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RACAR : Revue d'art canadienne Canadian Art Review

Carol Zemel, Looking Jewish: Visual Culture and Modern Diaspora, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015, 216 pp. 72 b/w illus. $ 45 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-253-01542-6 Nicholas Chare

Volume 43, numéro 1, 2018

URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1050830ar DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/1050830ar

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Éditeur(s) UAAC-AAUC (University Art Association of Canada | Association d'art des universités du Canada)

ISSN 0315-9906 (imprimé) 1918-4778 (numérique)

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Citer ce compte rendu Chare, N. (2018). Compte rendu de [Carol Zemel, Looking Jewish: Visual Culture and Modern Diaspora, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015, 216 pp. 72 b/w illus. $ 45 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-253-01542-6]. RACAR : Revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review, 43(1), 111–113. https://doi.org/10.7202/1050830ar

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Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’Université de Montréal, l’Université Laval et l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ der bildenden Künste (1843). Musto’s Carol Zemel article illustrates how the inception Looking Jewish : Visual Culture of art history as an academic disci- and Modern Diaspora pline, together with the material Bloomington : Indiana University Press, chosen for inclusion, was dependent 2015 on nineteenth-century constructions 216 pp. 72 b/w illus. of civilisation, replete with their cul- $ 45 (hardback) isbn 978-0-253-01542-6 tural hierarchies and other prejudices. Undoing and rewriting this disciplin- ary trajectory remains an ongoing and complicated process. Civilisation and Nineteenth-Century Nicholas Chare Art contributes to the ever-expand- ing body of scholarship published In her 1948 book A Short History of Jewish Jewish artists from relative obscurity since the 1990s that interrogates the Art, Helen Rosenau, an art historian and elevating them to the modern- relationship between imperialism educated in Germany but forced to ist pantheon. Drawing on remarks and artistic production in the West flee the country in 1933 due to Nation- about diaspora by the artist R.B. Kitaj, and its former colonies. The volume al Socialism’s persecutory policies she outlines the term as referring to complements Manchester Univer- toward Jews, discusses artists of the modes of living and working across sity Press’s series Studies in Imperial- diaspora — the painful dispersion or two or more distinct, yet interrelat- ism, which has published a number scatering of the Jewish peoples — a ed societies at once. This “working of important, related books over the reality Edward Carter draws aten- across” provides a means of resist- last decade. Particularly worth men- tion to in his preface to her book. ance against conforming to “any tioning in this context is Tim Bar- With respect to modern diasporic conventional aesthetic or national ringer, Douglas Fordham, and Geoff artists, Rosenau remarks, “The var- style” (2). Modern diaspora therefore Quilley’s 2007 volume Art and the Brit- iety of these artists is such that it potentially constitutes an enabling ish Empire, which was motivated by the seems almost impossible to gauge dislocation, a form of opportunity premise that “the concept of empire any specifically Jewish traits…. How- to look beyond extant categories and belongs at the centre, rather than in ever, in spite of the impact of their positions, a promise to be explored. the margins, of the history of British respective national schools, certain Diasporic identity is ofen conceived art” (3) ; it informed important exhib- traits of abstraction, of individualiz- negatively as incomplete assimila- ition projects, such as Tate Britain’s ation, of interest in personality and tion, yet this ambivalent status may Artist and Empire : Facing Britain’s Imperial the moral content of the work of art also provide liberating aspects. Past (2015–2016) and the reinstalla- survive, even with assimilated Jewish Through her engagement with tion of the permanent collection of artists, and relate them to their own diasporic art, Zemel makes an the Yale Center for British Art, themed past history” (19). For Rosenau, cul- important contribution to ongoing Britain in the World (2016). The essays in tures of the diaspora are sensitive to debates in diaspora studies about Civilisation and Nineteenth-Century Art fol- social change. She observes that, “in how to conceive and study diaspora. low Barringer, Fordham, and Quilley’s our own age the Jewish evolution By way of the importance she accords guiding principle, but within the lim- enters a new and contrasting phase, art and visual culture of the diaspora its of a more focused topic, and with a confronted as it is with atempts of as forms of social resistance, and broader geographical scope. Through destruction in the physical sense, and also as a result of the atention she subjects that cut across race, gender, by the problems of nationalism versus pays to ambivalence as a character- geography, and historical timeframes, assimilation, and liberalism versus istic of diasporic identity, she pos- this collection of essays offers a orthodoxy” (21). itions herself alongside postcoloni- wide-ranging and nuanced perspec- The problems Rosenau identi- al thinkers such as James Clifford, tive into the conceptual complexity fies feature significantly in Carol Homi K. Bhabha, Franz Fanon, and and malleability of the notion of civil- Zemel’s Looking Jewish, a thoughtful Paul Gilroy. Zemel, however, dif- isation in nineteenth-century art. ¶ and sophisticated analysis of art and fers from these thinkers, who have visual culture in the modern diaspora. each influenced art history, in the Nina Amstutz is Assistant Professor in the For Zemel, diaspora refers not solely, sustained focus she accords to the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon. or simply, to a displaced ethnic group visual as a locus of reflection upon — [email protected] living in a broader national milieu. diaspora. Looking Jewish is a work Her aim is not to celebrate an eth- of art history that explores paint- nic art production, thereby rescuing ing, photography, prints and other

