Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture
Antisemitism, Assimilation, Affirmation
9781584657958
Distributed for Brandeis University Press
Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture
Antisemitism, Assimilation, Affirmation
In modern western history, the cultural and social developments of modernism have long been associated with Jews. For conservative groups this has been a negative association: the perceived breakdown of traditional norms was blamed on Jewish influence in politics, society, and the arts. Throughout Europe, Jews were viewed as carriers of industrialized and cosmopolitan developments that threatened to undermine a cherished way of life. This anthology speaks to this issue through the lens of modernist visual production including paintings, posters, sculpture, and architecture. Essays by scholars from the U.S. and Israel confront the contradictory impulses that modernism’s interaction with Jewish culture provoked. Discussing how religion, class, race, and political alignments were used to provide attacks on modern art, the scholars also comment on visual responses to anti-semitism and the mainstream success of artists in the U.S. and Israel since World War II.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations • Acknowledgments • Introduction • CRITICAL RESPONSES TO MODERNISM AND JUDAISM • The Jew as Anti-Artist: Georges Sorel, Antisemitism, and the Aesthetics of Class Consciousness – Mark Antliff • German Antisemitism and the Historiography of Modern Art: The Case of Julius Meier-Graefe, 1894–1905 – Janne Gallen-Kallela-Siren • The Ecole Française versus the Ecole de Paris: The Debate about the Status of Jewish Artists in Paris between the Wars – Romy Golan • Dada’s Dark Secret – Albert Boime • “Ihr mu¨sst sein, auch wenn ihr nicht mehr seid”: The Jewish Central Museum in Prague and Historical Memory in the Third Reich – Dirk Rupnow • CODED REPRESENTATIONS • Identity and Interpretation: Reception of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Reine de joie Poster in the 1890s – Ruth Iskin • George Grosz, Otto Dix, and the Philistines: The German-Jewish Question in the Weimar Republic – Rose-Carol Washton Long • Tristan Tzara / Shmuel Rosenstock: The Hidden/Overt Jewish Agenda – Milly Heyd • Models of Freedom: The Young Yiddish Group from Lodz, 1919–1921 – Marek Bartelik • Soviet Artists, Jewish Images – Matthew Baigell • AFFIRMATION • Between Response and Responsiveness: On Michael Sgan-Cohen’s Hinneni – David Heyd • Postwar Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust – Gavriel D. Rosenfeld • Readymade Redux: Once More the Jewish Museum – Lisa Saltzman • Contributors • Index