Jewish Art in the 20th Century AJH 190715 pdf

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Jewish Art in the 20th
Century
Antony Jolyon Hale. July 19, 2015
Contents
Synopsis
Introduction page 2
1. The relationship between art and religion: a Christian standpoint page 3
2. The image of Christ in modern art page 7
3. Reflections on Jewish identity: in the Jewish Museum, New York City page 11
4. Reflections on Jewish identity: Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ page 12
5. The Holocaust (The Shoah) page 17
6. 20 Jewish artists of the 20th
Century page 19
7. Is there Jewish art? Page 38
8. Mark Rothko page 47
9. Key themes page 55
Bibliography page 55
Appendix A: Overview of the main movements in Western art 1900-1960 page 56
Synopsis
The survival of the Jewish Diaspora, and the Jewish belief that ‘Jews are the memory of the nations’,
gave to Jewish artists in the 20th
Century a purpose and a meaning in painting. Jewish artists also
acted as prophet and as peacemaker to the nations. Chagall is noteworthy in this respect.
Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust meant that many Jewish artists in the 20th
Century were either
displaced migrants learning to be American, or were imprisoned and put to death by Nazi Germany,
or they found themselves compelled to witness to the Holocaust as it took place or to find meaning
in the Holocaust subsequently. Newman in particular sought post-Holocaust meaning in the USA.
In the post Holocaust era, identity was the primary theme for Jewish artists, but because of the great
displacement of populations that took place in the 20th
Century, and the sense that ‘God is dead’,
Jewish concerns about identity also spoke to all peoples.
We cannot say that Rothko’s mature style colour-field paintings were a direct specific response to
the Holocaust. Rothko’s concern since at least the early 1930s had been the fragmentation that
afflicted individuals and society as a whole. He wanted to achieve paintings that would be new
‘anecdotes of the spirit’ which would provide ‘resolution of an eternally familiar need’. With his
mature style he was successful in this.
The Jew’s status as ‘outsider’ stimulated artistic creativity. The displacement and uncertainty about
identity meant that the Jewish artist ‘had a great schooling in grief’. The creativity that was thus
generated contributed fundamentally to 20th
Century art. Particular Jewish artists in this regard
were Epstein, Weber, Soutine, Chagall, Rothko, Guston, Newman and R B Kitaj.
At various points in the 20th
Century Jewish art engaged directly with Christianity. Much of 20th
Century art that used Christian iconography was too literal and too derivative to be effective.
Notable artists who were effective in producing Christian art were Roualt, Spencer, Sutherland,
Epstein and Chagall: the last two of these were Jewish.
Jewish artists of the late 20th
Century challenged Christians. Bak is a Holocaust survivor artist who
continues to do this. Since the Holocaust, Jew and Christian are both at ‘a corrupted place of our
shared humanity that leaves us even more uneasy before the divine’.

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Introduction
This extended essay is about Jewish artists in the West in the 20th
Century. The essay begins with
two sections about Christian art in the 20th
Century. Christianity was the dominant religious milieu in
the West in the 20th
Century. At various points in the essay Jewish art engages directly with
Christianity and Christian art.
The motivation for the sabbatical was a life-long commitment to art – including my own work as an
artist – and in particular the desire to understand more about 20th
Century art in the Western
tradition. As a priest of the Church of England and having travelled in Central and Eastern Europe in
the last five years, I wanted to make connections between the Holocaust, émigré Jewish artists from
the Pale of Settlement who settled in the USA in the 20th
Century, the Jewish history of the 20th
Century and the history of art in the 20th
Century.
My introduction to the study of art history was with my teacher at Caterham School - John Bleach –
who tutored me in 19th
Century French and English painting and enabled me in 1974 to obtain A
Level Fine Art at B grade.
An early prompting to pursue the history of Jewish 20th
Century art arose when I visited the
exhibition ‘Cross Purposes – Shock and Contemplation in Images of the Crucifixion’ at Mascalls
Gallery, Kent in 2010 in the company of my father Ken Hale, who died at the age of 85 in 2013, and
my mother Dorothy Hale, who is very much alive. This exhibition was a joint venture between Ben
Uri, the London Jewish Museum of Art and Mascalls Gallery.
As a priest of the Church of England, part of my task is to read and teach the Bible, the greater part
of which by length is the Jewish scriptures that comprise the Old Testament. After 27 years of
ministry, I decided it was about time that I learned more about the Jewish roots of Christianity.
The life and work of Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970) particularly interests me. Rothko – a Jew - was born
Markus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia – now Daugavpils, Latvia. He emigrated to the USA with his
family at the age of ten. By the age of twenty two he had chosen an artist’s life and he had moved
to New York City where he taught art to children at the Brooklyn Jewish Centre – a job he
maintained for 27 years until he was 49 years old. At the age of 55 Rothko was chosen – along with
three other artists – to represent the USA at the XXIX Venice Biennale. Rothko died at the age of 67.
His works in the Tate Modern in London are housed in their own room. Since I first encountered
these works in the 1970s when they were in the Tate Gallery, I have been aware of the power of
Rothko’s mature colour-field style and the fact that it has a great public appeal and sells for huge
sums. And the mature-style works by Rothko are regarded by many as having a ‘spiritual’ effect on
the viewer. The large size, the mesmerising wall of single colour and the sensitive ‘flickering’ edges
of the colour field – as well as the luminous appearance of the colour field – all attract the observer
in contemplation as of a great and deep mystery. In my curiosity about the meanings of abstract art
painted in the 20th
Century, and about the ways in which the Holocaust is commemorated and
presented in the visual arts, I wanted to know what connections exist between Rothko’s Jewish
identity, the history of 20th
Century art and Rothko’s reaction to the Holocaust.
This essay is one of the outcomes of a sabbatical that I took from mid May until mid August 2015. I
was permitted by the Bishop of Chichester to step back from my usual occupation as Vicar of the
parish church of All Saints, Crawley Down in the Diocese of Chichester so that I could pursue
interests in art. Grants from the Bishop of Chichester, Ecclesiastical Insurance and St. Matthias
Trust; the hospitality of the House of the Redeemer – retreat house of the Episcopal Church of the
USA on East 95th
Street; and the generous understanding of my wife Kerry enabled me to stay in
New York City for two weeks so that I could visit museums of modern art and become acquainted
with the city. New York City was the centre of 20th
Century art from the early 1940s and throughout
the post war era.

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During the three months of the sabbatical I also visited art galleries in the UK in Norwich, Cambridge
and St.Ives.
My very helpful tutor since April 2014 has been Dr Aaron Rosen, of Kings College, London.
Since August 2014 I have been studying 20th
Century art. My essays on the subject are on my blog:
http://abstractartc20.blogspot.co.uk/
As a Christian priest I begin in Section 1 of the essay by summarising the first two Chapters of
George Pattison’s book of 2009: ‘Crucifixions and Resurrections of the Image’. The book is a
‘Christian reflection on art and modernity’.
Section 2 reviews the image of Christ in modern art. This summarises parts of Richard Harries’
book: ‘The Image of Christ in Modern Art’. Harries is a retired Bishop of the Church of England.
Section 3 presents the first of two reflections on Jewish identity. This summarises a videotape that
was playing at the Jewish Museum, New York when I visited in June 2015.
Section 4 is the second reflection on Jewish identity: a summary of aspects of Saul Bellow’s novel
‘Herzog’ that I read whilst in New York City.
Section 5 concerns the Holocaust (the Shoah).
Section 6 describes twenty Jewish artists of the 20th
Century. Amongst other things this shows the
close interweaving of Jewish identity in art with Christian iconography and Christian identity, before,
during and after the Holocaust.
Section 7 reviews a preoccupation throughout the 20th
Century: the question “Is there Jewish art?”
Section 8 considers the case of Mark Rothko. It asks whether his mature style colour field paintings
were a direct response to the Holocaust. I take into account the contents of Clearwater’s ‘The
Rothko Book’ (2006), Lopez- Remiro’s ‘Mark Rothko: Writings on Art’ (2006) and a lecture dated 11
June 2005 given by Christopher Rothko about Rothko’s ‘The Artist’s Reality’ (probably 1940-41). I
also take into account the preceding sections of this essay. I conclude that Rothko’s mature style
colour field paintings were not a direct response to the Holocaust. Rothko’s concern since at least
the early 1930s had been the fragmentation that afflicted individuals and society as a whole. He
wanted to achieve paintings that would be new ‘anecdotes of the spirit’ which would provide
‘resolution of an eternally familiar need’. With his mature style he was successful in this.
At the end of the essay key themes and directions of future study are identified.
1. The relationship between art and religion: a Christian
standpoint
A summary of the first two Chapters of: George Pattison. ‘Crucifixions and Resurrections of the
Image’. SCM. 2009.
The Context and Inheritance
Since the Romantic era (late 18th
Century to mid 19th
Century) art and religion have had a conflicted
relationship. Art defines itself against imagined or actual constraints of religion but at the same time
art has also sought a ‘spiritual dimension’. The second tendency has seen artists serving the church
and at the same time it has seen art become a substitute for religion. These two tendencies are
ambiguous: discernment can be difficult. Religion is alternately suspicious of art as a repository of
the sensual and attracted to art as a vehicle for communication and evangelisation. The book does
not seek to resolve these tensions. We live in a complex, pluralistic world today and there is no easy
synthesis of meaning to be found.

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Individuals – whether artists or observers - are similarly conflicted, contradictory and multi-faceted.
The book assumes that artists working today are not subject to a simple secular paradigm, but that
modern and post-modern artists show ‘a shifting pattern of smaller or greater crucifixions and
resurrections of the (image of humanity), often reflecting the ebb and flow of larger societal events
in which the image (of humanity) finds itself at risk’. The book encompasses the 20th
Century.
Pattison discusses the work of Schleiermacher (19th
Century German theologian), Benjamin (Marxist
philosopher) and Malraux (French man of letters). This is to provide a benchmark for understanding
the relationship between art and religion in the modern and post-modern world. Schleiermacher
held a view of the relationship between culture and religion that was popular in the 19th
Century but
which was rejected in the 20th
Century. He held that the church’s highest purpose was to shape the
nation’s artistic inheritance. This was in order to enable the individual person to express his or her
most profound feelings. In the 20th
Century this standpoint was rejected as the church being
unacceptably identified with ‘official’ bourgeois culture. Today’s world inherits not only the shift of
attitude away from Schleiermacher, but also the trauma of two world wars and the technologization
of society.
Benjamin argued that in the mid 19th
Century the increasing use of processes of reproduction and
publication caused a paradigm shift in the world of the visual arts. All art forms are now produced
with a view to the possibilities of mass reproduction and marketing. This changes our view of the
arts in a pre-technological age and it means that any single work of art is less special than in a pre-
technological age. A work of art has an aura, but this aura is easily lost. Even so, when a unique
work of art is displayed – or when several such pieces are displayed in an exhibition, the display
exploits the tension between the specialness of a work of art and its vulnerability to easy
reproduction.
The modern concept of a museum was created in the 19th
Century: it displays an understanding of
history by presenting a series of unique artefacts, even though when these artefacts are seen out of
their original context they lose much of their essential nature and meaning. Malraux argued that the
invention of photography compromised the concept and value of a museum: everyone now has their
own imaginary museum. Prior to photography many artists would have knowledge of a relatively
small number of other artists’ works. Despite the present power of photography to communicate
powerful images, there is still a passion for an encounter with ‘the real thing’.
A major art exhibition depends financially on sales of reproductions, catalogues and books: a
paradox which gives rise to a tension that has characteristics of a religious experience.
Christianity significantly influenced the content of paintings in the pre-modern era. When such
works are now part of a contemporary exhibition there is a tendency in reviews to evacuate
Christian meaning from the works by asserting that works from the past reflected the values of the
culture in which they were painted. Pattison argues that despite this tendency, the current situation
is not totally opposed to spiritual meaning. Previous eras had their own forms of reproduction and
mass marketing in a religious setting: relics were frequently ‘discovered’, with profits to be made
from pilgrims, so the commercialised pattern of art exhibitions is not new. And previous eras’
paintings can still evoke a response of faith from the faithful today. And even when an individual
who is sceptical about faith views an explicitly religious painting, the manner of its presentation and
its uniqueness can evoke a deeper consideration of the power of the past, together with
contemplation of uncertainties about present values and the nature of the stability that they appear
to provide. Pattison concludes that a vestige of Schleiermacher’s purpose for the church remains
today.
Art, Modernity and the Death of God.
The Second Commandment has long had an effect on Western culture that is deeper than the
puritan’s hostility to images.

