Jewish Art, Modern and Contemporary

This article takes a minimalist approach to the designation of “Jewish” in the category of “Jewish art,” focusing primarily on works that directly engage the modern Jewish experience and the role that Jews have played in the development of new visual media in the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time, this article takes a maximalist approach to what is meant by the term “art” by including a wide range of visual mediums. The academic study of Jews in the arts can be traced to Germany in the mid-19th century, when both art history and Jewish studies were relatively new academic disciplines. While art history devalued Jewish art as derivative in the context of the development of modern national identities, Jewish studies devalued non-textual sources for academic study. It was the interdisciplinary field of Jewish art that would serve to negotiate biases from both academic branches, proving influential in the development of iconographic interpretation by promoting critical attention to the narrative function of a wide variety of mediums. This article traces the extent to which Jewish studies scholars have compensated for earlier disciplinary tensions by questioning the premise of nationalist models for art history and how they have broadened the criteria for visual analysis in the study of Jewish art. Although some of the most recognized modern artists are Jewish, the focus here is more narrowly dedicated to those artists and visual media that have secured a place within Jewish studies. In recent decades, scholars of Jewish art have forged an accessible path by adopting more of a “visual culture” approach that considers production and consumption of Jewish content in the plastic arts in non-hierarchical terms. Because Jewish studies touch on a wide range of disciplines, the study of Jewish art has come to include the material aspects of vernacular life (decorative art and handicraft) and popular media (stage design, photography, film) as well as the traditional fine arts (architecture, sculpture, and painting) within schools of style (Impressionism, Futurism, Abstract Expressionism). Scholars of Jewish art have largely avoided the high/low debate typical of other branches of art history by emphasizing the experiential aspect of Jewish objects of all types. This article is a survey of modern and contemporary Jewish art from approximately 1850 to 1990, when Jews participated in the artistic mainstream, and points to the considerable scholarly attention Jewish studies have placed on art as a comprehensive experience rather than a purely aesthetic one. The article opens with second-order categories, then moves to scholarship devoted to issues that are central to the field, such as nationalism and Jewish/non-Jewish relations, and closes with scholarship devoted to diverse media.