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Impressions of Eastern Europe: Prints from the Permanent Collection

On view February 23–May 10, 2020
Text by Susan Chevlowe, Chief Curator and Museum Director

As participants in some of the most significant art movements of the twentieth century, the 16 artists in this exhibition worked at a time of rapid change, including urbanization, secularization, industrialization, technological innovation, and seismic political and cultural shifts. Their genre scenes, folk tale illustrations, portraits and character studies evoke nostalgia for a communal past, solemn awareness of the fragility of life and deep reverence for tradition. Their lithographs, etchings, engravings and woodcuts—mediums increasingly popular in the modern period—allowed the middle classes to inexpensively acquire works of art, particularly ones that would meaningfully connect them to a shared past.

Most of the artists included here were born in far reaches of the Austrian or Russian Empires and sought to make their careers in what were in their lifetimes the major art capitals of Europe: Vienna, Munich, Berlin and Paris. Some found settled lives and success, such as Isidor Kaufmann (1853–1921), who was born in Arad, Hungary, then in the Austrian Empire (now in Romania), and studied art in Budapest and Vienna, where he maintained his studio. During the Holocaust, from 1933 to 1945, Jewish artists faced arrest, deportation, internment and death. Some escaped with their lives and some survived through the War. Rahel Szalit-Marcus (1894–1942), however, perished in Auschwitz. She had spent her childhood in Lodz, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, but was living in Berlin when Hitler came to power in 1933. She fled to Paris and was later deported.

Two artists from families seeking to escape anti-Semitism, violence and poverty in the Russian Empire, Max Weber (1881–1961) and William Auerbach-Levy (1889–1964), found refuge in New York City as children during a period of mass immigration to the US. Only one of the artists in this exhibition, Anatoli Kaplan (1902–1980), who was born in Belorussia and settled in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), remained in Russia. Several others immigrated to Israel, including Jakob Steinhardt (1887–1968) and Albert Dov Sigal (1912–1970), one before and the other after the Holocaust, and another was born there, Emanuel Schary (1924–1994), though he immigrated to the US to pursue professional opportunities.

As Jews in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe moved away from traditional communities, Jewish artists became increasingly nostalgic. This was particularly true for artists who were removed geographically from their origins in Belorussia, Ukraine, Moldova, Hungary, Galicia and other areas. Artists like Hermann Struck (1876–1944), who lived in cosmopolitan Berlin, and Kaufmann, who lived in Vienna, were especially drawn to the Ostjuden, traditional Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews, as emblematic of authenticity. Kaufmann was known for his finely painted renderings of traditional Jewish life. He traveled in Galicia, Poland and the Ukraine to observe village life first hand and became the foremost painter of the subject in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. Painting in a highly realistic style, he idealized and elevated his subjects while paying close attention to the accuracy of clothing and props.

Struck was a master of various graphic techniques and taught other artists, including Steinhardt. During WWI Struck served on the Eastern Front and became aware of the plight of Jews in Eastern Europe suffering anti-Semitism and pogroms, whom he then depicted in his prints. Steinhardt was a cofounder of Die Pathetiker, a German Expressionist artists’ group. One of his etchings portrays the suffering of the biblical Job (1914) in an angular Expressionist style with an almost apocalyptic energy. Hear Israel, a woodcut by the Prague-born avant-garde printmaker and painter Bedřich Feigl (1884–1965), has a similar intensity. This particular print, along with etchings by Struck and Steinhardt and eight other artists, was featured in an album published in Berlin in 1921 for the twelfth World Zionist Congress held in Karlsbad. Draped Head (1928) is another work by an avant-garde artist, Weber, born in Bialystok, then in the Russian Empire, who was a student of Matisse in Paris and has been credited with bringing Cubism to America. Later in his life, Weber became interested in Hebrew mysticism and created figurative expressionist works in a style influenced by El Greco.

The career of Szalit-Marcus, who had been associated with the radical Novembergruppe in Berlin, flourished in the 1920s. Her illustrations to the Yiddish tales Fischke the Lame (1922) by Mendele Moykher-Sforim, which both celebrated and critiqued traditional Jewish village life at a moment when it was confronted with modernity, and Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son (1922) by Sholem Aleichem were published in Berlin. Kaplan was another artist who illustrated stories and folk tales, including the poem “One Kid” (“Had Gadya”) that is sung as part of the Passover seder, published in 1961. A member of the Union of Soviet Artists, which allowed him to work as an official artist under the Communist system, Kaplan remained in the USSR his entire life. He was known in the West, however, through the efforts of supporters in New York and at the Grosvenor Gallery in London, who worked to bring his art out from behind the Iron Curtain.Among the artists who came to the US as children around the turn of the century, Auerbach-Levy was a successful caricaturist, who also focused on Jewish types he found among the Eastern European immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. Auerbach-Levy taught other immigrant and first-generation artists at the art school of the Educational Alliance settlement house. Joseph Margulies (1896–1984), who was born in Vienna and came to the US at a young age, was also interested in Jewish types, as in A Chassid (1966), an etching that uncompromisingly renders the deeply-lined face of his impoverished sitter in a manner that suggests authenticity and spiritual richness. The subject represents a surviving remnant of traditional life decimated by the Holocaust. Well into the first decades of the second half of the twentieth century, as distance in time and geography from their Jewish roots increased, interest in traditional Eastern European Jewish subject matter intensified. The appeal of such themes is evident, for example, in the popularization of romanticized depictions of religious study or dancing ecstatic Hasids, who represent the resilience and vitality of the Jewish spirit, as in the work of Tully Filmus (1903–1998).

Stylistically, the prints included here reflect broad influences, from nineteenth-century art movements such as Romanticism, Naturalism and Realism to avant-garde experiments of the twentieth century, including Expressionism and Cubism. For some, naive or folk art-inspired modes of representation—for example, in the work of modern artists like Ilya Schor (1904–1961)—were well suited to convey the simplicity and piety of the Old World while masking the trauma of forced migration and genocide. Schor himself was from a Hasidic family in Galicia and came from a folk tradition. He had studied art in Warsaw and lived in Paris before fleeing to the US via Marseille in late 1941. Artists like Simon Karczmar (1903–1982) created print portfolios that recollect traditional small-town Jewish life, such as Shtetl (ca. 1960).

Other prints directly reference life during and in the wake of the Holocaust. A series of etchings by Sigal provides glimpses of daily life in a British-run internment camp in Cyprus where he was imprisoned with his family while trying to illegally immigrate from Europe to Palestine in 1947. A work from 1961, perhaps based on an earlier eyewitness account, by an artist who signed their work A. Fuchs (dates unknown), appears to depict a deportation. As late as the 1970s, Lithuanian-born School of Paris artist Arbit Blatas (1908–1999), who was able to flee to the US from occupied Paris, but whose mother perished in the Stutthof concentration camp, created a print to commemorate the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1941.

Throughout history, prints have been an effective means of disseminating art and ideas to a broad public. The present exhibition underscores the impact the movements and upheavals of the twentieth century had on Jewish artists and the power of the print medium to communicate their experiences. Today when mass migrations, detentions, deportations, displacements and ongoing humanitarian crises continue to occur on a global scale, such endeavors remain urgently relevant.

Checklist of the Exhibition
All prints from the collection of Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection.

William Auerbach-Levy (b. Brest-Litovsk, Belorussia, Russian Empire, now Belarus, 1889–d. Ossining, NY, 1964)
The Patriarch’s Prayer, 1914
Etching, 9 15/16 x 7 5/8 in. (25.2 x 19.4 cm)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Lewis, HHAR 5472

Arbit Blatas (b. Kovno, Russian Empire, now Kaunas, Lithuania, 1908–d. New York, 1999)
Babi Yar, ca. 1975
Lithograph, 15 3/4 x 19 in. (40 x 48.3 cm)
HHAR 3068

Friedrich (Bedřich) Feigl (b. Prague, Bohemia, now Czech Republic, 1884–d. London, 1965)
Hear Israel, 1921
Woodcut, 6 13/16 x 5 1/2 in. (17.3 x 14 cm)
U.239

Tully Filmus (b. Ataki, Bessarabia, Russian Empire, now Otaci, Moldova, 1903–d. Fern Hill, MA, 1998)
Chassidic Dance, 1964
Lithograph, 19 3/4 x 25 5/8 in. (50.2 x 65.1 cm)
HHAR 176

Fuchs (Place of birth and death and dates unknown)
Untitled, 1961
Lithograph, 15 x 20 in. (38.1 x 50.8 cm)
Gift of Jacob Reingold, HHAR 06.03

Anatoli Kaplan (b. Rogachev, Belorussia, Russian Empire, now Rohachow, Belarus, 1902–d. Leningrad, USSR, now Saint Petersburg, Russia, 1980)
Frontispiece, from The Little Goat, 1958–1961
Lithograph, 13 5/8 x 9 7/8 in. (34.6 x 25.1 cm)
HHAR 1503
Verse 7: Came an Ox and Drank the Water, from The Little Goat, 1958–1961
Lithograph
14 x 10 1/2 in. (35.6 x 26.7 cm)
HHAR 1497

Simon Karczmar (b. Warsaw, Poland, Russian Empire, now Poland, 1903–d. Safed, Israel, 1982)
Market, from Shtetl, ca. 1960
Lithograph, 7 1/2 x 11 in. (19 x 28 cm)
Gift of Randolph and Herta Chester, HHAR 1180
Hupa, Marriage, from Shtetl, ca. 1960
Lithograph, 11 3/8 x 7 13/16 in. (28.9 x 19.8 cm)
Gift of Randolph and Herta Chester, HHAR 1194
Mechadech de Levana, Prayer to the Moon, from Shtetl, ca. 1960
Lithograph, 7 3/4 x 11 1/16 in. (19.7 x 28.1 cm)
Gift of Randolph and Herta Chester, HHAR 1195
Simhas Torah, Dance of the Torah, from Shtetl, ca. 1960
Lithograph, 8 15/16 x 7 1/2 in. (22.7 x 19 cm)
Gift of Randolph and Herta Chester, HHAR 1294
The Musicians, from Shtetl, ca. 1960
Lithograph, 8 1/2 x 10 13/16 in. (21.6 x 27.5 cm)
Gift of Randolph and Herta Chester, HHAR 1301
In the Classroom, from Shtetl, ca. 1960
Lithograph, 7 3/8 x 11 1/4 (18.7 x 28.6 cm)
Gift of Randolph and Herta Chester, HHAR 1305

Isidor Kaufmann (b. Arad, Hungary, Austrian Empire, now Romania, 1853–d. Vienna, 1921)
The Jewish Bride, ca. 1920s
Lithograph, 14 3/4 x 11 3/8 in. (37.5 x 28.9 cm)
Gift of Ita Aber, 02.15
Friday Evening in Brody, ca. 1920s
Lithograph, 11 1/16 x 13 9/16 in. (28.1 x 34.4 cm)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Lewis, HHAR 5941

Joseph Margulies (b. Vienna, 1896–d. New York, 1984)
A Chassid, 1966
Etching, 9 1/8 x 7 in. (23.2 x 17.8 cm)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Lewis, HHAR 5912
The Seeker, 1949
Etching and aquatint, 11 7/8 x 8 3/4 in. (30.2 x 22.2 cm)
Gift of Ester Rosenstark, 05.13.02

Emanuel Schary (b. Haifa, Palestine, now Israel, 1924–d. Rock Hill, NY, 1994)
A Letter Home, n.d.
Lithograph, 10 1/2 x 8 9/16 in. (26.7 x 21.7 cm)
Gift of Rita and Marvin Grant, HHAR 2943

Ilya Schor (b. Złoczów, Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Zolochiv, Ukraine, 1904–d. New York, 1961)
Jewish Wedding, 1950s
Wood engraving with hand coloring, 8 15/16 x 12 in. (22.7 x 30.5 cm)
Gift of Estelle Reingold, HHAR 6354

Albert Dov Sigal (b. Kolozsvár, Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 1912–d. New York, 1970)
Cyprus Detention Camp, from Cyprus Camp, 1948
Etching, 5 7/16 x 8 3/16 in. (13.8 x 20.8 cm)
Gift of Rose Sigal Ibsen, HHAR 3374
View of the Camp, from Cyprus Camp, 1948
Etching, 7 1/4 x 9 7/16 in. (18.4 x 24 cm)
Gift of Rose Sigal Ibsen, HHAR 3375
Detainees in Cyprus, from Cyprus Camp, 1948
Etching, 8 3/8 x 5 5/16 in. (21.3 x 13.5 cm)
Gift of Rose Sigal Ibsen, HHAR 3377

Jakob Steinhardt (b. Zerkow, Germany, now Poland, 1887–d. Israel, 1968)
Job 2, 1914
Etching, 6 5/16 x 4 1/4 in. (16 x 10.8 cm)
Gift of Sylvia and Tom Rogers, 09.02.03
Old Couple at the Window, 1933
Woodcut, 13 3/4 x 10 1/8 in. (34.9 x 25.7 cm)
U.136
Untitled (Rabbi Blowing Shofar), n.d.
Woodcut, 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm)
HHAR 2721
Untitled (Village Street), n.d.
Woodcut, 6 5/8 x 3 1/2 in. (16.8 x 8.9 cm)
U.238

Hermann Struck (b. Berlin, Germany, 1876–d. Haifa, Palestine, now Israel, 1944)
Untitled (Figure at Lectern), n.d.
Lithograph, 6 3/4 x 5 3/8 in. (17.1 x 13.7 cm)
Ralph and Leuba Baum Collection, B.1
Untitled (Figure Walking), n.d.
Etching, 5 3/4 x 4 1/4 in. (14.6 x 10.8 cm)
Ralph and Leuba Baum Collection, B.2
Patriarch II, ca. 1919
Etching, 5 5/8 x 4 3/4 in. (14.3 x 10.8 cm)
Ralph and Leuba Baum Collection, B.14
Patriarch III, 1935
Etching, 6 1/2 x 4 3/4 in. (16.5 x 12.1 cm)
Ralph and Leuba Baum Collection, B.13

Rahel Szalit-Marcus (b. Kovno, Russian Empire, now Kaunas, Lithuania, 1894–d. Auschwitz, 1942)
People and Scenes, frontispiece, from Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son, by Sholem Aleichem, 1922
Lithograph, 7 1/4 x 6 3/4 in. (18.4 x 17.1 cm)
Gift of Sigmund R. Balka, 09.01.06
Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son Sells Kvas, from Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son, by Sholem Aleichem, 1922
Lithograph, 8 1/4 x 6 in. (21 x 15.2 cm)
Gift of Sigmund R. Balka, 09.01.07
The Street Sneezes, from Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son, by Sholem Aleichem, 1922
Lithograph, 9 x 7 in. (22.9 x 17.8 cm)
Gift of Sigmund R. Balka, 09.01.11
Lunch in celebration of the guest. Chaje=Trajne, the tavern owner knows how to honor the new cousin, from Fischke the Lame, by Mendele Moykher-Sforim, 1922
Lithograph, 7 3/4 x 9 3/4 in. (19.7 x 22.9 cm)
Gift of Sigmund R. Balka, 08.07.08
Reb Alter spots the gang taking a rest in a grove. . . , from Fischke the Lame, by Mendele Moykher-Sforim, 1922
Lithograph, 7 3/8 x 9 3/4 in. (18.7 x 24.8)
Gift of Sigmund R. Balka, 08.07.10
The child is pushed out of the cart barefoot. . . , from Fischke the Lame, by Mendele Moykher-Sforim, 1922
Lithograph, 9 1/2 x 7 1/4 in. (24.1 x 18.4 cm)
Gift of Sigmund R. Balka, 08.07.12

Max Weber (b. Bialystok, Russian Empire, now Poland, 1881–d. Great Neck, NY, 1961)
Draped Head, 1928
Lithograph, 3 5/16 x 2 9/16 in. (8.4 x 6.5 cm)
Gift of Joanna V. Pomeranz, HHAR 6099

This text originally appeared in a printed brochure produced on the occasion of the exhibition Impressions of Eastern Europe: Prints from the Permanent Collection on view at the Derfner Judaica Museum from February 23–May 10, 2020.

About the Hebrew Home at Riverdale
As a member of the American Alliance of Museums, the Hebrew Home at Riverdale by RiverSpring Health is committed to publicly exhibiting its art collection throughout its 32-acre campus, including the Derfner Judaica Museum and a sculpture garden overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades. The Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection provides educational and cultural programming for residents of the Hebrew Home, their families and the general public from throughout New York City, its surrounding suburbs and visitors from elsewhere.  RiverSpring Health is a nonprofit, non-sectarian geriatric organization serving more than 18,000 older adults in greater New York through its resources and community service programs. Museum hours: Sunday–Thursday, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Art Collection and grounds open daily, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m.

Hebrew Home at Riverdale
5901 Palisade Avenue
Riverdale, New York 10471
Tel. 718.581.1596
RiverSpringHealth.org/art

This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Additional exhibition support provided by 

Leonard Freed: Israel Magazine 1967–1968

On view September 15, 2019–January 5, 2020
Text by Susan Chevlowe, Chief Curator and Museum Director

Leonard Freed had been living in Amsterdam for a decade when war broke out between Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in June 1967. In response to this news, he made his way to Israel and over the next two years spent 15 months living in the country, working as a staff photographer for Israel Magazine covering the aftermath of what came to be known as the Six-Day War. In 1968, his wife, Brigitte, and young daughter, Elke Susannah, joined Freed and they settled in Tel Aviv where Brigitte at first borrowed Micha Bar-Am’s darkroom to print Freed’s negatives, as she often did throughout her husband’s career.

The first issue of Israel Magazine appeared in late 1967. Dozens of Freed’s images from 1967 and 1968, and a few from an earlier trip, his first, in 1962—mostly in black and white, but occasionally in color—appeared in all but three of the issues in the first volume. Freed’s photographs continued to be reproduced in later issues, which came out irregularly in the magazine’s early years, including the first issue of volume two in 1969. The latter was a special picture issue featuring 150 photographs, mostly by Freed and Bar-Am. In 1976 the magazine ceased publication.

Israel Magazine was conceived of in Amsterdam as a joint Israeli-American venture. In the US, the Chairman of the Philadelphia-based publisher, Israel Publishing Company, was Beryl J. Wolk, whose family owned Goodway, Inc., an advertising and marketing firm. Vice President of IPC in the US and President of its Israeli partner in Tel Aviv, Spotlight Publications, was Dutch-born Hanoch Nenner, who had been the first mayor of Eilat. The editor was Maurice Carr, a nephew of the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, also a contributor. In addition to covering economic, political and military matters, the magazine featured short stories, poetry, theatre, visual art and book reviews, and cartoons by Dosh.

Responding to an increased interest in Israel in the wake of the war, the magazine sought “to serve as an enduring bridge between Israel and [the] Diaspora” while being independent, eschewing propaganda and bringing to Jews and non-Jews “as vivid, as truthful an image of Israel as possible.” At the same time, the magazine sought support for the State of Israel and celebrated its diverse Jewish population, its strides in scientific research and contributions to developing countries, including its neighbors in Africa and Asia, and its efforts on behalf of its own economy. It also encouraged secular and religious tourism.