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The Second Commandment was broken at the outset, and, ever since, worshippers have found it
difficult to worship that which is not represented. Battles in Christian history arising from
iconoclasm show, after Nietzsche, that ‘the spilling of blood lies at the basis of all great cultural
phenomena’. The iconoclast affirms the power of art
But iconoclastic controversies also have positive outcomes because they heighten cultural sensitivity
about the way in which images of God function. And Christianity has shown that there is a limit to
the extent to which the church will accommodate iconoclasm: the church needs to speak about
Christ as the image of God; Genesis 1 tells us that humanity is made in God’s image.
The complexity of the Gospel’s portrayal of Christ poses its own challenge: the ‘image of God’ who
was Christ was himself destroyed on the cross. The death of God is therefore a profoundly Christian
theme but it is difficult to distinguish what is authentically Christian from what is secular or nihilistic.
Pattison presents the reality of the dead Christ as a mutilated cadaver and asks, after Dostoevsky’s
‘The Idiot’ (1869), Holbein’s ‘The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb’ (1522) and Manet’s ‘Dead
Christ with Angels’ (1864), whether the disciples of Christ would have lost their faith before the dead
body.
Edouard Manet
Pattison extols Edouard Manet (1832 – 1883) as the originator of modern painting. Manet makes
paintings that have abandoned the attempt to present an illusion of reality and instead makes
paintings that are knowingly two-dimensional artefacts. Manet’s paintings are made so that they
can stand alone. His works are statements of fact and they eschew sentiment. This emphasises the
significance of Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’.
Pattison reviews Manet’s career and the role that Charles Baudelaire played in recognising Manet’s
talent and encouraging him. Baudelaire saw as early as 1860 that Manet recognised the necessity of
engaging with the ‘here and now’ of the present: ‘its fashions, its morals, its emotions’. He wrote
that art must show the ‘quality of modernity’: ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half
of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’. Baudelaire also observed that the
‘uniform’ for men of the age was the ‘frock coat’ because ‘all of us are attending some funeral or
other’. Thus, Manet’s ‘The Concert in the Tuileries’ of 1860 shows the hubbub of the crowds in the
Tuilerie Gardens in the centre of Paris: a scene of jollity, shot through with death by the presence of
the many men in funeral attire. The critics considered Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ to be
‘audacious bad taste’. Pattison considers other representations of corpses painted by Manet. He
concludes that Manet approached death in a ‘matter of fact’ way: his corpses were only corpses; his
everyday Parisian scene of promenading was attended by men on their way to a funeral.
Pattison considers Manet’s portraits: he considers that in the way in which Manet painted their eyes
Manet has the ability to paint ‘metaphysical shock’: Tillich’s ‘shock of non-being’, which is the deep
understanding in all people that ‘the possibility of death, extinction, oblivion’ is our constant
companion’. In Baudelaire’s words: ‘modern man’ is no longer sustained by religion but is an
‘infinitely suffering being’ in the midst of the mundane modern urban world. Manet shows this by
his depiction of death and by the ‘inner shock’ shown by the eyes in his portraits. Manet should not
be understood as a ‘religious’ painter, but in his ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ Manet shows us – after
Baudelaire – ‘the funeral we are all attending’. Manet therefore confronts modernity’s unspoken
assumptions.
The Death of God’ is not a negation of Christianity and neither is it a death that closes a chapter. The
‘unbearable secularity’ of a world without God carries its own memory and grief for that which has
been lost, and it is this which both sustains an awareness of God and provides a remedy for despair.
Pattison compares Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ with his ‘Olympia’ of 1865. The prostitute
Olympia gazes back at the viewer.

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Pattison writes, after Sartre, that Olympia’s gaze conveys resentment and indignation: she has been
handed over to an existence that denies her a ‘higher life’ of ‘beauty, truth, goodness or religious
transformation’.
Pattison again considers the characters and plot dynamics in Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’. He concludes
that comparison of Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ with his ‘Olympia’ is valid because Dostoevsky
also uses contemplation of Holbein’s ‘The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb’ and a portrait of a
‘fallen woman’ to ‘mark out the metaphysical space within which the action moves’. Pattison
concludes that Manet’s choice of these two subjects and his treatment of them in his two paintings
‘establishes a force-field of extraordinary metaphysical potential’. Through these two works the
‘Death of God’ is ‘obliquely reflected’. Manet’s presentation through his paintings of ‘statements of
fact’ strips away any pretence that the divine can be visualised.
In the words of Simone Weil, Manet asks us to ‘refuse to believe in everything that is not God’.
Godlessness as an ‘indirect and ambiguous moment of encounter between faith and
modernity’
Pattison then gives several examples of response to the Death of God in modern art ‘that we might
also call a loss of belief in everything that is not God’.
He reviews the artists: Vilhelm Hammershoj (1864 – 1916); Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967); and Andy
Warhol (1928 – 1987). These artists’ works show that the world is Godless, but they do so in a way
that reminds us that the world is Godless and ‘not simply a neutral or value-free surface’.
We may either see Godlessness as a sign of complete secularization or as a way of presenting
Christianity’s own narrative of the death of God on the cross. The latter mode is an ‘indirect and
ambiguous moment of encounter between faith and modernity’.
Vilhelm Hammershoj was a Danish painter whose works are becoming better known outside his
native country. His most frequently painted subject is the interior of his home in Copenhagen.
Although the interiors are enclosed from outside, they are always lit by an unseen source within.
These are works in which God is absent but in which signs of God are glimpsed.
Edward Hopper’s world has ‘pitted itself against the vastness of the North American continent and
installed 24 hour a day lighting to keep its ancient darkness at bay’. The characters in his paintings
are ‘living in a situation that exceeds their power of comprehension, and yet they know it’. He is
painting Kierkegaard’s ‘anxiety and nothingness’. Pattison writes: ‘How could one depict
nothingness? Perhaps by painting what there is to see in modern urban life – and nothing more’.
Like Edouard Manet, Andy Warhol was obsessed by death. Car crashes and the electric chair are
part of his oeuvre. This, and other aspects of his works, was a presentation by Warhol of modern life
being governed by death and no longer with a link to God who is the source of life.
Conclusion
Pattison concludes that ‘the god of death’ was successively ‘unmasked and critiqued’ throughout the
Jewish scriptures and that the cross enacted the ‘final exposure’ because a god of death can only
exist in concealment.
The Death of God theme in modern art likewise draws the god of death out of his hiding places
within contemporary culture. Art shows that the gods that are worshipped today are ‘no-gods’.
Even nihilistic art prompts us to consider what it is that ‘truly belongs to life and so to God who first
truly begins to live when death begins to be undone’. Nihilism may in fact be iconoclasm.

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Christian theology asks of any work of art: “Does this work reveal death in such a way that it make us
more powerless before the god of death, or does it help us name the god of death for what he is and
so open up the possibility of the God who, through the cross, comes to us as the God of life and the
living?”
2. The image of Christ in modern art
If it is true – after Schleiermacher, as described by Pattison – that the church still has a duty through
art to enable individuals to engage with their soul and thus make a spiritual response, then Harries’
book ‘The Image of Christ in Modern Art’ may show how the church, working with artists, may fulfil
this role.
In the introduction Harries discusses ‘four senses in which Christian faith might be said to relate to
art’.
These are:
i. firstly, that ‘all genuine art has a spiritual dimension’;
ii. secondly, that Christian art is art produced by Christian artists;
iii. thirdly, that Christian art is art that expresses or evokes certain characteristics associated
with Christian faith; and
iv. fourthly, art which is ‘related in some way to traditional Christian iconography’ which may
be the work of a painter of any faith or none.
Having chosen the fourth of these definitions as the one to which he will work, Harries writes that he
is concerned with images of Christ painted from the first decade of the Twentieth Century until the
date of the book’s publication in 2013. Harries will also consider paintings of characters who were
associated with Christ or who ‘reflect him’.
Harries states that movements in art in the 20th
Century have posed a direct challenge to art that
engages with traditional Christian iconography, and that many works that use traditional Christian
iconography in the 20th
Century have been pastiche. He will consider the best of those works that
are not pastiche.
The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985
Harries refers to an exhibition that was held in 1995 ‘The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-
1985’. This showed ‘how many of the abstract expressionists brought a definite spiritual viewpoint
to their work’ and he lists their sources as ‘Theosophy, Cabala, Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism,
Paracelsus, Madame Blavatsky, Zen, the Occult, Rosicrucianism, Swedenborg, Spiritualism and so
on’. Harries concludes ‘this approach is outside the scope of (his) book’ and that his book is not
concerned with ‘the concept of the spiritual in an even wider sense’, referring also to the book ‘100
Artists See God’ (ed. Baldersai and et al).
In the Aye Simon Reading Room at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York City I was able
to look at the book ‘The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985’ ed. M Tuchman which is
associated with the exhibition that Harries refers to. The book comprises seventeen illustrated
essays and has the aim of showing the spiritual roots of the abstract art of the 20th
Century. There is
a glossary. The authors do not define ‘spiritual’ or ‘Christian’ or ‘Jewish’: there are no entries for
these words in the glossary. In the foreword the editor makes clear that the occult and mysticism
are his main interests. The editor presents the originators of abstraction as being Kandinsky, Kupka,
Malevich and Mondrian, and he seeks to show in his book that each of these artists and many of
their contemporaries were inspired by ‘mystical concepts’ and ‘esoteric thoughts’.
My primary concern is with Jewish identity in 20th
Century art and secondarily with Christian identity
in 20th
Century art.

