Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

Jewish American Artists in the Twentieth Century

With a few significant exceptions, the role of Jewish experience in the development of modern art is rarely considered in standard art historical narratives. This may seem strange, considering that two of the most significant events in Jewish history—the Holocaust and the establishment of the modern state of Israel—occurred in the twentieth century, and many prominent American and European artists of the past century were Jewish. On the other hand, the marginalization (intentional or not) of Jewishness within discussions of their work is not, in fact, surprising. Jews make up only about 0.2 percent of the world’s population, so one factor hampering the identification and interpretation of Jewish experience and symbolism in modern visual art is simply a lack of knowledge.

As art historians Samantha Baskind and Larry Silver point out, there is no art historical subfield of “Jewish art” comparable to that of Islamic or Christian art, and art historians rarely attain the skills necessary to recognize references in the work of some Jewish artists to Jewish texts, mysticism, or the Hebrew language.¹ Another consideration is that, especially before the 1960s, many Jewish artists in the United States downplayed their identity, concerned that their work would not appeal to a broad public if it seemed “too Jewish.” They worried about antisemitism as well as being narrowly categorized according to their minority status. Their own efforts to minimize attention to their Jewishness were reinforced in the post–World War II era by prominent modernist critics who described art in almost exclusively formal terms. Likewise, in evaluating the work of Jewish artists today, scholars continue to make little, if any, reference to their cultural or religious identity. Nevertheless, understanding the specific influences, experiences, and challenges surrounding Jewish artists offers insight into the nuanced meanings and sources of modern art. And at a time when 63 percent of American Jews report feeling increasingly worried about their safety, it is critical to understand and legitimize Jewish experience, including its expression within modern visual culture.²

The Eskenazi Museum of Art’s collection contains works by a variety of Jewish American artists active in the twentieth century.³ Some engaged directly with Jewish subjects, while others chose to embed very subtle references to Judaism or Jewish experiences in their work. Others were completely disinterested in connecting their artistic practice to their Jewish heritage. Some were religiously observant, while others preferred to express their Jewishness culturally or through political activism. Sometimes, but not always, artistic engagement with Jewish content paralleled the artist’s engagement with Jewish ritual and study. The works presented here were made between 1920 and 1960 by six Jewish artists who were first or second generation Americans. While their work is very diverse, they shared some crucial experiences. First, as immigrants or the children of immigrants, they shared a sense of cultural displacement, as well as the aspiration to assimilate into secular American culture. More significantly, these artists witnessed the genocide of one-third of the world’s Jews—including many members of their own families. More than eighty years after the conclusion of World War II, the Holocaust continues to shape modern Jewish identity, and it has played a defining role in the ways Jewish artists approach their craft.⁴

Along with Marcel Duchamp, whose groundbreaking Readymades can be found in the Eskenazi Museum’s collection, Man Ray pioneered the use of found and manufactured objects in art-making. This practice was integral to the Dada movement, which arose in response to World War I and sought to rethink the traditions of Western art. Man Ray’s attraction to the anti-establishment ideas of Dada paralleled his rejection of the structures and strictures of organized Jewish life. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, and raised in New York, Man Ray adopted his pseudonym by 1914, and possibly as early as 1909. At the time, it was common for Jewish immigrants or their children to change their family name to obscure their Jewish identity. There is nothing overtly Jewish about Man Ray’s oeuvre, although Gift and The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, both originally made in the early 1920s, suggest his ambivalence—or even hostility—toward his Jewish identity.

Both works seem to reference the garment industry, which employed both of Man Ray’s parents. In the early twentieth century, New York’s garment industry was almost entirely comprised of Jewish immigrant workers. Man Ray claimed that The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse was inspired by a passage in the 1869 book Les Chants de Maldoror by French poet Isidore Ducasse: “Beautiful as the accidental encounter, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” Ostensibly, the object swaddled in gray felt is a sewing machine, but the viewer cannot know for sure. The work could thus be a metaphor for Jewish identity, which can often be hidden or obscured. The fourteen nails adhered to the surface of the flat iron in Gift send a less ambivalent message about the dangers one may encounter as a Jew in a hostile world.

