Eli Valley has never been one to back down from a controversial viewpoint. In his new comic for Jewcy (complete with beautiful coloring/shading by our very own Craig Leinoff), Valley borrows from that other great Jewish artist, Chagall, to give you a unique perspective on the hubbub surrounding the AgriProcessors kosher abbatoir in Postville, Iowa.

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This article first appeared on December 5, 2008 and has been republished as part of the series JEWCYEST WEEK EVER.

“If I say ‘Jewish Art’ to people, even to dear friends, Jewish or not, it’s like saying ‘the world is round’ in 1491. Each new painting sails off where there be monsters.”

So wrote American Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj in his 1989 book, First Diasporist Manifesto. That kind of stunned incomprehension has mellowed over the years, but it is still a mystery what Jewish art is, or where it comes from. After all, widespread Jewish participation in the visual arts is a relatively recent phenomenon, a fact often ascribed to religious antipathy towards visual representation.

In his recent book, Imagining Jewish Art, theologian and art historian Aaron Rosen contests this assumption of Jewish aniconism, asserting that the second commandment only prohibited the making of images specifically intended for idol worship. But Rosen acknowledges that the Jewish production of visual art has been historically sparse, if not for religious reasons, than because of poverty, oppression and a general lack of opportunity for would-be Jewish artists in Christian Europe.

All that changed in the twentieth century, when figures such as Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine and Jacques Lipchitz took center stage in the pre-Second World War Paris art scene. Likewise, in post-war New York, Jewish artists such as Philip Guston and Mark Rothko led the New York School of abstract expressionist painters.

But despite the recent prevalence of Jewish artists, the question of what makes art Jewish remains open, and attempts at definition have invariably run into difficulties. Rather than try to provide his own definition of Jewish art, Rosen takes a “non definitional approach,” essentially coming at the problem in reverse. Instead of formulating a set of criteria with which to characterize Jewish art, he explores individual works in order to find out if they have anything to say about Jewish concerns; if, in essence, they “speak Jewish.”

The question remains, however, what it means to “speak Jewish.” Rosen addresses this issue somewhat counter-intuitively, by examining the work of three Jewish artists – Marc Chagall, Philip Guston, and R.B. Kitaj - through the lens of their non-Jewish influences.

Studio Visit, by R.B. Kitaj

Indeed, the reality is that because Jewish visual art didn’t exist in any great measure before the twentieth century, Jewish painters who wished to create Jewish art were forced to turn to non-Jewish works for their visual vocabulary, and in the process turn those elements into Jewish expressions. While the influence of their Jewish upbringing may have had a powerful effect on their painting, they had few specifically Jewish artistic precedents. This may have presented an artistic challenge, but it also provided a unique opportunity.

Chagall, often regarded as the quintessentially Jewish artist, provides the most straightforward subject for Rosen’s thesis. “As a Jew from the Pale, [Chagall] came to European history from outside that history, and for him all periods were parallel to each other, like so many rooms in the Louvre,” writes Chagall scholar Benjamin Harshav in his 2003 introduction to Marc Chagall on Art and Culture. As a consequence of this outsider perspective, Chagall was able to approach his subjects with a degree of uninhibited creativity that would not have otherwise been available.

Rosen focuses on Chagall’s crucifixion paintings, including Dedicated to Christ of 1912, White Crucifixion of1938, and the post-war Resurrection and Liberation. Like earlier works by the Russian Jewish sculptor Mark Antokosly, Chagall’s depictions of Jesus take on a provocatively Jewish flavor. His Jesus is a Jew, and is identified as such by loincloths bearing stars of David and made out of prayer shawls. Whereas in Christian thought the suffering of Christ brought about the salvation of mankind, in Chagall’s Jewish vision, it has no such saving grace. The sufferings of his crucified Jews are without redemptive merit.

Exodus, by Marc Chagall

Chagall’s crucifixions may not have the redemptive potential of their Christian counterparts, but they are not entirely without hope. The main source for Chagall’s crucifixion paintings, Rosen contends, is the Isenheim Altarpiece of 1512-1516, by German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald. Painted for a monastery that treated sufferers of ergotism and other disfiguring diseases, the altarpiece portrays a particularly gruesome image of Christ on the cross, but also a remarkably beatific vision of the resurrection. In Resurrection and Liberation, the two crucifixion paintings done after the Holocaust, Chagall presents a similarly uplifting vision of a post-Holocaust Jewish renaissance, led by art.