Freed’s images of everyday life on the kibbutz, in Arab homes, among religious Jews, Christian communities and clergy, in refugee camps, in factories and on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv accompanied stories tied to a particular theme in each issue. With Israel having increased the area under its control by four times by the end of the war, according to the magazine, the focus of the premiere issue was logically on defense and was dedicated “to Israel’s war aim—peace.” According to Carr, the Six-Day War put Israel in a better negotiating position to achieve this end. The issue included articles by Moshe Dayan (“The Supreme Weapon”) and Brigadier General Chaim Herzog (“The New Israel”) with photographs by Freed.

Herzog’s essay gave a strategic and economic assessment of the new territories Israel occupied and its relationship to the Arab population. As a result of the war, Israel had regained authority over the Old City, which was under Jordanian rule since 1948 and out of Jewish hands since it was conquered in 70 C.E. For the first time in 19 years Jews could now visit their holy site, the Western (or Wailing) Wall. Freed’s photograph of a young Arab boy with a serious expression sitting precariously on a wall in front of the Damascus Gate entrance to the Old City appeared opposite the opening page of Herzog’s article (above). At right a strong diagonal leads to the gate where many people have gathered along the way. Oddly, the photo was captioned, likely not by the photographer himself, “At the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, an Arab child peddles Chinese wares,” though he appears to be selling canned fish.

Typically, Freed’s archival photographs have a city or country and date written on the back and they appear in publications with the location as the title. Freed has also included longer descriptions in publications accompanying exhibitions and in his own books. In Israel Magazine, the photograph of a Hasid surveying a ruined building (above) appeared in Herzog’s article with a caption that intentionally evoked Jewish history and religion: “The vanished frontier in Jerusalem—inspection of a miracle.” Compositionally, the image is typical for Freed who often foregrounded and monumentalized his subjects. It was also included in a group exhibition, The Concerned Photographer, that Cornell Capa organized at the Riverside Museum in New York in 1967, which featured Freed and five other photographers—Werner Bischof; Capa’s late brother, Robert; André Kertész; David Seymour; and Dan Weiner. Freed’s iconic images of African-Americans from the civil rights era, as well as others from Italy, France and Germany were represented in the exhibition. About a third Freed had taken in Israel in 1967.

In his book La danse des fidèles (Dance of the Faithful) published only in French in 1984 and dedicated to “the dead of my family murdered in the pogroms,” Freed stated that he had always wanted to write the texts for his photographs, and while they could stand on their own, he had used them “as a starting point, as a reference to an emotional experience which I was unable to capture as a photographer.” In his description in La danse des fidèles, Freed revealed some of the context in which he had photographed the Hasid, describing what else he had witnessed at that site but could not photograph: a 19-year-old Israeli soldier blown apart when clearing a mine in an area that was previously a no man’s land between Israel and Jordan, on the ”twenty-third day of the Six-Day War.”

Another image, of a Palestinian woman in traditional dress carrying her belongings on her head, also appeared in both The Concerned Photographer and Israel: The Reality (1969) (above). The latter, organized by Cornell Capa for The Jewish Museum in New York, was a broad historical exhibition with photographs dating back to the early part of the 20th century. In its accompanying publication, the image appeared with the caption “Arab Refugee Woman on Way to Allenby Bridge to Jordan/1967.” It appeared in The Concerned Photographer with the caption Israel, 1967, and with additional commentary by Freed: “All day they cross the River Jordan and the day after that and the day after that. I watched and thought of all the refugees I knew and of my wife.” Brigitte, who is not Jewish, was born in Germany and had been a refugee after World War II. It is a particularly resonant image today.

Freed’s photographs showed many aspects of Palestinian life, from families living in Acre to the Old City, as well as in refugee camps in Gaza. A slight variant also appeared in Herzog’s article with the caption, “Israeli soldier distributes food to Arab children in the Gaza Strip.” Another article from 1968 on the challenges facing Palestinian families traveling between the Occupied Territories and Israel reproduced a photograph captioned, “Still uncertain of herself, the bargain bride from Gaza poses on a stool in her inlaws’ house.”  A slight variant is included in the exhibition in the Jerusalem-themed second issue of volume one from 1968, another image of an Arab family at home in the Old City (above) accompanied an interview, titled “The Jewish Invasion” by Maurice Carr, with a moderate Arab, who reported that his home had been looted and who expressed regret that he had not emigrated to Jordan. The issue praised the speed at which East and West Jerusalem had been reunited under Mayor Teddy Kollek, but lamented that the hatred sown in a generation of young Arabs “will not be eliminated overnight.” While sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians, the editorial position of the magazine staunchly supported a unified Jerusalem.

A spotlight on religion in another issue in 1968 focused on the conflicts between religious and secular Jews in the State and included an article by a young Adin Steinsaltz, “What is a Jew?” Freed’s photos were spread throughout the issue, including an image of a modern secular couple in the reprint of a chapter from the former French Ambassador Jean Bourdeillette’s memoir, For Israel: “Tel Aviv looks like a big seaside resort . . . peaceful streets where one breathes in sea air together with an undefinable air of provincialism, comfort, bourgeois tranquility . . .” (above).

Freed’s photographs from Israel are part of his larger humanistic project. They reflect his particular connection to Israel and to Jewish suffering, his hopes for the future, as well as his empathy for others whose experiences were different from his own. Freed’s perspective was rooted in an understanding of his own family’s struggles as Jews in the modern world and the persecution they had experienced in Europe. His words and images convey those truths, and the enormity of that burden.

 

About the Photographer

Leonard Freed was born in 1929 in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents from Minsk, now in Belarus. From 1948–52, he studied and worked as a graphic designer, before traveling in Europe and North Africa from 1952–1954. While in Paris in 1953 he began taking photographs and discovered the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. He acquired his first Leica, the camera he would use for the rest of his life, second-hand in Cologne. After his return to New York in 1954, he documented Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In 1956 and 1957 he traveled and photographed in Italy, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, including the Jewish community in post-War Amsterdam, where he had recently settled.

In 1958, Freed married Brigitte Klück, whom he had met in Rome in 1956. Their daughter, Elke Susannah Freed, was born in 1959. Around this time Freed began to exhibit his photographs, including in a group exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. In 1961 he photographed Jewish communities in Germany and made his first trip to Israel the following year. In 1963 he photographed the historic March on Washington, beginning a long term project on African Americans. While based in the Netherlands, he continued to travel in Europe, the US, and Israel, and then settled with his family in New York in 1970.

Freed became a member of the international photographers’ cooperative agency Magnum Photos in 1972. During the next several decades, until his death in 2006, his assignments brought him to countries in Europe and Africa, as well as to Israel, India, Iraq and Brazil. His work appeared in such publications as Fortune, Life, Look, The New York Times Magazine, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, and Paris Match, among others. He also published 10  books of his photographs. Freed has exhibited widely and his photographs are in the permanent collections of the Jewish Museum, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of the City of New York, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam, the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Checklist of the Exhibition

All photographs in the exhibition are vintage gelatin silver prints or later prints signed by the artist, unless otherwise noted. Lent by Brigitte Freed. Courtesy of the Estate of Leonard Freed. Dimensions provided are image size, height x width.

Beersheba, Israel, 1962
8 1/2 x 12 5/8 in. (21.6 x 32 cm)
(Later print, unsigned, stamp)

Ein Gedi, Israel, 1962
12 3/4 x 8 1/2 in. (32.4 x 21.6 cm)

Jerusalem, Israel (Purim), 1962
8 6/16 x 12 5/8 in. (21.6 x 32.1 cm)

Sodom, Israel (Machine Shop, Dead Sea Works), 1962
7 1/2 x 11 7/16 in. (19 x 29 cm)

Arab refugee woman on way toward Allenby Bridge to Jordan, 1967
9 9/16 x 14 1/2 in. (22.9 x 36.8 cm)

Bnei Brak, Israel (Talmudic college), 1967
9 1/4 x 14 in. (23.5 x 35.6 cm)

Israel (Hafetz Haim kibbutz wedding), 1967
7 1/4 x 10 15/16 (18.4 x 27.8 cm)

Israel (Jewish couple in desert hills), 1967
8 1/2 x 12 5/8 in. (21.6 x 32 cm)
(Vintage print, unsigned, label)

Jerusalem, Israel (Arab family in their home in the Old City), 1967
6 3/16 x 9 7/16 in. (15.7 x 24 cm)

Jerusalem, Israel (Arab fish seller, Damascus Gate), 1967
10 x 6 1/2 in. (25.4 x 16.5 cm)

Jerusalem, Israel (Christians passing through the New City on the way to the Old City), 1967
6 1/2 x 9 11/16 in (16.5 x 24.6 cm)

Jerusalem, Israel (Dome of the Rock), 1967
11 3/8 x 7 1/2 in. (28.9 x 19 cm)

Jerusalem, Israel (laying tefillin at the Wailing Wall), 1967
14 1/8 x 9 3/8 in. (35.9 x 23.8 cm)

Jerusalem, Israel (looking toward Notre Dame de France), 1967
8 1/2 x 12 5/8 in. (21.6 x 32 cm)
(Later print, unsigned, label)

Jerusalem, Israel (Pillar of Absalom), 1967
6 1/2 x 9 3/4 in (16.5 x 24.8 cm)

Jerusalem, Israel (synagogue, Mea Shearim), 1967
7 x 10 1/2 in. (17.8 x 26.7 cm)

Jerusalem, Israel (Talmud students returning from the Old City), 1967
9 11/16 x 14 1/8 in. (24.6 x 35.9 cm)
(Vintage print, unsigned, label)

Jerusalem, Israel (two older women), 1967
9 3/4 x 6 11/16 in. (24.8 x 17 cm)
(Later print, unsigned, label)

Jerusalem, Israel (Wailing Wall after the Six-Day War), 1967
9 3/8 x 14 1/4 in. (23.8 x 36.2 cm)

Lag B’Omer, Israel (Lag B’omer pilgrimage to Meron and Safed), 1967
14 x 9 1/4 (35.6 x 23.5 cm)

Lag B’omer, Israel (rabbi’s tomb, Meron), 1967
12 5/8 x 8 1/2 in. (30.5 x 21.6 cm)
(Vintage print, unsigned, stamp)

Israel (older man smoking), 1967/1968
6 1/2 x 9 3/4 in (16.5 x 24.8 cm)
(Later print, unsigned, label only)

Jerusalem, Israel (water seller), 1967/1968
9 5/8 x 6 3/8 in.
(Later print, unsigned, label)

Acre, Israel (just married Arab girl with her inlaws’ family in their home), 1968
7 x 10 9/16 in. (17.8 x 26.8 cm)

Arab teacher with his family at home in a refugee camp near Hebron, 1968
11 3/8 x 7 1/2 in. (28.9 x 19 cm)

Ashdod, Israel (truck factory), 1968
11 7/16 x 7 9/16 in. (29 x 19.2 cm)

Beit Shemesh, Israel (textile factory), 1968
7 1/2 x 11 1/4 in (19 x 28.6 cm)

Bethlehem (an Armenian priest outside the Church of the Manger), 1968
7 5/8 x 11 3/8 in. (19.4 x 28.9 cm)

Galilee, Israel (children on a kibbutz), 1968
7 3/4 x 11 5/8 in. (19.7 x 29.5 cm)

Gaza, 1968
7 x 9 5/8 in. (17.8 x 24.4 cm)

Gaza (refugee camp), 1968
7 7/8 x 12 in. (20 x 30.5 cm)

Israel (an Arab Druze at home), 1968
7 5/8 x 11 3/8 in. (19.4 x 28.9 cm)

Israel (Arab family), 1968
7 5/8 x 11 1/2 in. (19.4 x 29.2 cm)

Israel (Bet Shean Valley, kibbutz spring festival), 1968
7 9/16 x 11 5/8 in (19.2 x 29.5)

Israel (border kibbutz, graveside), 1968
11 3/8 x 7 1/2 in. (28.9 x 19 cm)

Israel (fresh water spring on the Dead Sea near Qumran), 1968
11 7/16 x 7 9/16 in. (29 x 19.2 cm)

Israel (older man with walking stick), 1968
9 3/4 x 6 3/8 in. (24.8 x 16.2 cm)
(Later print, unsigned, label)

Jerusalem, Israel (International Economic Conference), 1968
10 x 13 11/16 in. (25.4 x 34.8 cm)

Jerusalem, Israel (Torah scribes), 1968
6 15/16 x 9 3/4 in. (17.6 x 24.8 cm)
(Later print, unsigned, label)

Kibbutz Sde Boker, Israel (the former prime minister David Ben Gurion), 1968
11 3/8 x 7 5/8 in. (28.9 x 19.4 cm)

Lag B’Omer, Israel (singing and dancing for the Lag B’omer festival in Meron), 1968
11 3/8 x 7 5/8 in. (28.9 x 19.4 cm)

Lod, Israel (aircraft factory), 1968
11 7/16 x 7 9/16 in (29 x 19.2 cm)

Occupied Golan Heights (a Druze at home in his kitchen), 1968
7 1/2 x 11 3/8 in (19 x 28.9 cm)

Occupied Golan Heights (Druze girl), 1968
12 3/4 x 8 5/8 in. (32.4 x 21.9 cm)

Ramallah, Occupied Territories (class of blind Arab children with their blind teacher), 1968
7 3/4 x 11 1/2 in. (19.7 x 29.2 cm)

Shore Near El Arish, Sinai Desert (remains of a soldier), 1967
8 1/2 x 5 5/8 in. (21.6 x 14.3 cm)

Tel Aviv, Israel (bathing suit factory), 1968
9 11/16 x 6 1/2 in. (24.6 x 16.5 cm)

Tel Aviv, Israel (couple on motor scooter), 1968
11 3/8 x 7 9/16 in. (28.9 x 19.2 cm)

Tel Aviv, Israel (modern couple), 1968
7 1/2 x 11 1/2 in. (19 x 29.2 cm)
(Vintage print, unsigned, stamp)

Tel Aviv, Israel (ulpan Hebrew language school for new immigrants), 1968
11 3/8 x 7 1/2 in. (28.9 x 19 cm)

This text originally appeared in the brochure produced on the occasion of the exhibition Leonard Freed: Israel Magazine 1967–1968 on view at the Derfner Judaica Museum from September 15, 2019–January 5, 2020.

About the Hebrew Home at Riverdale

As a member of the American Alliance of Museums, the Hebrew Home at Riverdale by RiverSpring Health is committed to publicly exhibiting its art collection throughout its 32-acre campus, including the Derfner Judaica Museum and a sculpture garden overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades. The Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection provides educational and cultural programming for residents of the Hebrew Home, their families and the general public from throughout New York City, its surrounding suburbs and visitors from elsewhere.  RiverSpring Health is a nonprofit, non-sectarian geriatric organization serving more than 18,000 older adults in greater New York through its resources and community service programs. Museum hours: Sunday–Thursday, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Art Collection and grounds open daily, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m.

Hebrew Home at Riverdale
5901 Palisade Avenue
Riverdale, New York 10471
Tel. 718.581.1596
RiverSpringHealth.org/art

This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

From the Eastern Bloc to the Bronx: Early Acquisitions from The Art Collection

On view May 5–August 25, 2019
Text by Emily O’Leary, Associate Curator

The Grosvenor Gallery in London promoted artists from Eastern Bloc countries at the height of the Cold War and came to play a central role in shaping the Hebrew Home Art Collection. Some of the first works that came into the collection were by artists included in solo and group exhibitions at the Gallery, which had been founded in 1960 by the American sociologist Eric Estorick (1913–1993). Prior to forming a permanent collection, in 1968 the Hebrew Home first exhibited works on loan from The Jewish Museum, New York, arranged by Jacob Reingold (1916–1999), who was then Executive Director of the Home. With a few key supporters, Reingold acquired work directly from Grosvenor Gallery beginning in 1975. At the time, Estorick was seeking care for his father, Morris Estorick (1890–1978), who was suffering from Alzheimer’s, which brought him into contact with the Hebrew Home. Morris resided at the Home for two years, from 1976 to 1978.

Today, Hebrew Home owns over 240 artworks made in the Eastern Bloc by 53 different artists that were acquired from Grosvenor Gallery. The paintings and works on paper in the present exhibition are by 35 of those artists and organized around nine key shows they participated in at the Gallery between 1961 and 1967.  When these artists—who lived and worked in the Soviet Socialist Republics of Armenia and Russia and satellite states Hungary and Czechoslovakia (today the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic)—were shown at Grosvenor Gallery, art from “behind the Iron Curtain” was largely unseen by Western audiences. As artists in the Eastern Bloc, they worked under oppressive conditions resulting from limits set by the government about what kind of art was permitted. The only style officially allowed was Socialist Realism, a figurative approach to art that glorified Soviet ideals. The exhibitions Estorick mounted offered a rare glimpse for the West into how Eastern Bloc artists functioned within this restrictive environment.

Exhibitions at Grosvenor Gallery

Lithographs by Twenty-seven Soviet Artists (May 9–June 10, 1961)

Boris Ermolaev (Russian, 1903–1982), At School on the Eve of the School Year, 1961, lithograph, 17 x 23 inches, HHAR 1513

Lithographs by Twenty-seven Soviet Artists was the first exhibition of Eastern Bloc artists at Grosvenor Gallery in 1961. It featured Russian printmakers from the Leningrad Experimental Graphics Laboratory (LEGL), an official workshop that included master lithographers who used the medium to create intricate images with complex color palettes.

Membership in the Artists’ Union—the body that oversaw artistic activities throughout the Soviet Union and maintained the printmaking workshops—was required in order to work at LEGL. The LEGL artists’ subjects had to adhere to Soviet standards, as exemplified in both the overtly socialist message in Boris Ermolaev’s  At School on the Eve of the School Year (1961), depicting peasant women and children on the collective farm, and the more decorative, Matissean still lifes of Alexander Vedernikov. In some cases, however, the subject fell into a more gray area, as was the case with Grigory Izrailevich’s ominous black and white owls, in such works as Time Flies (1960), which symbolize the fleeting nature of time.

Estorick recognized the quality and innovation in the work of the LEGL artists during a visit to the workshop in 1960 and the exhibition proved to be a successful venture for the Gallery. The London showing garnered enough commercial and critical success that it was remounted (with work by all but two of the original artists) in New York City later that same year.  Subsequently, The Museum of Modern Art acquired prints by Ermolaev, Anatoli Kaplan, Gerta Nemenova, Alexander Shenderov and Vedernikov.

 Anatoli Kaplan: The World of Sholem Aleichem and Other Scenes, Tales and Songs of Russian Provincial Life (November 22–December 31, 1961)

After Kaplan was first shown in the Gallery’s 1961 LEGL exhibition, Estorick mounted a solo show of 131 lithographs. He demonstrated a preference for Kaplan’s work well beyond that of the other artists, as suggested by LEGL artist Izrailevich’s comment that when Estorick visited the workshop he purchased more lithographs by Kaplan than anyone else (Kononikhin 62).

Throughout his life, Kaplan worked almost exclusively on Jewish themes. Between 1937–1941, he created Kasrilovka, a lithographic series that depicted scenes of nostalgic shtetl life. Named after the fictitious small town in Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem’s stories, Kasrilovka was purportedly commissioned to encourage Russian Jews to resettle in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO), a far-flung region in eastern Russia that borders China. The JAO’s regional seat of government is the better known town, Birobidzhan.

Estorick also commissioned Kaplan to expand portfolios based on Aleichem stories, as well as The Little Goat (1958–1961), a series based on a song from the Passover liturgy. Dedication Page (1961), included in this exhibition, was added to the series and indicates that the edition was printed exclusively for Grosvenor Gallery.

