The picture at Menorah Journal: Making "Jewish Art"

American Jewish History

Volumn 90, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 205-238

  Pappas, Andrea ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 64949153461     PISSN: 01640178     EISSN: 10863141     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ajh.2003.0048     Document Type: Review

References (52)

1. Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Henry Hurwitz Papers (hereafter AJA/HHP), Box 52, folder 6, correspondence with William Schack, 1924-1930, n.d
2. Although yet to be the object of a book-length study, accounts of Menorah Journal include Lauren B. Strauss, "Staying Afloat in the Melting Pot: Constructing an American Jewish Identity in the Menorah Journal of the 1920s," American Jewish History 84 (1996): 315-31
3. and Lewis Fried, "The Menorah Journal: Yavneh in America, 1945-1950," American Jewish Archives 50 (1998): 77-108
4. A look at the association that spawned the journal is Jenna Weissman Joselit, "Without Ghettoism: A History of the Intercollegiate Menorah Association, 1906-1930," American Jewish Archives 30 (1978): 133-54
5. The magazine was published between 1915 and 1962. Studies of its role in literary modernism include James Burkhart Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (New York, 1968)
6. Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and their World (New York, 1986)
7. Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left (Chapel Hill, 1987)
8. and Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Berkeley, 1991)
9. Jumonville, Critical Crossings, 27-50, 57, 63-74
10. Wald, The New York Intellectuals, 61, 63-64, 117-18
11. Lauren B. Strauss, "Staying Afloat in the Melting Pot," and Seth Korelitz, "The Menorah Idea: From Religion to Culture, From Race to Ethnicity," American Jewish History 85 (1997): 75-100
12. Henry Hurwitz, Menorah Journal 37 (1949): n.p
13. Menorah Journal, inaugural issue, 1915. Quoted in Introduction to The Menorah Treasury, (Philadelphia, 1964) vii. For a study that looks at the relationships between artists - some of them Jewish - and another magazine, see Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses (Philadelphia, 1988)
14. For a discussion of the history of antisemitism at Columbia, see Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York, 1994), 85, 87-88, 156, 158
15. Korelitz, "The Menorah Idea," provides an insightful discussion of Menorah Journal's ongoing debates over the meaning of culture
16. Lion Feuchtwanger, "A Note on Manè-Katz, Painter," Menorah Journal 29 (1941): 286
17. If some artworks in the magazine promoted Jewish identity as a form of ethnicity, others, especially in the years around World War II, depicted Jewishness as a form of national identity. Images of Palestine and art and photographs by Jewish Palestinian artists appearing in the magazine did more than connect Diasporic Jews across large geographic distances. Such images projected one possible Jewish future, and therefore identity, an identity circumscribed by national borders rather than parameters of race or ethnicity. This aspect of the visual culture of Menorah Journal, deserving of a study of its own in light of the complex issue of Zionism, is not examined here. For some work on the role of photography in the complicated relationship between Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians, see Kerri P. Steinberg, "Photography, Philanthropy, and the Politics of American Jewish Identity" (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1998). For a look at images produced in Palestine in relation to national identity, see Ruth Oren, "Zionist Photography, 1910-1941: Constructing a Landscape," History of Photography 19 (1995): 201-209
18. See Korelitz, "The Menorah Idea,"on the relationships among religion, culture, race, and ethnicity in the magazine
19. See Karen Brodkin, How the Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick 1998)
20. AJA/HHP, Box 60, folder 6, Max Weber correspondence, 1932-1937. Max Weber had a long career and was one of the better-known modern artists in New York in the pre-war years. He is today known mostly for his contributions to early American modern art and for his participation in the group of artists around Alfred Steiglitz. However, Matthew Baigell has recently identified him as one of the founding figures in the creation of an American Jewish art. Matthew Baigell, "Max Weber's Jewish Paintings," American Jewish History 88 (2000): 341-60
21. Louis Lozowick,"The Art of Nathan Altman," Menorah Journal 12 (February 1926): 61-64
22. Lozowick, "Eliezer Lissitzky," 175
23. See Korelitz, "The Menorah Idea," in particular. An extensive treatment of this process can be found in Eric Louis Goldstein, "Race and the Construction of Jewish Identity in America, 1875-1945" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2000)
