Menachem Wecker
By Menachem Wecker
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Culture The Challenge of Defining Jewish Art
American Artists, Jewish Images By Matthew Baigell Syracuse University Press, 288 pages, $45. In 1966, art critic Harold Rosenberg gave a talk at The Jewish Museum in New York. “First, they build a Jewish museum; then they ask, ‘Is there a Jewish art?’ Jews!” he quipped. But Rosenberg went on to give his own response…
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Culture A Painter on Earth Whose Brush Reaches the Heavens
‘I cannot imagine German culture without Judaism,” painter Anselm Kiefer said. “One thing is that Germans committed the immense crime of killing Jews. The other is that they amputated themselves. They took half of German culture and killed it.” As a result, Kiefer, who was born to Catholic parents in Donaueschingen, Germany, during the final…
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Culture ‘Beyond Insane’ Biblical Paintings
My artist friends think I’m crazy,” said Archie Rand, who is the first to admit that his newest project is “beyond insane.” Indeed, Rand’s series is arguably the most ambitious Jewish art enterprise, perhaps ever: 613 canvases, one per commandment. Surrounded by stacks upon stacks of paintings in his studio, Rand is easy to compare…
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Culture Humbly Going About His Work
Jules Olitski, the subject of an exhibit opening May 10 at the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery at the George Washington University, has been compared to nearly every artist in the canon — Rembrandt, Frederic Edwin Church, Picasso, Hans Hoffman, El Greco — as well as deemed the newest painting god to emerge from the…
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Culture Beating Swords Into Photographs
David Seymour’s photograph “Wedding in the Border Regions” (1952) has something of the prophet Micah in it. The picture doesn’t beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruninghooks, but it does sculpt a chupah of pitchforks and rifles. This move of combining the sacred and the profane captures a fundamental aesthetic of the Israeli settlers….
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Culture Coincidentally Israeli Designers
To classify art based on geographical origin is to play a silly game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. The Guggenheim exhibit The Aztec Empire recently showed the dangers of national taxonomies by including works of the Toltecs — whom the Aztecs sacrificed to their gods — and of the Olmecs, who are to…
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Culture Coincidentally Israeli Designers
To classify art based on geographical origin is to play a silly game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. The Guggenheim exhibit The Aztec Empire recently showed the dangers of national taxonomies by including works of the Toltecs — whom the Aztecs sacrificed to their gods — and of the Olmecs, who are to…
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Culture Jacob van Ruisdael Is Not Jewish
‘Sir, I think you are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp in trying to find a firm connection,” Seymour Slive told me over the phone from his Maine summer home. At 85, Slive is Gleason professor of fine arts emeritus at Harvard University, former director of the Harvard Art Museums, and the Ruisdael scholar — with a collection…
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