Kaplan’s relationship with the Hebrew Home and Estorick was longer and steadier than any of the other artists. The Hebrew Home’s first acquisitions from the Gallery in 1975 were Kaplan’s lithographs and Solomon Gershov’s paintings. Both artists focused on Jewish subjects. Reingold greatly admired Kaplan’s work and supported his career into the 1980s, encouraging other Jewish institutions to acquire his prints. In a letter dated May 3, 1976, in the Hebrew Home Archives, Reingold wrote to Kaplan about arranging a solo exhibition of his work. Ten years later, a large solo show of Kaplan’s prints, drawings and ceramics was finally realized at the recently founded Judaica Museum.

Favorsky (July 10–August 17, 1962)

Vladimir Favorsky was a revered Russian artist known for his woodcut illustrations of Russian folktales and to literary works by Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Shakespeare. Estorick mounted the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the West in 1962. Entitled simply Favorsky, it spanned 50 years of the artist’s career and featured loans from his personal collection that Estorick was able to arrange after first visiting Favorsky at his Moscow home in December 1961.

The exhibition included rare linocuts from the Samarkand suite, three of which represent Favorsky in the present exhibition and were created during the artist’s evacuation to the city of Samarkand in Soviet Uzbekistan between 1941 and 1943. The evacuation was an effort by the Soviet government to safeguard its most valued intelligentsia from the German advance during Operation Barbarossa by sending them to remote regions.

Favorsky took up linocut printmaking because it was difficult to practice woodblock printmaking due to the lack of available material. He had a student in Saint Petersburg send him linoleum as a replacement. Samarkand depicts the everyday lives of the Uzbek people—many of whom had to open their homes to evacuees—among their caravans and camels.

Despite the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition’s positive reception in the press at the time, Favorsky remains in relative obscurity among Western audiences today.

 First Image: Paintings and Sculpture by Artists of the Gallery (November 22, 1963–January 4, 1964)

This exhibition of 15 artists was mounted in celebration of Grosvenor Gallery’s move to a larger space in 1963. Nine of the artists were from the United Kingdom and three from Italy. The remaining three were Eastern Bloc artists: the Czech painter Richard Fremund, represented here by two abstract townscape paintings, and Hungarians Gyula Konfár and Mihály Schéner, who subsequently had a two-person exhibition.

A trip to Paris where he saw firsthand such modern masters as Picasso, Matisse and Dufy in 1956 was pivotal to Fremund’s approach to art. He also developed an awareness of contemporary art beyond the Eastern Bloc through his close friend Jiří Siblík, a Czech art historian, who was able to travel abroad and owned books and prints by major international artists. Siblík’s home created a nexus for young Czech artists, including Fremund, who sought access to the contemporary Western art world (Chmelarová 7). Estorick exhibited several artists from within Fremund’s circle, all of whom used vivid colors, abstraction and simplified geometry in their paintings. It was such bold experimentation that marked Fremund as a dissident artist. He died tragically in a car accident in 1969.

 Gyula Konfár, Mihály Schéner: Two Contemporary Hungarian Artists (March 3–24, 1964)

This exhibition of 52 paintings was the only one in which the Gallery featured Hungarian art exclusively, including Konfár’s White Cottages, Red Roofs (1964) and Schéner’s Self-Portrait at Work (1964). Both Konfár and Schéner worked in similar dark, expressionistic styles and, according to the Grosvenor show’s catalogue, enjoyed successful careers in their home country and exhibited internationally. Nonetheless, neither artist ever exceeded moderate successes within Hungary. Estorick framed  the emotional quality of Konfár’s painting, evident in the typical impasto handling and brooding colors in his White Cottages, Red Roofs, within the context of his relationship to the late 19th-century Hungarian School and referred to him as “one of the most highly esteemed artists in Hungary.”  The Hebrew Home owns three similar landscapes executed in this vein.

Schéner’s Self-Portrait at Work, a genre he utilized frequently, depicts an artist at work in a dark interior hunched over a palette and paintbrush. Executed only eight years after the short-lived Hungarian revolution of 1956 that was brutally quashed by the Soviet government, the painting may reflect deeper unrest given the oppressive atmosphere of Soviet-controlled Hungary. The self-portrait functions as a vehicle for introspection with heavy, dark colors that emphasize the artist’s solitude.

Aspects of Contemporary Soviet Art (June 8–28, 1964)

There was no single style that dominated Aspects of Contemporary Soviet Art, a sprawling exhibition of 82 artists that offered Western audiences a rare opportunity to view new and recent art from the Eastern Bloc. In a 1963 New York Times article announcing the forthcoming exhibition, Estorick stated that he sought works from the Eastern Bloc because he thought they would be salable, and also capable of providing a bridge between the Soviet Union and the capitalist West.

Acknowledging what Estorick had accomplished in securing the Soviets’ permission to export the artworks to London, British art critic Nigel Gosling noted in The Observer: “The show is a milestone. For the first time in 40 years, Soviet paintings are exhibited for sale outside Russia.” At the same time, he criticized it, lamenting “. . . I prefer many Soviet propaganda paintings, big and brassy and bold, to many of the feeble canvasses shown here.”

Nine of the paintings in From the Soviet Bloc to the Bronx are executed in the Soviet Impressionist style, an approach to art that drew influence from French Impressionism while maintaining a socialist message. They depict well-known Russian landmarks and architecture, bucolic landscapes and farm scenes. Three paintings of Armenian subjects—landmarks with nationalist overtones and a still life depicting the bounty of collective farming—reflect the influence of modernist movements in Armenian art that began decades earlier. Four paintings—two landscapes and two still lifes—in muted colors are by artists who worked in what was later termed the Severe Style, a subdued, less propagandistic form of Socialist Realism.

Out of 99 oil paintings listed in the Aspects of Contemporary Soviet Art catalogue (works on paper were uncatalogued), Hebrew Home owns 16.

Vincent Hložník: Paintings and Graphics (April 13–May 8, 1965)

Vincent Hložník was a Slovak artist whom Estorick featured in a major solo exhibition of 96 works in 1965. The catalogue included a brief introduction by Slovak art historian and critic Rastislav Matuštík, who recognized Hložník’s “tragic vision” as having grown “out of a feeling of kinship with those who suffered and died in the Second World War.” The artist’s perceptions were shaped by the atrocities he witnessed while a student at the School of Applied Arts in Prague from 1937–1942, which coincided with the German invasion and occupation of the city beginning in 1939.

Hložník went on to a successful career as an artist and teacher in Czechoslovakia where he established the highly influential Department of Graphic Art and Illustration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava (now in Slovakia), which he directed from 1952 to 1972. He also earned international recognition at the 1958 Venice Biennale when he received an award for printmaking given to an artist under 45 by the David E. Bright Foundation based in Los Angeles. The other Bright Foundation winners that year were Kenneth Armitage (1916–2002) of Great Britain for sculpture and Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) of Spain for painting.

Although not considered an outright dissident artist, Hložník had a strong affinity for Surrealism, which he attributed to his introduction in 1940 to a group of young artists with whom he discussed the then-banned style. He described that experience as opening new artistic possibilities for him to explore the purely imaginative (Petránsky 138–135). His surrealistic series of linocuts, Dreams (1962)—a cycle of prints that cautions about the horrors of war—were shown in the 1965 Grosvenor exhibition.

Hložník left a lasting legacy passed on to generations of students and his humanistic approach remains an influence on Slovak graphic artists today. His work is on permanent view in galleries and museums in the Slovak Republic.

 Oskar [sic] Rabin: Paintings, 1956-1965 (June 10–July 3, 1965)

Oscar Rabin, founder of the Nonconformist movement in Moscow in the 1970s and a major international artist today, had his first solo exhibition in the West at Grosvenor Gallery in 1965. The exhibition included Cats Under Crescent Moon (1963) and Bread and Factory (1964). Both paintings are typical of his style: expressionistic, industrial landscapes executed with heavy black outlines, punctuated by smokestacks and wires. Cats—an animal he recalled as being ubiquitous in the Moscow suburbs where he lived—were a frequent motif in his work and three appear in Cats Under Crescent Moon. Rabin described the cat’s shape as capable of resembling devils, railway levers or curling signatures.

The reception of Rabin’s exhibition in the London press was mixed. Art critic Terence Mullaly praised his work in The Daily Telegraph. Other reviewers simply labeled the paintings as uncontroversial. Nonetheless, Rabin faced backlash at home in Russia. In 1966, a scathing critique that appeared in Sovetskaya Kultura, the official newspaper published by the Soviet Ministry of Culture, gave Rabin’s paintings the epithet “neurotic” and attacked his willingness to exhibit at a Western venue.

Rabin’s activities continued to cause problems for the Soviet government. In 1974 he was an organizer of the infamous “bulldozer exhibition” held outside Moscow. In an incident that was reported internationally, dissident artists who were prohibited from participating in official galleries mounted an exhibition in an empty lot that was brutally shut down by the Soviet authorities with water cannons and bulldozers.

Rabin is the only artist in From the Eastern Bloc to the Bronx who resettled in the West. In 1978 while abroad in Paris, Rabin and his family were abruptly stripped of their Soviet citizenship, forcing them into exile. His citizenship was restored in 1990 but Rabin remained in Paris until his death in 2018.

The World of Sholem Aleichem, Kaplan lithographs, Gershov paintings (Opening date unknown­–February 14, 1967)

This exhibition was the last at the Gallery to focus on Eastern Bloc artists and was on view at the same time as works by South African artist Aileen Lipkin in 1967. It featured Kaplan’s lithographs illustrating the stories of the famous Yiddish writer and Gershov’s imaginary painted portraits of Tevye, the eponymous protagonist of Aleichem’s series of short stories Tevye the Milkman.

Gershov and Kaplan were the first artists the Hebrew Home acquired from Estorick in 1975. It’s likely that Reingold, himself an émigré from Russian Łódź (now Poland), who settled in the US in 1936, and Estorick, whose family fled Russia in 1905 to escape anti-Semitism, shared a desire to support Soviet Jewish artists. Gershov, who painted Jewish themes in an expressionistic style and was critical of Soviet policies regarding art, was arrested twice for his views, first in 1932 and then again in 1948. Both times, all of his work was destroyed. The Hebrew Home owns six paintings of Tevye by Gershov that were most likely influenced by his travels through Latvia in 1957 and 1960 when only a remnant of the pre-war Jewish population remained.

The Grosvenor Gallery’s focus on exhibitions of Eastern Bloc artists was concentrated in the period between 1961 and 1967, according to the Gallery’s available records, and coincided with an ambitious general program of a dozen or more exhibitions each year. During this same period, the Gallery organized at least 80 solo and group exhibitions featuring artists mostly from Western Europe. While he moved his focus away from Soviet Bloc artists after 1967, Estorick continued to include some in other broader, thematic group shows. Many works by Eastern Bloc artists remained in Gallery inventory beyond these critical early years and were thus available for the Hebrew Home to acquire in the 1970s. Although Estorick died in 1993, the Grosvenor Gallery remains active in London to this day.

 

Checklist of the Exhibition

Mariam Aslamazian (Armenian, 1907–2006)
Collective Farm Abundance, 1962
Oil on canvas, 34 x 54 inches
HHAR 3009

Alexander Dubinchik (Russian, 1922–1997)
A Warm Evening, ca. 1963
Oil on canvas, 20 x 31 1/2 inches
HHAR 1279

Boris Ermolaev (Russian, 1903–1982)
At School on the Eve of the School Year, 1961
Lithograph, 17 x 23 inches
HHAR 1513

Irina Fateeva (Russian, 1908–1981)
Galina Solovieva (Russian, 1908–1984)
Magic Carpet, ca. 1964
Gouache on paper, 16 1/2 x 12 inches
HHAR 1272

Vladimir Favorsky (Russian, 1886–1964)
Untitled, from Samarkand, 1942
Linocut, 13 3/8 x 17 1/4 inches
HHAR 1198

Arba, from Samarkand, 1942
Linocut, 11 x 13 1/2 inches
HHAR 1199

Talk About Gunpowder, from Samarkand, 1942
Linocut, 24 1/4 x 12 1/4 inches
HHAR 194

Moisey Feigen (Russian, 1904–2008)
Winter Landscape, ca. early 1960s
Oil on canvas, 35 1/2 x 47 inches
HHAR 1895

Richard Fremund (Czech, 1928–1969)
Blue Landscape, 1957
Oil on canvas, 36 x 45 1/2 inches
HHAR 125

Easter Landscape, 1963
Oil on canvas, 35 x 45 1/2 inches
HHAR 1276

Vladimir Gavrilov (Russian, 1923–1970)
Uglich, The Church of Iowan, 1963
Oil on canvas, 37 1/4 x 31 inches
HHAR 2009

Vladimir Gedikyan (Russian, b. 1928)
Tereshchenko, 1963
Tempera on paper, 22 x 27 inches
HHAR 655

Solomon Gershov (Russian, 1906–1989)
Tevye, ca. 1963–1964
Oil on canvas, 25 x 26 1/2 inches
HHAR 40

Grigoriev (Russian, dates unknown)
The Golden Cockerel, ca. 1960s
Gouache on paper, 22 1/2 x 29 inches
HHAR 665

Vincent Hložník (Slovak, 1919–1997)
Untitled, from Dreams, 1962
Linocut, 23 5/8 x 16 3/8 inches
HHAR 1407

Untitled, from Dreams, 1962
Linocut, 23 5/8 x 16 3/8 inches
HHAR 1421

Mikhail Ivanov (Russian, 1926–2000)
Sunny Morning, 1959
Oil on canvas, 23 x 26 1/2 inches
HHAR 1855

Grigory Izrailevich (Russian, 1924–1999)
Times Flies, 1960
Lithograph, 24 5/16 x 18 1/8 inches
HHAR 151

Anatoli Kaplan (Russian, 1902–1980)
On the Griboyedov Canal, from Leningrad, 1947
Lithograph, 18 3/4 x 14 1/8 inches
HHAR 1187

Kasrilovka (Religion is the opium of the people), 1939
Lithograph, 29 1/4 x 21 3/4 inches
HHAR 554

Cow in a Window, from Kasrilovka, 1941
Lithograph, 17 5/8 x 20 1/8 inches
HHAR 129

Verse 6: Came the water and quenched the fire, from The Little Goat, 1958–1961, published 1961
Lithograph, 24 3/16 x 18 7/16 inches
HHAR 1496

Dedication Page, from The Little Goat, 1961
Lithograph, 24 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches
HHAR 285

Gyula Konfár (Hungarian, 1933–2008)
White Cottages, Red Roofs, 1964
Oil on board, 27 1/4 x 29 1/4 inches
HHAR 1659

Pavel Kuznetsov (Russian, 1878–1968)
vening Landscape, 1956
Oil on canvas, 28 x 35 inches
HHAR 1167

Vera Matiukh (Russian, b. Germany, 1910–2003)
In the Train, 1960
Lithograph, 24 1/4 x 18 3/8 inches
HHAR 124

Alexey Morosov (Russian, 1896–1965)
After the Thaw, 1960
Oil on board, 19 1/2 x 28 inches
HHAR 1280

Gerta Nemenova (Russian, b. Germany, 1905–1986)
Korean Dancer, ca. 1960
Lithograph, 22 x 15 7/8 inches
HHAR 185

Anatoli Nikitch (Russian, 1918–1994)
Still Life with Plants, 1958
Oil on canvas, 18 x 33 inches
HHAR 132

Still Life, 1963
Oil on canvas, 41 x 23 1/2 inches
HHAR 2277

Pyotr Ossovsky (Russian, b. Ukraine, 1925–2015)
At the Railway Crossing, 1963
Oil on canvas, 27 1/2 x 45 inches
HHAR 1386

Albert Papikian (Armenian, 1926–1997)
Aragats, 1962
Oil on board, 49 x 55 1/2 inches
HHAR 42

Alexsei Pisarev (Russian, 1909–1970)
Uglich, 1960
Oil on board, 19 3/4 x 27 1/2 inches
HHAR 84

Uglich, ca. 1960
Oil on board, 19 1/4 x 27 1/4 inches
HHAR 85

Igor Popov (Russian, b. Ukraine, 1927–1999)
Kizhi, The Cathedral (Preobrazhensky Church), 1963
Gouache on board, 40 x 28 1/2 inches
HHAR 2016

Oscar Rabin (Russian, 1928–2018)
Cats Under Crescent Moon, 1963
Oil on canvas, 35 1/2 x 43 1/2 inches
HHAR 1076

Bread and Factory, 1964
Oil on canvas, 28 x 39 inches
HHAR 1075

Mihály Schéner (Hungarian, 1923–2009)
Self-Portrait at Work, 1964
Oil on board, 27 3/4 x 39 1/2 inches
HHAR 2994

Alexander Shenderov (Russian, 1897–1967)
Before The Mirror, ca. 1961
Lithograph, 25 x 15 inches
HHAR 187

Peter Shlikov (Russian, 1917–1920)
The Plain Before Mount Ararat, 1962
Oil on canvas, 23 1/2 x 29 1/2 inches
HHAR 1828

Mikhail Skouliari (Russian, 1905–1985)
Pink Tea Pot, 1960
Lithograph, 24 1/4 x 18 1/4 inches
HHAR 1518

Vladimir Sudakov (Russian, 1912–1994)
In the North, 1962
Lithograph, 18 x 24 inches
HHAR 586

Alexander Vedernikov (Russian, 1898–1975)
Still Life with Deer, 1956
Lithograph, 24 3/8 x 18 3/8 inches
HHAR 93

Alexandra Yakobson (Russian, 1903–1966)
The Snow Maiden (Snegurochka), 1960
Lithograph, 24 x 18 inches
HHAR 1321

Leonid Zakharov (Russian, 1928–1986)
Decoration Sketch for the Play ‘Echo of the Bryansk Forest,’ 1960
Oil on paper, 21 x 33 inches
HHAR 107

All works are from Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection at Hebrew Home at Riverdale

 

Further reading:

Addison, Judith. “Rabin. London-Moscow.” In Oskar Rabin. Early Works on Paper. Online exh. cat. Accessed March 24, 2015. http://www.oskarrabin.com/rabinlondonmoscow/.

Anderson, Raymond H. “Symbolist Artist Scored in Soviet; Rabin Said to Aid the West with ‘65 London Show.” New York Times, June 15, 1966, 9.

Bown, Matthew Cullerne. “Painting in the non-Russian Republics.” In Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-party State, 1917-1992. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993, 140–153.

Chmelarová, Marcela. Richard Fremund: krajiny z let 1959-1965. Exh. cat. Prague: Orlys Art Auctions, 2011.

Ehrenburg, Ilya, and Terence Mullaly. Anatoli Kaplan: The World of Sholem Aleichem and Other Scenes, Tales and Songs of Russian Provincial Life. Exh. cat. London: Grosvenor Gallery, 1961.

Estorick, Eric, and Jennifer Louis. Oskar Rabin: Paintings, 1956-1965. Exh. Cat. London: Grosvenor Gallery, 1965.

Estorick, Eric, and John Synge. First Image: Painting and Sculpture by Artists of the Gallery. Exh. cat. London: Grosvenor Gallery, 1963.

Estorick, Eric, and Terence Mullaly. Favorsky. Exh. cat. London: Grosvenor Gallery, 1962.

Estorick, Eric. Aspects of Contemporary Soviet Art: Paintings, Drawings and Watercolours. Exh. cat. London: Grosvenor Gallery, 1964.