racar 43 (2018) 1 : 109–128 111 ⇢ Carol Zemel, Looking Jewish : Visual Culture and Modern Diaspora A Young Jew and Two Women in an Alley images of Jews by Jews and for Jews” media. Because of its spirit of experi- (1920) enables her to tease out how (2) frequently allows her to draw mentation, as art history it merits the painting figures separateness atention to agency as it manifests being placed alongside endeavours and difference and the impact of a through diasporic cultural pro- such as Adrian Rifin’s Ingres Then, fast-changing world upon Jewish ductions — the Jewish “look” being and Now (2000), T. J. Clark’s The Sight life in Galicia. Zemel also provides self-produced. This is evident, for of Death : An Experiment in Art Writing a sustained and powerful analy- example, in Chapter Four, which cen- (2006), and Griselda Pollock’s Encoun- sis of Schulz’s The Booke of Idolatry tres on representations that examine ters in the Virtual Feminist Museum : Time (1920–1922), a series of erotic prints stereotypes of Jewish femininity, the Space and the Archive (2007). Its narra- in which the artist explores his desire Yiddishe Mama (the Jewish Mother) tive is not straightforwardly linear, for female domination. Schulz’s and the Jewish Princess. Zemel con- even if it is roughly chronological. It foot fetishism, already signalled in siders how artists, including Eleanor also does not track relations among Encounter (in which the young Hasid, Antin and Amichai Lau-Lavie, contest artworks through a prism of categor- bowing, seems to focus particular- and subvert such stereotypes. Rhon- ies including nation, style, or period. ly on the legs and feet of the women da Lieberman and Cary Liebowitz’s Zemel, rather, allows the concept of he passes in the alley) reaches its Chanel Chanukah (1991), for instance, diaspora to travel within and across apotheosis here. For Zemel, how- calls atention to the Jewish Princess various periods and media. Looking ever, The Booke of Idolatry is much more and critiques the stereotype for the Jewish performs something of the than a masochist’s “spank bank.” vacuous materialism it embodies. conceptualisation of the diasporic it Her remarkable reading traces how The chapter foregrounds Zemel’s ultimately elaborates, not straight- Schultz uses eros and idolatry in the sensitivity to gender issues, a sensi- forwardly accommodated within art prints “to evoke the tensions of Jew- tivity already signalled in Chapter history as it has been traditionally ish difference and accommodation Two in relation to masculinity, here conceived, yet all the more promis- at the same time” (67). Zemel argues involving a more expansive explora- ing for this lack of ready fit. that the tableaux stage an encoun- tion of Jewish gender ideals. Zemel begins with an analysis ter between the individual and the The final chapter examines dias- of the photographers Alter Kacyz- social, embodying both private fan- poric values in contemporary art, ne and Moshe Vorobeichic, Jews tasy and social metaphor. The dias- focussing on three artists unified by from the Pale of Setlement, who pora Jew’s social anxiety as it inter- their perceived use of allegory — R.B. were active in the 1920s and 1930s. sects with his masculinity registers Kitaj, Ben Katchor, and Vera Frenkel — Although Kacyzne and Vorobeichic through Schulz’s iconography, an as a means of providing a subtle and took on very different projects — the iconography in which women dis- sophisticated engagement with how former using pictorialist documen- dain and ignore the men who form specific works think the nature of tary to record a changing society their entourage — a lack of acknow- diaspora. The reading of Kitaj as an and an emergent nationalism for a ledgment between individuals that artist provocateur, whose paintings, North-American audience, the later provides broader insights into the at times, embody “the anxieties and employing modernist photomon- conditions of cultural subjectiv- uncertainties of diasporic emigra- tage to foster nostalgia and distance ity and of the realities of a subject tion” (143) through complex inter- in an international Jewish cultur- requiring the recognition of an Other plays of style and subject mater and al elite — Zemel suggests that both in order to be. a deforming of the figure, is particu- photographers capture “the pride The third chapter examines larly striking. Zemel demonstrates a and ambivalence of modern diaspora Roman Vishniac’s photographs of rigorous and perceptive understand- consciousness and minority nation- Eastern-European Jews, which were ing of the painter’s craf, one likely hood” (52). taken prior to World War II, but pub- honed through her earlier work on The second chapter considers lished in its afermath as A Vanished Vincent van Gogh, which permits the paintings, prints, and drawings World. These photographs, framed her to atend insightfully to com- of the Polish artist and writer Bruno by the horrors of the Shoah, are con- plex intersections of the ideological Schulz. Schulz is best known for his ceived as a eulogy to the diaspora. and the material in Kitaj’s work. Her Polish-language short stories ; his art For Zemel, the collection “presents sensibility towards paint as a means has received less critical atention. a curiously costumed and pathetic of meditation — towards paint as phil- Zemel’s close reading of the play of people, a people without potency osophy — lets Zemel investigate how gazes among a young Jewish man or agency” (102). This lack of agency Kitaj’s aesthetic articulates a vision wearing orthodox garb, two women places the images in stark contrast of diaspora as unfixed possibility, as dressed à la mode, and the puta- to many of the other case studies a source of both tension and pleas- tive spectator in Schulz’s Encounter : in Looking Jewish. Zemel’s focus “on ure. Through her readings of Kitaj,

