accomplishments, she was a pioneer in several projects aimed at producing a history of Jewish art. As an expert familiar with a wide range of Jewish cultural production, she spoke with authority. After praising the variety of art 45. Zadkine’s work appears in Menorah Journal 31 (1943). Archipenko’s work appeared on the cover of the Winter 1943 issue. 46. William Schack, “A Live Year of Art,” Menorah Journal 29 (1941): 185. 47. Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein, “Reflections on Jewish Art,” Jewish Review 2

With the break-up of the Soviet Union, countries and cultures under Soviet control opened up to the West. In the past few years, as information has begun to flow more freely, art historians have found themselves having to re-examine subjects in the light of newly accessible information. Nowhere is this situation more apparent than in the study of Jewish artists in Russia. Until recently, books and catalogues written in the West have concentrated on work done by Russian Jewish artists in exile. Now, for the first time, an international group of scholars has been assembled to address the last hundred years of art produced by Jews living in Russia itself. Under Tsarist rule, Jews were confined to communities within the Pale of Settlement, and those interested in pursuing artistic careers were educated locally or found that opportunities to attend urban academies were severely limited. Nonetheless, a significant Jewish presence existed on the Russian art scene before the Revolution. Having suffered persecution and circumscribed professional opportunities for decades, many Jewish artists welcomed the Revolution and threw themselves into the task of building the new Communist society. With the lifting of sanctions on Jews, many found jobs in the new Soviet bureaucracy of culture or as influential teachers, designers, and photographers. Some, like El Lissitszky, became world-famous members of the Russian avant-garde. With the advent of Stalin, the eternal political game played by Russian governments with ethnic minorities took another diabolical turn. Many Jews who had attained positions of responsibility became victims of Stalin's purges. Some survived, adopting the officially sanctioned Socialist Realist style; others emigrated. Beginning in the Khruschev years, the Russian underground gradually gained momentum. Jewish artists, who played an essential role in keeping unofficial art alive, worked solely for themselves or exhibited in their own apartments. Nonetheless, the political tide turned slowly. Today, the new openness between Russia and the West has made it possible for the work of these individuals to be set against a narrative of tragedy and transcendence stretching back over many years. Given the present state of research, this text purposely proposes more questions than it answers. An historical overview by historian Michael Stanislawski is followed by seven essays by an international roster of art historians who address, in chronological sequence, the difficult, frequently uplifting history of Jewish art in Russia in the modern period. Essays are contributed by Ziva Amishai-Maisels, John E. Bowit, Boris Groys, Victor Misiano, Aleksandra Shatskikh, Michael Stanislawski and Seth L. Wolitz.

The paper deals with renewal of socialist art history in the Post-Stalinist period in Soviet Union. The modernisation of art history is discussed based on the example of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (Estonian SSR), where art historians were forced to accept the Soviets’ centrally constructed Marxist-Leninist aesthetic and approach to art and art history. In the art context, the idea of progressiveness began to be reconsidered. In previous discourse, progress was linked with the “realist” artistic method that sprang from a progressive social order. Now, however, art historians found new arguments for accepting different cultures of form, both historical and contemporary, and often these arguments were “discovered” in Marxism itself. As a result, from the middle of 1950’s Soviet art historians fell into two camps in interpreting Realism: the dogmatic and revisionist, and the latter was embraced in Estonia. In 1967, a work was published by the accomplished artist Ott Kangilaski and his nephew, the art historian Jaak Kangilaski: the Kunsti kukeaabits – Basic Art Primer – subtitled “Fundamental Knowledge of Art and Art History.” In its 200 pages, Jaak Kangilaski’s Primer laid out the art history of the world. Kangilaski also chimed in, publishing an article in 1965 entitled “Disputes in Marxist Aesthetics” in the leading Estonian SSR literary journal Looming (Creation). In this paper the Art Primer is under scrutiny and the deviations and shifts in Kangilaski’s approach from the existing socialist art history canon are introduced. For Kangilaski the defining element of art was not the economic base but the “Zeitgeist,” the spirit of the era, which, as he wrote, “does not mean anything mysterious or supernatural but is simply the sum of the social views that objectively existed and exist in each phase of the development of humankind.” Thus, he openly united the “hostile classes” of the social formations and laid a foundation for the rise of common art characteristics, denoted by the term “style.” As is evidenced by various passages in the text, art transforms pursuant to the “will-to-art” (Kunstwollen) characteristic of the entire human society. Thus, under conditions of a fragile discursive pluralism in Soviet Union, quite symbolic concepts and values from formalist Western art history were “smuggled in”: concepts and values that the professional reader certainly recognised, although no names of “bourgeois” authors were mentioned. Kangilaski relied on assistance in interpretation from two grand masters of the Vienna school of art history: Alois Riegl’s term Kunstwollen and the Zeitgeist concept from Max Dvořák (Zeitgeist, Geistesgeschichte). In particular, the declaration of art’s linear, teleological “self-development” can be considered to be inspiration from the two. But Kangilaski’s reading list obviously also included Principles of Art History by Heinrich Wölfflin, who was declared an exemplary formalist art historian in earlier official Soviet historiography. Thaw-era discursive cocktail in art historiography sometimes led Kangilaski to logical contradictions. In spite of it, the Primer was an attempt to modernise the Stalinist approach to art history. In the Primer, the litmus test of the engagement with change was the new narrative of 20th century art history and the illustrative material that depicted “formalist bourgeois” artworks; 150 of the 279 plates are reproductions of Modernist avant-garde works from the early 20th century on. Put into the wider context, one can claim that art history writing in the Estonian SSR was deeply engaged with the ambivalent aims of Late Socialist Soviet politics, politics that was feared and despised but that, beginning in the late 1950s, nevertheless had shown the desire to move on and change.