Gershov, Solomon, and Lev Mochalov. Solomon Gershov. St. Petersburg: P.R.P. LLC, 2004.

Grosvenor Gallery. Gyula Konfár, Mihály Schéner: Two Contemporary Hungarian Artists, Exh. cat., London, 1964.

Gruson, Sydney. “Russia Offers Art for London Sale.” New York Times, May 6, 1963, 31.

Kononikhin, Nikolay. “Leningrad Experimental Laboratory: Selected Portraits.” In Leningrad Lithography: Meeting Place. Exh. cat. Saint Petersburg: Anna Akhmatova Museum in the Fountain House, 2017, 46–82.

Matuštík, Radislav. Vincent Hložník: Paintings and Graphics. Exh. cat. London: Grosvenor Gallery, 1965.

Mullaly, Terence. Lithographs by Twenty-Seven Soviet Artists. Exh. cat. London: Grosvenor Gallery, 1961.

Petránsky, Ľudovít. Vincent Hložník. Bratislava: Tatran, 1997.

Stock, M.F. “Leningrad Experimental Graphics Laboratory and Cultural Diplomacy in the 1960’s.” In Leningrad Lithography: Meeting Place. Exh. cat. Saint Petersburg: Anna Akhmatova Museum in the Fountain House, 2017, 31–36.

Wren, Christopher S. “Russians Disrupt Modern Art Show with Bulldozers.” New York Times, September 16, 1974, C17.

This text originally appeared in the brochure produced on the occasion of the exhibition From the Eastern Bloc to the Bronx: Early Acquisitions from The Art Collection on view at the Derfner Judaica Museum and Jacob Reingold Pavilion from May 5–August 25, 2019.

About the Hebrew Home at Riverdale

As a member of the American Alliance of Museums, the Hebrew Home at Riverdale by RiverSpring Health is committed to publicly exhibiting its art collection throughout its 32-acre campus, including the Derfner Judaica Museum and a sculpture garden overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades. The Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection provides educational and cultural programming for residents of the Hebrew Home, their families and the general public from throughout New York City, its surrounding suburbs and visitors from elsewhere.  RiverSpring Health is a nonprofit, non-sectarian geriatric organization serving more than 18,000 older adults in greater New York through its resources and community service programs. Museum hours: Sunday–Thursday, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Art Collection and grounds open daily, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m.

Hebrew Home at Riverdale
5901 Palisade Avenue
Riverdale, New York 10471
Tel. 718.581.1596
www.hebrewhome.org/art

This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Featured image: Oscar Rabin (Russian, 1928–2018), Cats Under Crescent Moon, 1963, oil on canvas, 35 ½ x 43 ½ inches, HHAR 1076

Swords into Ploughshares: Sculpture by Jay Moss
On view from July 15–October 7, 2018

Text by Susan Chevlowe, Chief Curator and Museum Director

Over a period of several months in late 1943, Jay Moss’s combat engineer regiment traveled on landing craft from North Africa to the beachhead at Anzio, Italy, landing on January 22, 1944. It was the first time Moss, 20 years old at the time, saw combat. “We replaced infantry that had to go and rest,” he explained. “At night, particularly in Anzio, it was like the Fourth of July with all the bombs.”*

Although trained as combat engineers, the soldiers in the unit had to replace combat troops. “I did whatever they told me to do, because other GIs were doing it too. They led me to a hole. When a guy got out of it, I got into it. The front needed constant watching, so the [Germans] didn’t spring an attack.” After months in a stalemate at Anzio the unit pushed on, trading sandy and flooded foxholes for the mud and cold of the Vosges Mountains in eastern France on the border with Germany. Not all of Moss’s sculpture of the last four decades is a response to those wartime experiences, but many are and they have a particular resonance for today.

Moss and I spoke recently about what inspired him and he suggested how his work “can make people aware of the horror, how impossible it was.” Pointing out Peace Missile (2011), its gray projectile wrapped with a sinuous garland of plastic flowers, he explained: “I did that seven, eight years ago and now Kim Jong Un wants to drop missiles on us. So that’s appropriate to send him this one with the flowers around it.” The fear that existed for him long ago remains palpable today.

About GI Joe (2012), a tall and lanky figure in relief, made up of fragments and with a skull-like face, he said: “It’s from my memory of a soldier. That’s all. . . . It had a big influence on my life because I spent a lot of time in the army and I was in the hospital a lot. I was on Anzio . . . .  I got into this hole with water up to here [he points to his calf] and I was sleeping on the parapet of it at night. I couldn’t sit down because it was full of water and the third day my feet swelled up and I got trench feet and I was hospitalized for two or three weeks at least.”

Another assemblage that looks like an artillery shell is titled Anzio (2003). Moss describes it as a “piece of plumbing” made from materials leftover from when he was a professional lamp designer. Inside he has collaged some mementos: “There’s a letter my mother sent me. And this is the Anzio beachhead. That was on each of our shoulders. This logo [a patch spelling out A–N–Z–I–O].” He described the other collage elements: “This is a German howitzer gun that was on a railroad track and we never could get it because it went into a tunnel and then it came out and shot at us and then went back in. . . . That’s Italian troop prisoners and this is occupation money that we were using in Italy. . . . That’s my brother [when we] met in Paris [at the end of the war].”

Moss’s unit arrived in Europe on August 15, 1944, for Operation Dragoon—the Allied invasion of southern France. Months later, not far from the front, in the forests of the Vosges Mountains, Moss built what were called corduroy roads—“that’s trees that they knock down to make a roadway so it’s very bumpy to the front. . . . And I was working on that road and on the way back the graves registration had dead GIs in the open back of a truck and they all had those knitted caps, which go underneath your helmet, you know, but they didn’t have the helmets. So I saw seven or eight caps and they were bouncing in the back and I was just working on building this road and they were coming in with dead [bodies]. It was one of the most traumatic things in my life really to see dead bodies—so that’s the essence of the front there. . . .my jaw dropped in horror.”

During those final months of the war, thousands of enemy soldiers were captured. That time is reflected in The Prisoner (1991): “It was just a block of wood. I wanted it to be as clumsy as I could make it—raw looking. You know a real bandana, they’re very bright and I put it on and it was so bright, it overpowered the wooden carving I made. So I took a plain piece of cloth and I drew a soft delicate bandana [design] so it didn’t dominate the head.” Those fine lines belie the meaning of the bandana and the prisoner’s fate. The base of the head is carved wood covered with sheet metal, which is soft and malleable, ready to be hammered or molded.

I asked Moss, “What attracted you to working in this way?”

“Well, in my work designing for manufacturers I went into many factories and saw what they had and this was Miller and Doing, a factory in Brooklyn that no longer exists. They used to do the marquee for the Paramount Theater . . . that’s a drop hammer stamping—it’s the same process and the metal may be a little harder, but they use this kind of metal to form [the letters].”

 

The top part of another work, War Collage (1980), is the Maginot Line—the defensive line on the border of France and Germany that predated World War II—and on the side is a Gothic arch symbolizing a church. The other metal elements are cannons. In another sculpture, For a Beautiful War (2001), formed with wood insulators, Moss suggests the irony of war. “That’s sarcastic—did you ever see a beautiful war?” he asks. And his Oscar for Torturers (2009): “That’s what a torturer deserves. He deserves to have a trophy like this. [The figure is manacled and wearing a hood.] That’s the kind of Oscar he deserves. That was for Cheney and Rumsfeld [key figures in the George W. Bush administration responsible for the war in Iraq]. And also for Guantanamo Bay. There’s still prisoners there.”

Stalag Theater (1980) references prisoners who saved their own lives by performing as musicians for their captors. An oblique reference to the Holocaust may be found in the numbers and suggestion of barbed wire. Toward the end of his two-and-half years in the army, Moss was based in Germany, where he met survivors from the Dachau and Buchenwald camps.

As for Swords into Ploughshares (2002), “that’s what I’d like to see them making,” he said. Moss is an artist not an activist, and his work is a personal demonstration that peace still may be possible.

*All quotations are from a personal conversation with the author on February 27, 2018, and from subsequent follow-up emails.

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About the artist 

Born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 1923, to immigrant parents, Isadore Moskowitz, a clothing maker and store owner born in Russia, and Josephine Goldsmith Moskowitz, who was born in Romania, Jay Moss attended the High School of Industrial Art (later the High School of Art and Design), where he studied graphic arts, three-dimensional design, display and studio drawing. The family first lived over the tailor shop and later moved to Flatbush and Greenpoint before settling in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Moss was drafted into the army in 1943 after working as a page at CBS, and trained as a combat engineer in Fort Belvoir, VA. His unit, the 36th Engineer Regiment, participated in key campaigns in Italy, France and Germany.  He was discharged in October 1945. Back in New York, Moss attended the Art Students League for three-and-a-half years as a benefit of the GI Bill, studying under José de Creeft, Morris Kantor and M. Peter Piening. A mahogany head he carved while a student at the League was exhibited at Jacques Seligmann and Company in 1947. The Gallery’s contemporary art department supported the work of young artists, in particular returning veterans.  Moss also received a sculpture prize at the Nassau County Art Association in the 1960s. He had a successful career as head of NBC television’s art department where he worked for 12 years and then was the owner-designer of a company that made decorative mirrors and wall pieces. After selling the company, he worked as a design consultant and lighting product designer. He also taught lighting product design at the Parsons School of Design and television graphic arts at the RCA Institute. All the while, he worked at his passion, sculpting in the basement studio of his family’s Long Island home and at their second home in Stockbridge, MA. Moss has worked both figuratively and abstractly, creating forms using a table saw and chiseling a variety of woods that he then assembles with other materials, including lead, metal and cloth.

Moss has had two previous solo exhibitions, at Manhattan College in 2014 and the Historic Wells Gallery in Lenox, MA, in 2001. In 2008 he and his wife, Sabina, who have two sons, moved to Riverdale, where Moss continues his artistic practice.

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Works in the exhibition

All works have been lent by the artist unless otherwise specified. Dimensions are height x width.

Stalag Theatre, 1980
Sheet lead, wood, acrylic, 22 x 31 3/4 inches

War Collage, 1980
Sheet lead, wood, acrylic, 27 x 18 3/4 x 5 1/2 inches

Armored Vest, 1983
Wood, sheet lead, 37 x 20 x 9 inches

The Prisoner, 1991
Mahogany, sheet lead, cotton cloth, 33 1/4 x 12 ¾ x 8 ½ inches

Mine Canary, 1997
Sheet lead, wood, acrylic, metal, 28 x 15 ½ x 15 ½ inches
Lent by Eric Jacobson

For a Beautiful War, 2001
Pine wood, sheet lead, rotted wood insulators, acrylic, 36 x 15 x 11 inches

Swords Into Ploughshares, 2002
Sheet lead, wood, cord, 29 1/2 x 12 inches

Anzio, 2003
Brass tubing, paper, sheet lead, 11 ¾ x 2 ¾ x 2 ¾ inches (open)

Oscar for Torturers, 2009
Sheet lead, wood, acrylic, fiber chord, 34 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches

Peace Missile, 2011
Wood, sheet lead, plastic, 28 x 11 inches

West Virginia Coal Miner, 2011
Wood, sheet lead, plastic, acrylic, 25 x 15 3/4 x 6 3/4 inches

GI Joe, 2012
Sheet lead, wood, 25 x 9 ½ inches

Tenement Family, 2012
Wood, sheet lead, acrylic, 31 1/4 x 17 3/4 x 3 ½ inches

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This text originally appeared in the brochure that was produced in conjunction with the exhibition, Swords into Ploughshares: Sculpture by Jay Moss on view in the Pauline and William Goldfine Pavilion Lobby Gallery from July 15–October 7, 2018.

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As a member of the American Alliance of Museums, Hebrew Home at Riverdale by RiverSpring Health is committed to publicly exhibiting its art collection throughout its 32-acre campus, including Derfner Judaica Museum and a sculpture garden overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades. Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection provide educational and cultural programming for all visitors, including residents of the Hebrew Home, their families and the general public from throughout New York City, its surrounding suburbs and elsewhere. RiverSpring Health is a nonprofit, non-sectarian geriatric organization serving more than 18,000 older adults through its resources and community service programs. Museum hours: Sunday–Thursday, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Art Collection and grounds open daily, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Call 718.581.1596 for holiday hours or to schedule group tours, or for further information visit our website at RiverSpringHealth.org/art

Hebrew Home at Riverdale
5901 Palisade Avenue
Riverdale, New York 10471
Tel. 718.581.1596
RiverSpringHealth.org/art

This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

 

Jerusalem Between Heaven and Earth
On view from January 28–May 27, 2018

Foreword

I am grateful to Yona Verwer and the Jewish Art Salon for providing Derfner Judaica Museum this opportunity to exhibit Jerusalem Between Heaven and Earth, first shown in two venues at the third Jerusalem Biennale in the fall of 2017. The Jewish Art Salon’s exhibition was one of 26 exhibitions and projects from around the world that occupied multiple venues at the Biennale. We are honored to bring Jerusalem Between Heaven and Earth to New York for its only US showing.

The exhibition includes 34 works by 30 artists who explore this year’s Biennale theme of watershed. “As a geological term, it examines water, streams and rivers that split and converge,” the Biennale’s founder Ram Ozeri explains. “It can also be used as a metaphor to help us think about ourselves and the way we split and converge as individuals and groups. Both in Hebrew (kav parashat hamayim) and in English, watershed is used to describe an important turning point—an event that changed the course of history.” According to Ozeri, the recent Biennale threw “a spotlight onto the concept of watershed, examining it from a literal, metaphorical and even historical perspective. . . . The theme finds its expression in issues as varied as Jewish identity, immigration and refugees, alongside watershed moments in history.” These are the subjects that occupy the artists from the US, Israel, the UK and the Netherlands brought together by the Jewish Art Salon’s guest curator, Ori Z. Soltes.

As Dr. Soltes explains in an expanded essay he has written for a forthcoming issue of Ars Judaica, there was an unexpected challenge when it came to putting the chosen works on view in Jerusalem. There the physical reality of exhibition installation collided with the reality of the ideological missions of the institutions where the work was to be shown. The Jewish Art Salon had been given space at HaMachtarot Museum (The Underground Prisoners Museum)—an institution devoted to recording the building’s use as a British prison for members of the resistance of ca. 1946–48. Its dramatic interiors were to be shared by seven disparate exhibitions, with the areas for Jerusalem Between Heaven and Earth, “mostly but not entirely contiguous,” as Soltes described them:

The solution to this was to organize each space to present defined aspects of the overall exhibit scope. More challenging was the censorship enforced by the Museum Director—presumably under the orders of the Department of Defense (rather than the Cultural Ministry), which owns the Museum building. Thus works by five artists were organized as their own exhibition and displayed at Beit Bezeq [an alternative venue], rather than at Machtarot (in one case, an artist had one photograph in each location).

This division of the exhibition—arbitrary, random and incontestable—is a mirror of the ruptures in Israeli society and among many Jews worldwide as a result of the painful political and moral issues facing the Jewish state. While this is not a political exhibition, the works in the show do reflect the complex, thought-provoking and deeply subjective experiences of the artists and their relationships to Jerusalem and to Judaism.

The question of Jerusalem having been left undecided by the Oslo Accords of the 1990s was recently in the news. This persistent uncertainty looms over the sacred city at the heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, provoking a range of reactions—from fiercely proclaimed judgments of entitlement to softer, but weighty, emotions stemming from deeply held religious beliefs and other moral and ethical convictions. Our arrival at yet another watershed moment raises the visibility of Jerusalem in the public eye and makes this exhibition all the more urgent for audiences willing to look through a Jewish lens at the different ways in which Jews and others connect personally, politically and spiritually to the holy city and the Jewish state.

I am grateful to the artists in this exhibition for their creativity and passion, courage and determination in bringing to visitors experiences at once full of beauty and of insight, and for lending their work here.

Susan Chevlowe, PhD, Chief Curator and Director, Derfner Judaica Museum

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Jerusalem Between Heaven and Earth
by Ori Z. Soltes, Curator

The idea of a watershed suggests a branching, be it of physical terrain, historical events or spiritual and aesthetic concepts. This notion is particularly powerful in conjunction with Jerusalem. The exhibition arc encompasses multiple divergences that begin with and come back to the geological topography of the Sacred City. That topography—an outcropping of land from the Judaean plain, surrounded by valleys on three sides—offers a symbolic statement of how the spiritual foundations of Jerusalem branch in three Abrahamic directions, and how multiple spiritual ramifications have flowed in diverse aesthetic and political streams. From beneath the surface, they periodically surge up into our consciousness.

Tobi Kahn’s uniquely sculptural paintings and Leah Caroline and Jeremy S–Horseman’s water-based sound-centered video offer, as a beginning point, abstract suggestions of the geological watershed that helps define Jerusalem. The Sacred City’s topography made it difficult for King David to conquer and when he did so, by way of its singular underground water source, he made it his political and spiritual capital. Jerusalem became the basis for much of Israelite-Judaean history and for Jewish, Christian and Muslim fantasy, and remains a centerpiece of contention in the politicized Israeli-Palestinian world of today.

The idea of the city pre-dates the city’s role in that history. The real—spiritual—beginning of the journey toward David’s unification and Jerusalem as a capital is found in watershed moments in Exodus when a loose confederation of tribes embraced a stringent, divinely-mandated covenant. Joel Silverstein’s painting Promised Land—here the beach at Coney Island—is a reference to biblical Israel and to American Jewish immigrant experience as exemplified by the artist’s grandparents.

Richard McBee’s dramatic painting submerges the plague-induced moments that gradually separated the Israelites from Egypt within a framework—conceived as two doors—that suggests the very portals into the Holy of Holies of the Temple in a watershed construction that will eventuate half a millennium after the plagues. For the Israelite evolution yields to David’s son, Solomon, the structure that he built and the wisdom with which he became associated—so that the Book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), as explored by Ellen Holtzblatt’s painting, is traditionally ascribed to him. Gabriella Boros considers watershed warnings to the Israelite-Judaeans articulated by Isaiah. Jerusalem is both particular and universal—and the message of the biblical book of Jonah, a dramatically different focus of Yona Verwer and Katarzyna Kozera, Jan Lauren Greenfield and Alan Hobscheid, emphasizes the watershed outreach of prophecy beyond the city of prophets as far as Nineveh—capital of the Assyrian enemies of Israel. For Verwer the painting (together with its augmented reality—hidden black and white video scenes of her family, located with one’s iphone) echoes her own journey from Holland to New York, from Catholicism to Orthodox Judaism: her own eyes above, a contemporary underwater fish (a submarine) and the Brooklyn Bridge below; her story embedded beneath the immediately visible surface—and Kozera’s parallel journey from Poland to New York.

The outcome of this series of divergences for the multi-valent city’s place in and between worlds is four-fold. One, within the Jewish tradition, the biblical has given way to the rabbinic (relating to Jewish law or teachings) and its penchant for midrash (commentary)—encountered through Rachel Kanter’s fiber work, Wake Up, and Beth Krensky’s video, Tashlich. Ben Schachter’s Aquavit: Praying for Rain furthers the rabbinic by re-visioning the concept of the mikveh (ritual bath). The rabbinic has in turn ramified toward the mystical, as in Susan Schwalb’s small, tight abstract visualizations of the legend of the LamedVav—the 36 hidden righteous ones.

In Carol Buchman’s haunting work, the mystical and geological become panentheistic: the Name of God suffuses nature at its most extreme; the artist functions as priestly intermediator.

