A Woman's Voice in a Man's Mouth: The Sarah Paintings of Richard Mcbee

Traditionally the family has been a narrative institution: It was the past and it had a tale to tell of how things began, including the child himself; and it had counsel to give.

Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), p. 139.

For the body of work called "Sarah's Trials," Richard McBee, artist, writer and Orthodox Jew, transformed his examination of the dysfunctional marriage of Abraham and Sarah into sixteen large oil paintings, arranged as eight diptychs, each more than twelve feet across. In order to present the narrative from Sarah's point of view, McBee delves into traditional sources, including many of the midrashim that, for Orthodox Jews, are almost inseparable from the biblical narrative itself. Pairing the paintings with texts emerging from these sources, McBee creates an imagined paraphrase of Sarah's observations. The resulting images become a visual midrash on the subversive and creative role played by the two women in the triangular relationship joining Abraham, Sarah and Hagar.

Nothing is left out. For starters, McBee pictures the idols that Abraham is said by a well known midrash to have smashed in his father's shop as female fertility goddesses. "For Abraham," says McBee, "the primitive, sensual feminine had to be destroyed." McBee's paintings take a critical view of the narrative, including the akedah—the story of the Binding of Isaac—and what McBee calls "the ultimate insult to Sarah's memory," Abraham's bedding down with the woman who had made her miserable for so many years.

According to McBee, it was his prurient interest in the scandal of the narrative that drew him to it. Then, fascinated by other aspects of the story, he devoted several years to studying the text and making art about it. The dysfunctional family drama has not ceased to smolder

Abraham, who perceives Sarah's legendary beauty as a liability, puts his concern for his own safety above hers and subjects his wife to the danger of rape and adultery. Sarah gives Hagar, a younger servant woman, to her husband. Abraham absconds with Isaac without informing his wife about his intension to sacrifice their beloved son.

McBee's appetite for iconoclastic discourse might surprise anyone with conventional notions of what an Orthodox man—the president of his congregation—might think. His view is that sexuality in the Torah is often pivotal, propelling narrative lines forward in ways that might seem counter-intuitive in a theological text. And yet, the more one examines these matrixes in McBee's provocative paintings, the more the crucial role of feminine sexuality becomes apparent.

"We are trained not to notice or hear the women," he says. "But when I start looking, they aren't in the back seat. They are the engine; they energize the story and drive it forward!"

"Quite frankly," he continues, "I believe we don't have a misogynous religion, but we have a misogynous history."

For McBee, whose understanding of these topics is evidenced through his paintings, there could be no King of Israel (David) or Messiah without the incest of Lot's daughters, which produced the ancestors of Ruth the Moabite, King David's great-grandmother. Tamar, who tricked her father-in-law Judah into having relations with her and thereby conceived David's forefather Peretz, stands out as an individual who struggled to fulfill her destiny within the familial system, and once frustrated there, used transgressive means to achieve her sacred purpose. Without Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar's lust, the Jewish people would not have emerged and been redeemed; Ruth's uncovering of Boaz's feet again brought us to King David; and Esther's beauty and sensuality saved the Jewish people. A sense of humor both heightens and defuses McBee's provocativeness, as apparent, for example, in his title for a painting about Lot's daughters: "Hop on Pop."

The "Sarah's Trials" exhibit, reproduced herein in its entirety, allows viewers to join his investigation into these issues. Meanwhile, the artist is at work on another sixteen-canvas series that will continue his thoughtful parsing out...