:Raphael Soyer and the Search for Modern Jewish Art

Abstract

Among its many treasures, the Jewish Museum in New York boasts a 1926 oil painting entitled “Dancing Lesson” in which a young couple gingerly essays the latest dance steps as various family members, arrayed on the living room couch, look on with a mix of bafflement, consternation, and utter indifference. “Dancing Lesson” also takes pride of place in Samantha Baskind's book, the most recent in a very long series of attempts, some of them dating back a hundred years or so, to get at the thorny and all-too-elusive issue of what makes art Jewish. Is it subject matter? The ethnicity or religion of the artist? The neighborhood in which the artist grew up? Or is it, perhaps, a matter of sensibility, the more rueful the tone, the better? Training her sights on Raphael Soyer, the painter of “Dancing Lesson” and of hundreds of other works that can be found in prestigious museum collections across the United States and Europe, Baskind claims this painting—and with it, a goodly portion of Soyer's numerous canvases, prints, lithographs, and watercolors—as vivid illustrations of an art in which “Jewish qualities are encoded” (p. 2). As for the artist himself, he, too, is said to have “encoded, coped, modified, adapted, retained, eschewed and embraced different aspects of his ethnicity and his Otherness in the Diaspora” (p. 199).