Reviewed by: Jewish Art in America: An Introduction, and: Encyclopedia of Jewish American Artists Barbara Gilbert (bio) Jewish Art in America: An Introduction. By Matthew Baigell. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. xxiv + 253 pp. Encyclopedia of Jewish American Artists. By Samantha Baskind. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. xvii + 323 pp. Two new volumes attempt to provide a comprehensive, critical picture of Jewish artists and art in America from the eighteenth century to the present; each addresses the concept of Jewish identity from a broad point of view. Matthew Baigell is emeritus professor of art history at Rutgers University. His Jewish Art in America: An Introduction builds on his earlier books Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust (1997) and American Artists: Jewish Images (2006) as well as on his numerous articles and essays on early twentieth-century East Coast Jewish American artists. His current book-intended as a survey of Jewish art in America-is more a study of Jewish cultural and social history than of art history. Yet, he provides an excellent background for understanding the various contexts in which American Jews, including artists, have operated. Samantha Baskind, assistant professor of art history at Cleveland University, is a scholar of American art of the first half of the twentieth century, with a focus on Raphael Soyer. Her Encyclopedia of Jewish American Artists provides in-depth entries on eighty-five artists ranging in time from the nineteenth century to the present. While including entries on the more predictable artists such as Ben Shahn, Raphael Soyer, and Max Weber, she also includes some unexpected entries on significant contemporary artists such as Richard Serra and Barbara Kruger as well as sketches of several Jewish photographers who have played a key role in the advancement and acceptance of the medium as an art form. Baigell intends Jewish Art in America to be as inclusive as possible, giving a comprehensive overview of American artists and art exhibiting specific Jewish content or whose interests relate to the American Jewish experience. The book is organized in a loose chronological order. In its introduction Baigell makes a case for a broad interpretation of Jewish art and the Jewish experience based on the diversity of Jewish ethnicity and the intentions of each succeeding generation. The first chapter provides a brief overview of Jewish art in America from the eighteenth century until 1920, with in-depth discussions of the nineteenth-century classical [End Page 475] sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, the massive East European Jewish immigration, and the eventual artistic transformation to a modernist art idiom. In chapter two he focuses on the 1920s, the place of Jewish artists within their own community, and how they were perceived by the wider art world. Particularly interesting is his discussion of Max Weber's unusual stylistic about-face in 1918, when, in response to antisemitism in Europe and America, he turned from strict modernist Cubism to expressionist Jewish subjects. Next Baigell focuses on the 1930s and on art driven by social issues, especially by the socialist ideology reflected in the proletarian themes which dominated so much of the work of immigrant- and first-generation American Jewish artists. In the chapter titled "The 1940s, the Holocaust Years and After," Baigell incorporates well-documented and previously published material about the responses of American artists to the Holocaust by way of a return to Jewish themes as well as the use of imagery from the Gospels-the crucifixion and related scenes-as the only artistic iconography readily available to express the horrors of the Holocaust. His discussion regarding the ambivalence of many young artists to identify Jewishly in their work is very cogent. In chapter five he discusses the work of the older generation of artists in the 1950s, a period he considers "the golden age for Jewish art in America." He examines art commissioned for post-World War II suburban synagogues; artists who continued to create work on Jewish themes; and Zionist-oriented works inspired by visits to the new state of Israel. Next he deals with the generation of artists born in the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the occasional Jewish works of such well-known artists as George Segal and Larry Rivers and also...