First There Was the Word: Early Russian Texts on Modern Jewish Art

Abstract

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).