As a young and Jewish student at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1980s, Douglas Rosenberg noticed a paradox.
On the one hand, “a lot of the people I was learning about in art history were Jewish,” Rosenberg said. “Many of the most important voices in post-war American art” were Jewish immigrants or children of Jewish immigrants.
But other parts of the curriculum were treating such topics as African-American art, Asian-American art, Native American art; and “it struck me that nobody ever categorized Jewish-American art, or Jewish art at all,” he said.
This realization “stuck in the back of my head” until sometime after he became a film-maker and joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997. The leaders of the university’s Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies invited him to join its interdisciplinary faculty — but he had to give a presentation first.
That launched him into research and thinking about Jewish art and Jews in the history of art as artists, critics, and theorists.
In addition to serving as associate professor in the UW art department’s dance/interarts and technology program and doing his own creative work, Rosenberg is the founding director of The Conney Project on Jewish Arts. This project holds a conference at UW every two years that explores topics in Jewish art.
Rosenberg shared some of what he learned in his explorations at a presentation on “Jewish Identity in the Arts” presented by the Jewish Museum Milwaukee on Jan. 24 at the Helfaer Jewish Community Service Building to an audience of about 30.
He spoke for less than an hour, but said that he could have spoken all day about this topic and his discoveries.
They included how the identity of many Jewish artists has become subsumed into national listings. For example, Chaim Soutine is usually regarded as a Russian artist, Amadeo Modigliani as an Italian, with art history paying little attention to their having been Jews, he said.
“Jewish artists and art theorists have been ‘whitened’ for the purpose of telling art history,” he said. Stripping them of their Jewishness has caused them to be “placed in a context that belies the full scope of their identity.”
Yet trying to discuss this “multicultural, global group” of Jewish artists raises its own issues. It is as though art historians say that if artists “don’t have a [national] homeland, we don’t know how to talk about” them, Rosenberg said.
Another set of issues involved the supposed historical influence of the Second Commandment (“You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters” — Exodus 20:4) in inhibiting Jews from making visual art.
Rosenberg said that some art historians and critics have claimed this was a significant reason why so many of the artists and theorists of abstract expressionism — the “dominant art force” in modernism — were Jews: artists Adolph Gottlieb, Kenneth Noland, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko; critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.
And yet, archeologists and scholars have shown that in ancient and medieval times, on the walls and floors of synagogues and in illuminated manuscripts, Jews made drawings, paintings, and mosaics of objects, animals, and people. “Jews expressed themselves in art forms that reflected the vernacular culture of the times and places in which they lived,” Rosenberg said.
Therefore, “there is a real back-and-forth” among art historians today about whether the supposed inhibiting influence of the Second Commandment is “valid or not valid,” Rosenberg said.
Rosenberg also said that one of the overwhelming events of the modern Jewish experience, the Holocaust, has influenced Jewish and general art.
He cited non-Jewish philosopher Theodor W. Adorno’s famous contention, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” — interpreting it to mean, “How do we make something beautiful after witnessing something so horrible? How is it possible even to think of beauty after such devastation?”
And yet, Rosenberg said that Adono’s challenge may well have proved inspiring. “It woke artists and people up to the need for beauty” after such an event, he said.
Rosenberg also emphasized that in “thinking about the art that Jews made … I noticed this immense sense of tikkun olam, the idea that through art one can repair that which is broken in culture and society and the world.”
The next Conney Conference on Jewish Arts is scheduled to take place at UW-Madison April 9-12.
Its theme, Rosenberg said, is “Diasporas” and will involve “thinking about ways that Jewishness has permeated other cultures, and how Jews have participated in those other cultures around the world.”
For more information about the conference, including a complete schedule, visit http://conneyproject.wisc.edu/2013-conney-conference.
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