"On the face of it, art history seemed
a gentile profession. For one thing,
the
study of Christian art was its center. In addition, there was an ancient
Jewish injunction against
making graven images. But the fact is, the field was filled with
Jews. One might
even
say it was shaped by them. Art history is
characterized
in this century by studies in connoisseurship, formalist analysis,
the study of iconography and iconology, and
social analyses.
Jews have been prominent in all categories."
Eunice Lipton,
in Rubin-Dorsky/Fishkin. People of the Book. Thirty Scholars Reflect
on Their Jewish Identities. Press of American Studies Association,
1996
"In
Baltimore, Miami, Atlanta, and a host of other cities, cultural institutions
are increasingly dependent on Jewish support."
Charles Silberman,
A Certain People, Summit Books, 1985, p. 214-215
"Some eyebrows may
have been raised at the awareness of Baltimore's Jewish 'Art Mafia.'
At the
time, Arnold Lehman was director of the Baltimore
Musem
of Art, Sergio Commissiona was music director of the
Baltimore
Symphony (in Meyerhoff Hall), and Frederick Lazarus IV, an arts
administrator,
was president of the Maryland Institute College
of Art. Also,
Herbert Kessler, a medievalist ... , chaired the well-regarded
art history department at John Hopkins [University]."
George Goodman,
A New Jewish Elite: Curators, Directors and Benefactors of American
Art Museums. Modern Judaism, February 1998, p. 123
"A
member of the [Jewish] Warburg banking family single-handedly started
up the field of art history ... [CANTOR, p. 271] ... All the art history
departments in the world are direct descendants of Aby Warburg's Institute
(moved from London in 1932 to escape the Nazis) and his great Jewish
disciple, Erwin Panofsky. Is it anamalous that a Jew would have been
so creative in the study of art that was so little cultivated in Jewish
tradition? All the more that a liberated Jew should pursue art history.
But one can see a Judaizing tendency in Warburg's method of art historical
criticism. The picture is studied for its 'iconology,' its pattern
of ideas illustrating textual passages. Art is therby approached in
hermeneutic fashion, again recalling Talmudic exegesis, rather than
for its aesthetic content. Yet the most significant aspect of Warburg's
development in art history is the demonstration that market capitalism
could embrace and fund a purely cultural and academic operation. The
distinct equality of capital was not its materialism, but its liquidity,
the fungible capactiy of capital to transform into any commodity,
including art and humanities literature that represents a dynamic
power in society. Aby Warburg's historical and critical mastery of
art was structurally the same as his brother's master in their international
bank of money and its investment potential. The transormative interaction
between art and capital is central to the nature of the market economy."
Norman Cantor,
The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews, HarperCollins, 1994,
p. 271
"It is my contention that the art world
of the 1980s represented a kind of renaissance
for
Jewish American artists who came of age in that decade. The list
of young Jewish American
artists
who took center stage in the 80's is long --
early in the decade we might think of Barbara Kruger, Laurie Simmons,
Sherrie Levine, R.M. Fischer, Donald Sultan, Julian Schnabel, and
David
Salle. Later, the work of Ross Bleckner, Terry Winters,
Haim Steinbach, and Meyer Vaisman come to the fore ... What originally
motivated
me to explore this subject [of growing Jewish artist prominence]
was
the strange fact that there has been an inexplicable
silence surrounding it. Especially in this era of multicultural
awareness, it is
surprising,
to say the least, that no one has mentioned this
phenomenon ... One possible reason for
this
silence about a Jewish artist renaissance in the 80's is that at
the
same time a great fluorescence of Jewish influence in the areas
of
philanthropy,
business, finance and the bastions of high society was
taking
place ... By the 1980s ... in cities with large Jewish populations,
like
New York, Jews had largely replaced the older WASP elite as standard
bearers of
social power and prestige in the evolving American
postwar ethnic meritocracy."
Thus
a new and yet unexamined social paradigm arose. Jews ... [who]
had
championed
the marginal culture of Modernism had suddenly become the
pillar of the American establishment. At the same time, a new
of
Jewish artists was emerging whose work was collected as often as
not by
Jews
in the cultural elite as part of a continuing tradition Jewish
support for contemporary art."
art critic
Peter Halley,
self-defined as 'half-Jewish,' The Eighties and Jewishness, The
New Art Examiner, June 1997, p. 26-28
Jewish
author Howard Jacobson wrote in 1993 about his experiences with prominent
New York City art critic Peter Schjeldhal:
'I came to New York to be Jewish,' [Schjeldhal] once told me:
'Did you make it?'
'No.'
'What were you before?'
'Porcelain-sink Lutheran.'