Two: away from Jerusalem, Jewish history and thought have constantly sought a spiritual and, ultimately, physical return to Jerusalem—with particular vehemence at the harshest watershed moments in the diaspora experience. Mark Podwal conceptualizes the Expulsion of 1492 in his unique style; Billha Zussman imagines how that external watershed has internal consequences in her Spinoza: Marrano of Reason; I’m the Rose, Beware of the Thorns; Archie Rand’s 1946 offers a cutting edge—watershed—visual reference to the Shoah.

In Exodus #5, one from a series of paintings that considers the current wide-spread refugee crisis, Siona Benjamin interweaves that issue with an exploration of how PaRDeS (as a Jewish, and particularly a Jewish mystical concept) intersects the equivalent Islamic concept of Jannat. Miriam Stern re-visions the lushly colored Christian vision explored in the Crusader Bible. Four: the watershed of Jerusalem turns inward: Sarah Lightman turns the topography of Jerusalem toward profound life watersheds regarding people and the very making of art.

The watershed of return to Jerusalem and the questions of Jewish-Christian-Muslim coexistence within Jewish-governed modern Israel begin to bring this exhibition arc back toward its earthbound beginnings. The ramifications are multiple. Aviva Shemer’s mobile installation, The Moral Victory, suspended Hebrew, Arabic and Latin (English) letters, is inspired by Martin Buber’s discussion of Jerusalem as a center of the Am ve’Olam (People and the World) a century ago; Jane Logemann’s Water—frenetically repeated (like a cross between Philip Glass music and Abulafian mysticism) in Hebrew and Arabic—turns words into abstract images. Leah Raab’s depiction of the Valley of Tears alludes to a specific time and place within the Yom Kippur War. Dorit Jordan Dotan’s Water Matter abstracts from nature, showing the transformation from liquid to semi-solid on the shore of the Atlit Salt Flats—archeological evidence of how ancient communities collected water into natural evaporation pools for the harvesting of sea salt; her Drop in the Bucket focuses on the crisis of Israeli-Palestinian water-sharing.

Bruria Finkel’s Salt Mound installation turns the issue of potable and salt water convergences back toward the geology of Jerusalem. Yehudis Barmatz-Harris’s video turns water to fire in pushing history backwards: from the crucible of Jerusalem’s return to Jewish hands through the Shoah and the connotations of fire in Hassidic mystical thought to the book-burnings of diaspora experience and the burning of the Second and First Temples to the purification process of the Israelites in the wilderness by means of the burning of the red heifer. Pamela Fingerhut’s digital image of Miriam and Baby Moses returns us to the biblical moment of Moses’s birth through a modern Middle Eastern lens.

Elaine Langerman’s small, colorful painting, interwoven with text, entitled Poem/Painting #11: Watershed, concludes the return to the topographic ground of the exhibition inquiry. Text as the basis for Jewish ethos ramifies to the visual imagery that defines Jewish art—and raises the questions: what is Jewish art? And what is Judaism within itself and within the world? Both “Jewish art” and Judaism are suffused by questions—like the city of Jerusalem itself.

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About Ori Z. Soltes

Dr. Ori Z. Soltes currently teaches theology, philosophy and art history at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. For seven years, Dr. Soltes was Director and Chief Curator of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, where he created over 80 exhibitions focusing on aspects of history, ethnography and contemporary art. He has also curated diverse contemporary and historical art exhibits at other sites, nationally and internationally. As Director of the National Jewish Museum he co-founded the Holocaust Art Restitution Project and has spent nearly 20 years researching and consulting on the issue of Nazi-plundered art.

Dr. Soltes has lectured at dozens of museums across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has been interviewed for a score of programs on archaeological, religious, art, literary and historical topics on CNN, the History Channel and Discovery Channel. Nearly 250 publications—books, articles, and catalogue essays—have included, among others: Tradition and Transformation: Three Millennia of Jewish Art and Architecture (2016). OriZSoltes.com

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Artist Biographies

Yehudis Barmatz-Harris, MA ATR BFA, resides in central Israel, where she uses man-generated and naturally sourced materials from human habitat, often combining two dimensional and three dimensional media. Yehudis incorporates biblical symbols in her works, referencing the essential human experience from a personal perspective. Yehudis Barmatz-Harris exhibited her first solo installation for City of David’s Tehillim Festival 2017.

Siona Benjamin is a painter originally from Bombay, now living in the US. Her work reflects her background of being brought up Jewish in a predominantly Hindu and Muslim India. In her paintings she combines the imagery of her past with the role she plays in America today, making a mosaic inspired by both Indian miniature paintings and illuminated manuscripts. She is represented by ACA Galleries, New York.

Gabriella Boros makes religious and cultural references in her woodcuts. A child of Holocaust survivors, she lived in Jerusalem during the Six Day War, and immigrated with her family to America soon after. Her series, always in black and white, begin with written concepts on which she builds visual images. Gabriella’s topics range from religious to scientific to pure narrative.

Memphis based artist Carol Buchman received her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and an MFA from Boston University School for the Arts. Her paintings have been collected and exhibited in museums, synagogues, children’s hospitals, private homes, schools, and corporate offices. Ms. Buchman will have a piece in the Massachusetts College of Art Biennale 2017.

Leah Caroline was raised in a Hassidic community in Brooklyn, NY. She works with cyanotype printing, digital media and installation—documenting nature and Jewish texts. Her exhibits include solo exhibitions and a commissioned installation for Artspace New Haven. Caroline has been an artist in residence, including at Weir Farm in Wilton, CT. Caroline lives and works in New Haven, CT.

Pamela Fingerhut is an artist who digitally manipulates her photographs to produce psychological complexity and depth. She attended Corcoran Gallery Art School (Washington, DC), obtained a BA (University of Hartford), and an MA (Long Island University). Further training: Art Students League (NYC), International Center of Photography NYC, and Maine Media Workshops. Her photo-montages are shown in US/European galleries.

Bruria Finkel, a sculptor working in mixed media and a curator, had over 79 solo/group exhibitions in museums and galleries. Her work is on permanent view at the Smithsonian, Washington, DC, included in the Archives of American Art. Bruria translated the works of the 13th-century kabbalist Abraham Abulafia from Hebrew to English, and has received many awards for her work and community involvement.

Jan Lauren Greenfield is a multi-disciplinary artist from New York City. She uses a variety of media to explore culture, spirituality and mental health. She was selected as the recipient of the 2014-2015 Artists Initiative by the Jewish Education Project and the UJA- Federation. She has performed at the UN, and her photographs have been featured in Vogue Italia. She is the author of My Beautiful Bipolar Mind Book: Fire on the Mountain (Classic Day Press).

Alan Hobscheid works in diverse media including digital art, photography, and painting. Hobscheid’s subject matter ranges from landscapes and still lifes to images inspired by Jewish texts and culture. As visual midrash, he integrates disparate sources to develop commentary on the nature of faith and fate that respects the past and strives for relevance in the present.

Ellen Holtzblatt is a Chicago-based painter whose work is fueled by the yearning exploration of the connection between the physical and the spiritual—the memories of the body that reside in the soul. Holtzblatt exhibits worldwide, including the Jerusalem Biennale and the Museum of Biblical Art in New York. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections.

Dorit Jordan Dotan, multidisciplinary Israeli-born, Chicago-based artist, combines her photography with innovative digital art. Through her creations, she attempts to call attention to social and cultural issues. Last 6 years she was invited to exhibit at The HUC Museum, New York, exploring contemporary Jewish art. Fellow Jewish Artist Lab, Spertus Chicago. She is guest curator at the Evanston Art Center.

Working in Rhode Island, Jeremy Santiago-Horseman reaches into biblical, kabbalistic and science-fictional realms with the mediums of sound, painting and installation. Santiago-Horseman has participated in venues in New York and Los Angeles, and he has gained international attention in the 2016 V Moscow Biennale with his work, Sanctuary (ab). Santiago-Horseman is included in the Sigmund Balka and the LeWitt collections.

Tobi Kahn has been steadfast in the pursuit of the redemptive possibilities of art. He has had over 70 solo museum exhibitions, including: Tobi Kahn: Metamorphoses, Avoda: Objects of the Spirit, Sky and Water, Tobi Kahn: Sacred Spaces of the 21st Century, Anointed Time: Sculptures and Ceremonial Objects by Tobi Kahn. Awards include Outstanding Alumni Award: Pratt Institute 2000; National Foundation for Jewish Culture Award 2004; JTS Honorary Doctorate 2007. Selected collections: Guggenheim Museum; Houston Museum of Fine Art; The Phillips Collection; Jewish Museum, NY; Museum of Art, FL and Minneapolis Museum of Fine Art.

Rachel Kanter grew up in Syracuse, NY, surrounded by women who were creating with their hands: knitting a sweater, sewing a quilt, beading, weaving. She followed in their path and is now a fiber artist using quilting and embroidery techniques while incorporating vintage textiles, sewing patterns, furniture and found objects into her work.

Katarzyna Kozera is a multimedia artist, art director and photographer. She is a PhD student and completed her MFA in Fine Arts at the Jan Matejko Academy in Krakow, Poland. Selected honors: The Kosciuszko Foundation Grant for advanced study in the United States; Maryland Institute College of Arts, Baltimore, MD: Research fellow grant; 2013 Erasmus Scholarship, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp, Belgium.

Beth Krensky is a Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Utah. She holds degrees from Tufts University, Harvard University and the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her work is intended to provoke reflection about what is happening in our world as well as to create a vision of what is possible.

Elaine Langerman earned her MFA from the University of Maryland. She makes paintings, collages, sculptures and one-of- a-kind mixed media books. She is inspired by Medieval and Persian illuminated manuscripts and Majolica ware (the relief kind) as well as by the work of Klee and Cornell. Her work is in many collections including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.

Long committed to abstraction in painting, drawing and languages over the last three decades, Jane Logemann has focused on the investigations of the intersection of language and visual meaning. She studied at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She lives and works in New York City. She has continued to show in over 40 group shows to date. Her work can be found in collections such as the Jewish Museum, NYC; Morgan Library; Yale University Art Gallery; Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Richard McBee is a painter of biblical subject matter and writer on Jewish Art. From 2000 until 2014 he wrote about the Jewish Arts for the The Jewish Press and continues to exhibit paintings, lecture and curate Jewish art exhibitions. He is a founding member of the Jewish Art Salon. His website exhibits 300 of his artworks and 250 Jewish art reviews.

Mark Podwal’s art is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Israel Museum, the Vatican, and the Bodleian Library, among many others. He is the illustrator of numerous books in collaboration with Elie Wiesel. In 1995, the French government named Podwal an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters.

New York City-based Leah Raab graduated with highest honors from the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem and received her MFA from the New York Studio School. Leah has exhibited her work in 22 solo exhibits and numerous group shows in the US and Israel.

Archie Rand is a painter and muralist whose work often engages text and Jewish subjects. He is the author of The 613 (Blue Rider/Penguin/Random House), which features full-page reproductions of every unit of The 613, his large painting that references the biblical commandments. The entire painting, The 613, was exhibited at the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum beginning in July 2017.

Ben Schachter is professor of Visual Art at Saint Vincent College. He received his MFA from Pratt Institute. His work has been shown at Yale University, Yeshiva University Museum, and other venues throughout the United States. His first book, Image, Action, and Idea in Contemporary Jewish Art was published in 2017.

Susan Schwalb was born in New York City and studied at the High School of Music and Art and at Carnegie-Mellon University. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery, Washington, DC, The British Museum, London, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, and Kupferstichkabinett-Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany. She has had over 35 solo exhibitions and has exhibited nationally and internationally.

Aviva Shemer is a sculptor, painter, installation artist and teacher in Israel. She has a BA in Creative Art and MA degrees in Art Therapy and Jewish Philosophy, and has participated in art projects combined with architecture. She is the author of The Power of a Word and Orange Red, a summary of her 50-year career. Shemer has had over 30 solo shows. Her works are in museum and private collections in Israel and globally.

Joel Silverstein is an artist, critic and teacher. He is a Founding and Executive Member of the Jewish Art Salon and has curated five exhibitions for them including JOMIX: Jewish Comics, Art and Derivation, Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art and UJA, NY. Exhibitions include The Jerusalem Biennial, 2015, Pratt Institute 2014, Columbia/ Barnard Center in 2012 and at the Clemente Center in NY in 2017.

Miriam Stern is an award-winning painter, printmaker and installation artist. Stern usually works in series of prints and paintings on a specific theme. In 2016 a monograph of her art was published. In addition to producing art, she has curated several art exhibitions and lectures about the relationship of art to Jewish interpretations of texts and ideas.

Dutch-born, New York-based Yona Verwer is a visual artist exploring identity, history, immigration, tikkun olam, and kabbalah. She has shown in galleries and museums internationally, such as the Yeshiva University Museum, Andy Warhol Factory, Ein Harod Museum, and the Bronx Museum. She was featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and others. Verwer is the Founder and Director of the Jewish Art Salon.

Israeli-born, Billha Zussman studied art at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam where she still lives and works. She has both exhibited and been awarded as an innovative graphic artist, cartoonist, photographer and Judaica designer in Amsterdam, Belgium, Germany, Poland and the US since 1980. Her works are at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.

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About the Jewish Art Salon

The Jewish Art Salon is the largest, most-recognized Jewish visual art organization in the world. It is a global network of contemporary Jewish art. The Salon provides important programs and resources, and develops lasting partnerships with the international art community and the general public.

The Jewish Art Salon presents public events in the US and Israel, and produces art projects with international art institutions. Since 2008 the Jewish Art Salon has organized dozens of art exhibits and events exploring Jewish themes, related to current issues. In the New York area it hosts occasional salon sessions with international artists and scholars. JewishArtSalon.org

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This exhibition was first organized by the Jewish Art Salon and curated by Ori Z. Soltes for the 2017 Jerusalem Biennale held in Israel from October 1–November 16, 2017. This text, which originally appeared in the printed exhibition brochure, was produced in conjunction with Jerusalem Between Heaven and Earth, on view in the Derfner Judaica Museum from January 28–May 27, 2018.

All works courtesy of the artist unless otherwise noted.

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As a member of the American Alliance of Museums, Hebrew Home at Riverdale by RiverSpring Health is committed to publicly exhibiting its art collection throughout its 32-acre campus including the Derfner Judaica Museum and a sculpture garden overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades. The Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection provide educational and cultural programming for residents of the Hebrew Home, their families and the general public from throughout New York City, its surrounding suburbs and visitors from elsewhere. Hebrew Home is a nonprofit, non-sectarian geriatric organization serving more than 12,000 elderly persons in greater New York through its resources and community service programs. Museum hours: Sunday–Thursday, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Art Collection and grounds open daily, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Call 718-581-1596 for holiday hours and to schedule group tours, or for further information please visit our website.

Hebrew Home at Riverdale
5901 Palisade Avenue
Riverdale, New York 10471
Tel. 718.581.1596
RiverSpringHealth.org/art

This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Brenda Zlamany: Golden Years

by David Ebony

Life is a journey. The places it takes us are unpredictable—sometimes disheartening but occasionally thrilling. Art is also a journey. The artist leads us—at least, those who pay attention—to places we have never been before, to realms of the imagination we have never encountered, and to paths toward truth we have never tried.

The truth is that all human beings share the same life process. We are all individuals, yet we age similarly. Every minute each of us advances toward the inevitable state of being old—if we are fortunate enough to stave off the mortal challenges that life can present along the way. Few artists have addressed this conundrum. You can either fight the process (ultimately a losing battle) or embrace it, as the artist Brenda Zlamany has done in her extraordinary project 100/100.

Zlamany, an estimable realist painter and portraitist, set out to paint watercolor portraits of a hundred residents of the Hebrew Home at Riverdale, New York. A celebration of the organization’s centennial, 100/100 highlights people in their golden years. The endeavor is part of Zlamany’s project The Itinerant Portraitist, an ongoing international effort to consider portraiture as a means of understanding the individuals who make up a community.

Zlamany spent weeks, mainly in summer 2017, as artist in residence at the home. Most of her subjects were in their eighties and nineties—several were over a hundred—and long in retirement, when parental and professional demands are well in the past. About this work, she remarked, “With 100/100, I am interested in aging: what is important at the end of life? In the face of loss—loss of loved ones, mobility, taste, hearing, sight—is joy still possible? What experiences from the past fuel happiness?”

With consummate brush knowledge, refined color sensibility, and total command of her craft, Zlamany focuses on the head and torso in each watercolor. She captures in the portraits a sense of the pleasures and disappointments of life experience that are inscribed on each face. Sharing with portraits by Alice Neel (1900–1984) an expressiveness achieved through heightened color and exaggerated line, Zlamany’s images never romanticize the subject, nor do they linger on the abject. Aiming for a faithful likeness with psychological depth, her approach recalls that of the English painter and portraitist Graham Sutherland (1903–1980), who preferred older portrait subjects. “Older people are more patient as subjects,” Sutherland remarked in the catalogue for a 1977 exhibition of his portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London. “Children are restless; the middle-aged, especially women, are always constantly ‘rearranging’ their faces…. But I must agree that the last state of man holds for me the greatest interest. He [or she] has faced the responsibilities and temptations of life.”

Having sat for Zlamany, as one of the portrait subjects of 366: A Watercolor Portrait a Day, part of her exploration of the art world, I can attest that there is an interactive, performance element to her endeavor. Her portrait-making process is one of looking, but you never feel that you are being scrutinized. Her work encompasses an exchange of ideas and experiences, a form of storytelling as meaningful as the resultant portrait itself.

She reinforces comments by her friend and mentor David Hockney, who said of his portrait subjects in a recent interview for the Royal Academy, “I’m looking. I’m looking. And most people have no experience in having someone look at them. I got to know them better, and they got to know me.”

Drawing on many decades of life experience, the portrait subjects of 100/100 had countless stories to tell. And in turn they gained insight into the artist’s life. In this unique and ambitious effort, Zlamany offers her sitters new roles—as dignitaries or life ambassadors, nearing the end of a long and profound journey.

About David Ebony

David Ebony is a contributing editor of Art in America. The author of numerous artist monographs, he is also a frequent contributor to artnet News and Yale University Press online.

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The Portraits

(Click on image to enlarge)

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Portraits of My Parents

by Alan Zweibel

It extends beyond the likeness of the features. Well beyond whether the portraits accurately replicate noses, ears, chins and hairstyles. This art is not about exactitude. Or even approximation. The triumph here is about capturing the spirit of the subjects. How, with a few watercolored strokes of a brush, the ageless essences of what lies within are brought to light.

That’s my takeaway when I look at Brenda Zlamany’s renderings of my parents, Shirley and Julius Zweibel. Sure, I can easily scroll through all the pictures from countless albums to view how they have morphed from children photographed in a black and white world through the decades to becoming the elderly statesmen of their own four children, eleven grandchildren and fourteen great grandchildren who visit them at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale.

But I’m most impressed with the intangibles that have defied time. The transcendent nuances that have somehow survived despite the inevitable changes to appearance and mobility. The same subtle expression of my father, a highly skilled jeweler who worked so hard to give us everything that was unavailable to him as a child of the Great Depression. How he took me to Yankee games and placed one foot ahead of the other to measure the distance of my practice tosses when I threw the discus for my high school track team. The familiar glow from my mother, a housewife in an era when motherhood was an art form, who encouraged me to follow my dreams of becoming a writer. Who, in 1972, approached a Catskills comic named Morty Gunty in a Lake Tahoe coffee shop and asked if he’d like to see some of the jokes her son wrote.

