As for paintings, these were much in use in synagogues and houses already during Hellenistic times. There were many representations of King David and major Biblical events while other themes were derived from the pagan mythology such as Orpheus playing the harp and charming animals meaning the victory of soul over the forces of the universe and death. Later, Christianity was even a source of inspiration for Jewish artists. As an example the extraordinary paintings decorating the synagogue of Doura-Europos built during the 3rd Century were purely Greek in style. Wherever they went Jews would adopt the style of their countries of adoption. There was therefore a long period of artistic activity, with a concept originating from the Bible and Biblical times, which spanned over some 2000 years despite the fact that religion and the uncertainties of life caused by persecutions prevented a free and truly significant development of Jewish art which was so closely associated to religion that it could not be really perceived by gentiles, notably Voltaire, the well-known 18th-Century French writer and philosopher who denied its existence. Strangely enough, it was during the second half of the 19th Century that Jewish ritual art suffered a certain decline at a time when many Jews who wanted to free themselves from religious principles decided to leave their communities so as to live and work like other artists in Europe.
The fact remains that no Jewish art existed in a conventional way if one wished to compare it with other artistic trends deriving from Greek, Roman, Gothic, French, German, Flemish or Italian influences. Still it is a known fact that certain Jewish artists of the Middle Ages, apart from producing illustrated manuscripts, did work on a larger scale. The best example lies with Juan de Levi, a Spanish Jew who was a famous painter during the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th Century. He probably decorated synagogues with non-figurative paintings while his talent was expressed in full in the works he carried out for several Catholic churches. Between 1392 and 1403 he notably painted an altar for the church of Tarazena comprising 32 small and three big paintings that can still be seen today. He also produced two altar pieces, for the church of Montalban and the church of the Hoz de la Vieja in 1405. We can assume that some other Jewish artists followed a similar path during at least three centuries before Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492.
This lexicon contains some 4000 names of Jewish artists and the biographies of many.Only a few are listed therein. The full printed version in the form of a book should be published during the year 2003.If you wish to add new biographies please contact:Adrian Darmon
Isidor Kaufmann (Austrian 1853-1921) Portrait of a Rabbi
Thanks to the new mentality shown by these painters the world of Art went on to gain a new dimension after 1870 with the emergence of such artists as
Jozef and Isaac Israels, Edouard Moyse, Isidore Kaufmann, Maurycy Gottlieb, Simeon Solomon, Gustav Bauernfeind, Max Liebermann, Abel Pann, Lesser Ury, Yehuda Penn, Marc Chagall, Henry Hayden, El Lissitzky, Amedeo Modigliani, Julius Pascin, Chaim Soutine, Moïse Kisling, Jankel Adler, Eugène Zak, Chana Orlov, Louis Marcoussis, Marcel Janco, Mané-Katz, Moshe Castel, Reuven Rubin, Nahum Gutman, Marcel Dyf, Pinchus Krémègne, Michel Kikoine and many others.
There were only a score of good Jewish painters at the turn of the 20th Century. Fifty years later, they were over a hundred. Their golden era spanned 30 years between 1910 and 1940 after which the Nazi invasion of Europe and the ensuing Holocaust caused the disappearance of many talented artists.
The revival of the Jewish School after the war then took some years to take shape but with the death of Chagall, its leading figure, it has not found any new impetus yet.
GENESIS
There is always a start for a School of painting and with Jewish painters the trend was quite academic at the beginning. They first produced portraits and some landscapes and only a few found their inspiration within their community. Because of a religious ban in the Deuteronomy and also a leaning towards a traditional art made of signs and symbols there was little representation of Jewish life until 1860 and most of those artists who did so were gentiles, like Rembrandt some 200 years backward who produced the portraits of several rabbis.
Jozef Israels concentrated on Dutch scenes and painted only a few Judaic scenes whereas Camille Pissarro, who was half-Jewish, never produced works inspired by his origins and joined instead the Impressionist movement before becoming one of its leading figures with Monet, Sisley and Renoir.
