7STILL 148-163 RGv6.qxd 1/2/08 19:09 Page 148 QUESTIONING PERCEPTIONS OF JEWISH IDENTITY IN THE WORK OF ARY STILLMAN Rachel Garfield 7STILL 148-163 RGv6.qxd 1/2/08 19:09 Page 150

119 . Chinese Poem, 1953 Oil on canvas 24 × 30 in. (61 × 76.2 cm) Collection of the University of , gift of the Stillman-Lack Foundation (location: Moores School of Music, Ary Stillman Green Room)

ooking for signs of Jewishness in Ary Stillman’s evidenced in part by such titles as Zim Zum and impossible to paint flowers, figures, etc. and so the crisis Labstractions is a matter of conjecture. There is no Hamakom. Matthew Baigell, who has written extensively moved around the problem of what I can really paint.”7 overt symbolism, nor direct engagement—even assuming, on Jewish artists in the , has recently added However, the shadow of future historiographic haziness that is, that there could be a consensus on what to this debate in American Artists, Jewish Images.3 looms here. By locating his revelation specifically in 1941, Jewishness actually is. As a boy in the Russian shtetl of The Second World War was pivotal for the work of Newman would most likely have been referring to the Hresk, Stillman received an Orthodox education. After these artists, including Stillman. It arguably shaped their impact of Pearl Harbor.8 This points to a central dilemma of he immigrated to the United States he was involved in the thinking for the rest of their lives, changing their aesthetic as Jewish artists of the post-war avant garde. For Newman, to Jewish community in Sioux City, . He went to well as their outlook on life. Stillman’s shift in 1945 to cite events in 1941 as his reason for moving towards synagogue, supported Jewish institutions such as the abstraction was based upon a complex range of factors abstraction may well have been an attempt to distance American Jewish Congress and Sioux City Jewish but mainly on his realization that in the new, post-war light, himself from being read as a Jewish artist through a response Federation, and was buried as a Jew. At Stillman’s “nothing is as it formerly seemed.”4 As Frances Stillman, the to the Holocaust, even while demonstrating an affiliation with funeral Rabbi Robert I. Kahn of Congregation Emanu El artist’s wife, explained, “it was the necessity of forsaking a Jewish institutions and milieux.9 This may give us some insight in Houston described the artist as “a faithful brother.”1 world in which they had grown up but which had now into Stillman’s position and the distinction between his work Yet, like other Abstract Expressionists during the 1940s collapsed.”5 The critic Clement Greenberg articulated a and life. Stillman demonstrated even less adherence to and 1950s, Stillman kept his professional aspirations similar position in his essay “Self-Hatred and Jewish Jewish themes in his work than Newman. He painted some separate from his expression as a Jew. Some scholarship Chauvinism” from 1950, which seemed to sum up the portraits of Jews, particularly in his early years, and while in in the visual arts has attempted to situate Abstract feelings of a generation of artists. Greenberg linked their Palestine painted self-evidently Jewish subjects, such as Expressionism within a Jewish paradigm. This is in part work to a sense of existential angst as a specifically Jewish Hasidic Jew (fig. 120) and Egyptian Jew (fig. 121). tied to the Holocaust, which has a position in Western response to the Holocaust: “The main struggle at least for However, it is significant that the Palestine paintings were left modernity that overshadows most other historical events us in the US, still has to be fought inside ourselves. It is there undeveloped, an isolated attempt at figuring the Jew, and and is a pervasive source of scholarship in Jewish and only there, that we can convince ourselves that that on arriving again in Europe, Stillman returned to his studies. Both Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko have Auschwitz, while it may have been a historical judgement secular concerns with a series of nudes. been invoked as the modern Jewish artist par excellence was not a verdict upon our intrinsic worth as a people.”6 Between 1946 and 1947 some of Stillman’s work, in the United States; “the last rabbi of Western art” was The art historian and critic Mark Godfrey has pointed out such as Carnival (fig. 1) and Walpurgisnacht (fig. 85), how the poet Stanley Kunitz described Rothko, for how Newman, in a radio interview in 1966, retrospectively referenced pagan festivals that had survived and been example.2 An important text in this discourse is the much- substantiated this viewpoint: “The feeling I had at the time of transformed through Christianity. He continued to cited Museum of Modern Art catalogue from 1971 by the war in ’41 was that the world was coming to an end. introduce other specifically non--Western themes during the curator Thomas B. Hess, which focused on the And to the extent that the world was coming to an end, the the 1950s (fig. 119) and Stillman’s late work in Mexico importance of Kabbalah in Newman’s work, as whole issue of painting, I felt, was over because it was also drew on a varied mix of Pre-Columbian Mexican