And their combined attitudes that filled our home with love, levity and optimism in addition to the security that comes from knowing that no matter what life presented, we can meet all challenges head on because we’re a team that would always be there for each other.

I can also detect a sadness. In their eyes. In the slight downturn at the corners of their mouths that were not present just a few short months ago. Despite their courageous attempts at normalcy, there’s the silent display of grief from losing my sister Fran this past May. Their beautiful second child who, in so many ways, embodied the combined traits of all that our family held dear. Yes, I’m the comedy writer but Fran was funnier than me. She was the understanding best friend to our younger sister Barbara. The wisdom dispensing biggest sister to our brother David. And the peacemaker who’d step in to settle disputes when she thought that any of us were holding onto anger for too long. We all carry the heartache of Fran’s passing. We ask God why did this happen to such a life-loving person and look for signs that she still has an ethereal presence. We all feel the loss. Yet in Brenda’s paintings I see my parents’ loss. Their pain. Their puzzlement. And their brave attempt to weather this cruelest blow of outliving a child.

But mostly I see contentment. The satisfaction of knowing they lived a full and rich life as best as they possibly could. As a couple. They got married in 1949 and during the following sixty-eight years they perfected their dance. Growing with each other. Learning from each other. Complimenting each other. Always making each other laugh. They still do. Sure, my dad has bouts with the onset of dementia. There are times when, well, when he is somewhere else. But in the intermittent moments of lucidity, when he returns and is once again here with us, he is sure to tell our mother that he loves her, that she is beautiful, and that she is his reason for living.

I love Brenda’s portraits. Since they were sent to me, I have looked at them often. I am looking at them now while I write these words. However, if there is any flaw I can find in them, it’s that my parents were painted on two separate pages. They should have shared one. That’s who our parents are. A pair of people who were always combined to be one person. Shirley and Julie. Mom and Dad. Mimi and Poppy. Each name never said without the other. As if they were one person who happened to have two names. One soul that’s shared by two bodies. They’re lucky. We’re lucky to still have them.

About Alan Zweibel

Alan Zweibel is an original Saturday Night Live writer whose work in television also includes It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, which he co-created and produced, The David Letterman Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm. A five-time Emmy Award winner, Alan is also a best selling author who collaborated with Billy Crystal on the Tony Award winning Broadway play 700 Sundays. His parents, Shirley and Julius Zweibel, live at the Hebrew Home.

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Top: Shirley Weintraub, with Portrait #8; Eugene Townsend, with Portrait #72. Middle: Morris Ducoff, with Portrait #10; Sylvia Sutton, with Portrait #100. Bottom: Selma Bachner, with Portrait #20; Arthur Bachner, with Portrait #21.

Top: Adele Weitz, with Portrait #19; Richard Graske, with Portrait #52. Middle: Gilda Wilson, with Portrait #63; Belle Bishop, with Portrait #75. Bottom: Ruth Brunn, with Portrait #98; Juanita Caro, with Portrait #35.

Top: Hyman Martin, with Portrait #9; Gloria Cimino, with Portrait #36. Middle: Joan Jackson, with Portrait #87; Sherman Paur, with Portrait #69. Bottom: Deborah Rivera, with Portrait #56; Ida Stone, with Portrait #40.

Top: Gloria Schwartzberg, with Portrait #65; Geraldine Balaschak, with Portrait #32. Middle: Herbert Birnbaum, with Portrait #34; Rita Casey, with Portrait #38. Bottom: Migdalia Persaud, with Portrait #54; Sabina Moss, with Portrait #50.

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Brenda Zlamany is a painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Since 1982 her work has appeared in over a dozen solo exhibitions (including, in New York City, at Jonathan O’Hara Gallery, Stux Gallery, Jessica Fredericks Gallery, and E. M. Donahue Gallery and, in Brussels, at Sabine Wachters Fine Arts) and numerous group shows in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Museums that have exhibited her work include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany; the National Museum, Gdansk, Poland; and Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent, Belgium. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Flash Art, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere and is held in the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum; Deutsche Bank; the Museum of Modern Art, Houston; the Neuberger Museum of Art; the Virginia Museum of Fine Art; the World Bank; and Yale University. Zlamany has collaborated with authors and editors of The New York Times Magazine on several portrait commissions, including an image of Marian Anderson for an article by Jessye Norman and one of Osama bin Laden for the cover of the September 11, 2005, issue. Grants she has received include a Fulbright Fellowship (2011), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2006–07), a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists’ Fellowship in painting (1994), and a Jerome Foundation Fellowship (1981–82). She received a BA from Wesleyan University in 1981.

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The 100 Sitters

Josh Aber
Cynthia Armstrong
Arthur Bachner
Selma Bachner
Geraldine Balaschak
William Beck
Lois Becker
Claire Berger
Brian Berko
Charlotte Bernstein
Stanley Bernstein
Herbert Birnbaum
Belle Bishop
Joan Blumberg
Ethel Brown
Ruth Brunn
Albert Cappiello
Juanita Caro
Ellen Carter
Rita Casey
Gloria Cimino
Anna Cuevas
Marie Damiani
Nina Dimas
Kelly Dixon
Morris Ducoff
Gloria Duncan
Ruth Ellias
Zelda Fassler
Selma Friedman
Jean Gantel
Terry Gioffere
Pearl Goldfarb
Richard Graske
Lillian Grogin
Mary Gross
Miriam Gross
Beverly Herzog
Joan Jackson
Phyllis Johnson
Ralph Kamhi
Esther Kaplan
Edythe Kershnar
Dr. Narenda Khurana
Nancy Kimbrell
Florence Kohn
Sadie Landskroner
Albert Levy
Frances Lockwood
Roslyn Lonshein
Gloria Lutz
Sylvia Lyons
Leslie Mage
Molly Maieli
Mark Marcucilli
Hyman Martin
Mabel Mills
Sara Mittelman
Louise Monsone
Stanley Moskowitz
Sabina Moss
Pearl Najowitz
Marjorie Negrin
Alice Osborne
Muriel Palley
Neil Papier
Sherman Paur
Migdalia Persaud
Olga Prieto
Charles Reis
Sam Richman
Concetta Rinaldi
Deborah Rivera
Felipe Rodriguez
Lillian Rosow
Victoria Ruiz
Ethel Sanders
Joetta Schneider
Gloria Scwhartzberg
Harriet Seiz
William Sheldon
Ekaterina Slavova
Verena Smith
Ann Smith
Ida Stone
Shirley Stuart
Sylvia Sutton
Mary Taylor
Jaime Torres
Eugene Townsend
Ana Trujillo
Eleanor Weinhouse
Shirley Weintraub
Arthur Weiss
Adele Weitz
Gilda Wilson
Esther Young
Debra Zion
Julius Zweibel
Shirley Zweibel

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Artist’s Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Susan Chevlowe, Chief Curator and Museum Director, and Emily O’Leary, Associate Curator, at the Derfner Judaica Museum for organizing 100 portrait painting sessions (an amazing feat), for mounting a beautiful exhibition and for their part in the production of this book. My sincere appreciation goes to David Ebony for his insightful essay and to Alan Zweibel for his thoughtful text about his parents and their portraits. Most of all, I am honored to have been entrusted with the likenesses of the 100 wonderful portrait subjects. I value our time together and am privileged to have shared in your life stories. I would also like to thank the staff and volunteers of the Hebrew Home at Riverdale, especially the nursing staff and social workers, who helped make this project a success. I am deeply grateful to all my friends, who have been generous with their support, critiques and suggestions. Much admiration goes to Michael Horton for designing this beautiful book. This book is dedicated to my daughter, Oona, who on her visits to the Hebrew Home contributed her marvelous sense of humor to the portrait sessions, who propped me up when I was emotionally drained from the work, who took incredible photos of the project’s progress and who never fails to amaze me with her insights.

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Essays © David Ebony, Alan Zweibel
All watercolors are 12 x 9 inches
All images © Brenda Zlamany
BrendaZlamany.com

This text appeared in the catalogue produced in conjunction with the exhibition Brenda Zlamany: 100/100, on view in the Derfner Judaica Museum from September 10, 2017–January 7, 2018.

As a member of the American Alliance of Museums, the Hebrew Home at Riverdale by RiverSpring Health is committed to publicly exhibiting its art collection  throughout its 32-acre campus including Derfner Judaica Museum and a sculpture garden overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades. Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection provide educational and cultural programming for residents of the Hebrew Home, their families and the general public from throughout New York City, its surrounding suburbs and visitors from elsewhere. RiverSpring Health is a nonprofit, non-sectarian geriatric organization serving more than 12,000 older adults in greater New York through its resources and community service programs. Museum hours: Sunday–Thursday, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Art Collection and grounds open daily, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Call 718.581.1596 for holiday hours and to schedule group tours or for further information, visit our website at http://www.riverspringhealth.org/art

This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Additional funding provided by Alicia Felton and Sherrill Neff and Andrea and Robert Meislin.

5901 Palisade Avenue
Riverdale, New York 10471
Tel. 718.581.1596
http://www.riverspringhealth.org/art

Text by Susan Chevlowe, Chief Curator and Museum Director
On view September 17, 2017 – January 7, 2018

In 1975, the young photographer Chuck Fishman traveled to Poland to photograph what he has described “was then a dwindling remnant of a once-vibrant Jewish community on the brink of extinction.”* Returning several times between 1975 and 1983, Fishman’s images provide rare glimpses into Jewish life during a period when Jews in the West had little or no access to their Polish forebears in the post-Holocaust era. Believing his photographs would bear witness to the final days of Jews in Poland, he could not have envisioned, thirty years later, the astonishing rebirth of a people that had inhabited its lands for 1,000 years. His return to Poland in 2013 chronicles a spiritual and cultural “return to identity” that Fishman says “would have been unthinkable before.” His latest work speaks “to themes of resilience and renewal, exploring and elucidating the myriad faces and facets of recovery and re-generation.” Describing the most recent images, Fishman has written:

Each and every subject manifests a collective tapestry of his/her cultural inheritance, offering a rare perspective into this exceptional moment in time: from Poles raised as Catholics, discovering hidden Jewish roots, to children and grandchildren in search of their pasts, transforming families, and reshaping futures with the question: what does it mean, “being Jewish?” The answer—often, ”it’s complicated”—is one that the passing of four decades has radically changed.

Thirty-six black and white photographs made during Fishman’s trips to Poland between 1975–2016 are on view in this exhibition. Although color and digital printing is the medium of choice today, Fishman, in his recent and current work, continues to use black and white fi lm as he had in the ‘70s and ‘80s, intentionally seeking a “cohesive, visual continuity throughout the images, and across the decades.” He both processes his own fi lm and makes his own exhibition prints, and emphasizes that working with fi lm—each of the original negatives—is of primal importance when crafting archival, gelatin silver photographic prints. This provides “an unmatched, timeless print quality for exhibitions,” he points out. When Fishman first arrived in Poland in 1975, he used both black and white and color transparency fi lm. “Black and white was used far more on my people pictures,” he says. “When returning in 1978, and through 1983, I very rarely shot any color fi lm on this project. It had become a very personal work, which I generally keep in black and white.”

Further insights about Fishman’s project are captured in the following interview:

Susan Chevlowe: What brought you to Poland in the 1970s?

Chuck Fishman: I was a college student in the summer of 1975 when I first went to Poland with a writer to hopefully produce a book on the remains of what we could find of Jewish life and culture there. The result was Polish Jews: The Final Chapter, which was published by McGraw-Hill and New York University Press in 1977. The project also became my first professional portfolio of printed photographs, which I brought to New York City six months later. With it I met editors, agents and professional photographers, who helped shape my future as a “new” photographer. One person I sought out, Roman Vishniac, who had photographed Jewish life in Poland and Eastern Europe before World War II, was very kind. His favorite photograph from my original 1975 portfolio was Woman knitting outside Majdanek, (above) included in this exhibition. (We later exchanged prints.) The original portfolio was exhibited in New York City in the late ’70s. SC: What did you find there?

CF: Locked synagogues with broken windows; sometimes desolate cemeteries when they could be found; kosher kitchens in Warsaw, Krakow and Wroclaw serving a small aging population; some Jewish clubs (Lodz); Friday night or Shabbat services in Warsaw and Krakow; the Yiddish theater in Warsaw—primarily older people on pensions.

SC: How did you locate the Jewish communities? What cities did you visit? How did you navigate through the country?

CF: Crossing Communist East Germany by train, we started from western Poland in the city of Wroclaw. There, through some literature we had, we eventually found the White Stork Synagogue, which was the Jewish epicenter in that city. Attached was also a study house (beit midrash) and kitchen. I then felt, for the first time, that I had a responsibility to show the rest of the world what was still left as I was now “on the other side of the iron curtain.” Seeing the enormity and condition of that synagogue, I was overwhelmed with the realization of what I felt I needed to do. We traveled by bus and train, often splitting up so I could shoot unaccompanied, and comparing notes later on. The larger cities we visited included Wroclaw, Lodz, Warsaw, Krakow, Lublin, and many smaller towns throughout Galicia. This first trip in 1975 lasted about six weeks. I had no idea if I’d be able to get my film out of the country. Alone, I took an overnight train from Katowice crossing through Communist Czechoslovakia to Vienna. I kept my exposed film on the bottom of my shoulder bag somewhat “hidden.” Of course, I was nervous at the border crossings where each time military officials would come through the train to check your passport and belongings. If my film was confiscated, I had only memories and (maybe) notes.

SC: Why did you decide to return to Poland? What year did you first return and what was your intention for that visit? How many trips have you made since then and what did you hope to accomplish?

CF: I returned to Poland three-and-a-half years later in the winter of 1978. My book had come out and I was there as a working, professional photojournalist to photograph the country of the then newly-elected Pope John Paul II. Again, Poland was a Communist country and there was now interest in the west to see this “off the radar” place. As a working photojournalist, one needed to work with the official “Interpress” government agency for access to most areas. Discreetly and with small prints I made to give away, I returned to the kosher kitchens, synagogues and study houses without any official “guide,” and saw some of the people from three-and-a-half years earlier. Some remembered me, especially when I gave them a photograph of themselves. I also saw, and photographed, children learning Hebrew. My next trip a few months later was during a Passover seder in Warsaw’s kosher kitchen. I met a few young Jews (my age or younger), who were actors in the Yiddish theater. I decided that I would not seek to publish any of these “newer” pictures. Under Communism I didn’t want any of my work to possibly have negative effects on the lives of the few younger people in my pictures. I continued photographing Polish Jews during several working trips from 1978–1983, archiving the negatives and contact sheets. I felt I was helping to capture and preserve, for future generations, the last of a 1,000-year history of Jewish life in Poland. I was in Poland to photograph both of Pope John Paul II’s trips in 1979 and 1983, and spent time with Lech Walesa and the Solidarity trade union in 1980. I always, quietly, would seek out the Jewish community to photograph and give small gift prints to those I had photographed before. I thought I would return to Poland someday, when I was much older and the people in my pictures would be gone and the few younger ones assimilated. My thought was I’d photograph some buildings or remains and then take out my older work from the ‘70s and ‘80s to combine with the newer, and possibly seek publication. In 1989 with the fall of Communism, history took a very sharp turn and very slowly there has been a reawakening of Jewish life and culture in Poland.

After a 30-year hiatus I returned in 2013, then again in 2014 and 2016. It’s a fascinating story of renewal that’s going on there now. I’ve photographed in schools, in synagogues, daily life and events, large and small, including a wedding, ritual circumcision (brit milah), funeral, Jewish cultural festival, conversions to Judaism of those who have discovered or are just now discovering their Jewish roots—many aspects of contemporary life today. This body of work now spans four generations of post-Holocaust Polish Jewry: the survivors being the fi rst generation; their children and grandchildren (the “unexpected” generation); and now great-grandchildren, growing up as Polish Jews aware of their heritage.

SC: In your Polish Jews: The Final Chapter, a great many of your photographs were of places—for example, architecture, Talmudic academies, Yeshivas and synagogue buildings, most of them abandoned, and cemeteries. This is quite different from the photographs we’ve chosen for this exhibition; for example, we have only two cemetery images, one old and one new, and the synagogues are now fi lled with celebrations of Jewish rituals and traditions. And there is quite an emphasis on portraits. Can you talk about your interest in portraiture over architecture or landscape in relationship to these images?

CF: The book was a collection of all that we could find and document at the time. It was important to show the places and architecture as those could vanish (in fact, the Jewish Club in Lodz did, after I had photographed two men playing chess in front of Adam Muszka’s mural before it was destroyed [above]; the building became condominiums). My primary interest in photography has always revolved around people. I enjoy capturing a specific moment in time when I feel that certain elements have come together in a frame, the nuances of expression and reality that shape a story, and in turn, move the viewer in some fundamental way.

SC: Can you speak to your relationship with your subjects? Were you able to keep in touch? Did you find any of your original subjects when you returned?

CF: I have with a few. In fact the picture of Jerzy Kichler with his mom in her kitchen from 1983 (above) was one that I gave him when we met again in Wroclaw at a Jewish wedding in 2014.

SC: Can you reflect on Polish Jews: The Final Chapter? Does the significance of the book change now that Jewish communal life in Poland is in a state of renewal? How does it remain meaningful?

CF: The book’s significance continues, albeit with fresh implications, especially when considering the broader scope of historical context. Its immediate importance lies in the fact that it reveals both the conditions and what was left in 1975, seven years after the final government purge in 1968 of Jews from Poland. That action led to the majority of middle-aged or younger Polish Jews with families leaving the country by giving up Polish citizenship, becoming stateless and declaring they would be going to Israel. They went primarily to Israel, Scandinavia and the US. The remaining Jews thought of themselves as the finale to 1,000 years of Jewish life in Poland. In larger terms, I think that, as much as it is an invaluable chronicle of a vanished past, the book serves equally as a cornerstone of, and a counterpoint to, my recent work, affording me the unique opportunity to revisit what was, by all accounts, an epilogue in Jewish history, to thereby redefine the narrative—a stunning about-face in history—and to illuminate one of hope and future possibilities. The photographer gratefully acknowledges the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture; The Honorable Sigmund Rolat; Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture, and the Polish Modern Art Foundation, which provided support for travel to Poland in 2013, 2014 and 2016.

Checklist of the Exhibition

All photographs in the exhibition are selenium-toned gelatin silver prints processed from the original negatives and printed by the photographer.

Mosses Lekker, caretaker of the Jewish Cemetery. Lodz, 1975. 20 x 24 in.

Chess players at the Jewish Club in Lodz. The mural, completed in 1960 by Adam (Aron) Muszka and no longer extant, depicts the Holocaust. Lodz, 1975. 11 x 14 in.

Mieczyslav Nusbaum, sexton of Lublin’s only remaining prayer room. Lublin, 1975. 16 x 20 in.

Robin Dawidowicz, the last Jew of Lublin’s once Jewish market, and wife at work selling donuts. Lublin, 1975. 16 x 20 in.

Woman knitting outside Majdanek concentration camp, wartime forced labor and killing center. Lublin, 1975. 11 x 14 in.

Pincus Szenicer, caretaker of the Jewish Cemetery, reciting from the Book of Psalms for a recently deceased 74-year-old woman. Warsaw, 1975. 11 x 14 in.