112 Reviews | Recensions Katchor, and Frenkel, Zemel, as else- Stan Dragland, with an appreciation where in Looking Jewish, compellingly by Michael Crummey advances a notion of diaspora “not Gerald Squires [as] a choice between separatism or St. John’s, nfld : Pedlar Press, 2017 assimilation, but instead [as] a more 240 pp. 240 colour and b/w illus. negotiated and changing space-be- $ 80 (hardcover) isbn 978-1897141823 tween” (160). Community and home are conceived by these artists as nego- tiated and tentative. Zemel identifies a specifically Jew- ish experience of “disquiet, disloca- tion, disruption, and fear” operat- Ray Ellenwood ing within works by Kitaj from the 1980s. Specificities of Jewish experi- Gerald Squires (1937–2015) was born commissioned by churches and pub- ence, shaped by history and cultural in Newfoundland, but moved as a lic offices ; and to take an active part in tradition, were also recognized by child to Toronto, where he received the astonishing ebullience in all the Rosenau, who observed that “the his early schooling and art education. arts, throughout the island, starting spirit in which a subject may be A reluctant student at the Ontario Col- in the late 1970s. approached is more important than lege of Art, he dropped out to travel In a rather apologetic introduc- the subject-mater as such” (57–58). and self-instruct, and was successful tion to an exhibition entitled Painters It is this spirit — a particular pictorial enough to become an editorial artist in Newfoundland at Memorial Univer- intensity, a characteristic excess — that for The Toronto Telegram in 1960, where sity in 1971, curator Peter Bell opined, enables Rosenau to perceive works he illustrated a column devoted main- “Newfoundland may seem isolated, by a Catholic convert, Anton Raphael ly to local church architecture and but away from snow-balling North Mengs, as retaining a Jewish look. For news. Meanwhile, he was pursuing American eclecticism, in a challen- Zemel, Kitaj appropriates aspects of his researches in paint and ink, ofen ging and virgin landscape, the artist the formal vocabulary of modern- exploring religious subjects in a style can find a new identity within him- ist painting, embraces its aesthetic that was figurative, but certainly not self.” Squires didn’t move to New- structures, yet also brings a supple- realist, and probably best described foundland to escape artistic eclecti- mentary intensity, a diasporic sens- as expressionist — a kind of fusion of cism, he had plenty of his own, but it ibility, to bear upon those structures. figurative and abstract expression- is true he never showed much inter- Other artists in Looking Jewish share ism seen in the work of such painters est in geometric abstraction, pop- or this spirit of openness and innov- as André Masson or the early Jackson op-art experiments, or the well-publi- ation, one facilitated by feelings of Pollock. By 1965, he was gaining some cized and widely admired adventures dislocation generated by diaspora. important recognition : he won the into conceptual art that were all the Neither Rosenau nor Zemel regards Bronfman “Best Young Artist Award,” rage at the Nova Scotia College of Art such a spirit as unchanging. In their participated in group shows in Mont- and Design in Halifax from 1967 to different ways, they both seek to real, Hamilton, Otawa, and Toron- 1973 (satirized in a delightful 1987 film, describe the particularities of mod- to, and had solo exhibitions at the Life Classes, by William MacGillivray, ern diasporic identity, an identity Pollock and Helene Arthur galler- also Newfoundland-born with a not given but continuously made ies in Toronto. But 1965 was also the mainland art education). Nor does and remade. Rosenau concluded her year he made a visit to Newfoundland he seem to have been tempted by the short history of Jewish art reflect- with his family, which eventually led cool hyper-realism (hints of the meta- ing on how “a productive assimila- to a permanent return there in 1969. physical within the middle-class mun- tion of … new values” might “lead to “Heading back to Newfoundland dane) of Nova Scotia’s Alex Colville hitherto unseen expressions in artis- at the time he did,” Stan Dragland or Newfoundland’s Mary and Chris- tic creation” (71). For Zemel, a similar understates, “was no career move” topher Prat, or the Gothic retrospec- promise — an as-yet-uncharted jour- (48). Indeed, it led to serious econom- tion of David Blackwood, whose sub- ney — is in the process of emerging in ic hardship for his family at a time jects are firmly based in Newfound- the art and visual culture of the mod- when Newfoundland had litle artistic land, where he was born, although ern diaspora. ¶ infrastructure, but it also stimulated his professional life unfolded in him to branch out and learn ceram- Ontario. However much Squires may Nicholas Chare is Associate Professor of Modern ics with his wife, Gail ; to establish a have liked and admired these fellow Art at the Université de Montréal. — [email protected] studio for metal sculpture ; to work East-Coast artists, he certainly took a on portraits, paintings, and sculpture different route. Dragland sees him as

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