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Title: twentieth century american art. Results 1 - 4 of 4. United Kingdom. Search Within These Results:. This not only deprives art of the lofty stimulus of religious feeling, but subjects it to suspicion, as of doubtful morality. After visiting England, Samuel F. Morse aspired to make such painting viable on American soil.
Instead, the major subjects of artists became the unbridled land of the newly founded country, portraiture, and genre scenes depicting the lives of the people—if not out of interest in painting such topics then for the monetary reward. Twentieth-century American artists also ignored the biblical vein. Focused on issues of modernism and life in the big city, artists of the past century explored industrialization and ultimately process and product, especially in the latter part of the century. In Europe, some early twentieth-century artists made religious values central to their artistic conception.
The Russian Wassily Kandinsky looked toward theosophy and abstraction to suggest spiritual ideas, and the Frenchman Georges Rouault made impassioned prints and paintings of Jesus in an expressionistic manner.
Young Lyrical Painters, Art in America, v. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Find a copy in the library Finding libraries that hold this item I have been over this book several times now and find the stuff inside super interesting. Retrieved Home About Help Search.
Themes from the Bible, though, and certainly Jews who produced such images, did not flourish. Yet, beginning in the s, a disproportionate number of Jewish artists actively made biblical works. During this period, 23 million immigrants entered the United States, more than 3 million of them Jews. Many other Jewish American artists arrived from Europe at an early age e. Thus they experienced acculturation in much the same way as American-born children who lived in immigrant households. Enjoying freedom outside enclosed walls, many Jews forged meaningful relationships with non-Jews for the first time.
Different cultures and ideas pervaded the once-constrained Jewish sensibility. The American diasporic experience was unlike any other that Jews had confronted in their peripatetic existence, and the desire to secularize became overwhelming in a democratic culture that promised prosperity and equality. After the challenging task of learning a new language, manners, and customs, a large number of Jews continued the assimilation process by relaxing religious practices.
For these younger American Jews, their native land, their homeland, was the Hebrew Bible. Their sense of locale was not the towns around them but biblical geography—the only Jewish soil they knew. The language, laws, and common perceptions of the artists discussed in this study—the environment provided by the Book—constituted the psychologically contiguous territory of these Jewish American artists.
The Bible functioned as a portable identity in the Diaspora and as a common element uniting Jews from different places and times. Although a European, Marc Chagall, the best-known Jewish artist of the twentieth century, provides a fitting comparison that helps to clarify this point. Hundreds of his paintings and gouaches of Jewish communal and sthetl life exist, but Chagall eschewed the Bible until , when he became interested in the story of Adam and Eve after his move to Paris.
Before this period, Chagall did not need a connection to his heritage because he felt Jewish every day in the way he ate, the company he kept, and the rules he lived by. Too, because Chagall lived within a Jewish community, he still felt the effect of the second commandment—the prohibition against graven images, addressed in more depth in chapter 1—which also may account for the dearth of biblical works in his oeuvre. Jewish genre scenes like those Chagall initially favored were a compromise for painters of Jewish descent.
Audrey Flack conveyed her feminist perspective by reshaping the lives of biblical women who were often vital catalysts in the Bible but who have been stereotyped negatively or simply ignored. A touchstone and locus of Jewish identity, the Bible functioned as a site of Jewish memory when enclosed communities whether shtetls in Europe or self-chosen segregation in America, such as that of the Lower East Side of Manhattan disappeared.
It is my argument that the Bible encouraged a Jewish connection when traditional forms of kinship in Jewish communities and affiliations were dissolving. The Hebrew Bible allied these artists with the past; scripture served as a sort of pilgrimage to the past that helped make sense of the present. This idea is firmly rooted in the ancient Jewish practice known as midrash.
Fleshing out the meanings of that word, however, is the task of the commentators, including major figures like Shammai ca. Midrash, a word derived from darash, meaning to search, even contains parables, folk stories, and conversations imagined between biblical figures. This postmodern mentality imbues the interpreter with enormous imaginative power over a book that can never reach limits.