Unlike Chagall’s evidently Jewish paintings, Philip Guston proves to be a more difficult case to work with. Guston was one of the first generation abstract expressionists, but he later scandalized the art world when he presented an exhibition in 1970 in which he returned to figurative work, painting ominous, cartoonish figures and objects. Rosen focuses on two of Guston’s later works, Deluge II of 1975, in which he traces references to Paolo Uccello’s The Great Flood (c. 1447), and Green Rug of 1976, in which he finds elements of Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation (c. 1455).

While Rosen does an admirable job illustrating the otherwise hard to detect influences of these earlier works, he does less well showing how Guston’s paintings ‘speak Jewish.’ As with Chagall, Rosen points to Guston’s concern with the Holocaust and its aftermath, but in this case, visual references to concrete Jewish experiences are far less obvious. For the most part, Rosen makes the connection by referring to Guston’s stated wish to “make a Golem,” which he interprets as the desire to create something new and living from the clay of older works.

“Guston’s late paintings are haunted by the breakdown of artistic tradition, by his encounter with the artistic past from the position of its inaccessibility and decay. Yet it is this very ‘mortification’…. which can be made to ‘promise a continuity’,” Rosen writes.

1980, by Philip Guston

The metaphor of the Golem is useful in explaining Guston’s artistic project. In this case, however, it wasn’t his identity as a Jewish artist that created a problematic relationship with art history, but a general artistic problem of how to create representational art after abstractionism. While Guston uses a Jewish metaphor to address the issue, it is questionable whether Guston’s paintings actually address Jewish concerns. And even though the idea of the Golem can provide a useful template for those struggling to create a viable Jewish culture after the Holocaust, it is a stretch to say that Guston offered anything other than broad inspiration.

Kitaj provides easier material for Rosen’s book, as he himself insisted on his desire to create Jewish paintings, as a subset of his proposed diasporist movement. Rosen develops this idea, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library:  A Talk About Book Collecting.” In the absence of a fixed physical home, or homeland, Kitaj’s paintings create an abstract home out of an imaginary library of images, Rosen writes. “In a diaspora where painting ‘feels like the last days in a transit camp, with your thin mattress in a roll at the foot of the bed’, Kitaj’s library functions, like Bejnamin’s, as a conceptual landscape and refuge.”

As with Guston, Rosen focuses on two paintings, Amerika (Baseball) from 1983-84 and Los Angeles No.1 from 2000-1. While Amerika borrows from Diego Velazquez’s La Tela Real, also titled Philip IV Hunting Wild Boar (c. 1632-37), its references are less relevant than the subject of the painting itself, baseball. A native of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, Kitaj was a lifelong Cleveland Indians fan, and saw a connection between that “tribe,” as they were affectionately known, and his own Jewish “tribe.” Though Baseball may be the American national pastime, in Kitaj’s vision it became a metaphor, after some adaptation, for Jewish experience in the Diaspora. “Remarkably for a baseball painting, in Kitaj’s ‘vast metaphoric field’ there is no home plate and – even more than that – there are no ‘bases’ whatsoever. This tribe of Jewish Indians may practice their sprints and slides, but no player can be declared ‘safe’,” Rosen remarks.

The source material for the second painting is more crucial. After Kitaj’s move to Los Angeles from London following his wife Sandra’s death in 1994, he came to identify her with the Shekhina, or female spirit of God, and painted a series of Los Angeles pictures depicting both of them as angelic beings. These paintings drew heavily on Cezanne’s late Bather paintings, particularly in their state of “unfinish.” “As Picasso said about unfinish, alive and dangerous,” Kitaj wrote.