previous spread Woodcut No. 5 (detail), c. 1953 Experimental proof 5/7 1 1 Paper: 19 2 × 15 2 in. (49.5 × 39.4 1 1 cm), block: 17 2 × 10 2 in. (44.5 × 26.7 cm) The Stillman-Lack Foundation (824)

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120. Hasidic Jew, 1925 121. Egyptian Jew, 1925 Watercolor on paper Watercolor on paper 1 1 1 3 14 2 × 10 4 in. (36.8 × 26 cm) 14 2 × 10 4 in. (36.8 × 27.3 cm) Jewish Community of Sioux City, Jewish Community of Sioux City, IA, IA, gift of the artist in memory of gift of the artist in memory of his his mother father-in-law, Arnold F. Fribourg 7STILL 148-163 RGv6.qxd 1/2/08 19:09 Page 154

122. Woodcut No. 5, c. 1953 Experimental proof 5/7 1 1 Paper: 19 2 × 15 2 in. (49.5 × 39.4 1 1 cm), block: 17 2 × 10 2 in. (44.5 × 26.7 cm) The Stillman-Lack Foundation (824)

symbolism, which had survived despite the hegemony of revered rabbi at a Jewish cemetery.14 At the same time as the following year (figs. 122, 123), both the violence of the Catholic Church.10 This approach was completely in exploring pagan references, Stillman was developing the the incised mark and the white surrounding rectangle of keeping with the “Modern Man” discourse as rehearsed drawings and woodcuts that constitute some of his the paper’s edge emphasize the depth that the figures by Newman, Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and others, all of strongest work. Their imagery consists of floating shapes, inhabit. The floating, unmoored shapes with sharp edges whom also explored motifs from pre-Christian jagged and awkward, that hover against voids, rich in may also be analogous to a community cut off from its civilizations.11 Matthew Baigell has argued that this is a textured darkness. They had been developed through roots in Europe. Yet, unlike Louis’s work, there are no Jewish theme, stating that Rothko, for example, found “in Stillman’s exploration of the technique of rubbing charcoal “Jewish” titles to assign such a meaning, only the name of Greek mythology and Christian iconography ways to and pastel over an embossed line. These images have a French hotel. Godfrey ultimately posits the idea that the comment on contemporary events for which he did not something in common with Morris Louis’s Charred Journal: “indeterminacy” of meaning in paint and a “failure to need a specific Jewish signifier to create a Jewish- Firewritten from 1951, which several scholars have related secure fixed meanings”16 can bind a work to the inflected art.”12 I would argue, conversely, that by to Jewish identity and the Holocaust.15 Holocaust, because the Holocaust itself, he suggests, figuring an Otherness built on primitivism, at a time when Godfrey has suggested analogies between the defies meaning.17 Thus the indeterminacy of meaning in Jews themselves were often cast as exotic and different processes of making art and post-Holocaust Jewry. He the bold, charred marks of Franz Kline and Robert from the mainstream community, these Jewish artists were described, for example, how the act of coating a field Motherwell, the “all-over,” amorphous compositions of making a distinction between themselves and Otherness. of colorful underpainting with a dense black and then Pollock and Richard Pousette-Dart, and the ripped-apart By painting non-Western forms as exotic and Other, and drawing jagged marks on it could be likened to the forms of Willem de Kooning and Conrad Marca-Relli by conflating the ancient and the non-Western, Jewish obliteration of a vibrant Jewish culture; or how the would suggest that the work of Jewish and non-Jewish artists identified themselves as sophisticated and layering of ink might represent the strata of time and the artists may be equally linked to the Holocaust. Western, thus assimilating Jewishness into whiteness.13 generations. We could apply Godfrey’s observations As tempting as it is to read the works of Jewish artists in So, while Jewish artists were making themselves “white,” to Stillman’s Lutece series, which he produced in the the post-war era as particularly engaged with the despite having a history in the West of being different autumn of 1952, during his first time back in since Holocaust, doing so would misread the times. The art enough to be persecuted and murdered, in other contexts fleeing in 1933. As in the earlier Priscilla, Brighton, and historian Juliet Steyn in her essay “The Subliminal eastern European Jews were seen as too white. For Sayville series, the paper is scored and the images are Greenberg” sees the “individualism” Greenberg Stillman, this bifurcated position may have enhanced his “found” by making these almost invisible marks visible. trumpeted in his writing as a move away from a collective intention to explore non-Western cultures, exemplified However, in the Lutece series the anthropomorphic but particularist—or monocultural—worldview toward through his experience in Morocco. Here he was forms could be said to emerge like smoke from universalism, a shift that opened a path to assimilation in identified by the Jewish community as “too pale” to be a shadows, which are strikingly black when compared the US.18 Greenberg and the New York avant garde had Jew, to the extent that he was met with “resistance and to the beach-like pastel tones of the preceding sets been moving in this direction since 1939, when a faction suspicion” when he attended a commemoration of a (figs. 124–27). Moreover, in Stillman’s woodcuts from of artists led by critic Meyer Schapiro resigned from the

