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© Steve Pease

Visual Arts & Architecture©

"When. . . Chaim Soutine (1893-1943), the son of a poor hasidic tailor, painted a portrait, . . . his father flogged him. Chagall's father, who hauled herring barrels for a living, did not go so far when his son began to study with portraitist, Yehuda Pen, but he flung the five-rouble fee violently to the ground as a gesture of disapproval."

Paul Johnson, History of the Jews

Charles Murray's book, Human Accomplishment, lists the 479 great Western artists from 800 BC to 1950. They are not his selections, but consensus picks drawn from fifteen of the world's foremost art authorities, such as the thirty four volumes of J. Turner's 1996 Dictionary of Art, Encyclopædia Britannica, and thirteen more. Based on their coverage of the individual artists, Murray took the implied rankings and compiled them into a single comprehensive list of the Western artists who have mattered most.

The fact that sixteen Jewish artists are included among the 479 (3.3 percent) seems only mildly interesting since, in the years Jews made the list, Murray calculates they were 2.1 to 2.2 percent of the West's population. Their representation among great artists was thus only slightly higher than their percentage of the relevant population. But, accurate as that observation is, it misses a key point. The Jewish Golden Age is of recent origin. Only in the last 125 years or so have Jews emerged as important figures in visual art. But once they arrived on the scene, they quickly rose to prominence. That story begins in biblical times.

Exodus 20:4 and Deuteronomy 5:8 in the King James Bible include among the Ten Commandments the familiar "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water underneath the earth." More recent versions of the Jewish Bible slightly alter that text saying, "You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters below the earth." Presumably, the Jewish Bible draws on more recent translations of Hebrew text than the 1611 King James version, and its prohibition of "sculptured" images seems to reduce the implication that the Bible proscribes drawn or painted images. Nonetheless, at different times and places, and at varying levels of intensity, that commandment's language has inhibited Jews from pursuing visual arts.

But it was not always interpreted that way. The Jews who remained in Babylonia after their sixth century exile made it into a cultural capital. They stimulated art in Jerusalem and later, appear to have influenced the Byzantine school of painting.

Images of animals appear on carved capitals at Capernaum (Jesus home in Galilee), as do owls, palms and urns on early Jewish coins, and lions on early Torah curtains. Visitors to Sepphoris (Zippori), the ancient "capital of the Galilee," can see mosaic images of people, animals, and an illustrated Zodiac in the remains of a fifth century synagogue. Those images resemble earlier third century (Dura Europos), and fourth century (Hammat Tiberias) synagogue mosaics.

During the long period of Jewish interaction with Muslims, Jews created almost no art worthy of comment. This contrasts with important Jewish accomplishments in philosophy, medicine, science, mathematics and linguistics over the same years. Only during the Renaissance, did Jews return to the arts in a significant way. They painted, sculpted, engraved, and served as purveyors and patrons of the arts, but in all of these, they were only minor figures. Italian artists and architects clearly surpassed them.

But, the Renaissance passed and the Inquisition arrived. Jewish involvement in visual art disappeared as Jews were forced into the Ghettos. Sephardic populations declined while Ashkenazi populations grew. Many of those Ashkenazi's chose to escape hostile Western European countries, moving East into what became the Pale of Poland and Russia. There, Orthodox and Hasidic Judaism were the dominant theologies and they encompassed ever more of the world's Jews. Except in Vilnius, Lithuania where art flourished, for a time with sponsorship from a Russian patron, Orthodoxy and Hasidism discouraged Jewish visual artists.

As in other domains, it was the Jewish Emancipation, Enlightenment and the reform movement which stirred a Jewish golden age in visual art. Moses Mendelssohn (1729 – 1786), gained prominence in Germany and brought secular education to German Jews. He wrote critical essays on art, and helped open the possibilities for Jews in various secular fields, including art. Nonetheless, while Western European Jewish artists were emerging, the same was not true for Ashkenazis in the Russian/Polish pale. Except in Vilnius, they were inhibited from sharing in the reawakening to visual art. That point is illustrated in this chapter's introductory quote, which tells of Jewish parental scorn towards the artistic aspirations of their offspring, Chaim Soutine and Marc Chagall.