'And now? Since you haven't made it across as one of us?'
He paused. He wasn't sure he want to be THAT un-Jewish.
'A certain transformation has occurred; but a certain gulf remains.'
It takes me a little while to put it together -- the fact that just
about every gallery/space/loft we go into is run by a Jew. This isn't
Jewish how I like it. This is slow-drawl, camp Jewish, retreating, high-toned,
not very sense-of-humorish Jewish. The pallid women gallery-owners whose
walls and wine we absorb are also Jewish.'"
Howard Jacobson,
Roots Schmoots. Journey Among Jews. The Overlook Press, NY, 1993,
1995, p. 84-85
By 1973, some art observers estimated that 75-80%
of the 2,500 core "art market" personnel -- art dealers, art
curators, art critics and art collectors -- were Jewish.
Sophy Burnham,
The Art Crowd, David MacKay Co., NY, 1973, p. 25
"[Jewish
lesbian artist Marina Vainshtein has] tattoos of graphic Holocaust images
over most of her body. On her
upper
back, the central image represents a train transport carrying Jewish
prisoners in
striped
uniforms towards waiting ovens ... It was ... in high school [in
Los
Angeles]
that Vainshtein became obsessed with
Holocaust
literature ... Vainshtein's tatoos include a violin player ... surrounded
by
hanging
corpses, anguished faces and Zyklon B, the
killing
agent in the gas chambers. The screaming faces of prisoners being
gassed
are tattooed on one breast."
Dora Apel,
The Tattooed Jew. New Art Examiner, June 1997, p. 12-
"The chimney [in a painting by Jewish
artist R. B. Kitaj] functions as an indictment of Christianity. Hence
Jewish identity in Kitaj's painting is achieved in opposition to Christianity
... Innocense and guilt: Jew and Gentile."
Juliet Steyn,
The Jew: Assumptions
of Identity, Cassell, London and New York, 1999
|
The Times: Another Dupe in Charles Saatchi's Con Game. New
York Observer, November 15, 1999
[Those mentioned below: lawyer Floyd Abrams, collector Charles
Saatchi, and museum director Arnold Lehman are all Jewish,
as is -- to his credit --the author of this article, Hilton Kramer]
"As expected, a Federal judge has rejected Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s
attempt to withhold funds from the Brooklyn Museum of Art for exhibiting
the odious Sensation exhibition. Once again, First Amendment
fundamentalist Floyd Abrams has made the world a safer place for the
market in the foulest varieties of obscene expression ... What is
now beyond question is that the entire project of bringing this shabby
inventory from the Saatchi Collection to Brooklyn has from the outset
been what even The [New York] Times, after publishing some 60 or more
news stories, editorials and reviews in ardent defense of the exhibition,
has finally been obliged to concede is 'an ethically dubious enterprise'
... Because of the Sensation scandal, all the world now knows
exactly how this market-manipulation venture works. Mr. Saatchi first
commissions work that is guaranteed to cause outrage, then promotes
it as his latest 'discoveries,' then importunes once-respectable institutions
like the Royal Academy of Art or the Tate Gallery to endorse it, and
then makes a killing in the art-auction market. This is what now passes
for 'avant-garde' art in London–and, of course, in New York–and it
has proved to be a highly successful business enterprise. Thanks to
the total lack of conscience, tact and taste which Arnold L. Lehman,
the director of the Brooklyn Museum, brought to the organization,
the financing and the promotion of the Sensation show, all
art museums that traffic in this particular vein of 'cutting-edge'
hucksterism have also suffered a significant loss in public confidence.
The sheer quantity of cynical hokum that it has long been standard
practice for our art institutions to invoke in defense of whatever
horror or inanities the art traders are currently promoting as avant-garde
is no longer as persuasive as it once was for anyone not involved
in the market. We haven’t witnessed the death throes of this phenomenon
yet, but some of the other institutional defenses of Sensation
have shown signs of moral fatigue and a distinct diminution of mental
acuity."
A New Jewish Elite: Curators, Directors
and Benefactors of American Art Museums.
Modern Judaism, 1998, 18.1,
p. 119-152
[To access this article, go to google.com
and type in for your search: George Goodwin
jewish art. When the link comes up, select the cached
version.]
"Presently, there are several Jews in the highest ranks of American
museum professionals. Michael Heyman is the Smithsonian's secretary
(or chief administrator). Elsewhere in Washington, Alan Shestack
is deputy director of the National Gallery of Art, Neil Benezra
is chief curator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (where
Stephen Weil recently retired as deputy director), and Stephen
Ostrow is curator of prints and drawings at the Library of Congress.