Ludwik Berlinski (left) and Maurycy Jam (right) leaving the Remu Synagogue after the last Saturday service of 1978. Krakow, December 1978. 11 x 14 in.

Roza Bauminger, taking her lunch home from the kosher kitchen. Krakow, January 1979. 11 x 14 in.

Weekly Tuesday morning selling of “kosher” meat in the basement of Krakow’s kehillah, the building where the official Jewish community has an office and kosher kitchen. Krakow, 1979. 11 x 14 in.

Kosher kitchen during Saturday lunch. Warsaw, January 13, 1979. 11 x 14 in.

Shabbat services in the Warsaw beit midrash. Warsaw, 1979. 11 x 14 in.

Saying the blessing for donning the tallit at morning services in the only study house (beit midrash) in Warsaw, adjacent to the unused Nozyk Synagogue. Warsaw, 1979. 11 x 14 in.

The ceremonial washing of hands. Natan Cywiak at a Passover seder in the kosher kitchen. Holding cup and basin is Solomon Klinghoffer. Warsaw, 1979. 11 x 14 in.

Women leaving after the ceremony commemorating the 36th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Warsaw, April 1979. 11 x 14 in.

36th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising at the site of its first armed conflict. POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which opened in April 2013, now occupies a large part of this plaza, facing the Natan Rapoport sculpture, “Ghetto Heroes Monument.” Warsaw, April 1979. 11 x 14 in.

Backstage at the Yiddish Theater. Actress Etel Szyk in hooded shawl. Warsaw, 1980. 16 x 20 in.

Cohanim blessing during Sabbath service in the Warsaw study house (beit midrash) on Shavuot. Warsaw, 1980. 11 x 14 in.

Arriving for Friday night services in the courtyard of the Remu Synagogue. Krakow, 1983. 11 x 14 in.

Jerzy Kichler, 36, in his mother’s kitchen. Krakow, 1983. 11 x 14 in.

Artist Jonasz Stern (1904–1988) in his studio and flat. Krakow, June 1983. 11 x 14 in.

Havdalah/party of Jewish Community Center student club. Krakow, 2013. 16 x 20 in.

Newly-appointed American-Israeli Rabbi Avi Baumol (far right) introducing a Torah scroll to third- and fourth-generation post-Holocaust Jews during his first day teaching Sunday school at the Jewish Community Center. Krakow, 2013. 11 x 14 in.

Piotr Klapec, 35, being congratulated after his immersion in a mikveh (ritual bath) thereby completing his conversion to Judaism. Krakow, September 2013. 16 x 20 in.

Sunday morning services during Sukkot in Nozyk Synagogue. Warsaw, September 22, 2013. 11 x 14 in.

Polish Jewish artists Urszula Grabowska (right) and daughter Helena Czernek eating lunch in the sukkah that Urszula built at her farmhouse/studio in Jedrzejow Nowy, 60 km. east of Warsaw. Jedrzejow Nowy, September 2013. 11 x 14 in.

Damian Nec, 22 (center), joking with Olga Danek, 27 (right), and Kinga Zmyslowska, 26 (left), at a Saturday night Jewish Community Center student club party in Olga’s apartment that she shares with seven people. Krakow, September 2013. 11 x 14 in.

Brit milah of Aaron Josef Kowalski at the Isaac Synagogue. Krakow, 2014. 11 x 14 in.

Jerzy Kichler, 66, at the refurbished White Stork Synagogue in Wroclaw. Kichler, president of Wroclaw’s Jewish Community and of the Union of Religious Jewish Communities in Poland, was instrumental in the renovation. Wroclaw, June 2014. 16 x 20 in.

Burlesque artist Anna Ciszewska (Betty Q), 28, backstage with her mother Joanna. Anna’s Jewish roots are through her mother’s father. Warsaw, June 2014. 11 x 14 in.

Barbara Lesowska (left) and daughter Bogumila. Barbara survived the Holocaust by being sheltered by a gentile woman; she had hidden her Jewishness all her life until confronted by Bogumila. Warsaw, July 2014. 11 x 14 in.

The largest Shabbat dinner held in Krakow since before the Holocaust with between 400-500 in attendance. Krakow, July 4, 2014. 11 x 14 in.

“Shalom on Szeroka Street”—closing night concert for the 24th annual Jewish Culture Festival. Krakow, July 5, 2014. 20 x 24 in.

Eight-year-old Stanislaw Sawicki putting name marker in grave of his father, Adam Sawicki, 60, Chairman of Jewish Community. Lodz, July 21, 2016. 11 x 14 in.

In a private meeting with representatives of Poland’s Jewish community, Pope Francis is introduced by Chief Rabbi of Poland Michael Schudrich (left) to JCC Executive Director Jonathan Ornstein, all being interpreted from Polish or English to Spanish by Marcjanna Kubala, a young Polish woman who discovered her Jewish identity as a teenager. Krakow, July 31, 2016. 11 x 14 in.

Sharing stories at Sunday brunch (Boker Tov) outside the Jewish Community Center. Elzbieta Siczek (center, with hands on head) discovered she was Jewish 12 years earlier. Warsaw, 2016. 11 x 14 in.

Participants in the fifth annual March of Remembrance commemorating the 74th anniversary of the first massive deportation to the extermination camp Treblinka, passing the Anielewicza tram stop as they make their way through the former Warsaw Ghetto. Warsaw, 2016. 16 x 20 in.

About the Artist

In his 40-year career, freelance photographer Chuck Fishman has focused on social and political issues with a strong humanistic concern.

His work has been extensively published, exhibited and collected worldwide, and has earned him prestigious World Press Photo Foundation medals four times. His photographs have appeared on the covers of Time, Life, Fortune, Newsweek, The London Sunday Times, The Economist and numerous others, and have been selected for publication in the American Photography and Communication Arts juried annuals. Fishman’s work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery; the United Nations; POLIN The Museum of the History of Polish Jews; The Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; The Studio Museum in Harlem; and Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, among many others, as well as in private and corporate collections.

Fishman’s first monograph, Polish Jews: The Final Chapter, was published in 1977 in the US. He has worked on book projects for publishers worldwide, from France to Singapore to Papua New Guinea. Exhibitions of his work include solo shows in the US and Europe, and influential group exhibitions globally, including the International Center of Photography in New York City and the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China.

He lives in New York with his wife, Susan.

All images © Chuck Fishman.

This text appeared in the brochure produced in conjunction with the exhibition Chuck Fishman: Roots, Resilience and Renewal–A Portrait of Polish Jews, 1975–2016, on view in the Derfner Judaica Museum from September 17, 2017–January 7, 2018.

Header Image: Chuck Fishman, Participants in the fifth annual March of Remembrance, commemorating the 74th anniversary of the first massive deportation to the extermination camp in Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto, passing the Anielewicza tram stop, named after Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the first armed action of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Warsaw, 2016. © Chuck Fishman

Jointly organized with Jewish Studies at Fordham University.

As a member of the American Alliance of Museums, the Hebrew Home at Riverdale by RiverSpring Health is committed to publicly exhibiting its art collection  throughout its 32-acre campus including Derfner Judaica Museum and a sculpture garden overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades. Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection provide educational and cultural programming for residents of the Hebrew Home, their families and the general public from throughout New York City, its surrounding suburbs and visitors from elsewhere. RiverSpring Health is a nonprofit, non-sectarian geriatric organization serving more than 12,000 older adults in greater New York through its resources and community service programs. Museum hours: Sunday–Thursday, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Art Collection and grounds open daily, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Call 718.581.1596 for holiday hours and to schedule group tours or for further information, visit our website at http://www.riverspringhealth.org/art

Additional funding provided by Joseph Alexander Foundation, the Jan Karski Educational Foundation, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

 

5901 Palisade Avenue
Riverdale, New York 10471
Tel. 718.581.1596
http://www.riverspringhealth.org/art

 

Text by Reba Wulkan, Guest Curator
On view from March 26 – July 30, 2017

As described in Genesis, at the advent of the world, God initiated the very first separation, using the term vayavdel (translated as “and He divided”). The world came into being through a series of divisions: light and darkness, day and night, sea and land, animals and human beings. Separation is intrinsic to the biblical Creation and to the human story, with its geographic, physical and spiritual borders. While the creation narrative applies to all of humankind, a more specific separation is described in the chosenness of Abraham. To be chosen means to be different from everyone else. Abraham is called an ivri and scholars note that through his discovery of monotheism, he separated himself, putting himself on one side, ever echad, and the rest of the world, mi’ever hasheni, on the other side. The story of the Jewish people is fraught with separation and division; at times some Jews have attempted to keep themselves separate; while at other times, it is the rest of the world that has insisted on separation. Individuals and communities are in a tug of war with themselves and with each other, creating boundaries, pushing the limits of borders and attempting to bridge differences. This tension offers a challenge to contemporary artists, who through a variety of art forms explore moral and spiritual challenges, gender identities, ethnic and national origins, geopolitics and tolerance, among other concerns.

In today’s turbulent times, the geopolitical climate of the world seems to be driving people further and further apart. This condition—untampered by humanitarian and ethical considerations—mitigates the hope for peace. Respecting borders and boundaries, while building bridges, offers the possibility of realizing a just and lasting coexistence between nations, ethnicities, genders and religions. Attempting to address such concerns, this exhibition presents works by artists living in the U.S., Israel and Argentina, several of whom are concerned with ideas of spatial boundaries that unite and bring communities together, while others engage with personal borders that have challenged notions of Jewish identity, gender, ethnic or national background; still others confront geographical borders, conceptual and physical walls. Many offer bridges for the sake of humanity.

In Exile, 2015, Andi LaVine Arnovitz addresses loss of home, border crossings and potential bridges to a new life in an installation of fragile porcelain houses encased in silk organza bags. The artist refers to the history of Jews during the Passover exodus, the Babylonian exile and mass deportations during World War II, while also addressing the refugee crisis and persecution of Syrians and Afghans under the domination of ISIS. Her other work, Garments of Reconciliation, 2009, creates a dialogue between Palestinians and Jews in Israel in child-size clothing that combines fabrics from Palestinian embroideries with Jewish prayer vests. Working with factory workers in Ramallah, Arnovitz appropriates and combines traditional garments of male/female, Jew/Palestinian “to create a hopeful framework for positive change,” she has said.

Tova Beck-Friedman’s two videos are about women who confront life’s boundaries: one is about aging and the other is the story of Lot’s wife. In On the Other Side, 2015, Beck-Friedman identifies with a woman’s vanishing youth: “We live within boundaries, some of which are marked and physical, while others are cognitive and implied.” Based on a poem by Natalie H. Rogers, Beck-Friedman points to crossing a threshold in the aging process as if from a distance. Lot’s Wife reveals the social divide between genders. The wife of Lot, Abraham’s nephew, “remains nameless,” while bearing the brunt of the punishment, turning into a pillar of salt. The artist comments: “An integral part of growing up in Israel was absorbing the concepts of the biblical stories as the link to our past. Moving to the U.S. in the 1970s, I was affected by the women’s movement and began probing into and re-defining the myths on which I was raised—linguistically, metaphorically and visually.”

Raised in predominantly Hindu and Muslim India, Siona Benjamin’s work is inspired by traditional miniature painting, Sephardi icons and the Bible. The geographical and spiritual boundaries Benjamin has crossed and her hybrid identity are reflected in a uniquely personal style. She appropriates heroines and goddesses and places them into contemporary scenarios fraught with conflict and evil, acknowledging current hostilities all over the world. In her two paintings from the Finding Home series, Lilith in Pardes, 2008, and Curry-oke, 2000, Benjamin depicts the defiant Lilith, said to be Adam’s first wife, and Kali, associated both with death and motherhood, combining Indian, Jewish and American iconography in a pop art style.

Ken Goldman’s L’lo Reshut, (Without Domain), 2016, relates to a performance in which the artist walked a section of the eruv of his kibbutz community on a tightrope three meters off the ground. The eruv is a symbolic boundary used to unite individual domains into one shared domain, allowing observant Jews, for example, to carry on the Sabbath; its literal meaning is intermingling. By walking the red line with one foot in the collective domain and one foot out, Goldman attempts to unite and find balance within the “new kibbutz” after its members voted to no longer preserve the classic, collective lifestyle they had maintained for nearly 70 years.

Tamar Hirschl’s Strife #4, 2015, is part of a series of paintings on recycled vinyl depicting maps. “In the tradition of Jasper Johns’s Map, 1961, the map of Israel becomes a painting readymade. This has given me an outlet to express the histories of various cultures vying for territory through the formal processes of painting. . . .The green borders [denoting Israel’s pre-1967 border] are conceptualized as permeable barriers, whereas red is a hard margin,” Hirschl has stated. The Star of David is both a reminder of past trauma—the yellow armbands and badges imposed on Jews during the Holocaust—and signifies the future of Jewish identity represented by the green, which symbolizes new growth.

Sara Klar’s Je Suis Juive, I Am You (Talmud Dreds and Tefillin Bindings), 2015, reimagines traditional male prayer phylacteries (tefillin) in a space that allows for both femininity and masculinity, personal choice, individual expression and inclusiveness. Traditional boundaries of gender in religious commandments are central for Klar, who left Orthodox Judaism when she was 21 years old after receiving a Jewish divorce, or get. In defiance of the gender imbalance in the religious power structure, Klar reclaims her connection to religion, her identity as a woman and her relationship to her Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, neighborhood through her work.

In Lunar Eclipse, 2015, Lea Laukstein offers a conceptual bridge between male and female roles, challenging the stereotype of women as mothers and housekeepers eclipsed by their husbands, especially within the religious community. The artist embraces a kabbalistic concept that compares male and female to the sun and moon, respectively. In the video, a mysterious silence pervades an interior bathed in delicate light and shadow. Drawing on her knowledge of traditional painting and of contemporary art, her work is a carefully composed investigation of narratives of identity, religion and gender. In Embryo, 2015, Laukstein pictures the world within the womb, which she describes as “the constant kicking, the movement of fluids, the mother’s heartbeat, the lights and shadows that penetrate through the abdomen and noises heard nearby, from outside the womb,” and reflects on the societal limitations imposed on pregnant women.

David Moss, a master calligrapher and illuminator, depicts a map of the Jewish community in Roaming Rome, 2016, in a succinct, illustrative style arranged like a page of the Talmud. Moss depicts key places and symbols of Jewish contributions to Roman culture, evidence of the Jewish presence in the city dating back 2,150 years, including the Ostia Synagogue, the Arch of Titus, Jewish catacombs and the walled Ghetto, among others. “It is an example of world persecution, European bestiality and man’s degradation of the Jews going back to ancient times,” Moss has said.

Laura Murlender’s painting Tracing Path, 2016, reflects a life’s journey of building emotional walls to protect the self, bridging connections with the past and crossing geographic borders between Argentina, Israel, Mexico, France and the U.S. Murlender’s experience as a “disappeared” under the former dictatorship in Argentina informs her exploration of personal and collective transitions and the construction of memory and identity. Sequence, 2016, uses abstract geometric patterns expressed through layers of oil and mixed media where emerging lines and patterns resonate with the sensitive place of past itineraries. Reinforced by the structural grid format, her visual language reinforces a blending of time and place. Her work expresses movement and fragmented time within the grid format meant to establish boundaries and barriers consistent with her personal history of repression and resilience.

Flo Razowsky combines art with activism and has been photographing international border walls and fences since 2002. Her project, entitled Up Against the Wall, began while Razowsky was living in the Palestinian territories and witnessed the construction of a 500-mile-long, 25-foot-high border wall. In 2008, she began to document other such walls, including between Ukraine/Slovakia, Serbia/Croatia, Mexico/U.S. and Morocco/Spanish Melilla. Razowsky has observed that such walls are ubiquitous and in many places people regularly risk imprisonment or death to try and cross them. Her photographs “show this world to those of us who benefit the most, those of us not forced up against the walls of this life,” she explains.

Andrea Robbins and Max Becher’s Following the Ten Commandments: Lyon County Courthouse, Yerington, NV, 2012-2014, is part of a series that presents an ironic paradox between public buildings and religious monuments, despite the separation of church and state. The artists have been photographing Ten Commandments monuments on public land: at courthouses, public schools, parks and county seats across the U.S. Many of these religious monuments are or have been under legal dispute. Some have remained in place for many years and were gifted by the Fraternal Order of the Eagles in conjunction with the release of the 1956 fi lm The Ten Commandments and were suggested by the film’s director Cecil B. DeMille.

Ben Schachter’s Architectural Follies of the Talmud, 2014, are playful renderings of Talmudic commentary. The title refers to the follies popular in European landscapes in the 18th and 19th century. These small, built curiosities that punctuated rolling gardens often resembled ruined Greek temples. As Schachter describes them: “My Follies envision the strange spatial questions the Rabbis encountered. Each one is numbered corresponding to the daf, or page of Talmud, it envisions. For example, Architectural Folly 2A depicts several doorways, the most basic element of an eruv. If the lintel, the bar that runs across the top, is tilted or otherwise looks like it is collapsing, well, it is not a door. . . . Some think of the Eruv as a fence, but I like to think of it as a garden wall. . . .”

Ruth Schreiber created An Oscar for my Daughter, the Surrogate, 2015, to recognize her daughter’s selfless act in becoming a surrogate for another family. In creating the bronze sculpture, the artist stretches the boundaries of Jewish religious law (Halacha) and human emotions. She explains: “We were speechless at first, but since then have been bursting with pride, . . .” as she and her husband observed the physical and spiritual demands placed on their daughter and then how she handed “over this miracle gift and then quietly” continued “with her own life.” Schreiber’s Enter the Eruv, 2011, is an interactive glass map of the North West London eruv that engages the viewer with motion sensors and lights. Until recently, there were no eruvim in the United Kingdom. However, a new awareness in society and religious feminism in the Jewish community precipitated a change and an 11-mile eruv was created in 2003. Based on text from Genesis, the watercolor Abraham’s Aliya, 2016, maps the journey that Abraham took from Ur Kaśdim into Canaan along with a list of the countries from which Jews have immigrated to Israel.

Angela Strassheim is fascinated with rituals of praying throughout the world. In her photograph Saugy Praying, 2008, a young Jewish girl finds a spot to pray on one side of a wall in a community housing settlement in central Israel, known as Yad Binyamin. Saugy has carved out a personal space among these impersonal, prefabricated buildings. The artist explains that the young girl, who was 13 at the time, loved to pray and learn Torah. She elaborates: “In the evenings the men from the community would line up on the sidewalk on the other side of the wall surrounding Saugy’s apartment home. . . . They would pray on one side and she on the other.” Then Strassheim would wait until the men left to photograph Saugy, which lends a sense of voyeurism to the scene both because of the presence of the photographer and of the viewer of her image.

Ahuva Winslow’s Creation: Separation, 2017, reflects on the separations of Creation. The divine process of division and separation is a theme repeated throughout Creation, both of the world and of man and woman. The artist uses bands of color that frame the canvas along with organic forms that flow within the center of the work to suggest continuous flux—from the creation of the physical world to the boundaries that Jewish law mandates throughout one’s life. She reflects on the borders of identity and the struggles presented to her in life as an Orthodox Jewish woman artist.