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It may be that Tuchman makes a good case for roots of 20th
Century abstract art in the occult,
mysticism and esoterica, but this is also outside the scope of this essay. Even so, I know as a parish
priest that even those who most strongly profess a conventional, orthodox Christian faith are often
also influenced by complex motivations that may include ‘unconventional’ or ‘unorthodox’ belief
systems. Therefore the potentially unknown complexity of spiritual motivation of Jewish and
Christian artists should not be discounted. Pattison observes that artists are as conflicted within
themselves as society at large.
A simple definition of an artist as ‘Jewish’ or ‘Christian’ may therefore fail to do justice to human
complexity.
The Break
In Chapter One of his book (entitled ‘The Break’) Harries discusses the awareness in the 20th
Century
that ‘the dominant cultural and religious ideology that had unified Europe for more than one
thousand years no longer existed’, and that the arts had been marginalised by technology. Although
the Nineteenth Century may be understood to have been the era in which this fundamental change
occurred, others see the break occurring as far back as the Enlightenment (the 17th
and 18th
Centuries). Harries states that in 1935 Anthony Blunt wrote that for about 100 years ‘the great
difficulty which has faced religious artists in Europe .... is that our natural tradition for expressing
religious feeling is utterly used up and dead’.
Three questions
The question posed by Harries is: ‘How could artists who wanted to be fully of their own time and
who also wanted to relate to traditional Christian themes, do this whilst retaining their integrity?’
Harries poses a further question which is enduring, which is how the invisible may be made visible in
art. He rehearses the Islamic and Jewish prohibitions ‘in most ages’ against making images of God,
and he celebrates the ways in which traditional Islamic mosque decoration conveys an
overwhelming sense of the transcendence of God. He affirms that the Christian task is also to
celebrate this transcendence whilst simultaneously using iconic art to convey the fact that the
invisible has been made visible.
A further question is then put by Harries: that Christ’s humanity was authentically human and was
therefore unremarkable, and indistinguishable from humanity at large. In the Eastern Orthodox
tradition this was solved by establishing the codified style and tradition of icons.
Irony
It may be argued that despite the varied styles of the Western tradition, none succeeds unless the
hidden human figure of Christ ‘makes a difference to what we see and how we see not only him but
life itself’. Harries states that the element of irony has been identified by Rowan Williams as one
way in which this truth may be stated in art. Thus, irony in a work of art can show ‘that the change
associated with Jesus is incapable of representation’, but that ‘for the change to be communicable it
must in some way be represented’. Without irony Christian art becomes banal. 19th
Century art had
Jesus ‘robed, calm and stately’, which is the opposite of ‘being transforming’: it fosters a casual
reinforcement of shared piety, but it cannot bring about the reference-changing character of Jesus’.
The twin tyrannies of literalness and pastiche
Harries concludes that modern Christian art has sought to be set free from the twin tyrannies of
literalness and pastiche.

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Harries’ review of the artists who engaged in the 20th
Century with traditional Christian iconography
in a way that is neither pastiche nor literal, and which may involve irony, begins with the German
Expressionists (Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Jacob Epstein and Georges Roualt).
His subsequent chapters cover the work of Marc Chagall, Cecil Collins, Stanley Spencer, Leon
Underwood, Eric Gill, David Jones, Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Ceri Richards and Henry Moore.
Harries writes that the theologian Paul Tillich asserted in 1964 that there are two forms of art that
cannot serve Christianity: naturalism (ie. landscape) and ‘purely abstract art’. Tillich expected ‘some
figurative expression’ to fulfil the need to ‘make visible the invisible’ and go show the
transformational nature of the human figure of Christ’. Tillich favoured Expressionism. Harries
states that this derived from Tillich’s experience as a chaplain in World War One, in which he saw
‘the alienation of humanity from its true being’. Tillich valued the work of the German Expressionists
as antecedents of expressionist works painted in the mid 20th
Century. Tillich is stated to have
regarded Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece as ‘the greatest German picture ever painted’. Harries
writes that critics of Tillich assert that his world view was too constricted by his familiarity with the
art galleries of Berlin and with the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
I will summarise those artists that I consider the most significant for the purpose of this extended
essay and I will introduce comment that I will take from other sources.
Jacob Epstein
Epstein (1880 – 1959) is noteworthy because he was Jewish. Harries writes at length about Epstein.
He writes about the controversial nature of his sculptured figures in the UK throughout the mid 20th
Century: they were seen as simultaneously distorted, modern and mysterious; they ‘cleared away
sentimentality and concentrated on essentials’.
In Chapter 6 of her book ‘AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States’,
Janet Wolff discusses ‘The “Jewish Mark” in English Painting: Cultural Identity and Modern Art’. This
chapter helps with understanding of the perception of Jacob Epstein and his works in the UK during
his lifetime.
A full account of Epstein in Harries and in Wolff is given below in Section 6 below.
Georges Roault
Roault (1871 - 1958) is commended by Harries for his finding Christ in the most marginal people.
Roualt said: ‘Behind the eyes of the most hostile, ungrateful or impure being dwells Jesus’. And he
understood how a clown’s mask of gaiety represents the facade that all people wear. Roualt wrote
that, when painting, he preferred to represent the harsh realities of human suffering – and he
believed that ‘to call a work “sacred art” is not enough to invest it with religious significance’.
Marc Chagall
Harries describes Chagall (1887 - 1985) from a Christian standpoint. This differs from the
perspective taken by Rosen, as summarised in Section 6 below.
For Harries, Chagall had a life-long affinity with Christianity. Harries shows how Chagall ‘began
combing Jewish and Christian iconography early in his career’ but Harries does not show the subtlety
and discernment about Chagall’s treatment of Old and New Testament that Harshaw shows, as
referred to by Rosen. Harries rapidly moves to Chagall’s crucifixions as both evidence of Chagall’s
Christian affinity and of the significance of Chagall uniting Christian and Jew.
In Rosen’s book: ‘Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the masters in Chagall, Guston and Kitaj’,
Rosen writes incisively about Chagall’s purpose in painting.

10
He does this in a way that shows Harries’ approach to be relatively superficial. Rosen’s account of
Chagall is summarised below in Section 6 below.
Stanley Spencer
Harries asserts that the paintings of Spencer (1891 - 1959) fully meet the criteria that he has set out:
a) the artist’s authentic voice speaking clearly in the modern age;
b) a transformed understanding and presentation of New Testament scenes;
c) presentation of a vision of reality that is transformed by love in Christ;
d) celebrating transcendence whilst simultaneously using iconic art to convey the fact that the
invisible has been made visible; and
e) art that has been set free from the twin tyrannies of literalness and pastiche.
Harries particularly celebrates Spencer’s ‘Christ in the Wilderness: the Scorpion’ of 1939: Christ holds
a scorpion in his hand and contemplates the creature. This work is remarkable because of the fear
induced by a scorpion. Harries reminds us of Luke 11: 11-12 (‘Which of you fathers, if your son asks
for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you
then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your
Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’) Harries also draws our attention to
Ezekiel 2: 6 and Luke 10: 19 in which the Son of Man and the disciples will sit and tread safely among
scorpions.
In the painting Jesus gently holds the scorpion and he is not afraid. This is the reverse of the
disharmony in nature that was brought about by Adam.
And more than this: the vocation of the Son of Man is to die, and in the wilderness Jesus Christ
accepts this vocation.
Graham Sutherland
Harries writes about the mood in Britain in the 1930s. The revival in the visual arts in Britain is
described by Alexandra Harris in her book ‘Romantic Moderns’ of 2010. Harries states that Eliot’s
poem ‘The Four Quartets’ expresses the era. When writing about Sutherland (1903 - 1980) and
Piper (1903 - 1992), Harries describes them as two artists who established themselves before World
War Two but who became more widely known after the war due to church commissions.
Harries describes the British post-war mood which lasted until the late 1950s, in which there was a
growing and widespread acceptance of Christian faith until the early 1960s. Salvador Dali’s ‘Christ of
St.John of the Cross’ of 1951 is described as having been in the possession – in reproduction – in the
home of ‘every other devout Christian’. (It was hanging on the wall of the vestry of the parish
church in south east England at which I was a choir member in the mid 1960s). The rebuilding of
churches was an expression of this renewed national faith, and this led to commissions for Chagall
(see Section 6 below), Epstein (see Section 6 below), Sutherland and Piper.
During World War Two Sutherland was invited by Walter Hussey (then Vicar of St.Matthew’s parish
church, Northampton, subsequently Dean of Chichester Cathedral) to produce a crucifixion painting.
Harries states that from 1944 until 1946 Sutherland painted images of thorns. In 1946 he began to
paint a crucifixion ‘inspired by ..... photographs of the terribly emaciated bodies of people released
from Belsen. They reminded him of the body of Christ on the cross painted by Grunewald for the
Isenheim Altarpiece’. The resulting work is Sutherland’s ‘The Crucifixion’ of 1946. Harries states that
this painting was immediately regarded as a success.
He writes that Sutherland went on to ‘mine its artistic possibilities and produced a number of
crucifixions, experimenting with different forms’.

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3. Reflections on Jewish identity: in the Jewish Museum, New
York City
On 13th
June 2015 in the Jewish Museum, New York City – in the Milstein Family Gallery - I came
across an audio-visual presentation in which rabbis, poets, writers, scholars, children and a
psychotherapists spoke about their Jewish identity. I made notes and these are reproduced below.
a) “Jews learned to live in exile without concrete elements of sovereignty such as an army.
Jews created a verbal environment as their concrete environment”.
b) “I am from Jerusalem but because Titus destroyed the Temple I am from Poland”.
c) “Jerusalem became an abstract place, and so Jerusalem lives in the Jewish heart as part of
the Jews’ story. A Jew who lives in Jerusalem finds it a great privilege – and very demanding
– I mean compulsory service in the army”.
d) “There is difficulty for Jews from different cultures coming together in modern Israel:
Bukharan, Ashkenazi and Yemeni Jews”.
e) “The Diaspora is here to stay. Jewish survival is not despite the Diaspora but because of it”.
f) “The family dining table replaces the Temple altar that was destroyed: it infused Jewish life
throughout the Diaspora”.
g) “The Talmudic tradition is one of writing poetry from poetry that’s already there – that is,
the Law. The Law is poetry: it infuses your life”.
h) “Jews reach out for community and at the same time they find it hard to be in community.
But there are always nine Jews looking for the tenth, and there is always one Jew looking for
the other nine”.
i) “I am a Jew without any God in my life”.
j) “What use is it to be a Jew and not to know your history?”
k) “At the time of crossing the Red Sea, each tribe crossed separately through their own path
through the water, with water on either side of each tribe, but all the tribes could see each
other through the waters that divided them. It’s a parable of unity.”
l) “I am an elderly Jew from Galicia. Before the First World War I knew about Jerusalem before
In knew about Lemberg”.
m) “Every writer is a Jew. There is something Jewish in the belief that we have to decode the
world and create our own rules for survival; and in writing our memory we give significance
to the past”.
n) “Maybe there is a Covenant. The left brain doesn’t accept it, but the right brain does.”
o) “God is the God of our ancestors, but there is no guarantee that the Covenant will
continue”.
p) “In the Creation story the waters were separated but rules were broken and the Flood
resulted. After that a Covenant was made – this is the first use of this word in the Bible –
and that meant that there was once again a separation of the water; so there is to be some
order in the madness; Earthlings won’t be smashed completely by God – but you are never
secure before God – and that is very significant. God smashed us in the Holocaust.”
q) “The Christian empire tried to destroy us for two thousand years, but we survived.”
r) “We are spread among the nations and we are the memory of the nations.”

