Jewish Art in America: An Introduction, and: Encyclopedia of Jewish American Artists (review)

Two new volumes attempt to provide a comprehensive, critical picture of Jewish artists and art in America from the eighteenth century to the present; each addresses the concept of Jewish identity from a broad point of view. Matthew Baigell is emeritus professor of art history at Rutgers University. His Jewish Art in America: An Introduction builds on his earlier books Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust (1997) and American Artists: Jewish Images (2006) as well as on his numerous articles and essays on early twentieth-century East Coast Jewish American artists. His current book-intended as a survey of Jewish art in America-is more a study of Jewish cultural and social history than of art history. Yet, he provides an excellent background for understanding the various contexts in which American Jews, including artists, have operated. Samantha Baskind, assistant professor of art history at Cleveland University, is a scholar of American art of the first half of the twentieth century, with a focus on Raphael Soyer. Her Encyclopedia of Jewish American Artists provides in-depth entries on eighty-five artists ranging in time from the nineteenth century to the present. While including entries on the more predictable artists such as Ben Shahn, Raphael Soyer, and Max Weber, she also includes some unexpected entries on significant contemporary artists such as Richard Serra and Barbara Kruger as well as sketches of several Jewish photographers who have played a key role in the advancement and acceptance of the medium as an art form.

Baigell intends Jewish Art in America to be as inclusive as possible, giving a comprehensive overview of American artists and art exhibiting specific Jewish content or whose interests relate to the American Jewish experience. The book is organized in a loose chronological order. In its introduction Baigell makes a case for a broad interpretation of Jewish art and the Jewish experience based on the diversity of Jewish ethnicity and the intentions of each succeeding generation. The first chapter provides a brief overview of Jewish art in America from the eighteenth century until 1920, with in-depth discussions of the nineteenth-century classical sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, the massive East European Jewish immigration, and the eventual artistic transformation to a modernist art idiom. In chapter two he focuses on the 1920s, the place of Jewish artists within their own community, and how they were perceived by the wider art world. Particularly interesting is his discussion of Max Weber's unusual stylistic about-face in 1918, when, in response to antisemitism in Europe and America, he turned from strict modernist Cubism to expressionist Jewish subjects. Next Baigell focuses on the 1930s and on art driven by social issues, especially by the socialist ideology reflected in the proletarian themes which dominated so much of the work of immigrant- and first-generation American Jewish artists. In the chapter titled "The 1940s, the Holocaust Years and After," Baigell incorporates well-documented and previously published material about the responses of American artists to the Holocaust by way of a return to Jewish themes as well as the use of imagery from the Gospels-the crucifixion and related scenes-as the only artistic iconography readily available to express the horrors of the Holocaust. His discussion regarding the ambivalence of many young artists to identify Jewishly in their work is very cogent.

In chapter five he discusses the work of the older generation of artists in the 1950s, a period he considers "the golden age for Jewish art in America." He examines art commissioned for post-World War II suburban synagogues; artists who continued to create work on Jewish themes; and Zionist-oriented works inspired by visits to the new state of Israel. Next he deals with the generation of artists born in the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the occasional Jewish works of such well-known artists as George Segal and Larry Rivers and also...