In modern western history, the cultural and social developments of modernism have long been associated with Jews. For conservative groups this has been a negative association: the perceived breakdown of traditional norms was blamed on Jewish influence in politics, society, and the arts. Throughout Europe, Jews were viewed as carriers of industrialized and cosmopolitan developments that threatened to undermine a cherished way of life. This anthology speaks to this issue through the lens of modernist visual production including paintings, posters, sculpture, and architecture. Essays by scholars from the U.S. and Israel confront the contradictory impulses that modernism’s interaction with Jewish culture provoked. Discussing how religion, class, race, and political alignments were used to provide attacks on modern art, the scholars also comment on visual responses to anti-semitism and the mainstream success of artists in the U.S. and Israel since World War II.
An expert in Modern, Contemporary and Israeli Art, Milly Heyd studies art with an emphasis on Psychology and is interested in questions of identity in Jewish art, among Jewish artists who hide their identity, and among Dadaists (Man Ray, Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter).
Matthew Baigell is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous books, including American Artists, Jewish Images, and Jewish Art in America: An Introduction.
Rose-Carol Washton Long is Professor Emerita of Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has coedited anthologies on Jewish dimensions in modern visual culture (2010) and on Max Beckmann (2009), edited an anthology on German Expressionism documents (1995), and published a study of Kandinsky’s development of abstraction (1980); in addition, she has lectured at numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Neue Galerie New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and published essays in their exhibition catalogues. Among her awards are a J. Clawson Mills Fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum, New York, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Younger Humanist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Continuing her focus on Kandinsky with an essay, “Is Der Blaue Reiter relevant for the twenty-first century? A discussion of anarchism, art and politics” (2020), she has also recently published on the Weimar photographer Lotte Jacobi (2019). She was a founding member of the CAA-affiliated Historians of German, Scandinavia, and Central European Art and Architecture (HGSCEA).
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