Camille Pissarro is the first Jewish artist to appear on Murray's list in 1870. Said differently, over the 2,670 years between 800 BC and 1870, the consensus of art experts is that not a single Jewish artist was worthy of being considered "great."

But as the Jews were freed (Emancipation), as they explored Western arts and sciences (Enlightenment) migrated from an Orthodox to Reform mentality and began to interact with non-Jews in significant ways, some of them emerged as highly accomplished artists.

As suggested above, between 1800 and 1849, none of the twenty-two great artists identified by the experts was Jewish. Between 1850 and 1899, one Jew (Pissarro) made the list among the fifty-four great artists of that era. After 1900, Jews quickly rose to prominence. Of the 109 great Western artists named by the experts between 1900 and 1950, fifteen (13.76 percent) are Jewish. This is six times their percentage of the population. Those fifteen Jews include:

The Jews had arrived.

Phaidon's 500 Great Artists

London based Phaidon first published "The Art Book" in 1994. Demand has been strong enough for it to be republished every year since. It is an excellent collection of representative work by important artists. Phaidon calls it "an A to Z guide of 500 great painters and sculptors from medieval to modern times". A delightful collection to browse, it is also an excellent catalogue of the best in Western Art, from Ghiberti and Giotto to Picasso and Oldenburg with Modigliani and Wyeth thrown in. The scope (500 artists) and a review of their selections encourages confidence that nearly all of the great Western artists since the Renaissance have been included. It also extends Murray's material by including 170 artists who are still alive or who died after 1950 - Murray's cut off date for inclusion. The Phaidon list (see Exhibit 13a) corroborates Murray's list. While the simple tally includes just thirty seven Jews among the 500, the real story only emerges when the list is broken down over time. Using the date of death as an index of when the artists were active, the analysis shows that:

The trend is unmistakable. The Murray and Phaidon data tell the same story. In roughly 125 years, Jews went from virtually no representation among world class artists to become more than 20 percent - six to ten times more than their numbers would suggest.

Among the more prominent of the thirty-seven Jews in the Phaidon collection are:

A completely different kind of index arises from "The Altahmazi Contemporary Art Gallery" owned by Khalid Al-Tahmazi, a Bahrain based painter and an unlikely promoter of Jewish art. As noted on its web site, in April 2002, Altahmazi did a survey of the world's 53 most popular painters, photographers and sculptors. "Popular" they are, including such names as Thomas Kinkade, Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol (See Exhibit 13b.) Of the fifty three, four are Jews including Chagall, Lichtenstein, Rothko and Modigliani.

Photographers

Two World War II photographs came to symbolize the victory of the Allies over Germany and Japan.

The first (on the left) is Joe Rosenthal's shot of five marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima. That image is immortalized by a bronze statue not far from Arlington Cemetery, symbolizing the determination and team spirit of the Marine Corps. The second photograph (on the right) is Yevgeny Khaldei's picture of a Russian soldier placing a Soviet flag atop the smoldering hulk of the Reichstag. Both photographers were Jews and Khaldi's photo became the iconic shot of the Soviet victory in what the Russian's call "The Great Patriotic War" over the Nazis who had killed six million Jews.

According to George Gilbert, an author who has written about the history of photography, and the role of Jews in that history, Jewish involvement in photography dates from the fourteenth century. At the time, Levi ben Gershom experimented with a camera obscura "to measure the apparent size of celestial bodies and safely observe an eclipse without looking directly at the sun."

Within two years of the 1839 invention of daguerreotypes by Jacques Daguerre, Hermann Biouw, a Jewish artist, was offering improved plates, faster than those of Daguerre. Biouw went on to become one of the world's first news photographers with his photos of Hamburg's Great Fire. Shortly thereafter, Diaspora Jews opened photography studios in Australia, the United States, Venezuela, Warsaw, Ukraine and other locations to which they had spread in the Diaspora.

