Menachem Wecker
By Menachem Wecker
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Culture Painting the Commandments, All 613 of Them
While Archie Rand was eating lunch at an Indian restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village in 2014, his agent told him and his wife that she’d landed a book deal to publish his series of 614 canvases — one per Old Testament commandment and an extra title painting. “I thought that some hippie in Saskatchewan had…
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Life Why Is There a Naked Woman on This Ketubah?
That naked bodies existed in the mid-18th century goes without saying. In a world where even Vogue finds its way to discussing tznius, the biblically-inspired modesty that has tended to be applied overwhelmingly to women’s attire, however, some may be surprised to learn that naked female bodies surface in illustrations adorning margins of religious Jewish…
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Art The Not So Avant-Garde Art of Harold Garde
If Harold Garde, a painter who lives in Maine and Florida, wasn’t a nonagenarian, the framework of his exhibit at the Orlando Museum of Art might scare him. The first room of “Harold Garde: Mid-Century to This Century” contains Abstract Expressionist works from the 1950s-70s, while the second room features the more figurative paintings that…
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Art Why Netanyahu Still Doesn’t Take Moshe Safdie’s Calls
Moshe Safdie was sitting in a wood-paneled room in the National Academy of Design’s Beaux-Arts mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, surrounded by his drawings and architectural models. Represented among the works by the septuagenarian architect in the exhibit “Global Citizen: The Art of Moshe Safdie” were materials related to some of his Israeli projects:…
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Culture The Most Jewish Crocodile in New York
On the sidewalks leading up to the National Museum of American Jewish History, located mere steps from Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell, green reptilian footprints lead the way to the exhibit “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile and Friends: The Art of Bernard Waber.” Ilana Blumenthal, the museum’s marketing and communications manager, conceived of the footprints to promote the show,…
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Life A 16th-Century Dutch Artist’s NSFW Take on Biblical Women
Before pornographic magazines and websites, there were religious and mythological paintings. Two paintings of Vulcan’s exposure (pun intended) of Mars and Venus’ infidelity, which appear in the National Gallery of Art’s exhibit are “among the extremely rare 17th-century works in which copulation is explicitly and openly portrayed,” writes Liesbeth Helmus, curator of old master paintings,…
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Art Indiana Jones and the Temple of Jews
Museums don’t typically take public, unequivocal stands on the question of the literal truth of the bible. But a National Geographic announcement of its exhibit “Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology” (on display through Jan. 3, 2016) refers to both the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail as “famous, fictional relics.” But…
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Life A Nazi Refugee Transforms Her Trauma Through Art
After Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist Carl Jung died in 1961, his family kept a manuscript of his “Red Book,” a dream journal which he said recorded his “confrontation with the unconscious” and which the New York Times would later call “the Holy Grail of the unconscious,” locked away in a bank vault. Family members were…
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