Kitaj's List

Abstract

I WANT TO PLAY A GAME I have never seen played before. To make a list of the dozen or so Jewish painters would invite much trouble, but to list my own favorites lies well within the democratic freedoms and perspectivism we usually enjoy, so that's what I'll try to do here because, well, the game sort of excites me, as the Jewish Question has for many years. I find it exciting to probe, and recover if I can, those rare souls who made art very unlike other art, what Harold Bloom, in his Western canon, valued above all else -strangeness. Right at the outset I will invite trouble by saying that there are no great Jewish or women painters for Mie, largely for the same post-Emancipation reasons, as there alre Christian males of ultimate genius. Jews and women were not freed from their closed societies to be schooled as painters until the late nineteenth century, the Second Commandment against idolatry notwithstanding in the case of Jews. So, it is only with Pissarro (1830-1903) that the first really good painter of Jewish descent emerges. Cezanne called himself a pupil of Pissarro. There is, sadly, no Jewish Cezanne or Degas or Matisse or Picasso (or Giotto, or Titian, or Rembrandt, or Goya). You will just have to trust me. The Jews have produced many great modern (and ancient) figures like Marx, Freud, Einstein, Proust, Kafka, and Schonberg, but no painters of that class. It is my contention that the best Jewish painters are what are called minor masters and that they only appear in what may be called the modern period. Before Pissarro, there were the very ordinary Hellenist painters of Dura-Europas and a very few inconsiderable, pedestrian others like Mengs, Zoffany, and Oppenheim, all said to be Jews. There was Jewish artisanship in between, but not painting. I will not treat here the fascinating Jewish Question of Jewish art. Good Jewish painters have hardly ever treated the Jewish Question, because they have insisted almost exclusively upon just being good, universal painters.