So wrote American Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj in his 1989 book, First Diasporist Manifesto. That kind of stunned incomprehension has mellowed over the years, but it is still a mystery what Jewish art is, or where it comes from. After all, widespread Jewish participation in the visual arts is a relatively recent phenomenon, a fact often ascribed to religious antipathy towards visual representation.

In his recent book, Imagining Jewish Art, theologian and art historian Aaron Rosen contests this assumption of Jewish aniconism, asserting that the second commandment only prohibited the making of images specifically intended for idol worship. But Rosen acknowledges that the Jewish production of visual art has been historically sparse, if not for religious reasons, than because of poverty, oppression and a general lack of opportunity for would-be Jewish artists in Christian Europe.

All that changed in the twentieth century, when figures such as Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine and Jacques Lipchitz took center stage in the pre-Second World War Paris art scene. Likewise, in post-war New York, Jewish artists such as Philip Guston and Mark Rothko led the New York School of abstract expressionist painters.

But despite the recent prevalence of Jewish artists, the question of what makes art Jewish remains open, and attempts at definition have invariably run into difficulties. Rather than try to provide his own definition of Jewish art, Rosen takes a “non definitional approach,” essentially coming at the problem in reverse. Instead of formulating a set of criteria with which to characterize Jewish art, he explores individual works in order to find out if they have anything to say about Jewish concerns; if, in essence, they “speak Jewish.”

The question remains, however, what it means to “speak Jewish.” Rosen addresses this issue somewhat counter-intuitively, by examining the work of three Jewish artists – Marc Chagall, Philip Guston, and R.B. Kitaj – through the lens of their non-Jewish influences.

Indeed, the reality is that because Jewish visual art didn’t exist in any great measure before the twentieth century, Jewish painters who wished to create Jewish art were forced to turn to non-Jewish works for their visual vocabulary, and in the process turn those elements into Jewish expressions. While the influence of their Jewish upbringing may have had a powerful effect on their painting, they had few specifically Jewish artistic precedents. This may have presented an artistic challenge, but it also provided a unique opportunity.

Chagall, often regarded as the quintessentially Jewish artist, provides the most straightforward subject for Rosen’s thesis. “As a Jew from the Pale, [Chagall] came to European history from outside that history, and for him all periods were parallel to each other, like so many rooms in the Louvre,” writes Chagall scholar Benjamin Harshav in his 2003 introduction to Marc Chagall on Art and Culture. As a consequence of this outsider perspective, Chagall was able to approach his subjects with a degree of uninhibited creativity that would not have otherwise been available.

Rosen focuses on Chagall’s crucifixion paintings, including Dedicated to Christ of 1912, White Crucifixion of1938, and the post-war Resurrection and Liberation. Like earlier works by the Russian Jewish sculptor Mark Antokosly, Chagall’s depictions of Jesus take on a provocatively Jewish flavor. His Jesus is a Jew, and is identified as such by loincloths bearing stars of David and made out of prayer shawls. Whereas in Christian thought the suffering of Christ brought about the salvation of mankind, in Chagall’s Jewish vision, it has no such saving grace. The sufferings of his crucified Jews are without redemptive merit.

Chagall’s crucifixions may not have the redemptive potential of their Christian counterparts, but they are not entirely without hope. The main source for Chagall’s crucifixion paintings, Rosen contends, is the Isenheim Altarpiece of 1512-1516, by German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald. Painted for a monastery that treated sufferers of ergotism and other disfiguring diseases, the altarpiece portrays a particularly gruesome image of Christ on the cross, but also a remarkably beatific vision of the resurrection. In Resurrection and Liberation, the two crucifixion paintings done after the Holocaust, Chagall presents a similarly uplifting vision of a post-Holocaust Jewish renaissance, led by art.

Unlike Chagall’s evidently Jewish paintings, Philip Guston proves to be a more difficult case to work with. Guston was one of the first generation abstract expressionists, but he later scandalized the art world when he presented an exhibition in 1970 in which he returned to figurative work, painting ominous, cartoonish figures and objects. Rosen focuses on two of Guston’s later works, Deluge II of 1975, in which he traces references to Paolo Uccello’s The Great Flood (c. 1447), and Green Rug of 1976, in which he finds elements of Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation (c. 1455).

While Rosen does an admirable job illustrating the otherwise hard to detect influences of these earlier works, he does less well showing how Guston’s paintings ‘speak Jewish.’ As with Chagall, Rosen points to Guston’s concern with the Holocaust and its aftermath, but in this case, visual references to concrete Jewish experiences are far less obvious. For the most part, Rosen makes the connection by referring to Guston’s stated wish to “make a Golem,” which he interprets as the desire to create something new and living from the clay of older works.

“Guston’s late paintings are haunted by the breakdown of artistic tradition, by his encounter with the artistic past from the position of its inaccessibility and decay. Yet it is this very ‘mortification’…. which can be made to ‘promise a continuity’,” Rosen writes.