As Rosen ties together Kitaj’s method of ‘speaking Jewish’ under the thematic rubric of ‘home,’ he also groups Guston under the heading of ‘tradition’ and Chagall under ‘family.’ These categories seem somewhat pasted on, and Rosen’s overarching thesis often seems loosely woven together. But his effort to identify and elucidate the Jewish concerns of these three very different artists is penetrating and his analysis of the works in question is consistently insightful. Though the exactly nature of Jewish art remains slippery, Rosen’s book is a worthy investigation of the ways in which the most evidently Jewish art can borrow from the least Jewish sources, and the ways in which less apparently Jewish art can have unexpected Jewish resonances.

 

I and the Village, 1911Care to learn a little about the man behind the Chagall your temple Sisterhood’s so very into? Pick up a copy of Marc Chagall, the newest installment in Nextbook’s excellent Jewish Encounters series. Though he is perhaps the most famous, identifiable “Jewish Artist” in the world, Wilson quite skillfully provides a welcome antidote to our conventional, “lachrymose”, post-Holocaust, rampant shtetl-nostalgia, Fiddler-on-the-Roof bullshit Chagall associations, laying out a clear-eyed and fascinating look at the artist himself. Beyond being the dude forever, sadly yoked to flying rabbis, misplaced sentimentality, and lame synagogue art, here we find Chagall alongside Modigliani and Degas in Paris pre-WWI, Chagall the hardcore metro-sexual, given to wearing rouge, Chagall weathering enormous financial, political, and artistic setbacks, Chagall somewhat under-whelmed by Palestine in the ‘30s, and on and on. In Wilson’s own deft prose:

A book marking the vast contribution of Jews to the history of sentimentality, from the novelist Grace Aguilar through Al Jolson and Irving Berlin and on, let us say, to Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond, has yet to be written. But in it Chagall would surely have his own chapter, not because his paintings are desperately mawkish (and after all, sentimentality is not the attribute only of weaker artists -- think of Dickens or Renoir) but because he walked the tightrope that separates sentimentality from deeper, more authentic feeling better than anyone, except perhaps the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

Those of you in New York have the opportunity to hear Wilson on Chagall tonight at Barnes & Noble in Chelsea at 7pm. Lucky you! And if you're not familiar with Wilson's ridiculously great fiction, you can't go wrong with his most recent story collection, the genuinely funny An Ambulance is on the Way.

"Promenade": Whoops, there you go flying off againJudaism and Marc Chagall went together like butter and toast, yet it's the schmaltz that's hampered this extraordinary painter's legacy. He was too "popular" to be taken seriously by the critics, so Jonathan Wilson said to hell with the critics and wrote a biography of Chagall for Nextbook. Jonathan Kirsch reviews it:

The best moments in Wilson's book are those in which he deconstructs the artist's work and decodes its iconography. He suggests, for example, that there is nothing magical, or even whimsical, about Chagall's rooftop violinists. "It was not at all uncommon for shtetl and town residents alike to take to their rooftops, sometimes out of fear and sometimes for fun," he argues. "Chagall's grandfather, for example, liked to climb up on high to chew a few carrots and watch the world go by."

At a still deeper level, Wilson finds in a common Yiddish idiom an explanation for the floating figures that appear in many of Chagall's paintings. "Paradoxically, his work is frequently a literalization of metaphors," he explains. "The word luftmensch, which denotes in Yiddish an individual overly involved in intellectual pursuits, literally means 'man of the air,' a prompt for Chagall to set him flying."

Edmund Wilson once said that the worst thing to happen to Abe Lincoln since John Wilkes Booth was for him to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg. Roughly the same mythopoetic rule is said to apply to Chagall's succumbing to the spell of Fiddler on the Roof, though I think Sholom Aleichem deserves more credit than what it typically accorded to "If I were a rich man."

My theory is this: Fiddler is just Jane Austen covered in soot and sent to the Ukraine. Consider: Affable but hidebound papa seeks financial relief by marrying off his daughters. Romance bows before materialism at every turn. As Auden said of the virgin genius of Hampshire, she "reveal[ed] so frankly and with such sobriety / The economic basis of society." Tevye's debate about whether to join the Marxists in the struggle against the tsar takes its counterpart in the more rococo arguments over the Reform Bill of 1832. Had Chagall come of age in Victorian England, he'd have been an early Impressionist mentioned in the novels of that great philo-Semitic Romantic George Eliot.