Jewish Artists in New York: The Holocaust Years (review)

A growing number of books and articles have been written on what was known in North America about the fate of European Jewry during the Holocaust, but few have addressed how North American Jewish artists responded to the tragedy as it was unfolding. Focusing on a circle of Jewish artists in New York in the 1930s and 1940s, Matthew Baigell asks: "On any given day, after hearing the latest news from friends, from the radio, or from newspapers and magazines...about the round-ups, deportations and murders, what did they paint or sculpt when they went into their studio?" (p. 1). To ascertain what these artists knew, Baigell gleans facts from previous studies about American reactions to the news of the mass murders, from Jewish intellectual journals such as Contemporary Jewish Record (the forerunner of Commentary), and from New York newspapers and magazines. With additional reference to artists' journals and conversations with the artists, Baigell examines the responses of a few key Jewish artists through well-crafted readings of their major Holocaust-influenced works.

While representations of the Holocaust have proliferated in the past twenty years, we learn in Baigell's fascinating introduction and first chapter that there was a dearth of Holocaust art created in New York from the late 1930s until the end of World War II. During the war, New York was considered the artistic center of America and was the gathering place for more Jewish artists than any other city in the world, but the Jewish intelligentsia gave little support to those artists who depicted the destruction of European Jewry. The art critic Clement Greenberg is the most interesting case in Baigell's estimation, for in his writings in Contemporary Jewish Record "one would not know that the Holocaust was taking place" (p. 10). Most New York-based Jewish artists at the time aligned themselves with the political left, which was primarily concerned with the general progress of humanity and the effects of capitalism rather than the particular plight of the Jews; this milieu encouraged universal rather than parochial Jewish themes. According to Baigell, many of these artists were conflicted about their Jewish identity. This internal struggle, combined with their desire to assimilate and the prevalence of anti-Jewish sentiment among the American public, made producing works of art with Jewish content less appealing. Also, with art sales in decline during the war, art dealers added more practical pressures by asking their Jewish artists not to paint "too Jewish" (p. 14).

The core chapters of Jewish Artists in New York, though organized somewhat randomly, ostensibly center on three artistic responses to the Holocaust (traditional imagery, Christological and mythological motifs, and the abstract expressionists' new paradigms) and on the artists who created works representative of these genres. The book's organizational difficulties may reflect the fact that of the few Jewish artists from the New York art scene who attempted to produce works on the Holocaust, no one "style" or common subject matter emerged. Baigell attributes this creative heterogeneity to the disparate backgrounds of the artists. As there was a scarcity of published documentary photographs of the massacres and concentration camps until the last months of 1944, when the Red Army began liberating the camps in Poland, few knew the exact face of Nazi brutality. A collective visual memory had not developed throughout most of the war, as artists' visualizations of Nazi atrocities were drawn from their own imaginations, based mostly on written descriptions.

In chapter two, "Images of Tradition," Baigell critiques paintings and sculptures by Max Weber, Hyman Bloom, Ben-Zion, and Mané-Katz. These artists used images of Jewish ritual and worship to affirm Jewish survival and renewal despite the fact that this world was vanishing in Europe. Somewhat out of place in this section, but deserving of Baigell's lengthy consideration, are the illustrations of William Gropper, one of the few American artists who "developed ways to visualize the destruction of the European community as it...