The metaphor of the Golem is useful in explaining Guston’s artistic project. In this case, however, it wasn’t his identity as a Jewish artist that created a problematic relationship with art history, but a general artistic problem of how to create representational art after abstractionism. While Guston uses a Jewish metaphor to address the issue, it is questionable whether Guston’s paintings actually address Jewish concerns. And even though the idea of the Golem can provide a useful template for those struggling to create a viable Jewish culture after the Holocaust, it is a stretch to say that Guston offered anything other than broad inspiration.

Kitaj provides easier material for Rosen’s book, as he himself insisted on his desire to create Jewish paintings, as a subset of his proposed diasporist movement. Rosen develops this idea, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library:  A Talk About Book Collecting.” In the absence of a fixed physical home, or homeland, Kitaj’s paintings create an abstract home out of an imaginary library of images, Rosen writes. “In a diaspora where painting ‘feels like the last days in a transit camp, with your thin mattress in a roll at the foot of the bed’, Kitaj’s library functions, like Bejnamin’s, as a conceptual landscape and refuge.”

As with Guston, Rosen focuses on two paintings, Amerika (Baseball) from 1983-84 and Los Angeles No.1 from 2000-1. While Amerika borrows from Diego Velazquez’s La Tela Real, also titled Philip IV Hunting Wild Boar (c. 1632-37), its references are less relevant than the subject of the painting itself, baseball. A native of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, Kitaj was a lifelong Cleveland Indians fan, and saw a connection between that “tribe,” as they were affectionately known, and his own Jewish “tribe.” Though Baseball may be the American national pastime, in Kitaj’s vision it became a metaphor, after some adaptation, for Jewish experience in the Diaspora. “Remarkably for a baseball painting, in Kitaj’s ‘vast metaphoric field’ there is no home plate and – even more than that – there are no ‘bases’ whatsoever. This tribe of Jewish Indians may practice their sprints and slides, but no player can be declared ‘safe’,” Rosen remarks.

The source material for the second painting is more crucial. After Kitaj’s move to Los Angeles from London following his wife Sandra’s death in 1994, he came to identify her with the Shekhina, or female spirit of God, and painted a series of Los Angeles pictures depicting both of them as angelic beings. These paintings drew heavily on Cezanne’s late Bather paintings, particularly in their state of “unfinish.” “As Picasso said about unfinish, alive and dangerous,” Kitaj wrote.

As Rosen ties together Kitaj’s method of ‘speaking Jewish’ under the thematic rubric of ‘home,’ he also groups Guston under the heading of ‘tradition’ and Chagall under ‘family.’ These categories seem somewhat pasted on, and Rosen’s overarching thesis often seems loosely woven together. But his effort to identify and elucidate the Jewish concerns of these three very different artists is penetrating and his analysis of the works in question is consistently insightful. Though the exactly nature of Jewish art remains slippery, Rosen’s book is a worthy investigation of the ways in which the most evidently Jewish art can borrow from the least Jewish sources, and the ways in which less apparently Jewish art can have unexpected Jewish resonances.

The post “Speaking Jewish” appeared first on Jewcy.

It’s common wisdom that Leonard Cohen is more than just a singer-songwriter: he’s also a poet, a sage, even a religious figure. “Leonard is this almost prophetic voice in music for me. He’s got this almost Biblical significance and authority,” said U2’s Edge in the 2005 concert film, I’m Your Man. That’s laying it on a bit thick, perhaps, but it’s an understandable reaction to many of Cohen’s songs. From ruminations about Jesus in “Suzanne” to the Jeremiad of “The Future”, his work doesn’t lack for profundity. While Cohen is widely accepted as a songwriter and a poet, however, there’s one thing that he’s rarely called: a novelist.

In fact, Cohen has published two novels, both of which be wrote before launching his music career at the age of 33. They have faded into obscurity compared to his better-known musical oeuvre, but the thematic depth and lively prose of both books show them to be more than just the scribblings of an immature writer or a brief preamble to a more significant songwriting career. And though Cohen is perfectly suited to his current role as singer-poet elder statesman, both The Favorite Game, published in 1963, and Beautiful Losers, from 1966, were criticized for their avant-garde literary experimentation and provoked outrage because of their violent, sexually explicit, and morally disturbing scenes.

By today’s standards, however, The Favorite Game seems rather tame. Written in the late 1950s and early 1960s while Cohen was living with friends in London, and later in his whitewashed, three-story house on the Greek island of Hydra, the novel is a semi-autobiographical account of Cohen’s Montreal upbringing and his pursuit of a poetic vocation. Like Cohen himself, the novel’s protagonist, Lawrence Breavman, is the scion of a prominent Jewish family from the wealthy neighborhood of Westmount.

Also like Cohen, Breavman loses his father at a young age, has a painfully neurotic mother, and uses hypnosis to seduce the family maid. Most of the novel focuses not on his home life, however, but on his relationships with women and with his pal Krantz. As teenagers, the two friends spend their nights driving around downtown Montreal, trying unsuccessfully to pick up girls while amusing themselves with high toned conversations peppered with loud proclamations of their own genius. Eventually Breavman’s sexual drought comes to an end, but not before a few frustratingly incomplete, coming-of-age type encounters.