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4. Reflections on Jewish identity: Bellow’s ‘Herzog’
During my two week stay in New York City I was reading Saul Bellow’s novel ‘Herzog’. I am not well-
read; the only other American novel that I have read is Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch 22’.
I had read a review of the recently published biography of Bellow (Zachary Leader’s ‘The Life of Saul
Bellow – to Fame and Fortune, 1915 – 1964’) and in a bookshop I chose Bellow’s ‘Herzog’. I began to
read it sitting on a bench in Central Park as I walked uptown to my lodgings. I read it slowly
throughout my two week stay, and I finished the book on my homeward flight.
The experience of reading ‘Herzog’ was greatly rewarding: it was an integral part of my living in
Manhattan.
Bellow’s ‘Herzog’
Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ was first published in 1964. This was one year before the New York Jewish
Museum held an exhibition entitled ‘What about Jewish art?’ and two years before the publication
of Harold Rosenberg’s essay “Is there a Jewish art?” In 1964 Newman was working on his ‘Stations
of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’ and they would be exhibited in 1966. Six years previously – in 1958
– Rothko had accepted the commission to paint murals for the Four Seasons Restaurant, and a year
later, in 1959, he withdrew from the project.
As I walked Manhattan, rode the subway and took the Penn Station train, I had as companions
Moses Elkanah Herzog and Marcus Rothkowitz.
This is a summary of aspects of ‘Herzog’ that speak of the Jewish identity of Moses Herzog and the
author – Saul Bellow. I have not read on the subject of either Bellow or Herzog, other than a review
of Leader’s biography. What follows is my own observation and speculation.
The story is set mainly in and around New York City, Massachusetts and in Chicago.
Moses Elkanah Herzog has found that he has been a made a fool by his neighbour and friend
Valentine Gersbach. Moses had persuaded Gersbach and his wife Phoebe (and son Ephraim) that
they should move to Chicago, at the same time that Herzog and his wife Madeleine (and daughter
June) made the move to that city. But now Herzog has discovered – through his old friend Luke
Asphalter - that Valentine and Madeleine are lovers.
Moses Elkanah Herzog
We are told that Herzog has a genteel, Yiddish accent. He ‘loves his relatives quite openly and even
helplessly’. He wonders if this might be ‘tribal – associated with ancestor worship and totemism’.
He is a ‘big-city Jew’ who is ‘peculiarly devoted to country life’.
He ‘was half elegant, half slovenly. If he knotted his tie with care, his shoelaces dragged …. Once it
had perhaps been his boyish defiance, but by now it was an established part of the daily comedy of
Moses E Herzog’.
Moses is troubled that his lover – the Argentinan Ramona – ‘does not recognize him as an American.
She says: ‘You’re not a true, puritanical American. You have a talent for sensuality. Your mouth
gives you away’. Herzog asks himself ‘what else was he?’ In the Services ’his mates had also
considered him a foreigner’. No matter how well he could show he knew Chicago, he was suspected
of being a spy. But ‘he believed his American credentials were in good order’.
On one occasion Herzog muses on ‘the philosophy of this generation’. ‘God is dead – that point was
passed long ago. Perhaps it should be stated Death is God. This generation thinks – and this is his
thought of thoughts – that nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have any true
power. Death waits for these things as a cement floor waits for a dropping light bulb’. ‘You think
history is the history of loving hearts? You fool! Look at these millions of dead.

13
Can you pity them, feel for them? You can nothing! There were too many. We burned them to
ashes, we buried them with bulldozers. History is the history of cruelty, not love, as soft men think’.
‘If the old God exists he must be a murderer. But the one true God is Death. This is how it is –
without cowardly illusions’.
Madeleine Herzog
Madeleine was Jewish but she had converted to be a Roman Catholic when she and Herzog met.
Soon after they married, Herzog resigned his position as Professor and they moved to the country –
the Berkshires in Massachusetts, where Herzog planned to write an incisive history of the 20th
Century. But after a year or so Madeleine resented being out in the sticks and Herzog was struggling
with his writing. The move to Chicago – where Herzog had grown up – was made, but the house in
the Berkshires was not sold. After a year Madeleine asked for a divorce. Herzog ‘had to give it, what
could he do?’ Madeleine tells Herzog that he is insane.
When Herzog talks with his psychiatrist Edvig, Herzog expresses the view that Madeleine has the
Christian view that ‘we have to recover from some poison, need saving, ransoming’. At this time
Madeleine was studying for a PhD in Russian religious history. Herzog’s reaction to this, when
speaking to Gersbach – Madeleine’s lover – is to say, of Madeleine’s Russian books: ‘She’s built a
wall of Russian books around herself .... It’s not enough they persecuted my ancestors!’ Lately,
Madeleine has lapsed from Roman Catholicism: ‘culture – ideas – had taken the place of the Church
in Madeleine’s heart’.
Herzog travels to Europe for respite. He returns to Chicago to arrange to live in New York City.
Madeleine considers Herzog’s behaviour ‘so strange and to her mind so menacing that she warned
him through Gersbach not to come near the house on Harper Avenue. The police had a picture of
him and would arrest him if he was seen in the block’.
Herzog’s first wife Daisy, and his lover Ramona
We learn about Herzog’s first wife Daisy (‘a country girl’ and ‘a conventional Jewish woman’) with
whom he has a son Marco.
Ramona is his lover now: she lives in the West Side and owns a flower shop on Lexington Avenue.
She is Argentinian and in her late 30s. Writing to himself about Ramona (‘a true sack artist’), Herzog
states: ‘Do I see myself to be after long blundering an unrecognized son of Sodom and Dionysius – an
Orphic type? (Ramona enjoyed speaking of Orphic types). A petit-bourgeois Dionysian. He noted:
Foo to all those categories’.
Herzog’s letters
In his current anguish Herzog writes letters to people in the public eye, to friends, to himself and to
members of his family. These letters lay bare his neuroses. They are never sent.
One such letter is addressed to the New York Times. It concerns the risk to human health from
atmospheric nuclear fallout. Herzog is a sceptic: ‘People greatly respected in their generation often
turn out to be dangerous lunatics’. He reminds the editor of the newspaper that Mr. Truman,
concerning Hiroshima, ‘calls people Bleeding Hearts when they question his Hiroshima decision’.
Since Hiroshima ‘life in civilised countries (because they survive through a balance of terror) stands
upon a foundation of risk’. He asserts ‘Ours is a bourgeois civilization. I am not using this term in
the Marxian sense. In the vocabularies of modern art and religion it is bourgeois to consider that the
universe was made for our safe use and to give us comfort, ease and support ....... De Tocqueville
considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society.
He can’t be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse .....

14
Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlours of indignation the right-
thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil’.
Herzog’s family
We meet other associates of Moses Elkanah Herzog, and we learn about and meet his wider family
including his sister Helen, and his brothers Alexander (‘Shura’) and Willie.
We meet Herzog’s aunt Zelda, who lives out in the suburbs, with whom he discusses his divorce.
Zelda is the wife of Uncle Herman – Herzog’s psychiatrist. Herzog’s aunt has heard Madeleine’s side
of the story: she stands her ground and tells Herzog some home truths. This leads Herzog to
distrust his aunt and to reflect on ‘female deceit’ and the affair between Madeleine and Gersbach:
his thoughts turn to murdering the couple with his late father’s antique revolver.
Herzog’s psychiatrist, lawyers and physician
Herzog’s psychiatrist is Dr Herman Edvig: he lives in Chicago; Herzog refers to him as ‘uncle’. His
wife is Herzog’s Aunt Zelda. Herman is ‘calm, Protestant Nordic Anglo-Celtic’. Herzog had first seen
Edvig because Madeleine made it a condition of their marriage continuing that Herzog see a
psychiatrist of his own choosing. Herzog chose Edwig because he had ‘written on Barth, Tillich,
Brunner etc’. Herzog finds himself in an emotional and religious vortex between Madeleine and
Edwig – his psychiatrist. He feels that Edwig has become preoccupied by his accounts of Madeleine
and that Madeleine and Edwig are oppressing him with Christian theology. He feels that Madeleine
is trying to usurp him as an intellectual heavyweight.
Herzog’s lawyer in New York is Simkin who respects Herzog: ‘Simkin had a weakness for confused
high-minded people, for people with moral impulses like Herzog. Hopeless! Very likely he looked at
Moses and saw a grieving childish man, trying to keep his dignity’. Simkin is a ‘ruddy, stout
Machiavellian old bachelor’ who lives in an large apartment on Central Park West with his mother, a
widowed sister and several nephews and nieces. The walls of his room ‘were covered from top to
bottom by abstract-expressionist paintings, unframed’. Herzog recognises ‘the peculiar notes of
Jewish comedy that Simkin loved, his elaborate shows of dread, his cosmic mock dismay’.
Herzog’s lawyer in Chicago is Sandor Himmelstein, who had suffered a disfiguring war wound in
Normandy. Sandor had taken Herzog into his own home at the time that Madeleine left him.
Sandor and his wife Beatrice try to console him. Sandor knows Herzog’s brothers who live in
Chicago. Willie is a ‘fine fellow: very active in Jewish life too’. There is ‘always some scandal about
Alexander’: he is suspected of being a racketeer. Sandor opines that the end of the marriage is
Herzog’s ‘own frigging fault. Somewhere in every intellectual is a dumb prick. You guys can’t answer
your own questions’. But Sandor encourages Herzog that he is ‘not like those other university
phonies: You’re a mensch’. Sandor then insults Herzog, telling Beatrice ‘’Moses can take it’, but
Herzog is ‘incoherent with anger’. Sandor becomes more emollient and says to Herzog: ‘Well, when
you suffer you really suffer. You’re a real, genuine old Jewish type that digs the emotions. I’ll give
you that. I understand it’. The next day Sandor antagonises Herzog because he suggests he takes
out insurance against ‘having a mental breakdown and having to go to an institution’. Sandor faces
Herzog down: he knows where Herzog came from, and Herzog falls silent: he agrees to take out a
policy on his life for the sake of his children. Sandor makes him breakfast but he begins to break
down: he pleads Herzog to counsel his teenage daughter – ‘her chance to know an intellectual – a
famous person – an authority’. Sandor urges Herzog to come back and live in New York, as he is a
‘West Side Jew’. He urges Herzog to sell his house in the Berkshires and Herzog says ‘I might’.
Sandor takes it as good as settled. He urges Herzog: ‘Get yourself a housekeeper closer to your own
age. Or we’ll find you a gorgeous brownskin housekeeper. Or maybe what you need is a girl who
survived the concentration camps and would be grateful for a new home’.

