Richard Meyer's new book on Morris Hirshfield trades in surprises. Of these, perhaps the most sta... more Richard Meyer's new book on Morris Hirshfield trades in surprises. Of these, perhaps the most startling is a photograph taken by Herman Landshoff of Leonora Carrington, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp posing alongside Hirshfield's 1941 painting Nude at the Window (Hot Night in July). The year is 1942, the setting is Peggy Guggenheim's apartment, and the painting is the second of Hirshfield's to enter Guggenheim's collection. Hirshfield (1872-1946) was a Jewish Eastern European immigrant tailor, slipper-maker, and self-taught painter from Brooklyn -at the time of Landshoff's photograph, he had only been painting for five years. The photographed scene places Hirshfield's painting in intimate proximity with the other four artists: Breton, Duchamp, and Ernst stand behind the large canvas, gazing at its titular nude figure, whilst Carrington sits next to it, a gourd balanced on her crotch. Although Hirshfield himself is notably absent (more on this later), that his painting is not only revered by the three men but also seemingly inspires Carrington's provocative gesture, puts his work at the centre of a conversation between four key players in the international avant-garde of the 1940s. For those schooled in what Meyer calls 'dominant accounts of modernism' (p. 200), accounts that -however various -disaggregate self-taught artists like Hirshfield from trained artists like Carrington, Ernst, and Duchamp, the Landshoff photograph would be especially surprising. Meyer counts himself as a student of this particular art-historical orthodoxy; his book is an attempt to come to terms with -and challenge -this education. Rather than merely serve up its many surprises, therefore, this book seeks to interrogate the grounds by which incidents like the Landshoff photograph have become surprising. At stake here is a question of history, and to be specific, art history. Art history is where Hirshfield's contribution to that 1940s conversation has been -as Meyer has it -'written out' (p. 8). As such, his book takes as its starting point the gap between the fame Hirshfield enjoyed whilst he was alive and the relatively obscure place that he occupies within art history today. It is in that vein that this review will also proceed.
The category of Holocaust art has been established by asking questions, the most vital of which i... more The category of Holocaust art has been established by asking questions, the most vital of which is whether it should be a category of art at all. This question pursued Holocaust art long before it was categorized as such. Indeed, as a means of describing the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, the word Holocaust itself only came into use belatedly in the 1960s. The category Holocaust art followed at an even further delay. The first major survey was published in 1993 by American art historian Ziva Amishai-Maisels. Her book opened by asking whether an artwork that took the Holocaust as its starting point could obtain any purchase as a form of aesthetic expression.
Although Amishai-Maisels did not provide an answer, her book attests to the manifold attempts by artists since the 1930s to grapple with this most fundamental question of Holocaust art. Other, related questions about the form, style, and temporality of Holocaust art have swirled around the category since its inception. In this new survey, those questions will provide the organizing framework. After the primary question of the viability of Holocaust art as a category is addressed, the subsequent five sections will move through a series of questions framed as either-or propositions: Life or theatre? Sacred or banal? Then or now? Figuration or abstraction? Painting or photography? Each section will pivot around a single instance of Holocaust art, chosen for the artwork’s ability to illuminate the problematics of the given proposition. While these propositions will not be resolved, as a set of questions they will offer a far more coherent narrative for the development of Holocaust art than one provided by chronology or region. But this is only fitting for a category that is as much involved with the art it has named as the questions it has provoked.
This essay situates two works by Eleanor Antin—the film The Man Without a World (1991), and the i... more This essay situates two works by Eleanor Antin—the film The Man Without a World (1991), and the installation Vilna Nights (1993)—in the context of Jewish art as it was articulated in 1990s America. During this period, efforts were made by scholars, curators—and some artists—towards a new Jewish art that would be consummate with other contemporaneous identity-based practices. Although these efforts did not birth a new Jewish art, they did instigate a revived interest in the history of Eastern European Jewry. This was Antin’s subject in both The Man Without a World and Vilna Nights, but the representation of this history in both works challenged the nostalgia that it courted in other corners of 1990s Jewish art.