At a time when many American Jews anglicized their surnames, Archie Gottlieb began using his Hebrew name—Ahron ben Shmuel (Aaron, son of Samuel)—professionally. After apprenticing with a stone carver, Ben-Shmuel developed a reputation as one of the leading American modernist sculptors in the 1930s. In the mid-twentieth century, it was not uncommon for Jewish artists to portray Christian subjects, as they were perceived to be universally recognizable and could function as metaphors for different aspects of the human condition. Possibly depicting Saint Sebastian, a Roman officer martyred for his Christian practices, this sculpture expresses the anguish that many were feeling during the Great Depression. Despite his use of a Christian subject, Ben-Shmuel’s Judaism was evidently important to him. Later in his life, he made Aliyah (immigrated to Israel), taking advantage of the right of return the country offers to Jews living in the diaspora.

Born in Bialystok in the Russian Empire, Max Weber and his family immigrated to New York when he was ten years old. Displaying artistic talent, he traveled to Paris as a young man to learn about the latest modernist innovations, and he became one of the foremost American practitioners of Cubism. After World War I, he adopted a more figurative style influenced by expressionism. Weber is well known for incorporating Jewish content into his work, especially scenes from traditional Hasidic life. On the surface, Beautification does not appear to contain any references to Judaism or Jewish life. Is it simply a reflection on female beauty—or vanity?

Given his Orthodox background, Weber undoubtedly had intimate knowledge of rabbinic commentaries on the Torah. His depiction of three women seated near an entryway and arranging their hair with the aid of mirror brings to mind a passage in Exodus describing the artist Bezalel’s creation of ritual objects for the tabernacle (also known as the Tent of Meeting) that would house the Ark of the Covenant: “He made the laver of copper and its stand of copper, from the mirrors of the women who performed tasks at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting” (Exodus 38: 8). In his interpretation of this verse, the medieval commentator Rashi wrote that the Israelite women’s donation of their mirrors for the tabernacle’s construction was especially significant. For in Egypt, when their husbands were exhausted from the labors forced upon them as slaves, the women had used the mirrors to seduce them, consequently bringing new generations into existence.⁵ Considering the composition through the lens of Jewish texts, Beautification, then, might be read as a reflection not on vanity, but on bravery and endurance.

Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, to parents who had recently immigrated from Russia to escape pogroms (violent attacks on Jews), Abraham Rattner, who also experienced antisemitism as a child, was acutely aware of the perils that Jewish identity could confer. His feelings of trauma were exacerbated when, in 1939, after living and working in Paris for twenty years, Rattner was compelled to return to the United States by the outbreak of World War II and the threat of Nazism. Upon his return to his home country, his shock at the high level of antisemitism within American society was renewed. Unsurprisingly, he was deeply affected by the horrific news about the fate of Europe’s Jews.

Reports of the deportation of Jews to concentration camps, as well as mass killings in the forests of the Soviet Union, began filtering into the United States in 1942. However, visual documentation was scarce until the war’s conclusion, and artists struggled to find appropriate visual means to convey their horror at these unprecedented events. Some, including Rattner, turned to traditional Christian imagery—particularly Crucifixions—to visualize agony through imagery most Americans would recognize. Although Place of Darkness does not draw upon Christian iconography, it nevertheless conveys Rattner’s emotional state during the war years. Describing the composition as “apocalyptic,” he referred to its grotesque figures as sinners. On the other hand, the centrally located angel offers a slight glimmer of hope, which may have been sparked, for Rattner, by news of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. This (ultimately unsuccessful) uprising, the largest Jewish armed resistance effort against the Nazis, began on the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943, as Rattner was nearing the completion of Place of Darkness.

For a creative writer's reaction to Place of Darkness as well as more information about from our curator, listen to this podcast recorded in 2018 for the exhibition Picasso to Pollock: Modern Masterworks from the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University.