15
Sandor urges Herzog to join him in going to the Russian bath on North Avenue and in finding an
orthodox shul. He sings ‘You and me, a pair of old-time Jews’. But Herzog does not trust Sandor: he
remembers old betrayals and he regrets his own vulnerability.
Herzog’s physician is Dr Emmerich who lives on Central Park West. He is elderly and ‘a refugee’. He
recommends that Herzog takes a holiday. This leads to his very short stay in Vineyard Haven with
Libbie Vane and Sissler.
‘Father Herzog’, ‘Grandfather Herzog’, ‘Mother Herzog’ and aunt Zipporah
Herzog’s father (‘Father Herzog’ – Ilyona Isakovitch Gerzog in his Russian origins) is described in
some detail. He ‘did everything quickly, neatly, with skilful Eastern European flourishes: combing
his hair, buttoning his shirt, stropping his bone-handled razors, sharpening pencils on the ball of his
thumb, holding a loaf of bread to his breast and slicing towards himself, tying parcels with tight little
knots, jotting like an artist in his account book. There each cancelled page was covered with a
carefully drawn X, the 1s and 7s carried bars and streamers. They were like pennants in the wind of
failure’. As a child Father Herzog’ was ‘put out at four years old to study, away from home, eaten by
lice, half-starved in the Yeshivah as a boy. He shaved, became a modern European’. Starting with
‘failure in Petersburg, where he went through two dowries in one year’, his life story is a catalogue
of decline and descent into petty criminality. He emigrated to Canada where his sister Zipporah
Yaffe was living. Business failures led to bootlegging. ‘He could calculate percentages mentally at
high speed, but he lacked the cheating imagination of a successful businessman’.
Grandfather Herzog ‘wrote long letters in Hebrew’. Soon after the Russian Revolution he had
predicted that the Revolution would fail: he sought to build up reserves of Czarist currency, hoping
to become rich. These ancient ruble bills were now in the possession of ‘Father Herzog’ and his
family, who treated them as objects of wonder.
‘Mother Herzog’ is described as ‘encountering the present on the left but sometimes seeming to
avoid it on the right’. She had descended from ‘linens and servants in Petersburg, the dacha in
Finland. Now she was cook, washerwoman, seamstress on Napoleon Street in the slum’.
Zipporah’s husband ‘Uncle Yaffe’ runs a junkyard where ‘kids, greenhorns, old Irishwomen,
Ukrainians and redmen from the Caughnawaga reservation came with pushcarts and little wagons,
bringing bottles, rags, old plumbing or electrical fixtures, hardware, paper, tires, bones to sell’;
Zipporah had bought real estate: she and her husband were rich. Zipporah taunts her brother that
he is too gentle a creature to ‘make a fortune out of swindlers, thieves and gangsters ….. You can
never keep up with these teamsters and butchers. Can you shoot a man?’
‘Mother Herzog’ in contrast has a mind that is ‘archaic, filled with old legends, with angels and
demons’.
Zipporah’s prediction is realised: ‘Father Herzog’ is betrayed by his accomplice – the Ukrainian
Voplonsky – and the two men are ambushed on the road to the Canadian border with a lorry load of
bootleg whisky.
Herzog reflects: ‘I had a great schooling in grief. I still know these cries of the soul. They lie on the
breast, and in the throat. The mouth wants to open wide and let them out. But all these are
antiquities – yes, Jewish antiquities originating in the Bible, in a Biblical sense of personal experience
and destiny. What happened in the War abolished Father Herzog’s claim to exceptional suffering
We are on a more brutal standard now, a terminal standard, indifferent to persons. Part of the
programme of destruction into which the human spirit has poured itself with energy, even joy.
These personal histories, old tales from old times that may not be worth remembering. I remember.
I must. But who else – to whom can this matter? So many millions – multitudes – go down in
terrible pain. And, at that, moral suffering is denied, these days. Personalities are good only for
comic relief. But I am still a slave to Papa’s pain’.

16
Herzog underground
Herzog takes the train from the underground station of Grand Central to stay at the coast with Libbie
Vane – a former student – and her new husband Sissler. In the tunnel he notes: ‘in dusty niches
bulbs burned. Without religion’. The train eventually emerges into the light at Upper Park Avenue
and runs ‘on the embankment above the slums’ in Harlem. As he heads to the coast he reflects on
the pain to his ‘Jewish family feelings that his children should be growing up without him’. He ‘fights
his sadness over his solitary life’. On his way to the railway station Herzog remembers childhood
holidays: his father ‘peeling fruit with his Russian pearl-handled knife’. He resists the desire to
meditate on his own mortality: ‘To him, perpetual thought of death was a sin. Drive your cart and
your plow over the bones of the dead’. When he reaches the home of Libbie Vane and Sissler in
Vineyard Haven he has no sooner arrived than he slips out the back door and heads for home. The
note he leaves behind states: ‘Have to go back. Not able to stand kindness at this time’.
On one occasion when Herzog is travelling to see Ramona we are with him on the subway. The
underground journey is described in a way that presents the subway as a parallel world. It is one in
which the contradictions and confusions of the modern world may be contemplated by means of
advertising posters and graffiti. It is a world with its own smells and rituals. It is a world in which
Herzog is aware of the ‘innumerable millions of passengers (who) had polished the wood of the
turnstile with their hips. From this arose a feeling of communion – brotherhood in one of its
cheapest forms’.
A ‘Christian lady’
He remembers a stay in hospital when he was 8 years old, when a ‘Christian lady came once a week
and had him read aloud from the Bible’. The passage that he remembered was from the New
Testament. He describes the ‘Christian lady’ thus: ‘She seemed to him a good woman. Her face,
however, was strained and grim’.
Herzog cannot remember whether or not he told her that his father was ‘a bootlegger. He has a still
in Point-St.Charles. The spotters are after him. He has no money’.
A clergyman and his wife
During his first marriage, Herzog and Daisy lived in rural eastern Connecticut. Their nearest
neighbours were a clergyman and his wife – Reverend and Mrs Idwal. They got on excellently ‘until
the minister started to give him testimonials by orthodox rabbis who had embraced Christian faith’.
Herzog was shown photographs of these rabbis: he ‘thought them crazy’.
The dénouement
The dénouement takes place when Herzog goes to Chicago ‘to see his daughter, confront Madeleine
and Gersbach’. In Chicago he drives to the house in which his father had died a few years
previously: the house is now occupied by Taube - Herzog’s ‘very ancient stepmother’. In the house
he removes his late father’s antique revolver and some of the Russian currency that he marvelled at
as a boy.
Herzog has a minor traffic accident and the police are suspicious of the unlicensed old gun – which
contains two bullets – wrapped in old foreign money, in his inside coat pocket. Herzog is
accompanied by his daughter June: through the mediation of Luke Asphalter he has been allowed by
Madeleine and Gersbach to have June for the day.
Madeleine is summoned to the police station where interrogation ensues. Madeleine admits that
she has never made a complaint to the police about her former husband. When Madeleine suggests
to Herzog that one of the bullets was for her, he leads the conversation towards Madeleine’s
situation with Gersbach. Madeleine leaves, taking June with her.

17
Herzog hopes that his explanation that he had taken the gun and the money from his late father’s
house as sentimental keepsakes, and that he didn’t know about the bullets because ‘he didn’t know
much about guns’ will persuade them of his innocence. Herzog is granted bail. His brother Will
pays, and the two of them leave the police station together.
Despite Will’s best efforts, Herzog will not be committed to an institution. Instead, he moves back to
the house in Massachusetts, which he restores to good order and where he is joined by Ramona.
Reflections on Jewish identity
I suggest that the following characteristics of Herzog indicate some aspects of Jewish identity in New
York City in 1964.
a) Personal inner conflict about Christianity and the demands that Christianity makes upon the
Jew and upon Jewish identity.
b) Anxiety as to whether one’s ‘American credentials were in good order’.
c) A high value placed on the Western tradition of history, philosophy, theology, literature and
psychology.
d) Personal and collective inherited memory of persecution by Christians in Central and Eastern
Europe in the late 19th
and early 20th
Centuries.
e) Nostalgia for Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 19th
and early 20th
Centuries.
f) ‘A great schooling in grief’: the collective memory of the struggles of Jewish people leaving
the Old World and making a new life in North America, which must be kept alive for the sake
of those who suffered and for the sake of Jewish identity; and the placing of this memory
within the context of the Jewish scriptures’ account of suffering and salvation.
g) The Holocaust as a persistent challenge to the existence of God and thus as a challenge to
Jewish identity.
h) The constant presence of people and ways of thinking that keep alive the Holocaust as a
recent event.
i) The way in which the Holocaust ended the significance and nobility of human existence: ‘We
are on a more brutal standard now, a terminal standard, indifferent to persons’.
j) Anxiety about nuclear physics and the threat of nuclear war.
5. The Holocaust (The Shoah)
It is difficult to discuss the Holocaust – the Shoah, ‘calamity’ in Hebrew. Any attempt to discuss the
Holocaust is in danger of being subverted by prior convictions. Langer writes in his ‘Pre-empting the
Holocaust’ of 1998 that ‘the unshakable conviction that the Holocaust contains a positive lesson for
all of us today’ is unacceptable. He gives three examples of ‘pre-empting’ of the Holocaust, which is
the use – or abuse – of the facts of the Holocaust to ‘fortify a prior commitment to an ideal of moral
reality, community responsibility, or religious belief that leaves us with space to retain faith in their
pristine value in a post-Holocaust world’.
Before he makes his case, Langer sets out briefly ‘starkest crimes’ of the Holocaust from eye- witness
testimony: a one year-old child taken from its mother’s arms and torn in two; making prisoners
selected for death dig their own grave before being shot, and charging the Jewish ‘leaders’ in the
camp for the bullets used; shootings taking place in large ‘actions’ on such a scale that burial did not
take place properly, and neither was the shooting always successful, so that a heap of the dead and
the dying resulted.

