Do Jewish Artists Make Jewish Art?
Is there a specifically Jewish way to paint? Is there a particular line, or shape, or color, that’s Jewish? That speaks to the Jewish soul? If klezmer music somehow shortcuts deep to our essence, is there a visual analog to that music?
Or is that a lot of romantic baloney?
According to many artists and art experts there is no such thing as inherently Jewish art. There are, however, Jewish artists, who, like all artists, create from what they know. And what they know is who they are.
Jewish art has a long history. Although much of the Torah is narrative, such details as the materials used in building the mishkan, the portable sanctuary that accompanied the wandering Israelites, and the threads that were woven into priestly robes are spelled out in sensual, graphic detail. Against the dun-colored desert, the draperies and linens and metals glow purple and white and gold. Aesthetics mattered even then.
There is an assumption that Jews came late to visual art. Despite popular mythology, though, the Bible does not prohibit drawing human forms. “The rabbis in the Talmud say that only the worship of graven images is a problem, not the images themselves,” Sharon Liberman-Mintz, the curator of Jewish art at the Jewish Theological Seminary’s library, said. The rabbis were concerned about three-dimensional art, the form often used for idols, but two-dimensional art was not a problem. “We don’t have images of God, of course,” she said, “but really when it comes to human forms, only the perfect form would be problematic.”
Often Jewish art is defined as work with overtly Jewish themes, and pictures of people in stereotypically Jewish clothing or holding menorot or Torah scrolls or stars of David logically might be considered Jewish. But the principle of “first time tragedy, second time farce” dictates that eventually those symbols would devolve into cliché. A painting of a dancing chasid, peyes flying, might be Jewish, but often it is kitsch, not art.
But what about the artist? Does an artist who happens to be Jewish necessarily make Jewish art? Or is there something, no matter how hard that thing might be to identity, much less to define, that must be present to make it Jewish? And is that something else always there anyway?
Here, four Jews talk about how they make art. One is a photographer, one a painter, one a watercolorist-turned-graphic-storyteller, and one a painter, sculptor, and designer of sacred spaces. One is a successful professional artist, one teaches art, one completed a lucrative career as a commercial artist and then moved to a more experimental form, and one is a dentist who moonlights (and plays with light) as a photographer because he is so strongly drawn to it. All are talented, all feel they were born to make art, and all have been shaped as artists by their identity as Jews.
Tobi Kahn, born into the Breuer community of Orthodox German Jews on the northern tip of Manhattan in the early 1950s, still lives in New York City. He is a sculptor, painter, and creator of ritual objects, abstract pieces, and sacred spaces. His work is infused with Jewishness and a sense of the larger world shining around us.
From as far back as he could remember, Tobi’s orientation to the world was visual. “I knew that I would be an artist from the time I was 6,” he said. “There was nothing else I wanted to do. Visual things do something to me. When some people think of Yom Kippur they think of Kol Nidrei; I think of how it looks. When I got married, I thought about how the chuppah would look. When my mother died I said kaddish for 11 months but it didn’t do very much for me; I also did 11 projects then, and that was unbelievably healing.”
Although the community in which Tobi grew up was rigid in many ways, “they were very into the arts. I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art all the time with my grandparents and I took flower arranging classes at the Museum of Modern Art. Art was always totally part of our lives. I never had the feeling that you had to make a choice between being an artist and being a faithful Jew.
“Is there Jewish art? We take all the experiences in our lives, and they make us who we are. Everything I create is based on everything I know. I went to day school for 12 years, and I also live in the world. When I think of blue, I can’t not think of techelet” – the mysterious blue dye used for the fringes of the priests’ garments in the Temple. “When I think of sacred spaces, I think of Stonehenge, and at the same time of the kodesh kedoshim” – the holy of holies, the tabernacle that contained the ark.
“I made a piece based on tashlich,” the Rosh Hashanah afternoon ritual when we cast our sins, at least metaphorically, into flowing water. “I thought that if you can’t get near the water, here’s a box you can put your sins in. And then knowing about Pandora’s box gives the option of making them free. If I didn’t know about tashlich and about Pandora I couldn’t do that. I like the idea of mixing metaphors.”