Images created by Jewish Master photographers are indelible, particularly for anyone born in middle of the 20th Century, or with anything more than a passing interest in photography. Eisenstaedt's August 1945 Times Square shot of a sailor leaning over to kiss a pretty girl on V-J day, and his shot of Churchill raising two fingers above his head in the shape of "V", for victory, are instantly recognizable. So are those of Margaret Bourke White setting up for a photo shoot perched atop a Chrysler building gargoyle, or her 1936 picture of the Fort Peck Dam - the first cover for Life magazine. The same is true for Stieglitz's 1893 photos of horse drawn carriages traversing snow covered 5th Avenue, his shots of the Flatiron Building or his austere shots of Georgia O'Keefe made around 1920.

And, because Jews were involved from the inception of photography, it is no surprise they are disproportionately represented amongst the great photographers of all time.

Absent a single definitive source for identifying history's great photographers - and to reduce the effect of judgments by a single person - seven sources were pulled together. They include:

Taken together (see Exhibit 13c), the seven sites name 153 Jews (26 percent) out of the 587 great photographers.

Because the Islamic world discourages artistic images, such as art photography, and some other cultures fear pictures, the frame of reference for judging this performance is the West. Though it is a conservative definition (excluding Asia and Africa) it nonetheless, provides a context for saying that Jews represent about 25 percent of the great "master" photographers.

Architects

Rebuilding the World Trade Center site will be one of the highest profile architectural projects in the early years of the twenty-first century. After the horror of September 11th, anything that arises from the ruin will be a National Memorial both to the 3,000 innocent lives and an event that changed the world. And, whatever is built there, it originated as the architectural conception of Daniel Libeskind, a Jewish immigrant from Poland who is now a U.S. citizen.

His selection symbolizes the importance of Jews in architecture, a conclusion amplified by the fact that one of two runners up, the so called New York Team, consisting of Peter Eisenmann, Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl included two Jewish "Master" architects (Eisenmann and Meier) among its four members. And the four principal partners of Think Design, the other runner up, are: Shigeru Ban, Frederic Schwartz, Ken Smith and Rafael Vinoly. Most likely, at least one of the four is Jewish.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and The Getty Center in Los Angeles, both completed within the last 10 years, are of similar importance to the World Trade Center Site. Both projects were architectural trend setters and both are important new buildings in their respective settings. Frank Gehry (nee Goldberg) was the architect for Bilbao. Richard Meier did the Getty.

Going back to the 1950s, Manhattan's Lever House on Park Avenue (see below) became an early high rise masterpiece helping to shape office design on one of the world's most prominent streets. Gordon Bunshaft, a Jew then working for Skidmore Owings and Merrill, designed Lever House. Only the Seagram's Building, a little further up Park Avenue and designed by non-Jew, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, could be considered as important in those influential few blocks that defined the twentieth century "high-rise."

The shopping mall was the creation of Victor Gruen, an Austrian emigrant Jew, who designed the Northland Mall outside Detroit and Southdale, near Minneapolis. Southdale was the first completely enclosed Mall. In 1967, Moshe Safdie designed the grounds for Expo 67, the World's Fair in Montreal. The names of Robert A. M. Stern, Lawrence Halprin, Morris Lapidus, Louis and Albert Kahn, Peter Eisenman and many others have become very familiar to anyone with a continuing interest in architecture. All would be considered "Masters", a preferred designation among architects.

There are many lists of great or master architects and a goodly number of awards. To set a context for Jewish achievement in architecture, six (shown in Exhibit 13d) were examined:

Limited as they are to the greats of architecture, these lists provide solid grounds for talking about the representation of Jews among the great architects.

Of the 309 designees, Laureates and other winners, 32 (ten percent) are Jews. This is a realistic estimate of the percent of great or master architects that are Jewish. Given the world as the context in which great architects practice (I.M. Pei, Imhotep, Gaudi, Le Corbusier, Palladino, Christopher Wren, Brunelleschi, Hadrian, Isozaki Arata, Kurokawa Kisho, Tange Kenzo, and Leonardo Da Vinci are among other international figures on the six lists), the achievement is 45 times what would be expected.