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Langer analyses three pieces of writing: Tzvetan Todorov’s ‘Facing the extreme – Moral life in the
concentration camps’ (1996); Judy Chicago’s ‘Holocaust Project – From Darkness into Light’ (1993];
and Frans Jozef van Beeck’s ‘Two Kind Jewish Men: a sermon in memory of the Shoah’ (1992).
Langer condemns all three because they ‘pre-empt’ the Holocaust. Todorov argues that the
Holocaust was little more than a drastic example of the conflict that takes place within all people
and all societies: the conflict between ‘ordinary virtues’ and ‘ordinary vices’. His aim is to draw
universal lessons from the historical events of the Holocaust that can serve humankind for the
future. Langer argues that, despite the virtues in Chicago’s work, her stated desire to present ‘ a
window into an aspect of the unarticulated but universal experience of victimisation’ fails to do
justice to the ‘particularity of the Holocaust as a historical event’. Langer writes that van Beeck’s
sermon is written in the style of Christian preaching and that it ‘testifies to the deficiency of certain
language for analyzing the Holocaust when it is imposed on the topic with little consideration for its
adequacy’.
Langer can offer no ‘corrective vision’ to the tendency to ‘pre-empt the Holocaust’ other than ‘the
opinion that the Holocaust experience challenges the redemptive value of all moral, community and
religious systems of belief’.
We may also conclude, from Langer, that ‘pristine values’ of moral reality, community responsibility,
and religious belief ‘ are no longer tenable in a post-Holocaust world’.
In his ‘On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War’ (2012) Wasserstein states in
Chapter 2 – The Christian Problem – that ‘in its essence, after all, anti-Semitism was a phenomenon
that arose out of the failure of European Christendom to live up to the most fundamental teaching
of its Jewish founder : ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’.
In Chapter 1 – The Melting Glacier - Wasserstein summarises the circumstances of the ten million
Jews who lived in Europe in the late 1930s. In western Europe, emancipation meant that Jews
enjoyed civic equality, though Jews remained subject to anti-Semitism. In Germany and the parts of
Central Europe that were occupied by Germany, Jews were stripped of citizenship, deprived of most
of their possessions and under pressure to emigrate. In Eastern Europe outside the Third Reich and
the USSR, in most places anti-Semitism was incorporated in public policy and law. In the USSR Jews
had been emancipated, but under Stalin they came to be severely restricted. In many places Jews
aimed to assimilate with the national culture and be ‘less Jewish’. In the 1930s throughout Europe
anti-Semitism held that the Jew was ‘a Christ-killer, a devil with horns, subversive revolutionary and
capitalist exploiter, obdurate upholder of an outmoded religion and devious exponent of cultural
modernism ... and alien presence’. There was a ‘Jewish problem’. Jewish culture varied across
Europe: the diversity of Jewish culture hindered a co-ordinated response to oppression. When Jews
assimilated they still found that they were persecuted. By 1939 democracies such as France and the
Netherlands had established camps to house Jews: in the summer of 1939 more Jews were held in
camps in these two countries than in camps within the Third Reich.
The Holocaust was the methodical killing by Nazi Germany of 11 million non-combatant civilians
during World War Two (1939-1945). The main target for killing was the Jewish population of
Europe. 6 million Jewish people died in the Holocaust. Others who were targeted and who died in
the Holocaust included non-combatant civilians in Central and Eastern Europe, Soviet prisoners of
war, Romani, black people, disabled people, the mentally ill, homosexuals and socialists. Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
Auschwitz – at the town of Oswiecim in Poland – is the best-known of the death camps of Nazi
Germany. ‘Auschwitz’ has become a symbol of the Holocaust. Auschwitz I – a former army barracks
- was brought into use to gas prisoners in 1941. Auschwitz II was a specially built camp of 150
hectares at which people were gassed in 1943 and 1944. A total of about 1,100,000 people were
killed at Auschwitz I and II.

19
6. 20 Jewish artists of the 20th
Century
A two week stay in New York City in June 2015 to visit museums of art and the Jewish Museum has
led me to write up accounts of twenty Jewish artists of the 20th
Century. This is predominantly a
USA-centred list of Jewish artists.
The sources are:
 Paintings on display in the Jewish Museum, New York
 Van Voolen. E. ‘50 Jewish Artists You Should Know’. 2011.
 Harries. R. ‘The Image of Christ in Modern Art’. 2013.
 Hepburn N. ‘Cross Purposes: Shock and Contemplation in Images of the Crucifixion’. 2010.
 Langer. L. ‘Pre-empting the Holocaust’. 1998.
 My blog: http://abstractartc20.blogspot.co.uk/
 Other sources as acknowledged.
The artists are listed chronologically by the date of a specific work produced by each artist. Thus, a
Jewish history of the 20th
Century is also presented. The story that is told also shows intimate
interweaving between Jewish and Christian identity.
The stay in New York City was made possible by: sabbatical grants made to me by the Bishop of
Chichester, Ecclesiastical Insurance and St.Matthias Trust; the hospitality of the House of the
Redeemer – retreat house of the Episcopal Church of the USA on East 95th
Street; and by the
generous understanding of my wife Kerry.
1. Camille Pissarro’s ‘Self Portrait’ of 1875 is reproduced in van Voolen’s ‘Fifty Jewish
Artists You Should Know’.
Pissarro was born into a Sephardic Jewish family: he moved to Paris in 1855 and by 1873 had
become a founder of the Impressionist School. He considered himself to be not religious but he did
not deny his Jewish ancestry. Pissarro was affected by anti-Semitism in France in the 1860s and
again in the 1890s during the Dreyfus Affair. Some of the Impressionists did not want to be
associated with Pissarro ‘the Israelite’. Impressionists in general and Pissarro in particular were
accused by some critics of being colour-blind, a disease believed to afflict Jews in particular. Pissarro
supported Dreyfus during his imprisonment and trial. Pissarro lived from 1830 to 1903.
2. Amadeo Modigliani’s ‘The Jewess (La Juive)’ of 1907-08 is reproduced in van Voolen’s
‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’. Modigliani lived from 1884 to 1920.
Klein and Brown on Modigliani
The paper ‘The Faces of Modigliani: Identity Politics under Fascism’ by Klein, M. & Brown, E. (in Klein.
M. (ed) ‘Modigliani beyond the myth’ (2004)) shows that Modigliani painted the ‘European tribe’ in a
challenge to the monolithic Christian perception of Europe. Modigliani was born an Italian Sephardic
Jew. When he was in Paris from 1906, Modigliani’s origin distinguished him from Eastern European
Jews. And to be Italian in Paris was to embody a land that had been snubbed diplomatically as a
backward nation at the dangerous southern margin of European civilisation. Modigliani was,
however, from Livorno, in Tuscany, the birthplace of Renaissance art, and this, together with his
‘aristocratic bearing’, gave him an air of cultural authenticity in Paris. Conversely, Modigliani’s
success in Paris made him a celebrated artist in Italy. Characteristics of Modigliani’s portrait style
include: the influence of African sculpture; emphasis on qualities of passivity and modesty; and
styles of imagery that originate more from Eastern Europe and the Orient than from Western Europe
and which define the ‘otherness’ of Modigliani’s subject matter.

20
It was in 1929 that Lamberto Vitali gave an account of Modigliani’s ‘racial qualities’: in Modigliani the
qualities of the Italian and the Jewish were combined and both were displayed to good effect. But
Vitali is writing about himself and his own Italian Jewish identity as much as about Modigliani. Vitali
was nevertheless the first Italian critic to describe positive stereotypes of Jewish religion and culture:
the eroticism of Modigliani’s nudes was ‘transfigured into chaste emotion’; and Modigliani’s
sensuality drew on Judaism’s ancient worship of women ‘with the most ancient and beautiful of
hymns’. Thus, Modigliani embodied Jewish and Christian, and ancient and modern.
A powerful perception ‘that was present in European fin-de-siècle Europe’ was that of the
“wandering Jew”. It was held that the Jewish diaspora was rootless and thus unable to develop a
distinctive Jewish artistic culture. Moreover, it was held – disapprovingly - that this diaspora was
responsible for disseminating modernism. The influential critic – and advisor to Mussolini –
Margherita Sarfatti – a Jew – argued that Zionism was a threat to Italy and its Jews. Sarfatti ignored
Modigliani’s Jewishness and regarded him as having been an ambassador of Tuscany abroad. It was
held that Modigliani had nothing in common with the works of his fellow Jews in Paris: Marc Chagall,
the abstractionist (see below), and the disturbing Chaim Soutine (see below). Modigliani’s portraits
were received as modernist versions of the old masters. ‘Stereotypes of Jewish suffering’ merged
with ‘Christian misericorda’. The narrative of Modigliani’s life was given overt Christian symbolism:
his time in Paris was a ‘road to Calvary’; Modigliani was a ‘hermit of beauty’ who sought neither
fame nor disciples; ‘the diasporic Jew and the patriotic Italian came together in this “martyr for art”’.
Alberto Savinio asserted that ‘the destiny of all “good” Jews is to relive the tragedy of Christ – to be
Christianised’.
In the 1930s the proponents of Modigliani began to suffer under Fascism. Even so, during the
Second World War Modiglianis remained in private collections and there is evidence that his work
was not universally reviled by the Fascists – because of his great international reputation.
3. Maurycy Minkowski’s ‘He Cast a Look and Went Mad’ of 1910, in the Jewish Museum,
New York, painted in Poland, shows young Talmudists – contemporaries of Minkowski - who
are contemplating the dilemma between faith and secularism.
Minkowski is included in ‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’. His work of about 1910 ‘After the
Pogrom’ is reproduced in the book: this work is also in the Jewish Museum, New York. Minkowski
(1881 – 1930) was born in Warsaw and studied in Cracow. He witnessed pogroms that took place in
Bialystok after the attempted revolution in Russia in 1905 and this led him to specialise in paintings
that depicted Jewish life in Poland. Minkowski had been deaf and mute since the age of five years
old. The entry for Minkowski in ‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’ summarises the history of
Christian persecution of Jews. It states: ‘Although the 18th
Century Enlightenment promoted
equality for all humanity and ultimately led to Jewish emancipation, its vitriolic critique of religion,
especially the supposedly backward and particularistic Judaism, created the roots of secular anti-
Semitism’. Specific circumstances in the late 19th
Century in the Jewish Pale of Settlement (in which
eastern Poland lay) that are stated to have created the circumstances for pogroms are: continuing
religious hatred; envy of the success of Jewish entrepreneurs; revulsion at Jewish poverty and Jewish
non-assimilation; and state-sponsored anti-Jewish restrictions. In pogroms ‘Jewish property was
destroyed, women raped, and hundreds of thousands of people were brutally killed or forced to
flee’. Consequently, over 1.5 million Jewish people emigrated from Eastern Europe to the USA in the
late 19th
and early 20th
Centuries.
4. Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Red Gaze’ of 1910 is reproduced in van Voolen’s ‘Fifty Jewish
Artists You Should Know’.
Schoenberg (1874 – 1951) was both a composer and a painter. He was born and circumcised a Jew
but was Baptised a Lutheran in 1898 in Vienna. Schoenberg’s ‘Red Gaze’ is an Expressionist portrait:
Kandinsky showed this work in the Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich.

