Jewish Art, Vol. 16/17, 1990-91 (review)

162 SHOFAR Fall 1992 Vol. 11, No. 1 fourteenth-century Spanish haggadah of Sarajevo, where the separation of day from night in Genesis is released by a similar abstract color field." Kampf concludes that "If there were a Jewish style Newman's work would be regarded as its most authentic and classic expression." This occasional tendency to bite off more than he can chew should not obscure Kampfs success in going to the heart and importance of the cultural and religious experience in the development of modern art. Wm. laird K1eine-Ahlbrandt Department of History Purdue University Jewish Art, Vol. 16/17, 1990-91, edited byAliza Cohen-Mushlin. Jerusalem: Hebrew University (HaMakor Press), 1991. 199 pp. Jewish Art (formerly entitledJournal ofJewish Art) began publication in 1974. Handsomely printed and well illustrated with both black-andwhite and color reproductions, it has established itself as the journal of record and a basic research tool for the young but growing field ofJewish art studies. The present volume, whose publication was delayed, according to an editor's note, by the outbreak of the Gulf War, is a double number, featuring articles on a variety of topics, but with a certain emphasis on the period from the early nineteenth century to the present. Several contributions concerning Jewish artists in Russia and countries of Eastern Europe give one reason to hope that under the new political conditions now prevailing, there will be easier access to monuments in these places and greater opportunities for research there. Three of the papers in the volume concern the work ofJewish artists of the nineteenth century. Christiaan Rosen briefly documents the career of the Dutch painter Maurits leon (1838-65), who in the late years of his short life produced several works with Jewish subjects. Elizabeth Kessin Berman studies the life and art of Solomon Nunes Carvalho (1815-79?), a native of Charleston, S.c., both a painter and a practitioner of the new reproductive process of daguerreotype, who accompanied John Fremont on his pioneering expedition to the American West. Norman 1. K1eeblatt makes a judicious comparison between the images of Jewish life in the works of the Frankfurt painter Moritz Daniel Oppenheim and those of his younger Alsatian contemporary, Alphonse Levy. These useful essays suffer-the first two more than the third-from a problem that besets the study of such comparatively minor figures. Their work, largely undocu- Book Reviews 163 mented or unknown, must be assessed on the basis of a small sampling representing what may well be only fortuitous finds. In the case of Leon and Nunes Carvalho, the unassuming quality of the works involved is apt to be redeemed for author and reader alike only by the knowledge that the artist was Jewish, in whatever sense this is to be understood and relevant to the investigation. Will this, however, suffice? The essays of Renee Neher-Bernheim and ofAvigdor W. G. Poseq are thematic in nature and thus tend to escape this difficulty. Neher-Bernheim 's paper concerns the use of the Tables of the Law for the symbolic expression of basic human rights and obligations in the imagery of the French Revolution. The author notes that the Mosaic tables, in their traditional configuration as twin joined slabs with rounded tops, came to function in this setting as an emblem for the authority of natural law and the common good. While this paper concerns the transformation of a symbol rooted in Judaism into a figure of timeless universality, Poseq's essay deals in equally interesting fashion with the process in reverse, the appropriation by Jewish artists of a motif with an initially general or neutral resonance, the hanging carcass of a slaughtered ox. Here, pictorial antecedents could be found in butcher shop scenes and moralizing allegories of the sixteenth century, but it is Rembrandt's famous picture in the Louvre (1655) that stands behind the evocative renditions of this theme by artists like Soutine, Chagall, and the contemporary Israeli sculptor Igael Tumarkin. Rembrandt's paradoxical significance for Jewish artists and the expression ofwhat might be called aJewish sensibility in art can indeed hardly be overestimated. Mirjam Rajner, another contributor to the volume, alludes to it as well in...