Jewish Art and Modernity

1 Quoted by Matthew Baigell, Jewish Art in America (Lanham, MD, 2007), 96. 2 On Jews and modern New York, see Harry Rand, “The Art of New York’s Jews: A Delicate Lesson,” in Transformation: Jews and Modernity [catalogue, Arthur Ross Gallery], ed. Larry Silver (Philadelphia, 2001), 69–75. 3 The phrase echoes the title of Margaret Olin’s The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Lincoln, NE, 2001), esp. 5–31; Kalman Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton, 2000). At the opposite pole, taking up the challenge of confrontational Jewish themes in modern art of various kinds, see Norman Kleeblatt, ed., Too Jewish? Challenging Both of the terms in the title of this essay have been endlessly debated in an effort to arrive at some kind of essentialistic definition of each. I suggest that such definitions are contextual and interdependent. The attempt to be a modern artist is vexing enough in general, but for Jews, who for centuries have been regarded by others as well as by many of their fellow Jews as the “people without art” because of the Second Commandment’s injunction against making graven images, making art poses particular challenges.3 As a result, perhaps unsurprisingly, their personal artistic achievements have varied considerably. Is there any way, then, to discern something “Jewish” in the work of late nineteenthor twentieth-century Jewish artists? This essay attempts to provide an analysis of Jewish art-making in context, theoretical as well as pragmatic.4