Beyond the federal domain, David Levy is director of the Corcoran
Gallery." This article goes on and on like this, in a detailed
look at Jewish prominence in the art world throughout the country.
There are actually two separate articles on this subject by Goodwin
in the Modern Judaism journal.
MOMA Board Member Quits After Indiscreet Purchase.
The Art Newspaper
[Great Britain], June 5, 2000
"The publisher and billionaire [Jewish] art collector Samuel
I. (Si) Newhouse has quit the board of trustees of the Museum
of Modern Art in New York after buying a 1913 Cubist Picasso painting
that was deaccessioned from the museum’s collection. Newhouse, who
controls Conde Nast Publications, Random House, and a chain of newspapers,
had been on the MoMA board for twenty-seven years. A museum spokesman
said that Newhouse had violated a museum policy that bans trustees
from buying works from the institution. In this case, the 1913 'Man
with guitar' was sold from the collection to raise funds for new acquisitions.
The guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors discourage
the selling of art from museum collections except for the purpose
of buying similar works of art. The museum appears to have been acting
within those rules in this deal. The painting was sold by the museum
to an art dealer, said to be Larry Gagosian (from whom Newhouse has
purchased many paintings in the past) and then sold to Newhouse for
$10 million. New York State requires that museums which receive government
funds deaccession works at public auction, a law established after
the Metropolitan Museum of Art surprised donors with the sale of a
number of paintings in the Seventies. The Guggenheim’s lucrative sale
at Sotheby’s of works by Kandinsky, Modigliani and others in 1990
to buy the Panza di Biuma collection of minimal and conceptual art
was condemned as unethical. Yet private museums, like the Guggenheim
and MoMA, are permitted by New York State law and the AAMD to sell
their works privately."
The
ARTnews 200 Top Collectors, by Milton Esterow. ARTnews,
Summer 201
The owner of this influential newspaper, Esterow, is Jewish as
are at least eight of the "Top Ten" art collector families
listed here as a tease to an off-line article. The Jewish ones are
Debbie and Leon Black, Edythe and Eli Broad, Doris
and Donald Fisher, Ronnie and Samuel Heyman, Marie-Josee
and Henry R. Kravis, Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, Jo Carole
and Ronald S. Lauder, and Stephen Wynn.
Helmut
Newton: The Master. The Difficult World of the Greatest Fashion Photographer
Who Ever Lived. The Independent [Great
Britain], May 9, 2001
"To radical feminists, [Jewish photographer Helmut] Newton
is the Antichrist. This is the man who photographed a woman on all
fours with a saddle on her back, and another sitting in her underwear
on an unmade bed, with a gun in her mouth ... Newton's vision is fuelled
by sex, status, power and, above all, voyeurism there are often
extras in his pictures who gaze at the women centre-stage. Those are,
of course, also the things that make fashion tick. Small wonder, then,
that much of the photographer's most successful imagery has become
far more famous than the garments he has chosen to photograph ...
Newton's influence is everywhere ... In the Sixties and Seventies,
Newton's decadent vision may have been labelled "porno chic", but
today the rest of the world has finally caught up with him and it's
just plain chic. There is barely a stylist, photographer or designer
working in fashion today who can fail to acknowledge Newton as an
influence."
The Frog
Prince. The Independent, [Great Britain],
January 4, 2000
"Serge Gainsbourg [born Lucien Ginzburg] ... is still
most famous in Britain for his number one Je t'aime moi non plus:
the scandalous anthem which was in the British charts 30 years ago.
He and [Jane] Birkin simulated their lovemaking so effectively that
the single was banned by the BBC and formally condemned by the Vatican
... Gainsbourg is the greatest popular musician France has ever produced
... Echoes of his favourite technique, of murmuring profanities against
a delicate and beautiful harmony, can be heard in many contemporary
records, not least the later work of Leonard Cohen ... Gainsbourg
appeared to relish the onset of old age as giving him licence for
the kind of appalling behaviour normally permitted to youth. Towards
the end of his life, the singer's media appearances became ritual
provocations: in one television broadcast, he subjected a veteran
paratrooper - horrified by Gainsbourg's dub version of the Marseillaise
- to a torrent of obscenities, pausing only occasionally, to inflate
condoms. On another notorious live show, sharing a platform with a
young Whitney Houston, Gainsbourg, then 58, turned to the presenter
Michel Drucker and declared, in English, 'I want to fuck her.'"
An
Avant-Garde Impresario: Julien Levy. Art
in America. March 1999
"Julien Levy, the promoter of Surrealism and pioneering
New York art dealer of the 1930s and '40s, was the subject of a recent
exhibition that wove together art works and archival materials ...