Review: Richard Meyer, Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered (London: MIT ... more Review: Richard Meyer, Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered (London: MIT Press, 2022), 204 colour illns, 320 pp., ISBN 9780262047289, hardback $59.95
This paper explores Elaine Reichek's 1994 installationA Postcolonial Kinderhood in relation t... more This paper explores Elaine Reichek's 1994 installationA Postcolonial Kinderhood in relation to the histories it resurfaced, namely those of American Jewry, modernism, architecture and interior design. Situating the work in the mode Hal Foster designated as ‘archival’, the paper contends that Reichek’s investment in these histories was decidedly post postmodern, which is to say, with A Postcolonial Kinderhood, Reichek attempted to weave history back together, rather than pull it further apart. This was achieved literally with embroidery, through the eleven hand-stitched samplers that lined the installation’s four walls. Part of the installation’s broader recreation of Reichek’s childhood home in 1950s Brooklyn, these samplers evoked America’s colonial period – the English textile form had been brought over by colonial settlers in the seventeenth century – as well as the subsequent (and various) Colonial Revivals in American architecture and interior design. Yet while Reichek’s sa...
uses and abuses of commensality. With Politics of Food, Delfina Foundation presents a collection ... more uses and abuses of commensality. With Politics of Food, Delfina Foundation presents a collection of resources for art historians interested in the social and material aspects of food in contemporary art practices.
Richard Meyer's new book on Morris Hirshfield trades in surprises. Of these, perhaps the most sta... more Richard Meyer's new book on Morris Hirshfield trades in surprises. Of these, perhaps the most startling is a photograph taken by Herman Landshoff of Leonora Carrington, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp posing alongside Hirshfield's 1941 painting Nude at the Window (Hot Night in July). The year is 1942, the setting is Peggy Guggenheim's apartment, and the painting is the second of Hirshfield's to enter Guggenheim's collection. Hirshfield (1872-1946) was a Jewish Eastern European immigrant tailor, slipper-maker, and self-taught painter from Brooklyn -at the time of Landshoff's photograph, he had only been painting for five years. The photographed scene places Hirshfield's painting in intimate proximity with the other four artists: Breton, Duchamp, and Ernst stand behind the large canvas, gazing at its titular nude figure, whilst Carrington sits next to it, a gourd balanced on her crotch. Although Hirshfield himself is notably absent (more on this later), that his painting is not only revered by the three men but also seemingly inspires Carrington's provocative gesture, puts his work at the centre of a conversation between four key players in the international avant-garde of the 1940s. For those schooled in what Meyer calls 'dominant accounts of modernism' (p. 200), accounts that -however various -disaggregate self-taught artists like Hirshfield from trained artists like Carrington, Ernst, and Duchamp, the Landshoff photograph would be especially surprising. Meyer counts himself as a student of this particular art-historical orthodoxy; his book is an attempt to come to terms with -and challenge -this education. Rather than merely serve up its many surprises, therefore, this book seeks to interrogate the grounds by which incidents like the Landshoff photograph have become surprising. At stake here is a question of history, and to be specific, art history. Art history is where Hirshfield's contribution to that 1940s conversation has been -as Meyer has it -'written out' (p. 8). As such, his book takes as its starting point the gap between the fame Hirshfield enjoyed whilst he was alive and the relatively obscure place that he occupies within art history today. It is in that vein that this review will also proceed.
The category of Holocaust art has been established by asking questions, the most vital of which i... more The category of Holocaust art has been established by asking questions, the most vital of which is whether it should be a category of art at all. This question pursued Holocaust art long before it was categorized as such. Indeed, as a means of describing the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, the word Holocaust itself only came into use belatedly in the 1960s. The category Holocaust art followed at an even further delay. The first major survey was published in 1993 by American art historian Ziva Amishai-Maisels. Her book opened by asking whether an artwork that took the Holocaust as its starting point could obtain any purchase as a form of aesthetic expression.