Born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz in Druskieniki, Lithuania (then part of the Russian empire), Jacques Lipchitz’s artistic ambitions took him to Paris in 1909. A meeting with Pablo Picasso in 1913 inspired him to begin incorporating the principles of Cubism into sculpture. By the 1920s, Lipchitz was developing a reputation as one of the most innovative sculptors of his generation, but with the rise of fascism in the 1930s, his work underwent a profound change. It became more expressionistic in its style and dramatic in its subject matter, with a new emphasis on mythical and biblical themes—metaphors for the worsening political situation. After the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, Lipchitz and his wife settled in New York with the aid of the Emergency Rescue Committee, an American organization dedicated to assisting artists in Nazi-occupied Europe. Lipchitz received great support from American gallerists, museums, and collectors—including the founder of the Eskenazi Museum of Art, Henry Radford Hope—and in 1958, he became an American citizen.

Influenced by his experience as a refugee, Lipchitz’s work became more personal in the 1940s, frequently incorporating references to Judaism. Song of Songs is one such work. A three-dimensional adaptation of a wall-mounted relief commissioned by a “very loving couple” for their home, the sculpture’s biomorphic forms indeed suggest a couple locked in an embrace. But the work’s title—referring to the Hebrew Bible’s book of love poetry—suggests an additional meaning, for rabbinic literature interprets the Song of Songs as a metaphor for God’s love for the people of Israel. The Song of Songs (Shir HaShirim) is traditionally chanted in synagogues during Passover, the commemoration of the Israelites’ exodus from slavery in Egypt. Creating this sculpture in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Lipchitz may, likewise, have been meditating on Jewish survival in the face of unprecedented trauma.

Morris Louis Bernstein was born in Baltimore to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. In the 1930s he moved to New York City, where he found employment with the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration and participated in experimental workshops led by Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Returning to the Washington, DC, area in the 1940s, Louis began creating large-scale, abstract paintings in which he soaked unprimed canvas with thinned washes of acrylic paint. Beth Aleph, featuring a rainbow of overlapping hues, is part of a series known as the Veils. Although in 1951 Louis created a group of works—the Charred Journal series—that alluded to the Nazi book burnings, little, if anything, in his later work refers to the Holocaust or to his Jewish identity. Perhaps this is why the titles of the Veil paintings—each one titled with transliterations of Hebrew letters—have aroused so much interest. Beth Aleph corresponds to ב and א, the alphabet’s second and first letters, respectively; their positioning corresponds to the direction in which Hebrew is read, from right to left. The letters of the Hebrew alphabet play a significant role in Jewish mysticism, which considers Hebrew text to be both generative and indestructible, a concept that is fascinating to contemplate in light of Louis’s Charred Journal paintings.

Yet, tempting as it is to interpret Louis’s ethereal Veil paintings through the lens of Jewish mysticism, he himself did not title these paintings. And because he kept no notes or records about his artistic practice, we can only speculate about any connections he may have seen between art and Judaism. Following the artist’s death, his widow, under the guidance of the art critic Clement Greenberg, assigned titles and dates to Louis’s paintings. According to the artist’s biographer, she titled the Veils with Hebrew letters to avoid “subjective overtones.”⁶ Yet she titled them shortly before sending some to the important 1964 Documenta exhibition in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). It is difficult to see as entirely neutral the decision to display monumental abstract paintings with titles signaling the artist’s Jewish identity in Germany, a nation just beginning to confront its perpetration of the Holocaust.

Jenny McComas
Curator of European and American Art

The IU Eskenazi Museum of Art would like to thank the Terra Foundation for American Art for their generous support of the museum's Curator of European and American Art.

Notes

¹ Larry Silver and Samantha Baskind, “Looking Jewish: The State of Research on Modern Jewish Art,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 101, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 632.

² For this statistic, see the Anti-Defamation League’s 2020 Survey on Jewish Americans’ Experiences with Antisemitism: https://www.adl.org/resources/reports/survey-on-jewish-americans-experiences-with-antisemitism.

³ For a useful survey, see Matthew Baigell, Jewish Art in America: An Introduction (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007).

⁴ For a comprehensive examination of this subject, see Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts (Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1993).

⁵ For a translation of Rashi’s commentary, see https://www.sefaria.org/Exodus.38.8?lang=bi&with=Rashi&lang2=en.

⁶ Diane Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), pp. 35-48..

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McComas, Jenny. "Jewish American Artists in the Twentieth Century." Collections Online. Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, 2021. https://artmuseum.indiana.edu/collections-online/features/european-american/jewish-american-artists.php.