Midrash relates to contemporary intertextual theories that characterize texts as entities that never close. That is to say, all texts engage in dialogue with other texts and transform the original discourse into a new creation.
Examining sacred writ in this way is a mitzvah, a good deed, in Judaism. It is commanded that on the holiest days in the Jewish year, including the Sabbath, one read and talk about the Bible. To this day, the Bible is continually discussed and reworked, with contemporary rabbis reinterpreting scripture in sermons and responsa —written rulings in rabbinic literature, compiled since the Middle Ages and essential to Jewish law—to explain the present application of divine teaching.
A midrash elucidates the importance of this practice, claiming that if not parsed and pondered, the Hebrew Bible is as useless as wheat left unspun in a box:. Then what difference is there between the Written and the Oral Law? To what can this be compared? Ultimately, the midrashic space allows for greater depth and vitality in our understanding of the Bible.
Modern commentators observe the continuing centrality and importance of midrash. Ben-Zion, who painted more than biblical subjects and produced a number of biblical sculptures as well see fig.
When thirty-nine of his strongly linear expressionistic paintings were exhibited at a retrospective held at the Jewish Museum, Ben-Zion characterized his biblical art in a way that unites the ancient and the modern in terms that allude to midrash, an approach similar to that of the five main artists examined in this study. All the events of the Bible were, relatively, part of the present.
Leonard Baskin, too, made a popular Haggadah , with more than a million copies sold , read annually at the Passover Seder, in addition to sculptures and scores of prints on biblical subjects. Audrey Flack conveyed her feminist perspective by reshaping the lives of biblical women who were often vital catalysts in the Bible but who have been stereotyped negatively or simply ignored.
A touchstone and locus of Jewish identity, the Bible functioned as a site of Jewish memory when enclosed communities whether shtetls in Europe or self-chosen segregation in America, such as that of the Lower East Side of Manhattan disappeared. It is my argument that the Bible encouraged a Jewish connection when traditional forms of kinship in Jewish communities and affiliations were dissolving. The Hebrew Bible allied these artists with the past; scripture served as a sort of pilgrimage to the past that helped make sense of the present.
This idea is firmly rooted in the ancient Jewish practice known as midrash. Fleshing out the meanings of that word, however, is the task of the commentators, including major figures like Shammai ca. Midrash, a word derived from darash, meaning to search, even contains parables, folk stories, and conversations imagined between biblical figures.
This postmodern mentality imbues the interpreter with enormous imaginative power over a book that can never reach limits. Midrash relates to contemporary intertextual theories that characterize texts as entities that never close.
That is to say, all texts engage in dialogue with other texts and transform the original discourse into a new creation. Examining sacred writ in this way is a mitzvah, a good deed, in Judaism. It is commanded that on the holiest days in the Jewish year, including the Sabbath, one read and talk about the Bible. To this day, the Bible is continually discussed and reworked, with contemporary rabbis reinterpreting scripture in sermons and responsa —written rulings in rabbinic literature, compiled since the Middle Ages and essential to Jewish law—to explain the present application of divine teaching.
A midrash elucidates the importance of this practice, claiming that if not parsed and pondered, the Hebrew Bible is as useless as wheat left unspun in a box:. Then what difference is there between the Written and the Oral Law? To what can this be compared? Ultimately, the midrashic space allows for greater depth and vitality in our understanding of the Bible.
Modern commentators observe the continuing centrality and importance of midrash. Ben-Zion, who painted more than biblical subjects and produced a number of biblical sculptures as well see fig. When thirty-nine of his strongly linear expressionistic paintings were exhibited at a retrospective held at the Jewish Museum, Ben-Zion characterized his biblical art in a way that unites the ancient and the modern in terms that allude to midrash, an approach similar to that of the five main artists examined in this study.
All the events of the Bible were, relatively, part of the present. Leonard Baskin, too, made a popular Haggadah , with more than a million copies sold , read annually at the Passover Seder, in addition to sculptures and scores of prints on biblical subjects.