Later, Modigliani, an Italian Jew, established himself in Paris and found a style of his own apparently far away from Jewish traditions. The same can be said of Hayden, Kisling, Pascin and Soutine but all these masters who were to become the founders of the School of Paris did remain Jewish in their approach to painting in that sense that they brought about deep transformations regarding the use of colours and the interpretation of life in their works. All the more, they gave a deeper meaning to artistic feelings as most of them did not really get rid of the thread that kept them subconsciously attached to the shtetls (villages) and cities from which they originated. They were mesmerised by the life in Berlin, Vienna or Paris which became their home-towns but still, they usually kept together forming a tight community with other non-Jewish expatriates like Picasso, Juan Gris or Kandinsky. But for the locals, they remained foreigners and only a minority managed to get into the mould of their new existence especially as the turmoil of the Second World War came as a reminder that being a Jew was not an easy status to have in the whole of Europe.
Marc Chagall was not different from them though he adopted a different approach in his works. Much marked by his Jewish roots, he painted scenes reminiscent of his younger days in the shtetl and throughout his career, his inspiration was almost entirely anchored to the Bible.
It would however be untrue to claim that Jewish painting only started some 150 years ago. In fact despite the second commandment (Exodus XX,4) ordering : «You won't produce any sculpted image » however with this detail : «You won't prostrate yourself before them and you won't serve them » (XX,5), the Jews living in the Holy Land did not bother to have statues erected in their streets or pictural representations in their homes during Roman times. It must also be stressed that their religion provided for the decoration of the sacred tabernacle in the Jerusalem Holy Temple which was notably adorned with two cherubs. King Solomon himself did not hesitate to have an imposing bronze basin called the « sea » standing on 12 sculpted oxen placed in the Temple compound.
After the destruction of the Temple, there was a time of tolerance during which many rabbis would indulge in the use of artistic artefacts while many cities were decorated with statues. Usually synagogues were richly adorned with paintings and mosaics floorings. In the following centuries many Jewish religious illustrated manuscripts were freely produced especially in Southern Europe. The trend was somewhat different in the Middle East as from the Seventh Century when Jews living preferred to abide by the principles of the Moslem religion which banned all figurative images and also during the 12th and 13th centuries in Germany where the representatives of the new ascetic Hassidic movement were opposed to any aesthetic ambition. Instead human faces in manuscripts produced in the Rhine region were shown with bird bills or replaced with the heads of animals. Nevertheless, many religious manuscripts bore testimony of the brilliant talent of Jewish limners between 1100 and 1500.
In addition, Jewish religious artefacts were often made artistically notably Hanukah lamps, Torah shields, Torah finials, etrog containers, sanctuary lamps, spice towers, goblets and candlesticks. These proved that the Jewish people, as most others in the Middle Ages, had a special liking for art. Many communities would therefore build richly adorned synagogues while individuals would order illustrated religious manuscripts for their personal use. Meanwhile, ritual objects were made accordingly to a true Jewish style that had emerged throughout Europe.
As for paintings, these were much in use in synagogues and houses already during Hellenistic times. There were many representations of King David and major Biblical events while other themes were derived from the pagan mythology such as Orpheus playing the harp and charming animals meaning the victory of soul over the forces of the universe and death. Later, Christianity was even a source of inspiration for Jewish artists. As an example the extraordinary paintings decorating the synagogue of Doura-Europos built during the 3rd Century were purely Greek in style. Wherever they went Jews would adopt the style of their countries of adoption. There was therefore a long period of artistic activity, with a concept originating from the Bible and Biblical times, which spanned over some 2000 years despite the fact that religion and the uncertainties of life caused by persecutions prevented a free and truly significant development of Jewish art which was so closely associated to religion that it could not be really perceived by gentiles, notably Voltaire, the well-known 18th-Century French writer and philosopher who denied its existence. Strangely enough, it was during the second half of the 19th Century that Jewish ritual art suffered a certain decline at a time when many Jews who wanted to free themselves from religious principles decided to leave their communities so as to live and work like other artists in Europe.