. Although best remembered as the preeminent American dealer of Surrealism,
Levy first exhibited and sold a range of European and American photographs
... [Salvadore] Dali would become central to Levy's stable ... In
terms of conceptual innovation and creative energy, Julien Levy and
his gallery are central to the history of American art between the
wars."
Modligliani:
The Pure Bohemian. Kirkus Reviews,
October 1, 1991
"Modigliani, explains British biographer [Elizabeth Fry]
Rose, was the product of an upper-class Jewish- Italian family. After
art studies in Livorno, Florence, and Venice, where he spent more
time in cafes and brothels than in class, he arrived in Paris in 1906,
seeking fame and fortune. Within weeks, the somber reality of poverty
set in--moving from seedy hotel to seedy hotel, he wound up living
in a wooden shack in Montmartre. There, and later in Montparnasse,
he met many of the foremost artists, writers, and 'characters' of
the day, including Picasso, Soutine, Utrillo, Cocteau, Hans Arp, and
Fernand L‚ger. Because of his success with women, Modigliani had easy
access to free models ('Women of a beauty worth painting or sculpting
often seem encumbered by their clothes,' he said). Rose seems torn
between downplaying what she refers to as the 'Modigliani myth' and
relating dozens of stories that have served to create that myth. Included
are accounts of how Modigliani danced wildly in the moonlight with
a famous courtesan; of how one of his first collectors was a senior
police official who first met the painter when he was jailed for drunkenness;
and of how the artist's only one-man gallery show was closed 'for
indecency' the day it opened."
Stealing
Beauty. Los Angeles, July 2000
"[Jeffrey] Hirsch, who had initially been hired
as editor of UCLA Magazine and head of campus publications in April
1994 and was now in charge of overseeing an array of university magazines,
marketing projects and annual reports, had an incredibly diligent
and time-consuming secret life. In four years, he had generated armloads
of falsified documents to acquire hundreds of pieces of art and other
prize possessions ... The tally was actually a staggering $480,000,
used to buy paintings, photographs, fine furniture, rare books and
assorted knickknacks, all of which were hidden in a public self-storage
space that even his wife of 11 years didn't know about."
Kahlomania.
The age.com. [Australia], July 4, 2001
"Overshadowed by her husband - famous muralist Diego Rivera -
during her lifetime, [Frida] Kahlo [whose father
was Jewish] is now a global cult figure. The feisty woman with
the striking stare and tempestuous love-life has inspired ballets,
operas, books, biography, films and plays. Dozens, if not hundreds,
of websites pay homage. A religion, 'Kahloism,' worships her as the
one, true god. 'Kahlomania' is about to hit Australia: a new play
about her opens tonight in Melbourne, a major exhibition will be launched
in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra next week, a Hollywood
movie will hit Australian screens in December ... Frida Kahlo is not
only arguably the world's most famous female artist, but also one
commanding the highest prices. Last year, a Kahlo self-portrait painted
in 1929 fetched $10 million, creating a record for Latin American
art and for a female artist. A Kahlo the size of a chicken's egg was
sold last November by Sotheby's for $400,000 ... Memorabilia including
a letter opener, dried flowers, a watch and ribbons went for $110,000
in a sale of Kahlo curios, prompting a Latin American art expert in
New York to observe that people were vying for shreds of Kahlo's garments."
Vanity
Fare. Phoenix New Times. June 7,
2001
"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all? Apparently,
it's high-profile art collectors Jacques and Natasha Gelman,
judging from all the glitzy portraits commissioned from famous Mexican
artists that now grace the walls of the Phoenix Art Museum as part
of 'Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Twentieth-Century Mexican
Art: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection' ... Contemporary acquisitions
-- which are, overall, of better quality and more engaging than the
work of the older Mexican art legends -- have been expertly guided
by longtime Gelman friend Robert Littman, ex-director of Mexico
City's now-defunct Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporaneo (referred to
popularly as the Centro Cultural). As president of the Vergel Foundation,
which is responsible for carrying on the Gelman legacy, Littman seems
to possess an infallible eye, which cannot be said for the Gelmans'
original aesthetic vision ... Both [Jacques and Natasha] were Jewish,
married in 1941 and [they] remained in Mexico because of the Second
World War ... Always nattily attired and fur-coat-swathed, Jacques
and Natasha were the stereotypical film producer and glamorous socialite
spouse. To cement their status in Mexican high society, in 1943, Jacques
commissioned Diego Rivera to paint Natasha's portrait, which appears
in the exhibition. Though the most famous of the Mexican mural painters
at the time, Rivera often paid the rent by doing portraits of wealthy
socialites ... Frida Kahlo's Natasha portrait of 1943 captures the
woman, crowned with sausage curls al modo and draped in a fur stole,
with a strangely flat effect ... To anyone familiar with Mexican art
history, the Gelman exhibition is not a well-balanced overview of
Mexican art at mid-century ... [it is] a classically status-driven,
gotta-be-better-than-the-Gomezes compilation reflecting one type of
art collector's psychic preoccupation with memorializing himself and
notable public figures with which he has socialized. Frankly, it's
one more befitting a newly moneyed, 18th-century Dutch burgher than
a discerning, visionary collector seeking emerging and mid-career
artists' best and most enduring work."
