ImagesPub Date : 2024-07-25DOI: 10.1163/18718000-12340182
Reuven Gafni
{"title":"On the Ideological and Practical Significance of Siddur Inner Cover Illustrations in Modern Eretz Israel","authors":"Reuven Gafni","doi":"10.1163/18718000-12340182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18718000-12340182","url":null,"abstract":"<p><em>This study focuses on one visual component within the envelope of the siddur (the Jewish prayer book) that has yet to receive scholarly attention: the artistic illustration appearing on its inner cover (for the siddur in Hebrew, on the first left page). Specifically, it examines the inner cover illustration of six modern Ashkenazi prayer books from Eretz Israel, delving into the marketing and ideological messages embedded within each illustration. The comparative study of these six Ashkenazi</em> siddurim <em>– most of which were created at a time when the liturgical and ideological design of the prayer and synagogue in Eretz Israel was being re-examined, affecting also the design and identity of each siddur – allows us to make an in-depth comparison between the different illustrations, placing each of them within a specific, comparative context.</em></p>","PeriodicalId":41613,"journal":{"name":"Images","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141776806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ImagesPub Date : 2024-04-12DOI: 10.1163/18718000-12340178
Larry Silver
{"title":"What Matisse and Picasso Owed to Jewish Collectors and Dealers","authors":"Larry Silver","doi":"10.1163/18718000-12340178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18718000-12340178","url":null,"abstract":"<jats:italic>While the prominence in twentieth-century painting of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso remains unquestioned, neither of these great artists could have emerged in their shared Parisian art world without the direct support of Jewish collectors and dealers. Foremost among the Jewish collectors of their earlier works were Americans living in Paris, especially the Steins: Leo, Gertrude, and Michael and Sarah Stein. While Leo followed by Michael and Sarah was an early purchaser of Matisse’s bold early Fauvist works, led by Bonheur de Vie (1905), Gertrude turned increasingly to Picasso, who painted her portrait (1906). Their support for Matisse was avidly seconded by the Cone sisters, whose extensive collection was donated intact to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Jews were also early adopters of French modern art in general as dealers. Chiefly led by the Rosenberg brothers, Léonce and Paul, prominent Jewish dealers during the teens also included the perceptive, if underfunded, Berthe Weill as well as the German immigrant Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Both of the latter gave crucial support to experimental art, the latter in particular to the art of Picasso’s Cubist phase (including a Cubist portrait of the dealer). In addition, a number of Jewish art critics served as influencers, supporting contemporary artists, albeit often castigating paintings by immigrant Eastern European Jewish artists, whom they viewed as outsiders. In their view, it was the multinational School of Paris’ often Jewish immigrants, against the greater, local School of France.</jats:italic>","PeriodicalId":41613,"journal":{"name":"Images","volume":"120 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140560351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ImagesPub Date : 2023-12-09DOI: 10.1163/18718000-12340175
Rachel E. Perry
{"title":"Not by Words Alone: Early Holocaust Graphic Narratives as a “Minor Art”","authors":"Rachel E. Perry","doi":"10.1163/18718000-12340175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18718000-12340175","url":null,"abstract":"Immediately after the Holocaust, scores of Jewish survivors created graphic narratives, in word and image, about their individual and collective wartime experiences under Nazi oppression. This essay will make a case for these early postwar works as a “minor art.” “Minor” captures the material characteristics of this low-capital, low-circulation printed matter: slight in weight, small in size, modest in price, and ephemeral in quality. It also describes their “poor” images that pull, in form and structure, from popular culture (comics, cartoons, illustrated books) on the margins of modernist concerns (composite image-texts relying on narrative storytelling). Borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” as a deterritorialized, political, collective utterance, I argue that disciplinary notions of “art” and “testimony” have prevented us from seeing this “minor art” and recognizing how its vernacular, amateur art practices allowed survivors to reconstruct the past, remember communities and identities erased, and reclaim their own narratives of persecution. Created by a minority (a decimated Jewish community) working on the peripheries of the art world, they tell a Jewish story using Jewish frames of reference to create a community outside of majoritarian culture. What is at stake in them is not only a poetics of recollection but a politics of representation: of seeing <jats:italic>with</jats:italic> Jews as a critical act by dominated persons against the dominant, antifascist master narrative of WWII and the primary media of its dissemination, photography and film. Ultimately, this “minor art” can have major implications for both how we understand the crucial first decade of survivor initiatives and how we write our histories of Jewish art.","PeriodicalId":41613,"journal":{"name":"Images","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138562746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ImagesPub Date : 2023-12-09DOI: 10.1163/18718000-12340176
Mariann Farkas
{"title":"Wrestling with the Diaspora’s Angels: A Note on Fra Angelico’s Legacy in Hungarian-Israeli Art","authors":"Mariann Farkas","doi":"10.1163/18718000-12340176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18718000-12340176","url":null,"abstract":"While numerous scholars have analyzed the influence of immigration on Jewish visual culture, few have focused on the Hungarian-Israeli scene. This article seeks to resolve some of the lacunae surrounding expressions of Hungarian immigrant experiences in Israeli art by analyzing the Annunciation theme in Hedi Tarjan’s series Homage to Fra Angelico, which was painted in the 1980s and the 2000s. A woman artist with a complex Christian-Jewish identity, Tarjan expressed her cross-cultural and interfaith experiences in her paintings and can be regarded as a “Jewish Diasporist” in the sense elaborated in American artist R. B. Kitaj’s manifestos. The article concludes by arguing that Tarjan, as a Jewish artist who emigrated from Hungary to Israel, faced unique professional, cultural, and religious challenges.","PeriodicalId":41613,"journal":{"name":"Images","volume":"195 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138564157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ImagesPub Date : 2023-12-06DOI: 10.1163/18718000-12340171
Katrin Kogman-Appel
{"title":"Images and Objects in Medieval Jewish Societies: Multidisciplinary Methods and Approaches","authors":"Katrin Kogman-Appel","doi":"10.1163/18718000-12340171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18718000-12340171","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41613,"journal":{"name":"Images","volume":"50 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138596225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ImagesPub Date : 2023-10-31DOI: 10.1163/18718000-12340172
Diane Wolfthal, Elisabeth Hollender
{"title":"The Intentional Alteration of Jewish Manuscripts and the Houston Mahzor","authors":"Diane Wolfthal, Elisabeth Hollender","doi":"10.1163/18718000-12340172","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18718000-12340172","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Books are living forms that must be understood not simply as they were at the moment and place of their creation, but also as they changed through time and space. This article focuses on a little-known medieval mahzor from the Rhineland, currently in Houston, which has been published in only three catalogue entries. It begins by introducing the manuscript and then goes on to focus on what is perhaps its most remarkable aspect: its extensive mutilation. After examining how and why other medieval Jewish manuscripts were intentionally altered, this essay explores the various campaigns that modified the Houston Mahzor and what can be known about the manuscript’s missing texts and images. Reimagining the Mahzor as it once was reveals a richly illuminated manuscript with strikingly unusual images. Studying how it was intentionally altered over time uncovers a range of reactions from its varied audience, Jewish and Christian, German and Italian, medieval and modern.","PeriodicalId":41613,"journal":{"name":"Images","volume":"33 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135929688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ImagesPub Date : 2023-10-31DOI: 10.1163/18718000-12340174
Chana Shacham-Rosby
{"title":"Ritual Chairs of Circumcision Ceremonies: Reassessing Meaning through Materiality","authors":"Chana Shacham-Rosby","doi":"10.1163/18718000-12340174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18718000-12340174","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay will showcase a process of contextualizing a Jewish ritual object through synthesizing a range of sources. The object at the center of this research is the chair in the context of the circumcision ceremony in medieval Ashkenaz and the early modern Ashkenazi diaspora. The two ceremonial chairs are designated, respectively, for the ba′al brit, who holds the infant, and Elijah the Prophet, whose association with circumcision will be explored. The essay will present the central themes that medieval Ashkenazi Jews wished to highlight during the ceremony and suggest how these themes were reflected and communicated in the affordances of the chair.","PeriodicalId":41613,"journal":{"name":"Images","volume":"74 ","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135929977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ImagesPub Date : 2023-10-23DOI: 10.1163/18718000-12340169
Eva Frojmovic
{"title":"The Siren’s Seed","authors":"Eva Frojmovic","doi":"10.1163/18718000-12340169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18718000-12340169","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In two liturgical Pentateuchs from Northern Europe from around 1300, images of sirens appear unexpectedly and in ways that vary from common siren iconography. Perhaps these human–animal hybrids, or mixta, in their elusive sexuality and transgressive boundary-crossing articulate Jewish cultural concerns with gender politics. Feminist bestiary studies and feminist studies of vocality (the siren’s song) provide new insights into medieval gender politics and its subversions.","PeriodicalId":41613,"journal":{"name":"Images","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135460810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ImagesPub Date : 2023-10-20DOI: 10.14746/i.2023.34.43.17
Witold Stok
{"title":"Ear to the ground. Searching for ourselves in each other","authors":"Witold Stok","doi":"10.14746/i.2023.34.43.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14746/i.2023.34.43.17","url":null,"abstract":"
 