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123. Woodcut No. 13, c. 1953 124. Lutece No. 13, 1952 Experimental proof 2/2 Embossing and charcoal on paper 1 1 Paper: 10 4 × 16 2 in. (26 × 41.9 cm), 12 × 19 in. (30.5 × 48.3 cm) 1 1 block: 8 2 × 14 4 in. (21.6 × 36.2 cm) The Stillman-Lack Foundation (499) The Stillman-Lack Foundation (812)

American Artists’ Congress over its failure to condemn the and became an active member the following year, Stalinist position on aesthetics, the Soviet–Nazi non- serving with Gottlieb on the exhibition committee. Since aggression pact, and the subsequent Russian invasion of Stillman’s earliest experiments with abstraction coincided Finland. The resulting Federation of Modern Painters and with this affiliation, it is likely that the organization’s Sculptors favored internationalism and what they saw as universalist standpoint on “world tradition” inspired his a new aesthetic freedom. As their constitution declared, own turn toward anthropology and psychology to explain “we condemn artistic nationalism which negates the the Holocaust. world tradition of art at the base of modern movements.”19 “Modern Man” discourse had developed in the West Stillman exhibited with the federation as a guest in 1944 since the First World War and was taken up with alacrity in

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125. Lutece No. 46, 1952 126. Brighton No. 34, 1951 Embossing, charcoal, and Embossing, charcoal, and pastel on paper pastel on paper 1 12 × 19 in. (30.5 × 48.3 cm) 13 2 × 11 in. (34.3 × 27.9 cm) The Stillman-Lack Foundation (519) The Stillman-Lack Foundation (564) 7STILL 148-163 RGv6.qxd 1/2/08 19:09 Page 160

127. Priscilla No. 50, c. 1948–50 Embossing, charcoal, and pastel on paper 1 12 × 9 4 in. (30.5 × 23.5 cm) The Stillman-Lack Foundation (442)