National
Collection Needs a Major Lucien Freud. The
Age, Australia
"Australia's national art collection needed a major Lucien
Freud painting, National Portrait Gallery director Andrew Sayers
said today. The National Gallery of Australia (NGA) is planning to
buy Lucien Freud's painting After Cezanne from the artist for
$8 million - if it can raise the last $1 million. This would make
it the NGA's most expensive painting ... Mr Sayers said the Art Gallery
of South Australia showed extraordinary foresight and bought a Freud
in 1950 and the Art Gallery of Western Australia had a painting of
a nude man holding a rat ... Mr Sayers said Freud, the 78-year-old
grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, was not a household
name but was an artist's artist."
Eli
Langer. Mercer Union Digital Archives,
1979-1995
[A compilation of art gallery press releases and local news articles
about a controversial 1993 Toronto art exhibition by Jewish artist
Eli Langer]
"Eli Langer's show of eight paintings and various small
pencil drawings is much talked about in Toronto art circles these
days -- much talked about because no one knows what to make of it.
In a community that sets few limits when it comes to explicitness,
Langer's subject matter breaks one of the last taboos: the sexuality
of children. The paintings, gorgeously rendered in a duo toned chiaroscuro
of red and black, show children and adults in various forms of sexual
play. A naked child sits on the lap of a naked man who might be her
grandfather. A masked intruder climbs through a window into a bedroom
where a naked girl straddles the neck of an adult and very erect man
who lies on the bed ... Let it be said then, that they are horrible
-- both the paintings and the pencil drawings which feature a dreary
catalogue of don'ts (children masturbating, performing fellatio or
buggering each other). The whole show is a self-conscious, juvenile
prodding of its own excrement." -- Globe and Mail. Langer
is Jewish. And "his father is an amateur Holocaust historian."
[Toronto Life, 1-20-94, p. A21]
Police
Obscenity Squad Raids Saatchi Gallery.
Guardian [London], March 10, 2001
"The Saatchi gallery has been raided by officers from Scotland
Yard's obscene publications unit and warned that they will return
to seize pictures in its current exhibition, I am a Camera,
unless the offending images are removed before the gallery opens its
doors to the public again. The Metropolitan police confirmed last
night that officers had visited the gallery twice this week after
three complaints under anti-child pornography legislation and a report
was being forward to the crown prosecution service. The exhibition
features the work of a group of artists and photographers selected
by Charles Saatchi himself and taken from his personal collection
of photographs and paintings. It has been running for eight weeks
and has been reviewed in most of the broadsheet papers and magazines
from the Tatler to the Telegraph, without any public
complaints to the gallery."
I'll
Be Your Mirror. [Book Review of Nan Goldin's work; Amazon.com]
"Based on an exhibition of the same title at the Whitney Museum
of American Art this collection of more than 300 pictures documents
the alternative culture of Nan Goldin's friends and acquaintances
in the arty bohemian substrata of Manhattan. Goldin turns her camera
outward to record transvestites carousing in downtown clubs and the
social impact of AIDS and drugs; and inward to look with unblinking
intimacy at her friends, her lovers of both sexes, and herself. She
records her boyfriend masturbating. She shows him on the toilet. She
shows her own battered face in a mirror after he beats her up. She
traces the decline and death of her friend Cookie Mueller. Goldin
has created a stark record of her urban demi-monde."
Nan Goldin's Retrospective and Recovery: Framing Feminism, AIDS, and
Addiction. Chapter 6. [This scholarly analysis of Nan Goldin's
work, apparantly posted at Syracuse University, floats -- alas --
uncredited in cyberspace]
"It may be correct to partially attribute renewed interest in
[Nan] Goldin's career to the currently fashionable status
of Goldin’s subject matter over the past 25 years: 'the urban demimonde,
the world of drag queens and slum goddesses, of Lower East Side nightclubbers
and Tokyo teen-agers in black rubber.' Goldin's work has even been
a model for the 'fashionable addiction' that I discussed previously.
