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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 Houston, 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 United States, 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, Iowa. 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) 150 151 | QUESTIONING PERCEPTIONS OF JEWISH IDENTITY IN THE WORK OF ARY STILLMAN 7STILL 148-163 RGv6.qxd 1/2/08 19:09 Page 152 120. 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 Paris since Holocaust, doing so would misread the times.

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