Jennings Tofel (American, born Poland, 1891–1959)
The Red Hand, 1954
Oil on canvas
40 x 33 in. (101.6 x 83.8 cm)
Gift of Arthur & Anne Granick, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, 97.45
Photo: Kevin Montague
In 1997, the Eskenazi Museum of Art received a donation of five paintings and a drawing by Jennings Tofel. Born Yehuda Toflewicz in Tomaszow, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire) in 1891, Tofel grew up in a traditionally observant Jewish environment that profoundly shaped his personality and worldview. Yet his father, Yosif, while proud that the family descended from pious Torah scholars, was also drawn to the world of secular modernity. He taught his children German and enrolled his son in the local Russian school. Restless in small-town Poland, Yosif immigrated to the United States, where Tofel joined him in 1905.
As a young man, Tofel found his way into the modernist artistic circles around gallerist Alfred Stieglitz. Collector Katherine Dreier, whose Société Anonyme exhibited avant-garde art, promoted his work. He was also featured in exhibitions at several New York galleries. In 1932 the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired Tofel’s painting Hagar, and in 1943 collector Joseph Hirshhorn purchased twenty of his canvases. Although Tofel never affiliated himself with artistic movements, his paintings might best be described as expressionist. Vibrant color structures the dense, multi-figured compositions often centered around biblical figures. His work emerged from his inner spiritual vision and emotional state of being.
Tofel also moved in explicitly Jewish artistic circles. In the years around World War I, he was associated with Di Yunge, a group of young Yiddish writers, among them the poets Mani Leib, Zishe Landau, Itzik Manger, and David Ignatoff. These authors often turned to artists such as Tofel, Max Weber, and Abraham Walkowitz to illustrate their publications, seeking a symbiotic relationship between written and visual expression. Tofel himself was a prolific writer, both in Yiddish and English. In 1925, along with other Di Yunge-affiliated artists, Tofel founded the Jewish Art Center in New York, which encouraged Jewish artists to resist full assimilation and maintain a meaningful connection with Jewish culture
Despite his early success, Tofel’s name was barely known when he died in 1959, and he has remained obscure ever since. Indeed, his paintings had languished in storage at the Eskenazi for some time when I decided to include Tofel’s enigmatic 1954 painting The Red Hand in a permanent collection reinstallation in 2019. A recent visit to the Center for Jewish History in New York, where Tofel's papers are held among the collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, provided me with greater insight into this fascinating artist whose work deserves far more recognition.
It is not difficult to see why Tofel’s art was marginalized. In the galleries, museums, and art criticism of the postwar era, there was little room for his approach to expressionism, which was at once intensely spiritual and deeply humanistic. The human figure and the expression of the full spectrum of human emotions was central to Tofel’s work. This is evident in Hostage, with its tense and fearful atmosphere, and Job, the biblical figure who heroically persevered in the face of suffering and grief. Frustrated by an art world that increasingly favored Abstract Expressionism, Tofel expressed frankly antagonistic views about non-objective painting in the diary he began in 1943. “These abstractions,” he wrote, “will some day be considered as expressing an era when man had lost faith in the humanity of man.” (1)
It’s notable that his strong condemnations of non-objectivity were written during World War II. Diary entries from summer 1944 express his grief and agony over the news of the atrocities being perpetrated against Europe’s Jews. After reading of the extermination of one and half million Jews—men, women, and children—at the Majdanek death camp outside Lublin, Poland, he wrote that he “wept and my heart nearly broke.”(2) In his eulogy for Tofel, a friend remarked that “a day did not pass that Tofel did not think of the murder of the 6,000,000 Jews.”(3) It is probable that the Holocaust influenced Tofel’s negative view of abstraction, which he viewed as devoid of any life force.
Despite the agony he felt over the genocide perpetrated upon his own people, coupled with suffering he endured from physical disabilities and depression, Tofel repeatedly wrote of his love for life. This attitude inspired paintings that celebrated human life in all its emotional complexity. In this way, his work is profoundly Jewish. “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life—if you and your offspring would live,” Moses charges the Israelites in Deuteronomy. The paintings of Jennings Tofel embody the profound value Judaism places on life.
The 2021–22 exhibition Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art and art historian Erika Doss’s new book Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth Century American Artists and Religion (2022) are but two examples of recent art historical examinations of the intersection between modernism and religion. Strategic initiatives to enhance diversity in American art museums are also prompting these institutions to finally take greater note of Jewish art. Perhaps the time is ripe for the rediscovery of Jennings Tofel.
(1) Quote from Jennings Tofel, "A Painter's Diary," February 4, 1944, typescript. Papers of Jennings Yehuda Tofel; RG487; folder 93, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
(2) Quote from Jennings Tofel, "A Painter's Diary," August 30, 1944, typescript. Papers of Jennings Yehuda Tofel; RG487; folder 94, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
(3) Unknown author, Eulogy, 1959, handwritten manuscript. Papers of Jennings Yehuda Tofel; RG487; folder 87, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Jennings Tofel (American, born Poland, 1891–1959)
Hostage, 1953
Oil on canvas
40 x 33 in. (101.9 x 84.1 cm)
Gift of Arthur & Anne Granick, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, 97.49
Photo: Kevin Montague
Jennings Tofel (American, born Poland, 1891–1959)
Job, 1958
Oil on canvas
24 x 20 in. (61 x 50.8 cm)
Gift of Arthur & Anne Granick, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, 97.50
Photo: Kevin Montague