THE BEST OF JUDAIC ART: HISTORY, DEVELOPMENT AND STYLES

 

HABIMAH: THE FIRST HEBREW THEATER AND JEWISH IMAGERY

Photo: Birth of the Muses (1887), by Jacques Lipchitz.

“Dybbuk”, written by An-Sky and which was based on tales, short stories, naïve anecdotes, folklore was the first performed and produced play by the Jewish theater in Russia.  It cemented the reputation of Habimah, as the first legitimate Hebrew theater company. Years later, Habimah moved to Tel Aviv and was immortalized by a painting done by Leonid Pasternak. In that painting, An-Sky is depicted as a scholar reading passages from his play. Among the most famous artworks of Pasternak, are his illustrations of numerous Yiddish books, including but not limited to drawings and sketches for  children's books, a signature-style  to which his well-known “1919 Had Gadya” for the “Passover Haggadah” pertains to. Many efforts were deployed by Jewish artists and intellectuals to revive the Jewish traditions, heritage and folklore. Unfortunately, as aspiration and hopes for creating a permanent global Jewish culture dissipated, due to interference, sponsorship, control and restrictions by  local governments, El Lissitzky’s dream faded away. He turned to avant-garde “Constructivist Structural Compositions”, for which, years later, he became famous for. Around 1921, El Lissitzky completed his last artwork “Shifs Karta” (Boat Ticket), incorporating Jewish vision and imagery, after he had finished the illustration of “Six Stories” a book by Ilva Ehrenburg. Many Jewish artists began to flee the Jewish ghetto, searching for artistic freedom and esthetic liberation. They found refuge in Paris, France, where they were freely introduced to Cubists, Surrealists, Fauvists, Impressionists, Dadaism innovators and abstract art pioneers of the era. In Europe and in the United States, many Jewish immigrant artists made their mark on the world of art.  Chana Orloff, born in the Ukraine, immigrated to Eretz Yisrael in 1905. In 1910, she traveled to Paris to further her studies and exhibit her art. By the 1920s, Orloff gained an international reputation for her portraiture work. Born in Lithuania, Chaim Jacob Lipchitz, arrived to Paris in 1909. He changed his name to Jacques Lipchitz. In 1913, he met Picasso and short after, he commenced to exhibit his Cubist sculptures. Influenced by metaphoric forms and mythological themes, Lipchitz began to distance himself from Cubism to adopt geo-organic style. Following the Nazi’s occupation of Paris, and around 1941, he left Paris to settle in New York. Another Jewish giant was Max Weber, who was born in Bialystok. Like his predecessors, he moved to New York when he was 10 year old. Other immigrant Jewish established and aspiring artists joined the “Educational Alliance School” located in New York’s Lower East Side. The school was already known for its outstanding German Jewish art teachers and instructors. During the Depression’s years, an avalanche of Jewish artists in New York contributed to a multidimensional artistic movement in the United States. The multiple and varied ethnic backgrounds of the immigrant Jewish artists and intellectuals added an ultra-dimension to American modern art. Such Jewish pioneers were William Gropper, Raphael Sover and  Ben Shahn who painted the Roosevelt Mural.

REMEMBERING THE HOLOCAUST AND VICTIMS

Photo: Max Weber.

Since the end of the second world war, many Jewish artists devoted their lives to find pragmatic ways and means to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust’s victims. A vast literature and an abundance of artwork by eminent Jewish thinkers, authors, writers and painters depicted and chronicled the bloody and barbarian mass murders and killing of Jews on the hands of the Nazis. “The Little Angels” written by Moshe Gershuni served as a remembrance tool.  Mordecai Ardon’s “Missa Dura” witnessed the sufferings of the victims, the catastrophic events, the destruction of Jewish properties and assets, the slaughters of innocent Jews and the Kristallnacht. The Holocaust of George Segal became a national memorial and a universal bleeding symbol of human suffering, injustice, barbarism and atrocities. Segal used living beings to be  directly “casted”  in plaster and  sculpted human images and forms of the corpses of the victims via photographs taken from real life,  from concentration camps and “cells of torture” shortly after the Allied liberated the Nazi’s concentration camps in Europe. One of the most pulverizing and frightening features was the lone figure standing by a barbed wire fence, inspired and accurately based on Margaret Bourke-White’s original photograph.

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