21
Schoenberg was pursued by anti-Semitism in Austria in the 1920s, and in 1923 he was made
unwelcome at the Bauhaus due to its anti-Semitism. He fled to Paris in 1933 where he reconverted
to Judaism ‘though rejecting all official forms of it, religious or national’. He arrived in the USA on a
Czech passport in 1933 and in 1944 he became a citizen of the USA ‘changing musical history in the
New World as he had in the Old’. In the early 20th
Century Schoenberg had experimented with
abstraction in both music and art. He knew Sigmund Freud’s view that ‘Art belongs to the
subconscious’. Schoenberg remained in America and resisted offers to return to Vienna or to go to
Israel. Van Voolen writes: ‘Many people change and choose new identities – voluntarily or not. As
Freud once commented about the Jews, one has to be both an insider and an outsider to develop
new visions. ‘Red Gaze’ and Schoenberg’s personal history – shows that this sometimes hurts’.
5. Jacob Epstein’s sculpture ‘Risen Christ’ of 1917-1919 was Epstein’s first major work.
Epstein was born in New York’s Lower East Side in 1880; he died in 1959. His career as sculptor
spans the period from his move from New York to Paris in 1905 and throughout his subsequent
residence in the UK until his death in 1959.
Harries on Epstein
Harries writes that in his autobiography Epstein states that the New Testament and Dostoevsky’s
‘The Brothers Karamazov’ were his primary reading matter as a young man. It is also known that in
his teenage years in New York City Epstein was encouraged by a Christian foundation - referred to in
the biography of Epstein by June Rose – as ‘the University Settlement’. Harries writes that Epstein
was befriended in this Settlement by a Mrs Moore who encouraged him. Rose writes that Epstein
did not mention this in his autobiography, stating: ‘Epstein shabbily omitted the whole episode,
ashamed perhaps to admit how much he had been helped by the University Settlement. Mrs Moore
does not rate a mention’.
In the sculpture (ie. ‘Risen Christ’), Christ points to his wounded hand – said by Epstein to be an
accusation of the world’s ‘grossness, inhumanity, cruelty and beastliness’. Epstein wrote ‘the Jew –
the Galilean – condemns our wars and warns us that “Shalom, Shalom” must still be the watchword
between man and man’. Later in his life Epstein affirmed that the sculpture spoke of both ‘man’ and
‘the Son of Man’.
Harries writes about the controversial nature of Epstein’s sculptured figures in the UK throughout
the mid 20th
Century: they were seen as simultaneously distorted, modern and mysterious; they
‘cleared away sentimentality and concentrated on essentials’. Harries describes how, when a work
by Epstein was proposed for the new Coventry Cathedral in 1954, the architect – Basil Spence –
recorded that a member of the committee established to commission the new cathedral initially
objected that Epstein was Jewish, Spence replied ‘So was Jesus Christ’.
Wolff on Epstein
In Chapter 6 of her book ‘AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States’
(Ithaca, New York; Cornell University Press; 2003) Janet Wolff discusses ‘The “Jewish Mark” in
English Painting: Cultural Identity and Modern Art’. This chapter helps with understanding of the
perception of Jacob Epstein and his works in the UK during his lifetime.
Wolff writes that at the start of the 20th
Century Englishness was defined by that which it was not: to
be English was, among other things, to be not Jewish. Wolff writes - from Colls and Dodd -
‘Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920’ – that ‘the Jew was the archetypal Other’. Working
from Cheyette’s 1993 work - ‘Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial
Representations 1875-1945’ – Wolff asserts that in English literature of the late Nineteenth and early
Twentieth Century ‘the Jew’ is not a fixed figure and is one that signifies ‘protean instability’.

22
Thus in the necessity of Englishness to define itself against alien groups, ‘the Jew’ was always in an
intermediate state between exclusion and inclusion.
Wolff writes that between 1880 and 1914 large numbers of Jewish people from Eastern Europe
settled in Britain. The 1905 Aliens Act was intended to reduce Jewish immigration. Amongst other
pressure for this legislation was that from Jews who were well-settled in Britain and who were
fearful of ‘less respectable’ Jews from rural Eastern Europe. On this Wolff concludes that in the early
Twentieth Century ‘the Jew’ was the paradigm of ‘the Other’: many Jewish people ‘colluded in this
belief in ethnicity as a foundation for art-making’. Wolff discusses three examples of Jewish
acceptance of this paradigm in the UK in the early 1920s. One example concerns Jacob Epstein: the
Jewish Chronicle described Jacob Epstein’s sculpture as “entirely Hebraic” at a time when non-
Jewish critics used this formula to serve anti-semitism.
Wolff subsequently enquires into the ‘art-critical language employed of Jewish artists in England in
the 1910s’. She considers the case of Epstein.
Epstein’s work was criticised for its ‘obscenity’ and its ‘uncompromising anti-naturalism’. Elizabeth
Barker has shown that this hostility was directed at Epstein’s Jewishness. In 1912 Epstein visited
Paris and was influenced by African and tribal art that he saw there. Barker shows that the
‘racializing of this discourse’ (ie. art criticism) increased after 1917. Barker has noted that a 1925
review of Epstein’s work described his ‘primitivist style’ as “an atavistic yearning of like for like”.
Barker states that a 1933 history of English sculpture omitted Epstein because his ‘ancestry and early
environment go far to explain his art’ which was described as ‘essentially oriental’: Epstein was ‘with
us but not of us’. The response to Epstein’s sculpture ‘Risen Christ’ of 1917-1919 (referred to
above), which was exhibited in 1920, exemplifies the equation that was made between Epstein’s
primitivist-modernist style and his Jewishness. Wolff writes that the sculpture was intended as a
personal memorial to the First World War and was an allegory of suffering. Barker’s view is that the
sentiment underlying criticism of the work was the principle that Jews had no right to portray Christ.
Barker writes that ‘Risen Christ’ was ‘a direct challenge to the moral and aesthetic values native to
contemporary Christian art’. Barker sums up the values that Epstein’s work was alleged to embody
as: ‘”archaic”; “barbaric”; “Oriental”; “Egyptian”; “aesthetic”; and “revolutionary”’. These ‘signify
the otherness of Epstein’s Christ’, ‘offering a counter-image to the gentle divinity of Christian
conventions’. Barker refers to sensationalist and exaggerated criticism in the press. In one example
she quotes, the ‘“degenerate” racial characteristics of Epstein’s figure … suggested “some degraded
Chaldean or African, which wore the appearance of an Asiatic-American or Hun-Jew, or a badly
grown Egyptian swathed in the cerements of the grave’.
Wolff’s aim is to highlight particular instances ‘in this critical historical period’ (ie. the end of the
Nineteenth Century and the start of the subsequent Century) that indicate the process of racial or
ethnic exclusion that is necessary to construct ‘Englishness’: ‘Jewishness is invoked in art criticism’ ….
‘in such a way as to reinforce its obverse, namely ‘Englishness’.
6. Chaim Soutine’s ‘Carcass of Beef’ of about 1925 is reproduced in Van Voolen’s ‘Fifty
Jewish Artists You Should Know’. Soutine was born in Russia (now Belarus) in 1893; he died
1943.
Cogniat on Soutine
Raymond Cogniat’s book ‘Soutine’ (1973) describes Soutine’s life and work. Chaim Soutine was an
‘artiste maudit’: an artist who finds himself at odds with his surroundings and yet who thrives in this
marginal condition and who thus comes to be representative of the era in which he lives. Chaim
Soutine was born in Smilovitchi – a small village near Minsk. From a young age Soutine believed he
had an artist’s vocation. At this time Soutine befriended a young man named Kikoine.

23
An anecdote from this time tells of one or more people assaulting Soutine because he had painted a
portrait: in one version the assault is said to have been made by the son of a rabbi who was angered
that Soutine had defied the injunction against representative painting in the Second Commandment.
Soutine received compensation for his injuries: this was partly given to his family and partly used by
Soutine in 1910 to travel to Vilnius where he was accepted at the art school and where he stayed for
two years.
Kikoine was also at the school but in 1912 he left for Paris where Fauvism had originated six years
previously and Cubism was four years old. Aspiring artists from Eastern, Central and Western
Europe were arriving in Paris to take advantage of the new opportunities.
Soutine joined Kikoine, along with other artists recently arrived including ‘Kremegne (another
compatriot and friend), Chagall, Fernand Leger, Robert Delaunay, and Blaise Cendrars, as well as
Laurens, Zadkine, and Archipenko. Soutine spent much time in the Louvre. He particularly studied
Courbet’s The Burial at Ornans which Cogniat describes as realism that exceeds visible reality. He
suggests that this – and other works by Courbet - would have liberated Soutine. Rembrandt’s works
in the Louvre were also a revelation to Soutine: he ‘discovered (in Rembrandt) the constantly
renewed, shifting play of colours in relation to one another, and ….. the poignant exploration and
externalisation of the inner life’. Cogniat writes that another element to be introduced at this point
is to relate Soutine’s work not to French art but to the German Expressionism of the time.
Cogniat argues that a complete change occurred with the start of the Twentieth Century and that
Soutine was in the vanguard. He writes: ‘Several artists from Central Europe and Russia have
introduced a very special note into the art of our age, a feeling for the pathos of daily life, a latent
despair, or even simply a melancholy and a resignation, forms of Eastern fatalism expressed in the
choice of themes and style’. This is a style, Cogniat writes, that delights in bold brushwork that
results from the artist’s ‘overstimulation … being held in check by the rules of an aesthetic system’.
Cogniat attributes this style to the ‘state of mind resulting from political circumstances and the
climate of permanent anxiety in which the Jews of certain areas live’. In the early Twentieth Century
the more relaxed atmosphere of Western Europe stimulated Jewish artists to ‘give free rein to the
hitherto suppressed nostalgia to which they had become accustomed’.
In 1915 Soutine met the painter and sculptor Amadeo Modigliani (see above), and the two of them
became close friends – or more accurately ‘companion hermits’, both living in ‘extreme poverty’.
Soutine and Modigliani were drinking companions, and temperamentally they were opposites:
Modigliani’s extraversion, his detachment, and his ‘controlled’ painting style contrasting with
Soutine’s introversion, his ‘hunted demeanour’ and his violent method of painting. ‘Alcoholism’ was
a source of the conflict between the two men, and yet Soutine received ‘daily nourishment’ from his
friendship with Modigliani. Modigliani introduced Soutine to Zborowski – a Polish poet and art
dealer. Zborowski and a small number of other patrons assisted Soutine financially and by
preventing Soutine destroying all of the paintings that he was dissatisfied with. Cogniat argues that
other extant paintings from 1915 and 1916 show Soutine’s immersion in anguish and misery.
Landscapes have a sense of impending doom; still lifes have a ‘despairing, aggressive realism’.
In 1918 Soutine moved to the south of France. He was accompanied by Modigliani. Zborowski
enabled the move. The experience precipitated in Soutine greater liberty and a more violent and
intense vision. Cogniat writes: ‘His art now fully attained its apocalyptic character and became a
suitable vehicle for the painful revelation of its creator, who continued to live in materially
deplorable conditions …. increasingly harassed by his stomach troubles’. Cogniat concludes that
Soutine’s works at this time are an ‘affirmation of catastrophe couched in the form not of a probable
future but of a visible, present reality’.
In the period 1920 to 1927 Soutine experienced the loss of Modigliani, who died in 1920, and a
sudden upturn in his situation in 1922 when Dr Albert C Barnes of the USA purchased seventy five of
Soutine’s works from Zborowski.

