Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art (review)

In writing my doctoral thesis on Man Ray in the early 1960s, I focused my attention on his relationship to Dada and Surrealism via descriptions of his stylistic contributions to those movements. My approach was in keeping with the way art history was widely practiced at the time, which was essentially formalist, a methodology derived from modernist art that entailed treating art objects as more than less autonomous entities requiring individual interpretations of their “meaning” but little in the way of contextual ization beyond their visual relationships to one another. Accordingly, it never occurred to me to probe Man Ray’s biography for clues to the meaning of his work, as Milly Heyd does in her essay, “Man Ray/Emmanuel Radnitsky: Who Is Behind The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse?,” in which she impressively demonstrates how, in this (a sewing machine wrapped in a blanket) and other works, the artist shamefully sought to conceal “the self- image that he associated with his Jewish family’s sweatshop experience.” From this “new art history,” Man Ray’s art, like Man Ray’s identity, emerges as more complex—and more problematic—than I had once supposed.

Fifteen essays, all but five of them previously unpublished, comprise this scholarly, Israeli-American study of Jewish consciousness and modern art. No effort is made to isolate specific Jewish characteristics in art—there’s no search for a “Jewish style.” Rather, as the introduction states, “By Jewish art, the coeditors mean an art created by Jewish artists in which one can find some aspect of the Jewish experience, whether religious, cultural, social, or personal.” Thus, as Milly Heyd finds the Jewish experience in Man Ray, so Donald Kuspit and Avigdor Poseq independently find it in Chaim Soutine, Harriet Senie finds it in Richard Serra, and Gannit Ankori finds it in Hannah Wilke—in each case convincingly, thereby demonstrating anew how modernism engages the world obliquely, for no explicit Jewish subjects appear in any of these artists’ works.

Those subjects and the experiences associated with them are in fact the concern of the majority of these essays, which embrace a wide range of artists from both the mainstream and the margins of today’s art historical discourse, from contemporary figures such as Morris Louis (“Sacred Signs and Symbols in Morris Louis: The Charred Journal Series, 1951,” by Mira Goldfarb Berkowitz), Chantel Akerman (“Graven Images on Video? The Second Commandment and Jewish Identity,” by Margaret Olin), and R. B. Kitaj (“R. B. Kitaj’s ‘Good Bad’ Diasporism and the Body in American Jewish Postmodern Art,” by Sander L. Gilman), to nineteenth-century practitioners such as Moses Ezekiel, Maurycy Gottlieb, and Max Liebermann (“Origins of The Jewish Jesus,” by Ziva Amishai-Maisels). In between, renewed attention is devoted to socially and politically activist artists who were prominent in the United States in the 1930s but went into eclipse with the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in the decades that followed, among them William Gropper and Louis Lozowick (“From International Socialism to Jewish Nationalism: The John Reed Club Gift to Birobidzhan,” by Andrew Weinstein), along with Philip Evergood and Ben Shahn (“Jewish American Artists: Identity and Messianism,” by Matthew Baigel and “Ben Shahn, The Four Freedoms and the SS St. Louis,” by Diana Linden).

The concern with Jewish consciousness that propels these texts translates to a strong emphasis on content over form, which in turn signals the unraveling of modernism that began at the end of the 1960s when formalism and its patriarchal, linear narratives yielded to postmodernism and an emphasis on ethnic, racial, identity, and gender issues; a revival of social and political approaches to the history of art; and scholarship that has become increasingly pluralistic and interdisciplinary. The volume under review is a worthy example of these intellectual sea changes, and it will be of interest both to readers of cul tural studies generally and to specialists in Jewish studies alike. It should not...