The fact remains that no Jewish art existed in a conventional way if one wished to compare it with other artistic trends deriving from Greek, Roman, Gothic, French, German, Flemish or Italian influences. Still it is a known fact that certain Jewish artists of the Middle Ages, apart from producing illustrated manuscripts, did work on a larger scale. The best example lies with Juan de Levi, a Spanish Jew who was a famous painter during the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th Century. He probably decorated synagogues with non-figurative paintings while his talent was expressed in full in the works he carried out for several Catholic churches. Between 1392 and 1403 he notably painted an altar for the church of Tarazena comprising 32 small and three big paintings that can still be seen today. He also produced two altar pieces, for the church of Montalban and the church of the Hoz de la Vieja in 1405. We can assume that some other Jewish artists followed a similar path during at least three centuries before Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492.
Because of the persecutions they suffered, members of the Jewish communities in Europe therefore never felt to be in a position to take to painting until at least the 19th Century. As a result, only a few artists, in Britain and Germany notably, were active by the end of the 18th Century.
However, there was to be no tangible sign of the existence of a true Jewish School of painting before 1870. At that time, the Hungarian Isidore Kaufmann went on to become the most important Jewish genre painter. Travelling throughout Eastern Europe, Kaufmann was constantly in search of material in Jewish towns and villages sketching as he went. Today, his paintings are worth between US $ 30,000 and 200,000. Maurycy Gottlieb, born in Poland in 1856, was as much talented as Kaufmann but died prematurely at the age of 23.
Nevertheless, the Jewish painter the most expensive remains by far Marc Chagall whose works produced between 1910 and 1918 usually reach between US $ 6 millions and 16 millions. After him, Modigliani is worth between US $ 1 million and 10 millions and Pissarro, who was half Jewish, between $ 500,000 and 4 millions. Chagall, played a leading role during the Soviet revolution during which he was appointed head of the Vitebsk Academy of Fine Arts. But after Malevitch's Supremacist ideas won support from the Revolutionary leaders he lost his post and went to Moscow where he worked actively for the Jewish Theatre before taking the wise decision to establish his new quarters in France in 1922.
While in Paris, Chagall remained impregnated by his origins and continued to produce Jewish and also Biblical scenes throughout the rest of his life. In his mind Jewish art was somewhat sacred and his own art revolved almost entirely around the Bible and Judaic traditions recalling that the atmosphere of Vitebsk, his home-town, was strangely mixed with that of Jerusalem. He often used to say that art deriving from the Bible was in fact naturally universal.
Chagall, Modigliani, Kisling, Soutine and Pascin formed the chore of the School of Paris within which Jewish painting blossomed intensely as France was a blessed land for Jewish painters who wanted to freely express their talents.
They came from many countries in Eastern Europe, Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, Lithuania and even Germany, where academic painters were above all much preferred by the public between 1860 and 1890. Max Liebermann (1847-1935) however managed to become the greatest Impressionist painter in Berlin only after a long stay in Paris where he worked under the influence of Jean-François Millet. Showing a major interest in rural scenes, he glorified the German working class and seldom painted Jewish subject matter as he felt much integrated into the German society. But he faced a rather harsh return to reality in his old age when waves of anti-Semitic actions swept his country after the Nazi take-over in 1933. His paintings are worth between US $ 30,000 and 400,000.
Alfred Wolmark (1877-1961) was a kind of painter who felt much concerned about his roots. Born in Warsaw, he arrived in the London East End area as a child. Close to his community, he did much to explore the Jewish subjects familiar to him in a style reminiscent of Rembrandt. His success in London with such works during the first decade of the 20th Century was quite considerable. Later in his career he produced works in increasingly vibrant colours. He is rated between US $ 7,000 and 40,000.
Born in Nancy, eastern France, Edouard Moyse (1827-?) was the first Jewish genre painter in his country. He started at the 1850 Salon showing portraits and Jewish scenes. His works are worth between US $ 4,000 and 25,000. As for the United States, William Auerbach Levy (1889-1965) was among the first to deal with Jewish portraits around 1910. His paintings sell between US $ 3,000 and 10,000.
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