Pavel Wolberg’s Tel Aviv, Purim, 2015, captures the diverse cultures in Tel Aviv’s clubs in the context of the Jewish holiday of Purim. The masquerades of Purim—a holiday that celebrates survival—provide a rare occasion where dressing up as the opposite sex is permissible. It has been said about Wolberg’s work that he is able to view his adopted country both intimately and from a distance, and to capture the private moments amidst the complex reality of conflicts and political instability in the region. He captures war, terror, occupation, army, intifada, Ultra-Orthodox and Hassidic communities, downtown Tel Aviv, religious and secular in large, even panoramic, formats.

The artists

Andi LaVine Arnovitz was born in 1959 and raised in Kansas City, MO. She earned a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and immigrated to Israel in 1999; Arnovitz is a printmaker, paper-manipulator, bookmaker and assemblage artist and has worked in all media. Her work has been shown in Europe, Israel, Canada, China, the U.S. and Eastern Europe. www.andiarnovitz.com

Tova Beck-Friedman was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, studied in the U.S. and Japan and works and lives in New York City as an artist, filmmaker, curator and writer. Her work has been shown internationally in festivals, museums and galleries, including Grounds for Sculpture, Yeshiva University Museum, Newark Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts and The Shoah Film Collection. www.tbfstudio.com

Siona Benjamin is from Bombay, India, and lives in New Jersey. Born in 1969, she received her first MFA in painting and a second in theater set design. She has exhibited in the U.S., Europe and Asia. She was awarded two Fulbright Fellowships: Faces: Weaving Indian Jewish Narratives and Motherland to Fatherland: Indian Transcultural Jews. She is represented by ACA Galleries in New York. www.artsiona.com

Ken Goldman was born in Memphis, TN, in 1960, and studied at Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College. In 1985, he moved to Kibbutz Shluchot in the Beit Shean area in Israel; he is an observant Jew and artist. His mixed media works have been shown in Israel, Europe and the U.S. and are in both private and public collections. www.kengoldmanart.com

Tamar Hirschl was born in Zagreb, Croatia, in 1939, and immigrated to Tel Aviv. She lives there and in New York. Hirschl has degrees from Lesley College and Cambridge University, and also studied in Israel at the State College of Art, Kalisher School of Art and Bezalel School of Art. Her work has been exhibited at museums in Israel, Europe and the U.S. www.tamarhirschl.com

Sara Klar was born in New York in 1959, studied at Brooklyn College, Barnard and Columbia University and has had solo exhibitions and group exhibitions in many local galleries in the New York area, including the Abrazzo Interno Gallery, My Sense of Place, A Virtual Art Exhibition, Pierro Foundation and Seton Hall University Walsh Gallery; and Techingsmuseet (Museum of Drawings), Prime Matter, Laholm, Sweden. www.SaraKlar.com

Lea Laukstein was born in 1986 in Valka, Latvia, converted to Judaism and lives in Israel. She is a multimedia artist, who works in video art, sound, installation and sculpture. Laukstein studied classical art in Latvia and at Emunah College of Arts and Technology, Jerusalem, and Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Ramat Gan, Israel. She also studied new media in Jerusalem at The Naggar School of Art. www.youtube.com/user/LeaLaukstein

David Moss was born in Youngstown, OH, in 1946, and moved to Jerusalem in 1983. He studied at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, and had residencies at Judah Magnes Museum, San Francisco, and Mishkenot Shaanaim, Jerusalem. Moss has created hundreds of privately-commissioned illuminated marriage contracts and Jewish manuscripts and has received the Israel Museum’s Jesselson Prize for contemporary Judaica. www.bet-alphaeditions.com

Laura Murlender was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1957. She was a “disappeared,” kidnapped in 1976 when the country was under military rule, and was sent to Israel after she was liberated. She has also lived in France and Mexico and graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, and the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and was awarded many art and photography awards. www.lauramurlender.com

Flo Razowsky was born in Chicago in 1974 and lives in Los Angeles. Her project Up Against the Wall began in 2002 while she was living in the Palestinian territories and witnessed the construction of the border wall in the West Bank. She has continued to photograph borders between Ukraine/Slovakia, Serbia/Croatia, Mexico/U.S. and Morocco/Spanish Melilla, among others. Her work has been exhibited in Minneapolis, San Francisco and Arizona and many online venues. www.flowalksfree.com

Andrea Robbins and Max Becher are based in New York and have been working collaboratively since 1984. Becher was born in Dusseldorf, Germany, in 1964 and Robbins in Boston, MA, in 1963. Their photo-based conceptual artwork is in the collections of museums in Europe and across the U.S., including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Both artists earned their BFA at Cooper Union; Robbins earned her MFA at Hunter College in New York City, and Becher received his MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. They are represented by Sonnabend Gallery, New York. www.robbinsbecher.com

Ben Schachter was born in 1974 in New York, lives in Pittsburgh and is professor of visual art at Saint Vincent College, Latrobe, PA. He earned MFA and MS degrees from Pratt Institute; received the Hadassah Brandeis research award; and has been exhibited at Yale University, Yeshiva University Museum, the Jewish Museum, the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, the Mattress Factory and other venues throughout the U.S. www.benschachter.com

Ruth Schreiber was born in London in 1947 and lives and works in Jerusalem. She studied art in London and California and at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem. Her work is in private collections in the U.K, the U.S. and Israel, and in the Ben Uri Gallery, London, the Jerusalem Print Workshop, the Ein Harod Museum of Art and Yad Vashem Museum, Israel. www.ruthschreiber.com

Angela Strassheim was born in 1969 in Bloomfield, IA, and lives and works in Connecticut. She has a BFA in Media Arts from Minneapolis College of Art and Design, a forensic and biomedical photography certifi cation and received her MFA in photography from Yale University. Strassheim has exhibited nationally and internationally, including in the Whitney Biennial and Re-Generation: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow at the Musée d’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland. www.angelastrassheim.com

Ahuva Winslow was born in New York in 1978 and lives in Bergenfield, NJ. She was a Keith Haring scholar for art education, graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and is Director of Visual Arts at the Frisch School in Paramus, NJ. Her work was exhibited at the Belskie Museum of Art and Science in Closter, NJ, The Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, Bronx, NY, Westbeth Gallery and Yeshiva University Museum. www.ahuvamalka.com

Pavel Wolberg was born in 1966 in Leningrad, USSR (now Saint Petersburg, Russia). An artist and former photojournalist, he immigrated to Israel in 1973 and graduated from the Camera Obscura School of Art in Tel Aviv. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, including the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Jewish Museum, Berlin, Jewish Museum, New York, and George Eastman House. He is represented by Dvir Art Gallery, Tel Aviv, and by Meislin Projects, New York. www.pavelwolberg.com

Checklist of the Exhibition
All works courtesy of the artist unless otherwise indicated.

Andi LaVine Arnovitz (born Kansas City, MO, 1959; lives and works in Jerusalem)
Exile, 2015
Porcelain, linen cord and silk, dimensions variable, each house, 4 x 4 3/4 in.

Garments of Reconciliation, 2009
Egyptian cotton, digital scans on linen and embroidery threads, each, 24 3/8 x 12 in.

Tova Beck-Friedman (born Tel Aviv, Israel; lives and works in New York City)
Lot’s Wife, 2011
Digital video, 4 min.

On the Other Side, 2015
Digital video, 6 min.
Courtesy Tova Beck-Friedman, Director

Siona Benjamin (born Bombay, India, 1969: lives and works in New Jersey)
Finding Home #99: “Lilith in Pardes,” 2008
Gouache on museum board, 10 3/8 x 7 1/2 in.

Finding Home #40: “Curry-oke,” 2000
Gouache and gold leaf on paper, 20 1/2 x 15 in.
Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York

Ken Goldman (born Memphis, TN, 1960; lives and works in Bet Shean, Israel)
L’lo Reshut (Without Domain), 2016
Digital print, 43 1/4 x 55 1/8 in.

Tamar Hirschl (born Zagreb, Croatia, 1939; lives and works in Tel Aviv, New York and Jersey City, NJ)
Strife #4, 2015
Acrylic on repurposed vinyl, 50 x 34 in.

Sara Klar (born Far Rockaway, NY, 1959; lives and works in Brooklyn)
Je Suis Juive, I Am You (Talmud Dreds and Tefillin Bindings), 2015-2017
Acrylic, Talmud pages, phylacteries (tefillin) case and straps and mixed media on canvas, 5 x 7 ft. 3 in. x 8 in.

Lea Laukstein (born Valka, Latvia, 1986; lives and works in Lod, Israel)
Lunar Eclipse, 2015
Digital video, 6.5 min.

Embryo, 2015
Digital video, 5 min.

David Moss (born Youngstown, OH, 1946; lives and works in Jerusalem)
Roaming Rome, 2016
Giclée print, 20 x 18 in.
Courtesy Bet Alpha Editions

Laura Murlender (born Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1957; lives and works in Buenos Aires)
Sequence, 2016
Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in.

Tracing Path, 2016
Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in.

Flo Razowsky (born Chicago, 1974; lives and works in Los Angeles)
Melilla (Spanish border at Morocco), 2007
Digital photograph on microfiber, 5 x 5 ft.

Playas de Tijuana (southern U.S. border), 2014
Digital photograph on microfiber, 5 x 5 ft.

Jerusalem, 2008
Digital photograph on microfiber, 5 x 5 ft.

Andrea Robbins and Max Becher (born Boston, MA, 1963, and Dusseldorf, Germany, 1964; live and work in New York)
Following the Ten Commandments: Lyon County Courthouse, Yerington, NV, 2012–2014
Mesh print, 6 x 8 ft.
Courtesy Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, Sonnabend Gallery

Ben Schachter (born New York City, 1974; lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA)
Architectural Folly 2A, 2014
Marker, acrylic and vellum on paper, 20 x 16 in.

Architectural Folly 11A, 2014
Marker, acrylic and vellum on paper, 20 x 16 in.

Architectural Folly 11B, 2014
Marker, acrylic and vellum on paper, 20 x 16 in.

Architectural Folly 16A, 2014
Marker, acrylic and vellum on paper, 20 x 16 in.

Ruth Schreiber (born London, 1947; lives and works in Jerusalem)
Enter the Eruv, 2011
Tempered glass, Perspex, motion sensors and LEDs, 5 1/2 x 43 1/4 x 36 1/4 in.

An Oscar for my Daughter the Surrogate, 2015
Bronze, 14 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 6 1/4 in.

Abraham’s Aliya, 2016
Watercolor, pencil and ink, 13 3/4 x 19 5/8 in.

Angela Strassheim (born Bloomfield, IA, 1969; lives and works in Stamford, CT)
Saugy Praying, 2008
Digital print, 24 x 30 in.

Ahuva Winslow (born New York, 1978; lives and works in Bergenfield, NJ)
Creation: Separation, 2017
Oil on canvas, 56 x 56 in.

Pavel Wolberg (born Leningrad, USSR, now Saint Petersburg, Russia, 1966; lives and works in Tel Aviv)
Tel Aviv, Purim, 2015
Digital print, 51 1/4 x 62 3/4 in.
Courtesy Meislin Projects

As a member of the American Alliance of Museums, the Hebrew Home at Riverdale by RiverSpring Health is committed to publicly exhibiting its art collection throughout its 32-acre campus including Derfner Judaica Museum and a sculpture garden overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades. Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection provide educational and cultural programming for residents of the Hebrew Home, their families and the general public from throughout New York City, its surrounding suburbs and visitors from elsewhere. RiverSpring Health is a nonprofit, non-sectarian geriatric organization serving more than 12,000 older adults in greater New York through its resources and community service programs. Museum hours: Sunday–Thursday, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Art Collection and grounds open daily, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m.

5901 Palisade Avenue
Riverdale, New York 10471
Tel. 718.581.1596
http://www.riverspringhealth.org/art

This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

 

Text by Emily O’Leary, Associate Curator
On view from January 22 – May 14, 2017

Susan Schwalb: Metalpoint Paintings features 15 paintings executed in metalpoint and colored gesso by master metalpoint artist Susan Schwalb, who has been working in the centuries-old technique since 1973. She began experimenting with silverpoint after encountering the medium unexpectedly via an artist friend. Today, she is recognized as one of the most important living artists whose work exemplifies this technique in contemporary art.

Historically, the practice of silverpoint, the most common type of metalpoint, dates back to the Middle Ages. Artworks that use this technique are executed with a stylus that creates fine lines when applied to specially coated paper. Once a line is laid down, it cannot be erased or changed. Schwalb uses a variety of metals in her work, including copper, aluminum, gold, platinum, and tin. Working on a prepared surface of paper laid on wood panel, she draws painstakingly thin lines in different formations.  Schwalb often coats the paper herself, creating a surface which becomes an important part of the work.

Schwalb’s initial foray into metalpoint began with figurative subjects, such as flowers and landscapes, but quickly shifted to more abstract works. She was particularly inspired in the late 1970s by tribal motifs (Weber, 233). Schwalb continued to experiment with how the compositional elements of metal, color, line, and light interact, and are capable of evoking a variety of ethereal, delicate effects.

Traditionally, metalpoint is a medium applied to paper. Beginning in the 15th century, silverpoint was most commonly used the same way that graphite would be later, since it rendered fine lines and gradations that few other materials could match at the time. Even in the 20th century, though, many artists who worked in silverpoint continued to produce primarily figurative art, albeit in a modernist idiom. Schwalb, on the other hand, pioneered inroads into the contemporary potential of metalpoint. In addition to turning to pure abstraction, she also incorporated materials not seen in traditional metalpoint, such as metals other than silver, along with brightly colored or black grounds.

In the three series included in the exhibition—Harmonizations (2015), Intermezzo (2015–2016), and Polyphony (2013–2016)—the exploration of luminosity evolves with each body of work. Subtle tonal shifts depend on the type of ground, along with the process of incising and layering the metals. As Schwalb stated in an interview, different metals also age in different ways. For example, silver and copper both tarnish, whereas gold and platinum do not.

Schwalb intentionally works in series, drawing inspiration from previous works to create new ones. For example, Harmonizations is a direct continuation of the spatial and compositional explorations that began in Polyphony, a series focusing on overlapping lines and shapes. Each piece in Harmonizations is executed on a square picture surface and comprised of 36 smaller squares, with a single one left blank. The series explores the idea of the void, or a space intentionally left open and unoccupied. Working in a square format has been paramount to Schwalb’s work since 1997.

The series derive their titles from musical terminology, affecting the same type of intangible space that music creates for a listener. The paintings are often meditative, much like Schwalb’s artistic process, allowing the viewer to become lost in the myriad of colors and tones found in each work. The nature of the void and of pure abstraction in Schwalb’s paintings invite the viewer to reflect and ponder the depths of luminosity.

About the Artist

 Schwalb is considered one of the foremost figures in the contemporary practice of metalpoint. She was one of three living artists, and the only woman, to be included in the major 2015 exhibition Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns which was mounted at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), before traveling to The British Museum (London). Currently, two of her prints are on view in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Drawings and Prints: Selections from The Met Collection in The Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery through January 30, 2017.

Schwalb was born in New York City and studied at the High School of Music & Art, and at Carnegie-Mellon University. She has been in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2010,’07, ‘92,’73), the MacDowell Colony (1989, ’75,’74), Yaddo (’81) and has had two residencies in Israel in 1994 at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, Jerusalem, and the Tel Aviv Artists’ Studios. She has had over 35 solo exhibitions and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work is represented in most major public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; The British Museum, London; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Kupferstichkabinett—Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England. For more information about the artist, visit http://www.susanschwalb.com/

 

About Garvey|Simon, New York

Elizabeth K. Garvey is the co-founder and owner of Garvey|Simon, New York, a boutique gallery in Chelsea that is focused on drawing, works on paper, unusual materials, and design, while also acting as curator and advisor to select private clients.

Further reading:

Corona, Sarah. “Interview with Susan Schwalb.” WSImag.com. Wall Street International, 16 Jun. 2015. Web. 05 Jan. 2017.

Weber, Bruce. “Modern and Contemporary Drawing in Metalpoint.” In Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonard to Jasper Johns. Exh. cat. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Checklist of the Exhibition

All works courtesy Garvey|Simon, New York

Harmonizations I, 2015, goldpoint, silverpoint, green and yellow gesso on paper on panel, 24 x 24 x 2 inches

Harmonizations II, 2015, goldpoint, silverpoint, carmine and yellow gesso on paper on panel, 24 x 24 x 2 inches

Harmonizations III, 2015, goldpoint, silverpoint, Jaune Brillant and yellow gesso on paper on panel, 24 x 24 x 2 inches

Harmonizations IV,  2015, goldpoint, silverpoint, copperpoint, black and yellow gesso on paper on panel, 24 x 24 x 2 inches

Harmonizations V, 2015, goldpoint, silverpoint, platinumpoint, yellow gesso on paper on panel, 24 x 24 x 2 inches

Harmonizations VI, 2015, goldpoint, silverpoint, platinumpoint, grey and yellow gesso, aluminum wool pad on paper on panel, 24 x 24 x 2 inches

Intermezzo XXV, 2015, tinpoint, silverpoint, goldpoint, copperpoint, graphite, green gesso on panel, 16 x 16 x 2 ¼ inches

Intermezzo XXIII, 2015, silverpoint, copperpoint, aluminumpoint, brasspoint, black gesso on paper on panel, 16 x 16 x 1 ¾ inches

Intermezzo XXIV, 2015, silverpoint, goldpoint, tinpoint, graphite, carmine gesso on paper on panel, 16 x 16 x 1 ¾ inches

Intermezzo XXVII, 2016, silverpoint, goldpoint, graphite, aluminum wool pad and brass brush, yellow, carmine and black gesso on panel, 16 x 16 x 2 ¼ inches

Intermezzo XXVI (for Paris), 2016, silverpoint, tinpoint, goldpoint, aluminum wool pad, graphite, carmine, blue, and white gesso on panel, 16 x 16 x 2 ½ inches

Intermezzo IX, 2014, tinpoint, silverpoint, goldpoint, aluminum, graphite, copper wool pad and black gesso on panel, 16 x 16 x 2 ¼ inches

Intermezzo XXVIII, 2015, silverpoint, goldpoint, colored pencil, yellow gesso on paper on panel, 16 x 16 x 1 ¾ inches

Polyphony VI, 2013, silverpoint, goldpoint, copperpoint, blue gesso on paper on panel, 16 x 16 x 1 ½ inches

Polyphony XI, 2015, silverpoint, goldpoint, copperpoint, green gesso on panel, 16 x 16 x 1 ¾ inches

This text appeared in the brochure produced in conjunction with the exhibition Susan Schwalb: Metalpoint Paintings on view in the Elma and Milton A. Gilbert Pavilion Gallery from January 15–May 14, 2017, open to the public daily from 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m.

Special thanks to Sarah Corona for proposing this project and helping to facilitate the exhibition.

As a member of the American Alliance of Museums, Hebrew Home at Riverdale by RiverSpring Health is committed to publicly exhibiting its art collection throughout its 32-acre campus including the Derfner Judaica Museum and a sculpture garden overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades. The Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection provides educational and cultural programming for residents of the Hebrew Home, their families, and the general public from throughout New York City, its surrounding suburbs, and visitors from elsewhere. RiverSpring Health is a nonprofit, non-sectarian geriatric organization serving more than 12,000 older adults in greater New York through its resources and community service programs. Museum hours: Sunday–Thursday, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Art Collection and grounds open daily, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Call 718.581.1596 for holiday hours and to schedule group tours, or for further information, visit our website at http://www.riverspringhealth.org/art

This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

5901 Palisade Avenue
Riverdale, New York 10471
Tel. 718.581.1596
http://www.riverspringhealth.org/art