Jewish art is not hip. It can be beautiful, sure. It can be meaningful, of course. It can be valuable, no doubt. But cutting-edge? Current? Cool? Meh. If you believe that, you clearly have not yet been to the first-ever Jerusalem Biennale for Contemporary Jewish Art, which opened this week at five venues around town,…
Heirs of four German-Jewish art dealers are gearing for a fight over a treasure they say was forced from their families’ hands on orders of Hitler’s deputy Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering. But lawyers for the heirs hope a Sept. 17 hearing in Berlin will obviate any legal battles over the fortune in medieval gold artifacts –…
Cast in the major exhibition “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” (through September 29 at the Art Institute of Chicago), certain paintings expose their undergarments, so to speak. The exhibit, jointly organized with Paris’s Musée d’Orsay and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was shown earlier this year, features a Who’s Who of impressionist painters….
Sometimes stories are so ingrained in us, so much a part of our culture, that we take them for granted. In these instances, artists become particularly valuable, revisiting and reinterpreting stories for us, giving them new life. In “As Subject and Object: Contemporary Book Artists Explore Sacred Hebrew Texts,” which runs through September 29 at…
● The Flamethrowers By Rachel Kushner Scribner, 400 pgs, $26.99 In many ways, “The Flamethrowers,” Rachel Kushner’s novel about the historical, political, cultural and — most daringly — ideological chaos of the 1970s, is a simple bildungsroman. It tracks the sentimental education of its heroine, Reno, from starry-eyed, eager youth, lusting after experience — her…
On the wood-framed doorway of the gallery Untitled, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, hangs a mezuza. It’s small, unassuming, something you wouldn’t necessarily notice if not for the title of the exhibition inside: “Jew York.” But it turns out that the mezuza wasn’t installed for the show; it’s been there for years, since…
It was a good year for [Saul Leiter][1], who died Tuesday at the age 89. There’s a new documentary about his life and work, an exhibition of his photographs and paintings in London and earlier this year, he was presented with a lifetime achievement award at the ArtHamptons International Fine Art Fair. Over the course…
In 2002, during a visit to his native Israel, Haim Baron’s mother urged him to buy one of his cousin Isiu Schärf’s artworks. Baron had seen some of Schärf’s work before in the apartment of his maternal grandmother, Schärf’s aunt, who had sponsored the artist’s emigration from Romania to Israel in 1974. And Baron and…
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