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Fixing the World: Jewish American Painters in the Twentieth Century by Ori Z. Soltes Brandeis Univ. Press, 2003 160 pp., $50 
Masterworks of the Jewish Museum by Maurice Berger et al. Yale Univ. Press, 2004 256 pp., $60 |
Jewish-born artists flourished in the United States throughout the 20th century. A survey of their work reveals a rich and diverse range of styles and attitudes toward Jewish themes, from unconscious identifications with, to explicit dissociations from, Judaism and Jewish culture. This has engendered an intriguing puzzle that has haunted art historians for close to a hundred years: Is there such a thing as "Jewish art"? If so, what are its defining characteristics?
By midcentury, the number of Jewish-born artists attracting market and critical attention had proliferated. Some were figurative painters. Others made their reputations as abstract expressionists. A few warmly avowed their Jewish heritage, while many feared rejection if they did so too explicitly. To complicate matters further, by century's end a new generation of Jewish-born painters had come to maturity meditating on the Holocaust. In comparison with their immediate predecessors, their work reflects far less anxiety about reconciling Judaism with the demands of a secular society, and more with making sense of a mechanized world where murder can instantly reach epic proportions.
It would seem, then, that with each new generation and every new movement and style, any hope of resolving the enigma about Jewish art grows fainter. Yet, the scholarly mission to define Jewish art continues. Several new books address these questions with a freshness of presentation that merits close attention.
Fixing the World: Jewish American Painters in the Twentieth Century, by Ori Z. Soltes, is fairly brief but beautifully illustrated with color plates that trace the full scope of Jewish painting throughout the 20th century, especially in New York. The sweep of Soltes' study is nothing less than epic. Beginning with 19th-century Europe, he examines paintings by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim and Camille Pisarro before turning his attention to 20th-century New York. Soltes presents a lavish series of plates that includes work by artists many of whom you probably never knew were Jewish: Philip Guston, Morris Lewis, and Larry Rivers, for example. His central premise is that Jewish art is motivated by the ancient religious injunction to fix the world—in Hebrew, tikkun olam. What holds these disparate stylists together in a single, identifiable category, Soltes argues, is their passionate concern for bringing justice to a fallen world.
Soltes is right on at least one point. Social commentary, even pungent critique, is often found in the work of Jewish artists. But he is not entirely convincing when arguing that tikkun olam is necessary or sufficient for identifying art as Jewish. Beginning in the mid-19th century, for example, many non-Jewish painters, such as Courbet and Daumier, assumed the role of social commentator, calling attention to the hypocrisy and injustice they perceived in the contemporary social order. On the other hand, there is barely an intimation of tikkun olam in paintings by some of the Jewish artists included in Soltes' book, such as Modigliani, Samuel Halpert, and Louis Lozowick. Soltes' emphasis on tikkun olam as the defining theme of Jewish art thus becomes strained to the point of incredulity at times. The chief merit of his study consists rather in its panoramic and well-illustrated survey, and the aesthetic insight he brings to individual paintings when he describes their purely visual elements. At least as he handles the subject, the Jewishness of the artists included in this volume appears to be little more than an incidental fact about them.
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