Tobi has had a long career; his work has been shown in many prominent museums and galleries, he teaches and has been commissioned to create, among other things, such Jewish ritual objects as chanukiyot and thrones for use at britot milah, and contemplative spaces in hospitals and hospices. He’s now artist-in-residence at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Of all these projects, “the most religious thing I’ve ever done is my sky and water paintings,” he said. This deceptively simple series of 12 abstract works shows the ever-shifting separations of above and below, firmament and fundament, light and liquid, the blue and the blue. “It’s all about the idea of separating the holy from the holy,” he said. “It’s beyn hashmashot, twilight, the time when everything is up for grabs. It’s a metaphor for everything in religion, when things come together and change. Sky and water is about creation.”
“I want my work to take you to a higher place,” Tobi said. “When you walk into a space you feel one way, and when you walk out you should feel better.”
Dr. David Greenfield of Newton, Massachusetts, is a Harvard-trained periodontist who specializes in plastic surgery and dental implants and teaches at his alma mater. He belongs to Temple Emanuel in Lexington.
He also is a master photographer and the son of another. His father was a survivor of Mauthausen whose images of the Second World War and its aftermath still sear.
“With a Leica camera bartered for two tins of canned fish, he became prolific as a photojournalist, documenting the life emerging around him in Jewish displaced persons camps in Allied-occupied Europe,” David wrote about his father, Joseph Greenfield. More than 100 of those images are now in the permanent archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. David was born in one of those DP camps in Austria in 1947; his mother had spent the war hiding in Polish forests.
“I had a photographic gene implanted in my DNA; my father’s uncle also was a photographer,” David said. He was interested in taking pictures since childhood, started dabbling more in high school, more seriously in college, and then with increasing intensity as he’s gotten older.
“I don’t see myself looking for Jewish themes to photograph but I think that my Jewish identity and family history steered me in the direction of photography and the particular kind of photography I do,” he said. “Life goes on. Things happen in real time. An image can capture a unique time, and then a moment later it’s gone.” The art is in capturing the transience. “Now I have a sense of what life everlasting means,” he said.
Some of his images are formal compositions that capture light just as it is about to change. “I have an attachment to photography that goes beyond an image that looks pleasant or interesting,” David said. He looks for things that have more form or contrast, and for moments and objects that tell stories. “Photographic images clearly can tell a story, and groups of them can tell a story even better. I learned a lot of stories and family history through photographs.”
Other pictures he has taken have overtly Jewish content. For instance, his European photographs reflect his family history. A series of photographs of basketball hoops included one near an air-raid shelter in Israel, where players have 15 seconds to escape when the siren blows. (That picture was in the spring 2009 issue of CJ, on page 14; his photographs also appeared on CJ covers in the spring and fall of 2009.)
But, as David points out, he is very much an American so his European trip also took him to Normandy, where the American army stormed the beach and turned the war’s tide. “Being Jewish and being American are inextricable for me,” he said, and his art reflects that complex intertwined identity. “When it comes to looking at the world I try to find things that are ordinary and to present them as extraordinary,” he said.
Carol Buchman was born on Long Island in the mid-1950s. Despite the Jews who surrounded them (Long Island, then as now, was overwhelmingly Italian and Jewish), her family did not belong to a synagogue. According to Carol, “We were temple nomads.” Her parents were divorced, and her mother “wasn’t a joiner; we tried all the temples, but were members of none.” She didn’t go to Hebrew school but her mother spoke Yiddish at home and lit candles every Friday night. Many of their close est relatives were Holocaust survivors and they had lots of family in Israel, where Carol went to visit twice as a teenager. “I had a strong Jewish identification, but not a religious one,” she said.
As for her other identification, “I’ve always been a painter,” she said. “Always.”
Carol went to art school in Boston, showed some of her work, and was certified to teach art. In her early 30s, married to a non-Jewish sculptor, she moved to Memphis, Tennessee, the buckle of the Bible belt.
