Social Concern and Left Politics in Jewish American Art: 1880-1940 by Matthew Baigell Syracuse University Press, 280 pages, $39.95 This ambitious, meticulous cultural history examines how and why Jewish artists and art critics cared about social upheavals in American life. Focusing on the years of abundant immigration of European Jews to the USA until the…
On a bright, sunny day in 2007, Alina and Jeff Bliumis stood on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, asking strangers to choose an identity. Volunteers could pick from three options — “Jewish,” “American” and “Russian” — and then pose in front of the sign or signs bearing that designation. By the end of the day, 52…
“Natürlich.” When asked if he collected things as a child, Stefan Edlis replied in impeccable German. Of course he did. “I was a stamp collector,” said Edlis, 89, industrialist and art collector, who recently donated over 40 works of art to the Art Institute of Chicago together with his wife, Gael Neeson, making it the…
For every Al Hirschfeld — whose splashy retrospective just opened at the New York Historical Society — there’s a Sam Berman or Alan Jedla, star caricaturists whose fortunes faded along with the glory days of newspaper cartooning. But Drew Friedman and Stephen Kroninger won’t let them disappear. In fact, they conjured the artists on May…
Halfway through my visit to the Jewish Museum, someone thought to turn down the Barbra Streisand. Or maybe I just got used to it. Either way, it was a blessing. For, the sound of Babs belting out the Peter Matz tune “Gotta Move,” from her 1966 CBS TV special, “Color Me Barbra,” threatened to drown…
Last month’s column, as you may recall, made much of Judaica collectors who prefer to sell rather than donate their holdings. No sooner had I made that claim than a number of readers as well as colleagues duly informed me that I was barking up the wrong tree. Dolefully, they pointed out that even if…
Would you know what it means if I say that we are living in a post-Internet age? A whole lot has been said regarding the designation, but consensus, alas, remains out of grasp. Nonetheless the notion stakes its claim on, even demands, our attention: Whatever, wherever, the post-Internet may be, welcome to it. “Surround Audience,”…
New York City is losing its Museum of Biblical Art. The Board of Trustees of MOBIA announced that it will close for good on June 30 this year. Its current exhibition, Sculpture in the Age of Donatello, will remain open to the public through June 14. This comes about a year after the American Bible…
In October of 1986, as a delegation of Jews active in community affairs toured a closed Auschwitz-Birkenau, investigative journalist Ann Weiss fell behind the others. “A need for solitude compelled me to linger behind, Weiss said of confronting 30,000 shoes that once belonged to prisoners. “Alone, I studied their broken forms, and thought of their…
This year, Israel’s contribution to the World’s Fair is, more or less, breakfast cereal. The theme of the fair, which opens in Milan in May and runs for six months, is “Feeding the planet, energy for life.” Israel will be represented by a 39-by-230-foot living billboard of wheat, rice and corn. It is meant to…
The largest art gift in the history of the Art Institute of Chicago has been donated to the museum by Stefan Edlis, a Vienna-born Jewish industrialist and art collector, and his wife Gael Neeson. The over 40 works from Edlis’ collection of Pop and contemporary art that will go to the museum include nine silkscreens…
