Jewish Visual and Material Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

A Dazzling Array of Painting, Sculpture, and Photography

The truly dazzling images of the period from 1880 to 1918 offer insight into three worlds of Jewish material creativity: a feast of painting, sculpture, and photography produced by Jewish artists within the modern “fine arts” tradition; examples of Jewish efforts to reorganize space in a meaningful fashion; and a sampling of the vast universe of material culture produced for religious, decorative, educational, and other meaning-laden purposes by Jewish artists, artisans, and private individuals, some of whom remain anonymous. This threefold division reflects the need to capture new convergences and forms of fragmentation in Jewish visual culture in the period covering the years 1880 to 1918.

Traditional Jewish life had always made room for visual beauty and the decorative arts, particularly as adornments to religious observance, but also for more worldly purposes, like adornment of the body. This in turn meant continuous traditions in some places of extraordinary, specialized artistry. Jewish silversmithing and jewelry making in Yemen and other parts of the Arab world offer perhaps the most dramatic examples. The Posen Library’s  material culture offerings capture these continuities as well as new developments. Conversely, Jewish creativity in fine arts, like Jewish involvement in secular literary creativity, was a product of modernity, and the 1880–1918 period was arguably its watershed. Where integration and acculturation had already reshaped Jewish life or were doing so with increasing force, individuals of Jewish origin naturally found their way into the burgeoning metropolitan art worlds of Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, London, and New York. What had been a trickle in the mid-nineteenth century became a flood, and a more variegated cohort found their way to art: Jews from every geographic background, including Eastern Europe and North Africa, and increasing numbers of women alongside men, like the British painter and suffrage activist Lily Delissa Joseph. Painters and sculptors of Jewish origin like Amedeo Modigliani (scion of a refined Livornese Sephardic family), Sonia Delaunay, and Max Weber played substantial roles in the modernist art revolutions of Paris and New York. Jews also entered the still-young world of art photography “on the ground floor.” Alfred Stieglitz, born in Hoboken, New Jersey, to a German Jewish Union Army veteran who became a wealthy businessman, redefined photography as a modern art form in the United States.

Jewish National Art

Particularly distinctive to this period was the birth and rapid development of a new vision or project shaped by the confluence of aestheticism with Jewish nationalism: the idea that Jews “as a nation” could and should strive to create their own distinctive “national art.” It was not new for artists of Jewish origin to place Jewish figures and themes at or near the center of their work, as figures such as Max Liebermann, Katherine M. Cohen, and Maurycy Minkowski continued to do in this period. But the idea that there should be a sustained, collective effort to create a Jewish art parallel and equal to the national traditions of Polish, Russian, or German art was different. Born somewhere between St. Petersburg, Vienna, Vitebsk, Tel Aviv, and the East European Jewish artist colony in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris, and midwifed by the influential Zionist art-nouveau illustrations of Ephraim Moses Lilien, this idea sank lasting institutional roots only in Palestine’s Yishuv. But between roughly 1910 and 1920, it inspired excitement and creativity far more widely, with particularly spectacular implications in late imperial and early revolutionary Russia, as exemplified in the early works of El Lissitzky, Marc Chagall, Joseph Chaikov, and Natan Altman.