The popular mainstreaming of the transgressive fringes of society
(who are the stock subjects of Goldin’s work) in the 'drug chic' school
of fashion photography has liberally borrowed from Goldin's exemplary
documentary-style realism. It became common in the late '90s for young
fashion photographers to request that their lab recreate Goldin’s
style of printing and, in fact, Nan Goldin herself shot publicity
photos for the Italian fashion firm Matsuda. Even the bruised
eyes of sleepless junkies and battered women that have been the touchstone
of Goldin's photography for over two decades became a 'look' in high
fashion makeup application."
Dangerous
Curves. The Advocate, 1999
"[Lisa] Cholodenko found inspiration all around
her when she moved to New York. Originally a Valley Girl—from Encino,
Calif., no less—she came of age via college in San Francisco and a
few years of globe-trotting, including a stint with her then-girlfriend
in Israel. She even did time in Los Angeles, working as an assistant
editor and slowly moving up the Hollywood ladder until she began to
feel trapped, read about 'the new queer cinema' in New York, and vowed
to try her luck ... She was inspired by the retrospective of Nan
Goldin photographs at the Whitney. She wondered why so many lesbians
she knew suddenly had access to cheap, clean heroin and thought it
was hip. 'I’m too uptight to go there,' the 33-year-old filmmaker
demurs when asked whether she herself got into the heroin experience.
She got hooked instead on her fascination with the whole scene. The
lesbian art world, drug culture, interpersonal power plays, careerism—all
became material for her screenplay ... The main model for Lucy [the
main character in her film High Art] is more likely the late
photographer Diane Arbus. 'I was reading her biography at that
time,' Cholodenko notes. 'All the stuff about Lucy’s rich Jewish family,
her early success and later isolation from the fashion world, that
all came from my view of Arbus.' As for Goldin, at last report Cholodenko
was planning to invite the famed photographer to see High Art
for herself."
Still
Life: Jews, Photography, Memory. National
Foundation for Jewish Culture, December 1999
"George Gilbert ... independently published his groundbreaking
survey "The
Illustrated Worldwide Who's Who of Jews in Photography" in
1997, which documents 550 Jews who developed the art, science, and
business of photography, such as Ben Shahn, Alfred Steiglitz,
Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winograd, and
Annie Leibovitz, to name merely a few ... The lucid directness
of photography has allowed Jews to record the transformation of individual
identity while preserving communal memory." [There are many,
many, many well-known Jewish photographers. Here's a few: Jacques
Lowe (John F. Kennedy's personal photographer), Richard
Avedon (superstar portrait photographer of the fashion world and
celebrities), Weegee
(a New York City ambulance chaser who has been reinvented as a famous
"artist"), etc.]
After 'Dinner
Party,' Judy Chicago Feasts on Judaism.
Jewish Bulletin of San Francisco. July 14, 1996
"She is a woman of names. Born, Judy Cohen. Married, Judy
Gerowitz. Self-designated, Judy Chicago. But the name that
fills her eyes with joy today is the one her grandmother called her
-- Yudit Sipke. Twenty years ago, Chicago -- controversial
creator of the acclaimed feminist art installation 'The Dinner Party'
-- wouldn't have offered the public this particular morsel. Her first
autobiography, released in 1975, detailed Chicago's gender politics,
not her religious heritage. Judaism 'wasn't even a subject. I can't
believe I hadn't thought about it,' Chicago reflected during a Bay
Area visit last month that included an appearance at the Marin Jewish
Community Center. The recently released sequel, 'Beyond the Flower:
The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist,' includes sections about
her Jewish upbringing, her return to the fold and her eight-year,
multimedia project on the Holocaust ... Even now, the artist can't
exactly explain why she underwent a religious transformation later
in life. But she can describe how it happened. In the mid-1980s, she
met her future husband, Donald Woodman. Her two previous husbands
also had been Jewish. But this time, something was different. The
pair decided to have a Jewish wedding. When they began studying the
traditions with Renewal-movement Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, they realized
the depth of their hunger for Judaism." [CONTEXT: "There
are in halakhic {Jewish religious law} literature [that has]
repeated groupings of women in categories with slaves, minors, fools,
deaf mutes, and the like which are so offensive as to take one's breath
away ... The issue is an [anti-woman] attitude which was deeply and
systematically imbued into Judaism." Gerald Skolnick, Domestic
Violence and the Jewish Community, Sh'ma, January 19, 1996,
p. 3-4"]
Shock
Value. Jerome Witkin's Paintings Bear Witness to the Holocaust in
Graphic Detail, Jewish Journal of Greater
Los Angeles, April 21, 2000
"Jerome Witkin, perhaps the greatest figurative painter
alive, is ... most renown[ed] for his Holocaust works, which have
received an 'almost reverential' response from the curators and critics
who have visited the show ... the painter's Jewish father, who had
abandoned the family when the twins were 3, attempted suicide and
began to live, homeless, on the streets. His last words to Jerome
were, 'Go to hell.' At the age of 50, his father was found, dead,
in a diner; he had suffered a heart attack after enduring a vicious
beating by thugs. At the funeral, Jerome stood at the graveside and
realized he had hardly known his father. 'I wasn't listening to anything
except my head, which kept repeating, Who was this man?' he recalls.