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In 1927 Soutine had his first one-man exhibition, in Paris. In the late 1920 and early 1930s Soutine
achieved some stability through friendship with the Castaing family.
Zborowski died in 1932. Cogniat writes that the carcasses of animals that Soutine painted emerged
from Soutine’s exposure to ritual sacrifices that he witnessed as a child ‘with their atmosphere of
religious terror’. In the latter part of his life – the late 1930s and early 1940s - the dominant red in
Soutine’s earlier works gave way to a dominant green in his portraits of trees, often shown battling
against the wind. In 1941 Soutine escaped from Nazi Paris and, due to misunderstandings, was not
able to reach the USA. He moved to Touraine in Vichy France in the company of Marie-Berthe
Aurenche. In 1943 surgery on Soutine’s stomach became essential, and on 8th
August 1943 he was
operated on in Paris. Soutine died the following day.
Schama on Soutine
In his book ‘Hang Ups’, (BBC Books; 2005) Simon Schama has a chapter on Soutine entitled Chaim
Soutine: Gut Feeling.
Schama asserts the apparent central role that Soutine’s stomach pain played in his selection of
subjects to paint and in his style of painting. Soutine painted in an Expressionist manner, and
expressed not only his inner mind but also his whole afflicted body.
Schama describes Soutine’s contradictory approach to personal relationships: he argues that
Soutine’s physical suffering inspired him to achieve some of his greatest works, and that this
affliction was a controlling influence on his friendships. Schama observes that dietary concerns are
key to Jewish identity.
Schama asserts that shtetl culture within the Pale of Settlement of Soutine’s origin may well have
been inhibited by the Second Commandment against figurative depictions in art, but that city life in
the Pale of Settlement was different. Minsk and Vilnius were centres of creativity that produced ‘an
entire generation of Jewish modernists, including El Lissistzky, Jacques Lipchitz (see below in this
Section) and Marc Chagall (see below in this Section), so Soutine was not isolated in pursuing a
painter’s life.
Schama writes that Soutine’s ‘Expressionist landscapes’ painted at Ceret are ‘of dumbfoundingly
original power’. The Tate Gallery’s ‘Landscape at Ceret (The Storm)’ is described as ‘one of the most
radical pictures’ of this time. The patronage of Soutine by Albert Barnes from 1922 was a surprising
phenomenon: Soutine returned to Paris as ‘primitivist poster boy’. But Soutine remained the
tortured ‘wild man’.
In the mid to late 1920s Soutine returned to the Masters whom he believed ‘had treated painting as
a perpetually incomplete creation’. He was particularly drawn to Rembrandt’s obsession with the
texture of paint in the late part of his life. Schama describes Rembrandt as the ‘proto-patriarch of
Expressionism’. Soutine was especially drawn to Rembrandt’s slaughtered beasts: ‘profound
meditations on the relationship between sacrifice and redemption’. This was the impetus to
Soutine’s ‘slaughter’ paintings.
Schama asserts that Soutine’s attraction to ‘sacrifice and redemption’ was ultimately religious. From
his upbringing he would have understood Jewish and Christian traditions of sacrificial atonement: as
an Orthodox Jew, he would have been averse to the Christian amalgamation of God and sacrifice.
But Soutine’s blood-filled carcasses are ‘adamantly unkosher’. Jewish ritual slaughter requires the
draining of blood, but Soutine painted dead creatures hanging inverted, so that the blood would not
drain. And there is a hint of life, still, in these dead bodies: these paintings have an ‘element of self-
portraiture’. Schama considers that these paintings of slaughter have the meaning only of Soutine’s
personal fate.

25
In the early 1940s, as Soutine’s death approached, he had already come to the notice of Mark
Rothko (see below in this Section and in Section 8) and Adolph Gottlieb (see below in Section 8) in
the USA. In 1950 Soutine’s works were shown for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York: he had become ‘the patriarch of gestural abstraction’.
7. Max Weber’s ‘Still Life with Challah’ of the 1930s, in the Jewish Museum, New York,
was painted in New York: it is oil on canvas.
The painting has its origins in still lifes that Weber painted when he was in Paris from 1905 to 1908:
he was an admirer of Cezanne. Weber returned to New York in 1909. In 1913 Weber painted ‘Still
Life, Judaica’ which is an assemblage of ritual objects for the Sabbath. By 1919 Weber ‘had
abandoned formal experimentation and turned to Jewish subjects in pursuit of the spiritual’. Weber
was born in 1881 and died in 1961.
8. Jacques Lipchitz’s sculpture ‘David and Goliath’ – a bronze – of 1933 is reproduced in
Van Voolen’s ‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’.
Lipchitz lived from 1891 to 1973. Lipchitz moved from Lithuania (then Russia) to Paris and was a
contemporary there of Brancusi, Soutine, Modigliani, Rivera, Picasso and Gris. In 1940 Lipchitz fled
to New York where he stayed for the rest of his life. Lipchitz’s sculpture of the 1930s and 1940s has
subject matter and titles that depict the situation in Europe. ‘David and Goliath’ has its genesis in
sketches begun by Lipchitz soon after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. Lipchitz responded to
Israel’s 1948 War of Independence by creating his sculpture Hagar (1948 and 1969). Lipchitz wanted
to bear witness to Exodus 22:20 ‘do not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in
the land of Egypt’. His concern is with the fate of Palestinians. Van Voolen writes: ‘Hagar is
considered the ancestor of the Arabs’. Lipchitz was buried in Israel.
9. Mark Rothko’s ‘Crucifixion’ of 1941-42 is oil on canvas. It was painted in the USA. This
work is in the Jewish Museum, New York.
This is a presentation of a crucifixion that separates the upper and lower part of the painting by two
crucified arms – one above the other, one a right arm and the other a left arm – on which the hand
is pierced by a nail. Above the arms is a semi-human form which comprises several human faces,
with the open eyes as the dominant features. Below the arms, on the left are several human pairs of
legs – some fleshed and other skeletal. In the lower right side of the painting there are two nailed
feet, emerging as from out of a wooden box and above them, in a separate wooden box, is a human
fist. The background to the whole painting is vertical red and white stripes. The ‘floor’ on which the
assemblage stands is painted as red and white stripes. In her book ‘The Rothko Book’ of 2006, (Tate
Publications) Bonnie Clearwater writes that in the early 1940s Rothko was interested in the symbolic
content of ancient mythology, and the potential of myths to achieve personal unification in the
present day. He was concerned about fragmentation and compartmentalism. Rothko wrote in his
‘The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art’ (probably written in 1940 / 41, discovered and published in
2005) ‘we have religion to serve our souls, we have law to serve our notions of temporal and
property justice, we have science to qualify the structural world of matter and energy, we have
sociology to deal with human conduct .... and we have psychology to deal with man’s subjectivity’.
Clearwater writes that several of Rothko’s paintings from the early 1940s ‘represent multiple
crucifixions, with figures that are fragmented and compartmentalised. The architectural details
provide a unifying structure to these scenes of communal suffering’. Rothko was born in 1903 and
died in 1970.
Section 8 below discusses Rothko at greater length.

26
10. Emmanuel Levy’s ‘Crucifixion’ of 1942 was in the exhibition: Cross Purposes.
In this painting Levy shows Christ as a contemporary Orthodox Jew being crucified in a cemetery
where the graves are marked with crosses. Christ is wearing phylacteries and a prayer shawl.
Hepburn writes: far from being responsible for Christ’s death, the Jews are presented as
synonymous with Christ as the scapegoat of Christian Europe. He is seen as the archetypal Jewish
martyr’.
11. Felix Nussbaum’s ‘Self Portrait in Death Shroud (Group Portrait)’ of 1942 is
reproduced in Van Voolen’s ‘Fifty Jewish Artists You Should Know’.
Nussbaum was born in 1904; he died in 1944. Nussbaum was born in Osnabruck in Germany: he
moved to Berlin in 1923. In 1933 he travelled to Rome. In Osnabruck he experienced a pogrom and
in Rome his studio caught fire. Nussbaum and his wife were arrested in 1944 and deported to
Auschwitz where they were killed. Nussbaum’s paintings show the unsettling uncertainties that
Nussbaum lived with.
12. Marc Chagall’s ‘The Yellow Crucifixion’ of 1942 is reproduced in Van Voolen’s ‘Fifty
Jewish Artists You Should Know’. Chagall lived from 1887 to 1985.
Rosen on Chagall
In his book: ‘Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the masters in Chagall, Guston and Kitaj’ (2009),
Rosen writes incisively about Chagall’s purpose in painting. Rosen’s account of Chagall is
summarised here.
Chagall was born in 1887 in Vitebsk – then in Russia and now in Belarus – and in 1910 he moved to
Paris. He decided that his future as an artist lay in Paris and that it could not thrive in Russia.
Chagall observed that the artistic tradition of his homeland was that of Christian icon painting, and
that while he valued this tradition and considered Christ ‘a great poet whose poetical teaching had
been forgotten by the modern world’, the Russian, Christian tradition remained strange to him.
Chagall and the Christian tradition
Rosen discusses ways in which some of Chagall’s works indicate the artist’s alienation from the
Christian artistic tradition. His ‘Pregnant Woman’ of 1913 can be read as an irreverent observation
on the immaculate conception of Jesus Christ. His ‘Abraham and the Three Angels’ of 1956 is a re-
working of Rublev’s icon ‘The Holy Trinity’ of 1410-1420: instead of presenting the angels of Genesis
18 as a prefiguring of the Christian Trinity, Chagall has the angels with their backs to the viewer.
Rosen asks why Chagall felt so comfortable in Western Europe where the Christian tradition in art is
also dominant. Rosen quotes Harshav, who states that Chagall would have come to Western art in
the same way as a newcomer who encounters all periods of art history as parallel galleries in a
museum. This would have stimulated Chagall’s creativity. In this setting, for Chagall Christ is no
longer Christ of the icons but Christ the ‘great poet’. Thus, the New Testament and the Western
tradition of art become for Chagall a source of stories and symbols, and in paintings with a New
Testament setting Chagall introduces his own life-story. In contrast, when Chagall paints from the
Old Testament, these external references are less common.
Chagall and the Jewish scriptures
Rosen refers to research that has been done by Meyer Schapiro which shows how, in some of his
paintings of Old Testament subjects, Chagall has been influenced in his compositions by the works of
Rembrandt and Ribera. In his ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ of 1956 Chagall has added a Hasidic Jew who points at
Jacob. This, states Rosen, is Chagall showing that Jacob’s dream is a specifically Jewish story with
promise of future blessings by the Lord for the Jewish people. In Chagall’s ‘Promise to Jerusalem’ of
1956, Chagall refers to the promise made to Israel by the Lord in Isaiah 54: 7.

Jewish Art in the 20th Century AJH 190715 pdf

Jewish Art in the 20th Century AJH 190715 pdf

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