Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the Masters in Chagall, Guston, and Kitaj (review)

Abstract

Imagining Art: Encounters with the Masters in Chagall, Guston, and Kitaj, by Aaron Rosen. London: Legenda, 2009. 128 pp. $89.50. The question is art? has preoccupied scholars over the decades, although such discussions have recently waned even if there is still a lack of consensus (including no consensus on whether a consensus is necessary). As early as the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1901, Martin Buber mounted a special exhibition of art, which explicitly aimed identify and define elements in visual art. Critics argue whether art should be limited exclusively any art made by a Jew, independent of content, or else whether both the artist and the artwork must be identifiably Jewish, expressly engaging the experience, religious or worldly. In other words, a nineteenth-century portrait of a Gentile sitter by German artist Moritz Daniel Oppenheim would be considered a Jewish work of art, just as much as objects with obvious content, such as a Holocaust memorial by American sculptor Louise Nevelson, a landscape scene of early twentieth-century Palestine by Israeli painter Reuven Rubin, or an eleventh-century German Chanukiah. This issue is obviously most relevant for painting and sculpture from the modern period, namely after the Haskalah, whereas ancient and medieval artwork, or even ceremonial objects, are easily accepted as art. Intrigued by what art may or may not be, well outlined in an introduction that thoughtfully elucidates his methods, Aaron Rosen takes a different tack this question. Rosen builds on Margaret Olin's rejection of the notion that art must be defined, and her argument that instead art can speak'Jewish' (p. 1) at various times, depending on how it is tead and who views it. Accordingly, in his slim volume, Rosen adopts a non-definitional approach (p. 5) art, manifested by fleshing out the non-Jewish artistic influences on the work of the three artists noted in his title: Marc Chagall, Philip Guston, and R. B. Kitaj. That is say, rather than offering an overarching theory of art comprised of characteristics - style, subject, function, or authorship, for example - Rosen looks at works individually, discerning Jewi sh qualities. Although a trained theologian, Rosen shows sensitivity visual form, not treating art as illustrations of a moment or cultural experience, as non -art historians often do. In his chapter on Marc Chagall, Rosen considers several of the artist's biblical works, but especially his crucifixions, and in reference artistic precedents, notably German painter Matthias Gruenwald's Isenheim Altarpiece (1510-15). Using the model of family, Rosen argues that Chagall's art creates a lineage as well as a dialogue with the past and offers a way understand how a artist connects with a decidedly Christian history of art. The second chapter explores Philip Guston's late work, when he returned figuration after decades of painting as an Abstract Expressionist. Rosen concentrates on two images, and ones that on the surface would not appear be Jewish - Deluge II (1975) and Green Rug (1976) - examining them in conjunction, respectively, with two fifteenth-century paintings that are decidedly not Jewish: Paolo Uccello's The Great Flood (c. 1447) and Piero della Francesca's The Flagellation (c. 1455). Playing on Guston's comment that he hoped to make a Golem (p. 51), Rosen understands the artist as wanting mold the clay of older art, so speak, into something newer and of his own. …