Jewish Art and Modernity

The idea of being a so-called Jewish artist is like being a professional Jew. I think art is international and should transcend any racial, ethnic, religious, or national boundaries.

Adolph Gottlieb¹

Everyone from New York is Jewish, and everyone who isn't, isn't.

Lenny Bruce²

For Harry Rand

Both of the terms in the title of this essay have been endlessly debated in an effort to arrive at some kind of essentialistic definition of each. I suggest that such definitions are contextual and interdependent. The attempt to be a modern artist is vexing enough in general, but for Jews, who for centuries have been regarded by others as well as by many of their fellow Jews as the "people without art" because of the Second Commandment's injunction against making graven images, making art poses particular challenges.³ As a result, perhaps unsurprisingly, their personal artistic achievements have varied considerably. Is there any way, then, to discern something "Jewish" in the work of late nineteenth-or twentieth-century Jewish artists? This essay attempts to provide an analysis of Jewish art-making in context, theoretical as well as pragmatic.⁴

Jewish Art as "Marked"

In what ways can artists or other modern figures be seen as "Jewish?" One recent interpretation begins with the following provocative declaration:

The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century. Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible.[. . .] Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.⁵

To begin the search for a Jewish engagement with modernity, I offer a quote from Freud's foreword to the Hebrew edition of Totem and Taboo:

No reader of this book will easily be able to put himself in the emotional situation of its author, who does not understand the holy tongue, is alienated from ancestral religion–as from all others– and is not able to share in national ideals, yet has never denied belonging to his people, feels his particularity as a Jew and does not wish it otherwise. If you were to ask him: What is Jewish about you, when you have given up all these commonalities with your people? He would answer, a great deal still, probably the most important thing of all. But he would not be able to render this essential thing in clear words.⁶

This question regarding identity is echoed in an essay by Isaac Deutscher, "The Non-Jewish Jew" (1968), referenced by Mirjam Rajner in her paper at the conference "Constructing and Deconstructing Jewish Art,"⁷ and it raises the issue of what to do with such Jews as Spinoza, Heine, Marx, and Freud himself, who lived, in the words of Deutcher, "on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures [. . .] insider and outsider."⁸

A similar dilemma arises in the attempt to identify any common element among twentieth-century Jewish artists, who inevitably look so different from one another, even when they have common Jewish roots. This article looks at several artists with origins in closely comparable periods and places, in order to consider how they could all still be considered "Jewish." In modern literature, Saul Bellow and other American Jewish (or Jewish-American) authors have refused to accept that label, and many women artists, such as Helen Frankenthaler, have rejected gender as either a marginalizing or a demeaning qualification of their output.⁹ Cynthia Ozick once deplored what she calls the "descent into ethnicity," and called the phrase "Jewish writer" an oxymoron. Memorably Ozick also declared:

To be Jewish is to be a member of a civilization–a civilization with a long, long history that is [. . .] a procession of ideas. Jewish history is intellectual history. And all this can become the content of a writer's mind.[. . .] To be a writer is one thing; to be a Jew is another thing. To combine them is a third thing.¹⁰

My rejoinder here is that however much they wish to escape their origins, all Jewish artists are, nevertheless, marked somehow by their Jewish origins. The case is similar...