To find out, Witkin began exploring his Jewish roots, avidly reading
volumes on Jewish history, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. His interest
culminated in a series of Holocaust-themed paintings."
So
Many Women, So Little Time. Salon.com,
June 7, 2001
"Jan Saudek doesn't mind admitting it: He likes a woman
with a fat ass. Unlike fellow erotic photographers such as Helmut
Newton, whose Euro-babe models seem to subsist on a diet of champagne
and heroin, Saudek, 66, happily dives head first into the mountains
and valleys of jiggling flesh proffered by his mostly Czech trollops.
Plus-size beauties are a recurring theme in his work. Sometimes they
bend over while Saudek spanks their glorious, globelike keisters with
handfuls of switches. Or they might spank each other, skip rope or
simply crouch nude on all fours with wildflowers crowning their heads
and saggy green socks on their feet. Indeed, in one of the Prague
maestro's favorite hand-tinted, sepia prints, titled 'The Burden,'
Saudek stands nearly naked with his back to the camera while his former
wife, Maria, sits atop his shoulders -- her creamy, gargantuan derrière
apparently having swallowed Saudek from the neck up. Looking at that
woman's divine posterior, bathed as it is in blue, one fantasizes
about drowning in the folds of her massive sex ... The enormously
prolific Saudek has been wildly popular in Europe since the '70s ...
Saudek's father, a Jewish banker, survived the concentration camp
Theresienstadt, the only brother in his family to do so."
Richard Avedon. Slate.com, December
17, 1999
"[Richard] Avedon has done much to revive the portrait
as a central genre of photographic art. His only serious rival is
Irving Penn, and his epigones (whether they admit it or not)
include everyone from Robert Mapplethorpe to Annie Leibovitz.
Among his precursors are Julia Margaret Cameron, the great 19th-century
British portraitist, and August Sander, who set out to compile
a comprehensive visual record of German life between the world wars.
But while Avedon's portraits clearly represent his bid for artistic
immortality--a bid he has assiduously devoted much of the past decade
to mounting--they represent only one facet of his work ... Avedon's
ubiquity, the extraordinary variety of subjects and styles, and his
willingness to shoot album covers, posters, and advertisements as
well as museum-worthy black-bordered prints, have occasionally offended
purists. Hilton Kramer, for instance, called Avedon's 1994
retrospective at the Whitney (which produced a gorgeous book titled
Evidence: 1944-1994) 'the ultimate capitulation to celebrity,
money and fashion at the expense of art.'"
Las Vegas Spotlight: Backers of Guggenheim, Hermitage Museum Undaunted
by Criticism. Gaming Magazine, 2001
"Here we are in Las Vegas, a city where, until a few years ago,
the term 'culture' referred mostly to the faux marble in the casino
bathrooms, and the venerable Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
is preparing to open not one but two museums. That irony, and the
concept of 'my, how things change', is not lost on the projects' backers.
'The fact that it is based in Las Vegas is creating something of a
stir,' said Thomas Krens [Jewish?], director of the Guggenheim foundation.
That said, 'nowhere do the rules say you can't come to Las Vegas.'
'Evolution is what a place like Las Vegas is all about,' said Sheldon
Adelson, chairman of the board of Las Vegas Sands Inc.,
developers of The Venetian, site of the new museums. 'Las Vegas
keeps doing things that amaze other people, and it keeps re-inventing
itself.' Krens and Adelson were speaking at a Jewish Federation meeting
and press conference to introduce the project ... The museum will
open with 'The Art of the Motorcycle,' which Krens said was 'hugely
successful' at the Guggenheims in New York and Bilbao, Spain ... Criticism
of the Guggenheim entering the Las Vegas market has come from various
fronts. An article in The Independent of London was headlined:
'Finest art museums join forces to open an outpost in the cultural
desert of Las Vegas' and suggested the museums follow Strip tradition
and use fakes. But the same article ascribed much of the criticism
to 'art snobs'and quoted Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage,
as saying, 'Las Vegas is America.'" [Las Vegas, of course is
largely Jewish-founded --see Jewish Influence in
Popular Culture]
Judge
Allows Suit Over 15M in Nazi Loot.