“Then he was in a room undressing her. He couldn’t believe his hands. The kind of surprise when the silver paper comes off the triangle of Gruyere in one piece. Then she said no and bundled her clothes against her breasts. He felt like an archeologist watching the sand blow back.”

Negative reactions to the book were in part because of its sexual descriptiveness, but also because of its saw-toothed criticism of the Jewish community. Breavman is not by any means ashamed of his Jewishness, yet he is contemptuous of his family’s style of Judaism. “Victorian gentlemen of the Hebraic persuasion,” he terms them.

“They had sold their sense of destiny for an Israeli victory in the desert. Charity had become a social competition in which nobody gave away anything he really needed, like a penny-toss, the prizes being the recognition of wealth and a high place in the donor’s book. Smug traitors who believed spiritual fulfillment had been achieved because Einstein and Heifetz are Jews.”

Despite such deliberate button pushing, the literary and moral incitements of The Favourite Game remain relatively low-key. Beautiful Losers on the other hand, Cohen’s second novel, still retains its power to shock readers 43 years after its publication.

The book is aggressively experimental. As Cohen’s biographer Ira Nadel puts it, Beautiful Losers “almost bursts its form” by “incorporating journals, letters, grammar books, historical narratives, advertisements, catalogues, footnotes, poetry, and drama.” Or, as Cohen himself put it, the book is “a love story, a road map through the wilderness, a joke, a tasteless affront, an hallucination, a bore, an irreverent display of diseased virtuosity, a Jesuitical tract, an Orange sneer, a scatological Lutheran extravagance.” But objections to Beautiful Losers ran deeper than readers’ discomfort with the book’s unfettered architecture.

The first section of Beautiful Losers is delivered by an unnamed narrator – a chronically constipated scholar of deteriorating mental health who is a specialist on the A – s, a nearly vanished North American aboriginal tribe. Though the book is set in Montreal, Cohen shifts his attention away from his own past to focus on larger themes, such as Quebec nationalism and the history of the Jesuits in colonial Quebec. The narrator is obsessed with Catherine Tekakawitha, the first Iroquois saint, and his disjointed narrative is riddled with invocations to her. His wife Edith was herself a Mohawk, though at the beginning of the book she has already committed a gruesome suicide at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

The second part of the novel consists of a long letter written by the narrator’s friend F., and only delivered five years after his death. F. is a Quebec nationalist and a disgraced member of Canadian parliament who, in a mirroring of real life events, blows up the statue of Queen Victoria on Montreal’s Sherbrooke Street. In their mutual need for each other the two characters have a Breavman-Krantz type of relationship, conducting the same kind of amused dialogue. In this case however, both characters are thoroughly stripped of any pretension to innocence. The fact of their bisexuality would have been more controversial in 1966 than it is now, but F.’s description of his affair with Edith can still raise eyebrows. The book’s signature scene is a trip F. and Edith take to Argentina, where their erotic exploits include being raped by a vibrator that has come to life and “learned to feed itself”, followed by a bath with an escaped Nazi who sells them a bar of soap made from human flesh.

Such episodes may be grotesque, but they are successful at provoking an intensity that is at the core of all of Cohen’s work. The shock factor of Beautiful Losers isn’t an exercise in masochism, but the distillation of experience to its most horrific, as well as its most euphoric elements. An acute awareness of the present moment pervades both novels, complete with all of its rawness and uncertainty. “We sought the peculiar tone of each peculiar night. We tried to clear away the static, suffering under the hint that the static was part of the tone,” F. says in Beautiful Losers. Sex in particular is a means by which his characters transverse the emotional distances that separate them and establish meaningful contact with other human beings. “When I see a woman’s face transformed by the orgasm we have reached together, then I know we’ve met. Anything else is fiction,” says Breavman. The narrator of Beautiful Losers expresses a similar sentiment. “For a blessed second truly I was not alone, I was part of a family. That was the first time we made love. It never happened again.”

As Cohen’s Canadian publisher observed, The Favourite Game has the quality of a first novel and it bears the traces of self-indulgence that accompany almost any kind of autobiography. Beautiful Losers is a progression, at a further remove from Cohen’s life, but the literary experiments carried on within its pages have an exploratory quality and suggest further developments. By abandoning the form of the novel it seems as though Cohen left something unfinished; experiments usually lead somewhere, even if it’s only to more experiments. Perhaps this is a small complaint against a man with no shortage of artistic achievements to his name. Reading Cohen’s books, however, and reveling in the ingenuousness of his prose, one can’t help but be a little wistful that he didn’t pursue the form further. As Cohen himself might admonish us, however, we should be thankful for what we’ve already got: two groundbreaking novels of the very first order.

The post Everybody Knows: The Novels of Leonard Cohen appeared first on Jewcy.