the art world.20 It seemed to offer a way of explaining the discourse rather than a “Jewish” response to the Holocaust. twentieth century, through a “Family of Man” ideology that As I have argued in relation to Newman’s statement of not only made ethnic and geographical particularity 1941, there was a lot of repositioning going on, and for redundant but also conflated time, positing early man and Jews there was much at stake. contemporary non-Western man as equivalents.21 This also The central question about Stillman surely isn’t “Where laid a context for drawing from non-Western art forms as a can we see Jewishness in his work? Is he a Jewish artist? way of exploring the “essence” of man. There was comfort Or does he have a Jewish soul?” but “How did he position to be had in seeing equivalence between ancient and his work within the discourses of art?” In my attempt to modern man—for example, if barbarism is essentialized as address the problem of approaching Stillman’s work from “innate,” this lets the individual off the hook. There was a Jewish perspective, I draw again on Godfrey’s writing also much to be gained for Jews in adopting Family of on Newman. As has been noted earlier, Newman used Man politics. This was not a retreat from politics, as is often titles from Jewish mysticism and was happy to be suggested, but in fact was the politics of the times.22 The considered a Jewish intellectual, but he unequivocally particularity of Modern Man discourse lay in its expression refused to be seen as a “Jewish artist.” In response to a through other intellectual developments of that time, symposium on Jewish art that he attended at New York’s particularly the influence of Jung. Jewish Museum in 1965 (while the institution was planning However, even the assertion of a shift toward valuing the his retrospective), Newman wrote to the director “to subconscious needs to be examined. Michael Leja has express my disgust at the Jewish Museum’s sponsorship of argued vigorously against this view of Abstract Expressionist the debate ‘What about Jewish Art?’ What the Jewish artists through his analysis of Pollock, suggesting that his Museum has done is to compromise me as an artist imagery constituted the “deliberate construction of a formal because I am Jewish. . . . you have made it impossible for vocabulary adequate to the representation of the me to show my work in your museum.”24 unconscious and its contents as Pollock was coming to More than forty years later, we need to heed conceive these entities.”23 That is, Leja claimed that there Newman’s concerns and acknowledge the clear and was a deliberate attempt to depict forms that would be important distinction between being born Jewish seen as intuitive, which itself makes nonsense of the notion (however that is lived out), being a Jewish artist of intuition. If that were the case with Pollock, so it would (whatever that may mean), and making Jewish art. We have been for Stillman. Such an understanding of the need to take care to acknowledge the ambitions as well processes of art-making ties the work to a Modern Man as the aims artists have for their work and to consider the

