Editorial

The social dimension of both production and research in the visual arts and culture is the common denominator of this volume. Here we move the focus from the works of art to the patrons who supported artists’ creative work and to the collectors who cared about the fruit of artistic work. Richard I. Cohen joined us as guest editor to prepare a Symposium on art patronage and Jewish culture. In his introduction to the Symposium, Cohen states that the selected articles are an output of an international workshop that took place at the Department of Jewish Art of Bar-Ilan University in 2018. Their publication during a time of pandemic, when human mobility and public gatherings are no more taken for granted, stresses our confidence in the value of in-person exchange of ideas. We profoundly appreciate the effort of all the authors who finalized their texts and collected illustrations while many libraries, museums, and archives were barely reachable, and while many people felt anxiety about their health and lives.

The Symposium highlights the patronage and collection of Jewish art in three regions of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe: Germany, Italy, and eastern Europe. Jewish patronage and the collecting of modern art in Italy is explored by Luisa Levi D’Ancona Modena. Sergey R. Kravtsov examines the history and driving forces behind art collecting by Jews in Austria- and Poland-governed Lviv. The article by Aleksandra Krypczyk-De Barra sheds light on Jewish collectors of Polish art. Inka Bertz investigates a monetary prize offered by a Jewish donor and art lover for the sake of integrating Jewish artists in nineteenth-century Germany into the mainstream of European art. Artur Tanikowski traces the process of unchaining artists from the state funding of art, as their protest against political oppression and antisemitism erupted in communist Poland in the aftermath of the Six Day War in 1967 in Israel, and they joined the liberal protests of 1968.

The Special Item of our sixteenth volume is a series of Gershom Scholem’s kabbalistic charts. J. H. Chajes’ analysis of these documents adds new pages to the history of Scholem’s intellectual heritage and epitomizes the power of collections as treasures and vehicles of knowledge.

The Book Reviews survey several recent scholarly contributions to studies of Jewish art. Two of them celebrate more than half a century of devoted collecting and propagating of traditional Jewish art by William Gross, one of the begetters of Ars Judaica and an active member of its Academic Board. Richard I. Cohen writes about Windows on Jewish Worlds, an edited volume of essays presented as an homage to William Gross on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Shalom Sabar reviews Gross’s own monumental oeuvre, the catalogue of catalogues of exhibitions of Jewish art from 1876 until the present.

Two more reviews look at monographs on Jewish artists who were born in nineteenth-century Galicia and Ukraine and developed their careers in western Europe. Elana Shapira considers Lynne M. Swarts’s research on women in the work of Ephraim Moses Lilien at the German fin de siècle, and Olaf Terpitz surveys Sigalit Meidler-Waks’s book on Issachar Ber Ryback.

The three final contributions present the views of their authors on thematic studies of contemporary perceptions of the Holocaust and the State of Israel in visual culture. Ziva Amishai-Maisels scrutinizes Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius’s and Sigrid Philipps’s work on the Holocaust in the art of postwar Germany. Lisa Saltzman shares with us her thoughts on Samantha Baskind’s The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture. Dalia Manor discusses Alec Mishory’s vision of the interplay of national and universalist, and religious and secular aspects of Israeli visual culture.