Post-Jewish Painting And Its Discontents
Ludwig Schwarz's 2000 assemblage of seven altered thrift store-bought paintings, "Untitled (Born to Be Mild)," can be said to evoke Piet Mondrian's abstract works, which rely heavily upon a simple palette and the grid.
Artists Speak Out for Israel on Independence Day
Not all artists are taken hostage by the BDS movement
We Are Patriarchs: Paintings by Elke Reva Sudin
One way to understand the Biblical is through contemporary eyes, literally. And so artist Elke Reva Sudin has recast biblical figures through contemporary portraits. The juxtaposition is revealing.
Doll (Haunted) House: Two ‘Naïve’ Holocaust Artists at GW’s Brady Gallery
In an interview for an article published in these pages (Aug. 25, 2004), Jewish Bombay-born painter Siona Benjamin discussed her technique of hiding troubling imagery in the seemingly inviting floral and decorative borders of Indian and Persian miniature-influenced paintings. "Under the beauty of miniatures you can hide danger," she told me of her "Finding Home" series. "The beauty of miniatures draws you in-veiling and revealing."
Foundations Of Jewish Life: An Auction At Kestenbaum
The foundations of a Jewish life may be discerned in three outstanding works of Jewish art that I had the pleasure to preview for the Kestenbaum auction scheduled for March 30, 2004.
Haredi Comedian Is Hilarious
After giving a talk at a melaveh malka about his work experience a few years ago, people told him he had enough material to do a standup routine. They were right.
Letter From Tel Aviv
A new generation of Sabra artists have come to the fore, creating imaginative and attractive pieces of arts.
Leonard Everett Fisher’s Challenge
Just look at the expression on Yonah's face. It combines fear and incomprehension at his terrible punishment of floating in the belly of the great fish. So too Noah peering out of the ark, perched on the edge of understanding that there might be a future for mankind. Both works point to the genius of Leonard Everett Fisher as an artist and interpreter of biblical narrative.
My Jewish Art Criticism Dénouement
It all started at an art and education conference at the Yeshiva University Museum. When one of the speakers misidentified a Goya painting at the Frick Collection, both the gentleman sitting next to me and I turned to each other and corrected the error simultaneously.
Art And Auschwitz: Art Created In The Holocaust At The Brooklyn Museum
The Holocaust was the largest mass murder in human history. It casts an indelible shadow over everything that follows, twisting morality and normative values in unfathomable ways. The vast complicity of Western Civilization in the pre-meditated murder of six million Jews taints all culture and intellectual life to this day.
Nechama Farber: From Belarus To Jerusalem
Little did artist Nechama Farber know, when growing up in Minsk, Belarus, that some day she would yearn to live in Israel, become an artist, sell her Judaic paintings, drawings and prints internationally, be commission to create portraits for Jewish families, and, most noteworthy, create an original painting for one of the most grandiose synagogues in Eastern Europe, the 102 year old Riga Synagogue in Latvia.
Jewish Women Artists Talk About Their Work (Part One)
On Sunday, February 18, I attended an opening at the Kraft Center for Jewish Life (also known as the Columbia/Barnard Hillel) for the exhibit Words Within.
Equus Opportunity
Now, only months after the artist’s death, is no time to be coy. Moshe Givati’s work is a revelation: dynamic, throbbing with life, pulsating with meaning. The exhibition “Equus Ambiguity – The Emergence of Maturity,” is up for only a few more days but I urge you to hurry to the Jadite Gallery and familiarize yourself with this under-recognized artist.
Aderaba – A Lesson In Achdut
Many Jewish songs have been written and composed based on Rabbi Elimelech’s writings and tefillot that he composed. Rabbi Elimelech was also a composer and composed a few niggunim.
Marking The Land Of Israel: Photographs Of Chanan Getraide
What makes the Land of Israel so special? Given to us by G-d, this wonderfully diverse corner of earth is much more of a gift than meets the eye.
The Divine Ecology Of Janet Shafner New Paintings
"When the Holy One, blessed is He, created the first man, He took him and led him around the trees of the Garden of Eden and said, 'Look at My works!
Honeybee Songs
Song of Songs is one of the most controversial books in Tanach because of its ambiguity.
Was Oppenheimer A Defender Or Destroyer Of Worlds?
Jewish physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's decision to move forward with the production of the atom bomb in 1945 represented the culmination of a moral dilemma of tremendous magnitude.
Sotheby’s Riches
The varieties of Jewish art are always a delight to explore, but occasionally an exhibition comes along that provides surprises and insights that trouble even the most assured of viewers.
Zionist Art Nouveau: Ideal Or Idealistic?
It's just about the last thing you'd suspect of relevance and contribution to anything culturally meaningful.
Should We Feel Guilty For Enjoying Holocaust Art?
Some of history's greatest paintings have explored tragedy, from Francisco Goya's "Saturn Devouring his Son" and etching series on "The Disasters of War" to Pablo Picasso's "Guernica" to John Singer Sargent's "Gassed."
In Search Of South African Jewish Art
I went to the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town with high hopes of seeing how South African Jews uniquely approached the fine arts and Jewish ritual objects.
Here I Learned Love
A Documentary Produced and Edited by Avi Angel
Based on “Three Mothers for Two Brothers” by Izhak Weinberg
54 minutes: Quad Cinema March 1...
An Artist In Love… With The Land Of Israel
When Rav Kook became the chief rabbi of Jerusalem, he visited the Bezalel Academy of Art, and encouraged the students to use their talents to paint landscapes of Eretz Yisrael to arouse a yearning for the Land in the hearts of everyone who viewed the paintings.
Yiddish Theater Is Alive and Well (at Least in Chicago), But What Does It...
Trying to summarize the plot of "Jacob and Jack," currently in its world premier at Victory Gardens in Chicago, is a bit like, well, trying to understand a Yiddish play if you don't speak Yiddish. The viewer quickly gets the sense that something really interesting is happening in the play's myriad flashbacks - which are simultaneously redundant and singular - but even after skimming the Jacob and Jack script, I'm still having trouble keeping the narrative and chronology straight.
A Middle Eastern Scavenger Hunt: Can Shaymos be Art?
Oftentimes, the art world functions like an ecosystem, whereby certain artist-producers generate innovative, new content, and artist-consumers readily borrow from those raw materials and shape them into new products.
Lynda Caspe: Biblical Reliefs and Cityscapes
Lynda Caspe’s current exhibition at the Derfner Museum is an extraordinary event. In this show of 12 bronze relief sculptures and 14 cityscape paintings we have the opportunity to see the full scope of her last six years of work that, as least with the sculptures, marked a radical change in subject matter and technique.
Robert Frank’s Empathetic Photographs At the Metropolitan Museum
In a 2008 photograph by Spencer Platt (Getty Images), a pedestrian wearing a red hooded sweatshirt and jeans and carrying a backpack walks down a rundown Detroit street. Behind him, graffiti covers the red and white brick buildings. Scrawled on one wall in enormous thick black letters, which are much larger than the figure, is the word "Help." In thinner lettering, partially obscured by the other graffiti inscription, someone has written: "It don't exist," presumably responding pessimistically to the call for help.
Rock-Hard Paintings
The notion of a foreground and a background in a painting is an illusion.
The Last Jew: A Tragedy By David Pinski
One hundred years after David Pinski's (1872-1959) "Di Familye Tzvi" was written, the scathing examination of the Jewish world that the play depicts is neither dated nor out of touch with contemporary Jewish life.