Exhibitions
Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art (Barbican Art Gallery till 6 January)
Elusive archetype
Giles Auty
The current exhibition at the Barbican sets out to survey Jewish art during the past 100 years or so. The task is a very complicated one. Professor Avram Kampf is the leading scholar and researcher in this field and the present show builds on his work and on a first exhibition he devoted to the subject in 1975.
The Jewish races are ubiquitous as a result of their dispersion, yet the exhibition excludes work from whole continents: South America, for instance. The wide- spread persecutions and other traumas of this century and the founding of the state of Israel are central to much of the experience symbolised or represented. The show concentrates necessarily on Jewish separateness rather than integration. Any central theme would be even harder to discern otherwise. To what extent then is racial, rather than national identity appa- rent?
Faced with an exhibition such as this I find a need to remind myself that all peoples, other than the aboriginal, are immigrant. My own name, for example, is of Danish, then Huguenot origins. My ancestors include persecuted as well as persecutors. A Huguenot Diaspora took place, hardly less than a Jewish one. Yet it is because the Huguenots were so racially diverse that any specifically Huguenot culture vanished entirely long ago. The quest for a uniquely Jewish style seems to depend, if one dare say so, on a notion of continuing racial purity. For although spe- cifically local cultures may be destroyed through enforced exile, a racial strain persists even among the irreligious. Jewish historical consciousness,is founded in the Judaic faith and in ancestral memories of wandering and statelessness. The exhibi- tion seems to me to posit the idea of a specifically Jewish racial sensibility which 'Self-Portrait at the Easel', 1919, by Marc Chagall is independent of localised cultures. Some- thing in this idea disturbs me. Indeed, if one selects art for such a show because of its conformity to imagined ideas of Jewish- ness then any claim to have proved the notion that such a consciousness exists seems merely self-fulfilling. I am tempted to suggest that one needs to seek the exact opposite; to search for art by Jewish artists In which no strain of racial sensibility is apparent. Such a procedure could help establish the existence of true archetype rather than caricature. For I prefer to think that it is caricature to present Jewish visual art as predominantly subjective, self- deprecating and sentimental. I fear this is a conclusion the casual visitor might draw from the present show of more than 360 items.
Perhaps I should admit heres that I am no great admirer of the art of Chagall, who provides one half of the exhibition's title. Unfortunately, what we see here is far from Chagall's best work although the over-literary Mr Kitaj — the omega of the show — is treated rather more kindly. The exhibition begins chronologically with such extraordinary works as Samuel Hirzen- berg's 'The Black Banner', a huge painting of an army of black-clad Jews bearing the coffin of Zadik to its last resting place. Is there some element of self-hatred in this painting, or in Nathan Altman's costume designs for the Dybbuk? The family is central to Jewish life yet is often the object of a desire to break free on the part of Younger members. Josef Herman and Raphael Soyer touch cleverly on this theme. From the show's earlier eras Pas- em, Libermann, Modigliani and Lucian Pissarro provide examples of artists who not only broke free but also broke through to some more generalised consciousness. I admired Antonietta Raphael Mafai's sculpture of 1958, 'The Flight', for broadly similar reasons. Anna Ticho supplied such examples as there were of art which sees human existence as cause for at least Momentary joy and the temporary forget- ting of self. Conversely, paintings about the Holocaust, sometimes by those who survived miraculously, did not always seem to me to extend human understanding of this terrible subject. Samuel Bak's 'The Family' is deeply moving nevertheless. Possibly the great suffering of a people is hard to convey adequately in paint; indeed sometimes the conscious attempt to por- tray anguish may even be counter- productive. Thus the art of David Bam- berg who, with Epstein, was the pick of the British artists represented in this show, seems to me to retain a crisper and lighter element than does that of ex-pupils Au- erbach and Kossoff. The lugubrious, over- emphatic school of Jewish painting has roots in the psychotic anguish of Chain Soutme's art. I wonder sometimes whether those find lives are more blessed should not find a new and more personally appropriate manner of working.
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