24. The phrase is Royal Cortissoz's, critic for the New York Tribune, and was occasioned by the blockbuster Armory Show in 1913. Cited in Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art (New York, 2002), 65
25. Aaron Spivak, "The Jew Enters the Plastic Arts," Menorah Journal 16 (1929): 400-408
26. The literature treating the origins and effects of these two factors is growing rapidly. For a definitive historical overview of the Second Commandment stereotype, see Kaiman P. Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Denials of the Visual (Princeton, 2000)
27. See also the volume edited by Catherine M. Soussloff, Jewish Identity in Modern Art History (Berkeley, 1999) for a collection of essays treating the intersection of Jewishness and art history
28. Louis Lozowick, "Jewish Artists of the Season," Menorah Journal 10 (1924): 282-85
29. See Fried, "The Menorah Journal," on acculturation and assimilation in the magazine
30. "Lithography: Abstraction and Realism," Space (1930)
31. reproduced in Survivor of a Dead Age, Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, ed. (Washington, D.C, 1977), 285-87
32. The phrase is Irving Sandler's and is the title of his pioneering text, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York, 1970). Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Adolph Gottlieb are among the core group of eight to ten abstract expressionist painters commonly given credit for founding the movement
33. Zadkine's work appears in Menorah Journal 31 (1943). Archipenko's work appeared on the cover of the Winter 1943 issue
34. William Schack, "A Live Year of Art," Menorah Journal 29 (1941): 185
35. Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein, "Reflections on Jewish Art," Jewish Review 2 (1944): 202-208
36. See for example, Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman, Ex. Cat., Museum of Modern Art, October 21, 1971-January 10, 1972 (New York, 1971). More recently, conference papers presented by Nancy Nield Buchwald have discussed Newman's Stations of the Cross series in terms of Newman's Jewishness
37. Nancy Nield Buchwald, "Beholding the Outcry: The Collision of Utterance, Inscription, and Image as Revenants of the Holocaust in Barnett Newman's 'Station of the Cross,'" Annual Conference of the American Studies Association, October 12-15, 2000, Detroit
38. "Re-Tracing the Unruly Boundaries of the Jewish Body in Barnett Newman's 'Stations of the Cross,'" Race and the Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Conference, November 15-17, 2001, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
39. Matthew Baigell, "Barnett Newman's Stripe Paintings and Kabbalah: A Jewish Take," American Art 8 (1994): 33-43
40. and Nancy Nield Buchwald, "Anxious Embodiments: Speculations Upon Tropes of American Jewish Masculinity in Barnett Newman's 'Stations of the Cross'" (Ph.D. Diss., in progress, University of Chicago). Nield's conference papers on this topic are listed in n. 49, supra. I am grateful to her for stimulating conversations, as well as for her generosity in sharing an unpublished manuscript with me
41. Werner Haftmann, Mark Rothko, Ex. Cat., Kunsthaus Zurich Museum of Fine Arts, March 21-May 9, 1971 (Zurich, 1971) (Trans. Margery Schärer), x
42. Lozowick, "Jewish Artists of the Season," 282
43. A case in point is Avram Kampf, Jewish Experience in the Art of the 20th Century (South Hadley, 1984), 201. He says of Barnett Newman's post-war paintings that they are "in the classic 'no graven image' tradition of Judaism."
44. See also Robert Pincus-Witten, "Six Propositions on Jewish Art," Arts Magazine 50 (1975): 66-69. Pincus-Witten rehearses the "no graven image" argument. A more recent study of the origins and developments of this line of reasoning is Bland's The Artless Jew
45. and Matthew Baigell's Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, 1997)
46. Likewise, the literature on American art and American national identity is large; recent key texts are Matthew Baigell, "American Art and National Identity: The 1920s," Arts Magazine 61 (1987): 48-55
47. anthologized in Mary Ann Calo, ed., Critical Issues in American Art: A Book of Readings (Boulder, 1998)
48. and Wanda Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999)
49. For a review of the role of national identity as a structuring idea in the development of the field of American art history, see Wanda Corn, "Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art," Art Bulletin 70 (1988): 188-207. Revised and anthologized in Calo, Critical Issues
50. William Meyerowitz, "On the Need of Art," Menorah Journal 32 (1944): 59. Note that this wording, "strengthening" Judaism, implies that visual art is important in the securing and maintenance of Jewish identity
51. Schack, "A Live Year of Art," 185
52. The founding text is Linda Nochlin's essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" Art News (1971): 22-39