New York Daily News, September 6, 2001
"The secretive [Jewish] Wildenstein clan, owners of an
art fortune worth billions, suffered a legal setback yesterday in
a battle over eight rare religious manuscripts allegedly looted by
the Nazis during World War II. A state judge refused to dismiss a
lawsuit brought against the Wildenstein Gallery in Manhattan
by the heirs of Alphonse Kann, a French Jew whose vast art
collection was pillaged by Hitler's henchmen after he fled to England
in 1940. The works, 15th, 16th and 17th century Christian prayer books
from the French aristocracy, are worth an estimated $15 million. The
suit was filed in 1999 by Francis Warin, Kann's great-nephew,
who wants the manuscripts returned. 'The Nazi inventory establishes
the Kann family's ownership,' said Stephen Somerstein, Warin's
lawyer. 'It's clearly identified as having been taken from the Kann
mansion by the Nazis in 1940.' Hyman Schafer, lawyer for the
Wildensteins, said the suit exceeded the statute of limitations under
French law."
In Depth Art News: "Gemma Levine": Portrait Photographer
25 Years, absolutearts.com, [exhibition
at the National Portrait Gallery, London]
"Gemma Levine is one of Britain's leading portrait photographers,
with a marvellous capacity for capturing the character of her subjects
... Her career in photography was initiated by a commission from [Jewish
publishing mogul] George Weidenfeld to take photographs for
two books in Israel collaborating with [prime ministers] Moshe
Dayan and Golda Meir.
E.M.
Gombrich, Author and Theorist Who Defined Art History Is Dead at 92,
New York Times, November 7, 2001
"Ernst Gombrich, an author of panoramic erudition and
probably the world's best-known art historian thanks to his best-selling
'Story of Art,' died on Saturday in London, where he had lived since
moving from his native Vienna in 1936 ... Like Meyer Schapiro,
the other great art historian of his generation, Mr. Gombrich was
a lucid writer."
Estee
Lauder Heir Opens Own Art Museum,
Virtual New York [from UPI], November
16, 2001
"The Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian Art opened
to the public Friday, the latest addition to New York's museum mile
on upper Fifth Avenue. The museum is the pet project of cosmetics
heir Ronald Lauder, former U.S. Ambassador to Austria and a
onetime aspirant to the New York mayoralty. It reflects his passion
for Central European art produced during the early years of the 20th
century as a revolt against academic art. Visitors to the Neue Galerie
view avant-garde art from the twilight years of the Hohenzollern-Hapsburg
empires and the years between the two World Wars in a magnificent
French Louis XIII-style brick and limestone mansion with a view of
Central Park. It was the home of Grace Wilson Vanderbilt, the uncrowned
queen of American society, until her death in 1952. The mansion at
the corner of 86th Street was owned by the Yivo Institute for Jewish
studies when Lauder and his project partner, the late art dealer Serge
Sabarsky, purchased it for $9 million six years ago. It took four
years and more than $10 million more to renovate the structure as
a museum, restoring the polished marble and paneled interiors with
gilt detailing to their original elegance ... Lauder has given some
of his collection, including an important Klimt painting, to the New
York's Museum of Modern Art of which he is board chairman."
Two
Brothers from Montreal Make Good -- and Waves,
[Jewish] Forward, November 30, 2001
"Canada's Jewish community kvelled when, at the turn of the new
century, Montreal-born, look-alike brothers Victor and Robert
Rabinovitch were named to head two of the most important government-owned
cultural institutions in the country. The brainy, 50-something brothers
are sons of a lower middle-class Jewish family. Younger brother Victor
is president of the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corp.,
the country's largest and busiest museum, while his older brother
Robert is president of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Their appointments, the apex of careers built largely in the federal
civil service, were 'a source of naches [pride] for the entire
Jewish community,'' said Irving Abella, a Toronto historian and former
president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. 'They are energetic and
dedicated, and never tried to hide their Jewish background.'"
Yizhak
Rabin - The Original Famous Painting, ebay.com,
March 1, 2002
[For sale] "The original famous painting of ISRAEL Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin that was gunned down by an ultra-nationalist assassin
because is peace policy, the painting was located a few meters from
where the assassin took place,on the painting there are the original
inscriptions that the people wrote, expressing there feelings, there
is a date on the painting,dated a few days after the murder. the painting
size is 98*144 inch, it is possible to get a personal designating
from the artist ...Opening bid $500,000."
SEE ALSO: CRIME -- ART DEPARTMENT
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