Although Amishai-Maisels did not provide an answer, her book attests to the manifold attempts by artists since the 1930s to grapple with this most fundamental question of Holocaust art. Other, related questions about the form, style, and temporality of Holocaust art have swirled around the category since its inception. In this new survey, those questions will provide the organizing framework. After the primary question of the viability of Holocaust art as a category is addressed, the subsequent five sections will move through a series of questions framed as either-or propositions: Life or theatre? Sacred or banal? Then or now? Figuration or abstraction? Painting or photography? Each section will pivot around a single instance of Holocaust art, chosen for the artwork’s ability to illuminate the problematics of the given proposition. While these propositions will not be resolved, as a set of questions they will offer a far more coherent narrative for the development of Holocaust art than one provided by chronology or region. But this is only fitting for a category that is as much involved with the art it has named as the questions it has provoked.
This essay situates two works by Eleanor Antin—the film The Man Without a World (1991), and the i... more This essay situates two works by Eleanor Antin—the film The Man Without a World (1991), and the installation Vilna Nights (1993)—in the context of Jewish art as it was articulated in 1990s America. During this period, efforts were made by scholars, curators—and some artists—towards a new Jewish art that would be consummate with other contemporaneous identity-based practices. Although these efforts did not birth a new Jewish art, they did instigate a revived interest in the history of Eastern European Jewry. This was Antin’s subject in both The Man Without a World and Vilna Nights, but the representation of this history in both works challenged the nostalgia that it courted in other corners of 1990s Jewish art.
Review: Richard Meyer, Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered (London: MIT ... more Review: Richard Meyer, Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered (London: MIT Press, 2022), 204 colour illns, 320 pp., ISBN 9780262047289, hardback $59.95
This paper explores Elaine Reichek's 1994 installationA Postcolonial Kinderhood in relation t... more This paper explores Elaine Reichek's 1994 installationA Postcolonial Kinderhood in relation to the histories it resurfaced, namely those of American Jewry, modernism, architecture and interior design. Situating the work in the mode Hal Foster designated as ‘archival’, the paper contends that Reichek’s investment in these histories was decidedly post postmodern, which is to say, with A Postcolonial Kinderhood, Reichek attempted to weave history back together, rather than pull it further apart. This was achieved literally with embroidery, through the eleven hand-stitched samplers that lined the installation’s four walls. Part of the installation’s broader recreation of Reichek’s childhood home in 1950s Brooklyn, these samplers evoked America’s colonial period – the English textile form had been brought over by colonial settlers in the seventeenth century – as well as the subsequent (and various) Colonial Revivals in American architecture and interior design. Yet while Reichek’s sa...
uses and abuses of commensality. With Politics of Food, Delfina Foundation presents a collection ... more uses and abuses of commensality. With Politics of Food, Delfina Foundation presents a collection of resources for art historians interested in the social and material aspects of food in contemporary art practices.
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Although Amishai-Maisels did not provide an answer, her book attests to the manifold attempts by artists since the 1930s to grapple with this most fundamental question of Holocaust art. Other, related questions about the form, style, and temporality of Holocaust art have swirled around the category since its inception. In this new survey, those questions will provide the organizing framework. After the primary question of the viability of Holocaust art as a category is addressed, the subsequent five sections will move through a series of questions framed as either-or propositions: Life or theatre? Sacred or banal? Then or now? Figuration or abstraction? Painting or photography? Each section will pivot around a single instance of Holocaust art, chosen for the artwork’s ability to illuminate the problematics of the given proposition. While these propositions will not be resolved, as a set of questions they will offer a far more coherent narrative for the development of Holocaust art than one provided by chronology or region. But this is only fitting for a category that is as much involved with the art it has named as the questions it has provoked.
Although Amishai-Maisels did not provide an answer, her book attests to the manifold attempts by artists since the 1930s to grapple with this most fundamental question of Holocaust art. Other, related questions about the form, style, and temporality of Holocaust art have swirled around the category since its inception. In this new survey, those questions will provide the organizing framework. After the primary question of the viability of Holocaust art as a category is addressed, the subsequent five sections will move through a series of questions framed as either-or propositions: Life or theatre? Sacred or banal? Then or now? Figuration or abstraction? Painting or photography? Each section will pivot around a single instance of Holocaust art, chosen for the artwork’s ability to illuminate the problematics of the given proposition. While these propositions will not be resolved, as a set of questions they will offer a far more coherent narrative for the development of Holocaust art than one provided by chronology or region. But this is only fitting for a category that is as much involved with the art it has named as the questions it has provoked.