[lawrence dennis]

Jewish-'American' Artists and Genesis

...the varied responses to biblical text by Jewish-American artists.... The artistic approaches reflect and incorporate the cultural milieu and specific experiences of these artists. This presentation includes works by:

Ida Applebroog
Leonard Baskin
Sir Jacob Epstein
Philip Evergood
Helen Frankenthaler
Adolph Gottlieb
Chaim Gross
Philip Guston
Jack Levine
Harry Lieberman
Jacques Lipchitz
Seymour Lipton
Barnett Newman
Archie Rand
Susan Rothenberg
Mark Rothko
Ben Shahn
Miriam Schapiro
Susan Schwalb
Elbert Weinberg
William Zorach

Jewish-'American' Artists & World War II

From "The Degenerate Art Show" of 1937 to contemporary times, artworks included are by:

Leonard Baskin
Jonathan Borofsky
Marc Chagall
Judy Chicago
Philip Evergood
Audrey Flack
Leon Golub
Jack Levine
Sol LeWitt
Jacques Lipchitz
Seymour Lipton
Barnett Newman
Abraham Rattner
Larry Rivers
Mark Rothko
George Segal
Ben Shahn
Art Spiegelman
Roman Vishniac
Max Weber
Jerome Witkin

These artists synthesized events through their perspectives, revealing their angst and their unique place in American life.

Jewish-'American' Photographers

"Photography is about death," wrote Roland Barthes... For Jewish photographers, this is a powerful and important aspect.

In the early nineteenth century, the first Jewish-American photographer, Solomon Carvalho, was born into a Sephardic family in Charleston, South Carolina. He was a painter and daguerreotypist, best remembered for accompanying John Charles Fremont on his expedition to the West....


In the mid-nineteenth century, in Hoboken, New Jersey, Alfred Stieglitz was born into a family who came from Germany. He was passionately interested in the changing qualities of nature, particularly clouds, and his photographs captured the transcendent characteristic of his environment. He is best remembered for introducing the most advanced European art to America and for bringing photography to the level of fine art.

Paul Strand, who came from a family recently arrived from Bohemia, was a disciple of Stieglitz. His devotion to America and to cultural pluralism was a guidepost in his aesthetic development. In the 1930s, he was strongly affected by conditions in the western United States, and even moreso, by the events in the Eastern Europe. In the 1950s, he was cited as "subversive" and "un-American" by the Attorney General of the United States.

Born in Kovno, Lithuania, Ben Shahn came to America when he was five years old. He trained as a lithographer and became a painter and photographer. In 1932, he discovered the newly created handheld camera, which gave him the opportunity to document the Lower East Side of New York City and its primarily Jewish population. Later in the decade, he employed art to promote social change. Through his photographs around New York and later in rural America, he documented the living conditions in the hope that this kind of visual education would bring about change.

This part begins with the photographs of Roman Vishniac. He took surreptitious photographs throughout Eastern Europe, documenting a life that was soon to disappear. Trained as a biologist, he became a linguist, art historian, and philosopher renowned for his photomicroscopy of living organisms. [Wow! 'Biologist, linguist, art historian, and philosopher,' thanks to a little help from his tribe in academia and media, no doubt. --L.D]


At the same time, a Jewish photographer from West Prussia, Alfred Eisenstaedt served in the German army during World War I. Due to the rise of Naziism, he immigrated to New York in the mid-1930s and became the father of photojournalism. His photographs have reached far greater numbers of people than most other photographers.

Weegee (aka Arthur Fellig) was born in a shtetl in the Ukraine whose population was one-third Jewish, but came to the United States when he was eleven. Pursuing a somewhat different direction, Weegee photographed the seamier side of life in New York City. He took images of auto accidents, disasters, fires, traumas, and the irony of life. He visited Alfred Stieglitz, with whom he shared the role of seeker of invisible images. Stieglitz sought exaltation while Weegee reveled in shock tactics.

One of the photographers Weegee who shared membership with Weegee in the Photo League was Lisettte Model. She was born in Vienna and studied music, before turning to photography. Her photographs were analytical approaches to people "on the edge," especially those at the extremes of economic distress, chronological age, and physical disability....