Jews and American

art

DAVID STOLLER

JEWS & AMERICAN MODERNISM

Art Lectures in New Hope

IN THE DECADE BETWEEN1905–1915, more than one million Jews immigrated to America. Among these were families of four artists who would one day be recognized as masters of 20th Century American modern art: Ben Shahn, Mark Rothko, Louise Nevelson, and Helen Frankenthaler.

Shahn would become one of the country’s most celebrated artists in the ’30s and ’40s, and the leading proponent of “Social Realism.” Rothko’s rich rectangular fields of color would mark him a leader in Abstract Expressionism. Nevelson became famous for her monumental wall pieces and outdoor sculpture (leading generations of women into a province previously reserved for men) and use of found materials. And at age 24, Frankenthaler became the leading exponent of color field painting and, as one of her fellow artists observed, “The bridge between [Jackson] Pollack and what was possible”.

These four are representative of an extraordinary group of Jewish artists that led the way into American modernism, including Newman, Gottlieb, Guston, Krasner, Shapiro, Rivers, Steinberg, and many others. What explains the outsized contribution and influence of Jewish artists in America? They were disproportionately fewer in number, unfamiliar with the language and culture (nearly all Yiddish speaking), and they lacked claim of any artistic heritage. Driven by their ambitions and outsider status, they embraced the chance to make their mark as individuals; inclined to an inwardness cultivated over generations of dispossession, they pushed themselves to extraordinary emotional depths.

Shahn, Rothko, Nevelson and Frankenthaler played a frontline role in American art, and it is impossible to disentangle their Jewish identities from their work. Kehilat Hanahar, New Hope’s Jewish Reconstructionist Synagogue, is presenting three lectures on Zoom by David Stoller, covering the story of these four remarkable artists, on successive Sundays: February 13, 20, and 27, at 1:00. The public is invited. Please register at littleshul@kehilathanahar.org for more details on these and other cultural and educational programs offered by the synagogue. n

Rothko in his West 53rd Street studio, painting what may have been a version of Untitled, 1952–1953. Photo by Henry Elkan, c.1953. Courtesy of Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao)

Mark Rothko, Orange, Red, Yellow, 1956. Helen Frankenthaler works on an abstract expressionist painting in her studio. NYC, 1957. © Burt Glinn, Magnum Photos

Helen Frankenthaler, Jacob’s Ladder, 1957.