reviews - Jewish Book Council

59 TH NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS
VISUAL ARTS
Winner:
ACTION/ABSTRACTION: POLLOCK,
DE KOONING, AND AMERICAN ART,
1940-1976
Norman L. Kleeblatt, ed.
Yale University Press
Published in association with The Jewish Museum
Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning,
and American Art, 1940–1976 is
much more than a handsomely-designed,
weighty catalogue that accompanied the
glorious exhibition of Abstract Expressionist work held at The Jewish
Museum in New York. It is an important contribution to the alreadyvast
literature of the period that reframes the way we conceive of this
historic and defining era of American art
Using an inspired approach, the curator, Norman L. Kleeblatt,
chose to focus on the two outsized and fiercely competitive critics,
Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, and the artists they championed.
The scholarly essays within the catalogue uncover the reality
of both critics’ significant connections with Jewish publications and
debates about Jewish culture. This information has, until recently,
been suppressed under the dominance of formalist theory in the case
of Greenberg, and an emphasis on self-determination through the
action of painting in the case of Rosenberg.
The nine essays in the catalogue cover the topic from a variety of
vantage points including solid biographical information about each of
the critics, personal remembrances of the era by the distinguished art
historian Irving Sandler, and specific historical documentation of both
Greenberg’s and Rosenberg’s writings relating to contemporary Jewish
debates. In addition, a detailed cultural timeline integrates the creation
of the art with contemporaneous events in American life and the
literary world.
Action/Abstraction is remarkable for adding a fresh
dimension to this increasingly historic era. We can
now consider the impact of post-war Jewish identity
on the lives and work of several important artists,
and on the two men who acted as their primary
translators, articulating the meanings of the work for
generations of observers.
Finalists:
CHAGALL AND THE ARTISTS OF THE
RUSSIAN JEWISH THEATER
Susan Tumarkin Goodman, with essays
by Zvi Gitelman, Vladislav Ivanov,
Jeffrey Veidlinger, and Benjamin Harshav
Yale University Press
Published in association with The Jewish Museum
Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish
Theater is the skillfully-researched
companion volume to an historic exhibition
at The Jewish Museum in New York
City. This captivating work documents the development of two theater
companies, Habima and GOSET, and brings to light an astonishingly
rich body of visual work they produced in the two decades following the
18 Jewish Book World Spring 5770/2010
Bolshevik revolution. As Goodman and her essayists vividly describe,
the folkloric-themed Hebrew-language Habima and the contemporarythemed
Yiddish-language GOSET were distinctive forces during this
brief, once-flourishing cultural moment. Yet their designers—Marc
Chagall, most famously, along with Natan Altman, Robert Falk, and
others—shared a common devotion to vigorous experimentation as
they promoted the vanguard Expressionist, Cubo-Futurist, and Constructivist
idioms in their work for the stage and revolutionized the visual
vocabulary of the theater. Tragically, the prolific years of the Russian
Jewish theater came to an end under the crushing repression of the later
Stalinist regime. Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater merits
special recognition for bringing the achievement and daring of these
gifted artists to wider notice. The volume includes
many fine examples, beautifully reproduced, of the
visual record of this productive movement—Chagall’s
renowned murals, along with rarely-exhibited costume
and set designs by lesser-known lights, photographs,
posters, and other theatrical ephemera of this
fascinating time and place.
PHOTOGRAPHING THE JEWISH
NATION: PICTURES FROM S. AN-SKY’S
ETHNOGRAPHIC EXPEDITIONS
Eugene M. Avrutin, Valerii Dymshits,
Alexander Lvov, Harriet Murav,
Alla Sokolova, eds.
Brandeis University Press
This succinct volume, Photographing
the Jewish Nation, is a collaboration
between scholars at the University of Illinois
and the European University at St. Petersburg in Russia. It showcases
the photography of Solomon Iudovin, who brilliantly documented
rural Jewish life in the Russian Pale from 1912–1914 during
the ethnographic expeditions organized by S. An-Sky. An-Sky was an
ethnologist who wanted to document, analyze, and preserve the long
arc of Russian Jewish life at a critical moment of change in Russia at
the beginning of the 20th century. These recently rediscovered, visually
rich photographs capture a vanished world of Jewish life and are the
most tangible legacy of their ambitious venture. The authors’ insightful
essays analyze the compelling photographic images technically, aesthetically,
and within the political context of that day. However, the
well-researched book goes further than just gathering a memorable
group of photographs. The text conjures up the gulf between the Jewish
intellectuals, who on one hand embraced ideals of enlightenment
and left behind the rigid framework of Jewish tradition; and on the
other hand, intensely tried to capture the unifying “nation-defining”
essence of Jewish folklore, Jewish images, Jewish architecture and Jewish
artifacts to pass along to the future. This book is a testament to An-
Sky’s timely expedition to preserve the Jewish past through the modern
medium of photography and the modern idea of the museum as a
sanctuary for culture. Photographing the Jewish Nation highlights An-
Sky’s struggle to come to terms with the duality of bringing ancient
Jewish traditions forward, while living a modern life—issues that
assimilated Jews continue to wrestle with today.
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