“My soul is really Jewish,” she remembers telling her husband. “Even though I don’t practice, it is really important to me.” But in Memphis, she realized that if she didn’t do something actively Jewish she’d lose that connection. “There isn’t a person in Memphis who doesn’t belong to a church,” she said. “Their social life is their church. There is a huge Baptist community here, and they believe that you’ll go to hell if you don’t accept Jesus.” She worked at a progressive Episcopalian private school, where she was required to go to chapel twice a week. When she looked around she realized she was the only Jew there.
“And I didn’t know anything. When one of the teachers gave me a calendar of psalms for Christmas, I was sure she was trying to convert me. I was so ignorant I didn’t know that the psalms are from the Jewish Bible. Kids would ask me about my holidays and I couldn’t tell them anything! I would go to chapel and not know what was Jewish and what was Christian.
“So I went to an introduction to Judaism class. I got more and more into it. I took Hebrew, had an adult bat mitzvah, and started to feel more and more connected. At my bat mitzvah, when I went up to the Torah, I had an almost paranormal sense of connection.”
Other elements also played a part in Carol’s changing sense of identity. More conversations with Holocaust survivors and their children, including one who had never told her own children that she had been born Jewish because the war had so scarred her, and the ongoing intifada in Israel inspired Carol. “As a painter, I could have thought about all those things but if it wasn’t moving me visually it wouldn’t have mattered,” she said. “It did move me visually, so I started painting.”
Once she started working Jewish images into her art, she had to figure out how to keep it fresh, relevant, not hackneyed. One of her heroes is Leonard Cohen, the Montreal musician whose work includes a moving version of the high holiday prayer Unetaneh Tokef that he calls “Who By Fire.” “Here’s a contemporary guy in the music world, where any kind of religion is totally uncool, and he’s taking something religious and ancient and turning it into something contemporary.” She wanted to take Jewish themes and make them come to life. She wanted to use her real experience as a Jew from Roslyn, New York, who now lives in Baptist Memphis. She had to ask herself how she could make it fresh; how she could remain a contemporary painter and refer to this stuff without going into swirly clouds and enraptured men holding up Torah scrolls.
She often incorporates Hebrew letters in her work. “Graphically, they’re beautiful,” she said. “I like using Hebrew particularly when the words aren’t obvious, when people can’t necessarily read the text.”
Marvin Friedman was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1930, the son of immigrants from a small Russian town with an unspellable name. He always knew that he wanted to be an artist: “I came out of my mother holding a pencil, which she complained about all the time.” His father, a grocer and frustrated pianist, made sure that he went to art school in Philadelphia. Beginning his career painting watercolors for Christian Sunday school pamphlets, he soon graduated to illustrating stories for magazines. “I went from $35 for a story to $3,000 commissions from Good Housekeeping and $4,000 from Playboy,” he said. Those were the days when people read the short fiction (or, in Playboy’s case, said they did) they found in popular magazines. Marvin’s illustrations ran in the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, the New Yorker, and other middle- to highbrow publications. “I did the illustrations, but I never noticed that the magazines were dying until one day it was all over. I lived in a 22-room house, I had five or six people to support, and it was all over.” He painted and sold his work, but he suffered through a long, severe depression. And then he created a new art form for himself.
He drew pictures from his past and handwrote text to go with them, and he began interviewing other people, mainly Jews, including about 60 Holocaust survivors. Some of the work was displayed at a synagogue in Philadelphia, close to his home in southern New Jersey, and more and more people noticed it. At first, the art – sometimes line drawings, sometimes watercolors – was the essential element, as Marvin saw it, and the text just an accompaniment, But Marvin watched people and he saw that they were reading his text carefully.
No word-mincer, Marvin is a charming but blunt conversationalist whose style does not always lend itself to direct quotes in CJ. When asked what he calls his art form his answer is direct: “Pictures with text, sometimes portraits with text.” Text and pictures are equally important, to him. He has always loved to write, so these texts are a joyous return to that art. And he’s always aware of how words look. His hand-printed letters vary in size and slant down the page. Words frequently are crossed out, which adds texture to the page, and makes it look spontaneous – even though it’s not.
Marvin’s not religiously observant in any way, but his closely observed childhood and adolescence were steeped in immigrant Jewish culture. His work is loving and nostalgic, but at the same time astringent, barbed, sad, and very funny. And, as is true of so many artists who happen to be Jews, overwhelmingly Jewish.