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context of their time. We must be careful about owning Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 3, Chicago Painting in the 1940s, New Haven, Conn., and London (Yale meaning, it is likely to be repeated. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. culture through claims made on art, to bolster a collective and London (University of Chicago Press) 1993, p. 53; quoted also University Press) 1993. Alberto Toscana, Cambridge (Polity Press) 2007, p. 3. pride and sense of self as a community. Stillman painted by Mark Godfrey, “Morris Louis’ Charred Journals,” The Jewish 12 Baigell, American Artists, p. 5. The artists themselves, at least Rothko 18 In Juliet Steyn, The Jew: Assumptions of Identity, London (Cassell) 1999. at a time when modern painting was posited as an Quarterly, 46, Autumn 1999, pp. 17–22. and Adolph Gottlieb with the help of Newman, stated that “only that Lisa Bloom puts forward a similar case but goes further, arguing that opposition to the particular and often as a vehicle for 7 Quoted in Mark Godfrey, “Barnett Newman’s Stations and the subject matter is valid if it is tragic and timeless. That is why we Greenberg reasserted the priority of one axis of identity over another; collective social change.25 The move into abstraction Memory of the Holocaust,” October, 108, Spring 2004, p. 35. profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.” Quoted in see Lisa E. Bloom, Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art: Ghosts of was not a retreat from this position but was seen as a Jonathan Boyarin argues conversely that the Holocaust was Edwin Alden Jewell, “Globalism Pops into View,” New York Times, Ethnicity, New York and Abingdon (Routledge) 2006, p. 28. way of fulfilling those aspirations. universalized in post-war culture, and that Jews were “whitened” by June 13, 1943, p. X9. 19 Cited in Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, p. 174. the representation of the Holocaust, making the figure of the Jew a 13 See Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That 20 Evidenced in part by Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man Notes generic Westerner, in order that mass empathy could take place. Says About Race in America, New Brunswick, NJ (Rutgers University exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955. 1 Rabbi Robert I. Kahn at the funeral of Ary Stillman, January 30, See “The Other Within and the Other Without,” in The Other in Press) 1999. Michael Rogin has made a cogent argument for this in 21 Writing about Rothko, Matthew Baigell suggests this conflation of 1967, Congregation Emanu El, Houston, Texas, transcript in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of Jewish Culture and relation to “blackface” entertainers in Blackface, White Noise: Jewish time as a “Jewish sense of synchronic time” (American Artists, p. 66), Stillman-Lack Foundation. Identity, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn, New York Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, Berkeley, Calif. (California but I would argue, as I do elsewhere in this essay, that the 2 This was Stanley Kunitz’s term according to James E. Breslin, Mark (New York University Press) 1994, pp. 434–35. University Press) 1996. Rogin’s thesis is that by using “blackface,” phenomenon had a much wider reach than Rothko himself and was Rothko: A Biography, Chicago (University of Chicago Press) 1993, 8 Thanks to James Wechsler for this insight. Godfrey cites Benjamin such Jewish entertainers as Al Jolson were not identifying with the popularized through the Modern Man discourse. p. 320. Buchloh’s reference to the difficulty of lyrical painting after the black figure but, on the contrary, were aiming to make a distinction 22 Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism. The use of the “primitive” can 3 Matthew Baigell, American Artists, Jewish Images, Syracuse, NY Holocaust (a direct reference to Theodor Adorno’s famous statement between themselves as wannabe whites and blacks. be seen as part of a history of romanticizing the Other in the West, (Syracuse University Press) 2006; Thomas B. Hess, Barnett on the impossibility of lyrical poetry after Auschwitz). Buchloh uses 14 Frances Stillman, “Ary in Paris (1920–1933),” The Stillman-Lack from the Enlightenment of Rousseau and the “noble savage” onwards, Newman, New York (MoMA Books) 1971. this statement to tie Newman’s artistic decisions to the Holocaust. Foundation, stillmanlack.org/03reminiscences_12.html#12, arguably lending a framework for a eugenicist view of humanity. 4 Ary Stillman, quoted in Frances Stillman, “Reminiscences: The Godfrey builds on this assumption. accessed August 28, 2007. 23 Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, p. 140. Leja is an art Personal Life of Artist Ary Stillman,” The Stillman-Lack Foundation, 9 Serge Guilbaut, in his classic text How New York Stole the Idea of 15 This work has been explored extensively in relation to Jewish identity historian working in a tradition of art history that considers art to be stillmanlack.org/03reminiscences.html, accessed August 28, 2007. Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War, by Mark Godfrey in “Morris Louis’ Charred Journals” and by Mira inseparable from contemporary social, political, and intellectual 5 Frances Stillman to Norman Podhoretz, Editor, Commentary, Chicago and London (University of Chicago Press) 1983, cites Ad Goldfarb Berkowitz in “Sacred Signs and Symbols in Morris Louis: developments. Other art historians of this interpretive genre include February 3, 1982, The Stillman-Lack Foundation. This view has to Reinhardt as saying that “most painters were reluctant to join a group The Charred Journal Series, 1951,” in Matthew Baigell and Milly T.J. Clark, Charles Harrison, Fred Orton, and Griselda Pollock. take into account the shift in zeitgeist from the 1940s to the 1980s in for fear of being labeled or submerged” (pp. 47 and 217, n. 120). Heyd, eds., Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern 24 Godfrey, “Morris Louis’ Charred Journals,” p. 35. relation to the Holocaust, as has been examined by Peter Novick, 10 See James Wechsler, “Alchemy of Light,” p. 000, above, and David Art, New Brunswick, NJ (Rutgers University Press) 2001. 25 Although the battle lines from earlier in the century between The Holocaust in American Life, Boston (Mariner Books) 2000. Craven, “Ary Stillman’s Cuernavaca Paintings,” p. 000, above. 16 Godfrey, “Morris Louis’ Charred Journals,” p. 22. particularism and universalism were more complex than sometimes 6 Clement Greenberg, “Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism: Some 11 For a full explanation of Pollock’s adherence to these themes, see 17 The French philosopher Alain Badiou urges against this position on presented, especially for artists, Modernists saw universalism as a Reflections on ‘Positive Jewishness,’” in Clement Greenberg: The Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and the Holocaust. He states that unless it is thought through and given progressive force.

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