 
 An acclaimed Polish cinematographer and documentary film director describes his meeting with Sergey Paradjanov in the 1970s in Kiev. Stok found himself there in connection with the shooting of Piotr Studziński’s documentary film about one of Ukraine’s mathematicians. Despite the difficulties created by the Soviet totalitarian state to isolate Paradjanov, Stok managed to reach the director and also to watch his documentary film about the frescoes in Kiev at a special secret club screening. In his essay – a memoir – the author describes the differences between life in the Soviet Union and in more liberal Communist-ruled Poland. He characterizes Paradjanov’s artistic profile and his fate in the Soviet Union.
 
 
","PeriodicalId":41613,"journal":{"name":"Images","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135570138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ImagesPub Date : 2023-10-20DOI: 10.14746/i.2023.34.43.23
Agata Jankowska
{"title":"Images which are not there. The Representations of the Final Solution in the Examples of Son of Saul and Kornblumenblau","authors":"Agata Jankowska","doi":"10.14746/i.2023.34.43.23","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14746/i.2023.34.43.23","url":null,"abstract":"
 
 
 Since the problem of representing the Holocaust first emerged, philosophers, writers and filmmakers have tried to find appropriate aesthetic methods of expression. Two approaches dominate the thinking about the Shoah: Claude Lanzmann’s claim of “the event without images” and George Didi-Huberman’s “images in spite of all”. The author’s analysis deconstructs these two theoretical approaches through the interpretation of two films: the Polish Kornblumenblau and the Hungarian Son of Saul and the notion of “the images which are not there”, that is, the non-existent photographs of the Nazi “Final Solution”. The main thesis of the essay states that cinematic representation and artistic expression can substitute for the lack of historical and visual (mostly photographic) depictions of the Holocaust. With the inspiration of theory (Giorgio Agamben, Siegfried Kracauer), I consider different methods of dealing with the dilemma of “unimaginable Auschwitz” and the concept of “bare life” as an aesthetical problem.
 
 
","PeriodicalId":41613,"journal":{"name":"Images","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135570126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}