Northern Italy or Southern Germany (?)
Wedding Ring in the Form of a Synagogue, ca. 1700
Silver, 1 ¾ x 1 x 9/16 in.
Gift of Frederick Stafford, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, 59.54
Photo: Eskenazi Museum of Art / Kevin Montague
Jenny McComas is the Curator of European and American Art at the
Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University and an affiliated faculty member
with IU's Borns Jewish Studies Program.
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“Jewish Art” and American Art Museums
As an undergraduate art history major, I wrote my senior thesis on Marc Chagall’s exuberant series of murals painted for the Moscow Jewish Theatre in 1920. I continued to examine the work of early twentieth-century Russian Jewish artists as a graduate student, and ultimately wrote my dissertation on the American reception and display of the modernist art deemed “degenerate” in Nazi Germany. Yet, only during the last few years, as my own Judaism has become a more central feature of my personal life, have I become more conscious of the striking absence of Jewish experience and identity from the art historical narrative—as presented by university programs and art museums in the United States.
As a curator, I’ve particularly noticed the absence of Jewishness from art museum galleries and exhibitions. Of course, many works by Jewish artists are displayed in American art museums. But analyses of their works—whether short label texts or monographic exhibitions—often give Jewish experience and identity short shrift, even when it would add critical context. In any event, the works we see in American art museums rarely address Jewish experience explicitly. Why, I wonder, are Jewish ritual objects and artworks openly engaging with Jewish themes almost exclusively the purview of specialized Jewish museums? In 2021, I published a short article in AJS Perspectives, the magazine of the Association for Jewish Studies, pondering this question. There, I wrote that “the marginal place of Jewishness within the standard art historical narrative—and therefore the art museum—is a direct consequence of the discipline’s development in tandem with the emergence of nationalist ideologies and racial classifications in nineteenth-century Europe. An artistic canon dependent upon such categories simply could not accommodate the artistic expressions of a diasporic, religiocultural group.”
To put it more simply: because the Jewish people, for much of our history, have been a diasporic people without a political state, art historians have not known what to do with our art—especially if it references Judaism or Jewish experience. This historical reticence to engage with Jewishness in the visual arts still determines how (or whether) “Jewish art” is collected, researched, and presented in American art museums.
The reasons for the invisibility of Jewish experience within the art historical narrative and the museum gallery are, of course, more numerous, complicated, and multifaceted than I could fully explore in that short article. They range from the lack of clarity around the category of “Jewish art” itself, to unease with religious expression in the modern world, to misperceptions that Judaism itself forbids artistic practice, to the tendency, historically, of Jewish artists and art world professionals to downplay their Jewish identity, worried about antisemitism and wanting to assimilate.
As the founder of the Eskenazi Museum of Art’s World War II-Era Provenance Research Project, I have conducted research into the Nazi looting of Jewish collections and the antisemitic nature of art-related propaganda in the Third Reich for almost two decades. Yet as important as this topic is, the mistreatment of Jewish collectors, artists, and gallerists is only one facet of Jewish artistic experience. In other aspects of my curatorial work at Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art, I’ve taken steps in recent years to weave Jewish art, identity, and experience into the broader art historical narrative we present in our galleries. As part of a major gallery reinstallation in 2019, I installed the museum’s sole Jewish ritual object—a ceremonial wedding ring in the form of a synagogue—in conjunction with medieval Christian liturgical objects, contextualizing it with explanatory text about the status of Jewish communities in medieval and early modern Europe. I also brought out of storage a group of midcentury works by Jewish American artists Jacques Lipchitz, Jennings Tofel, and Leonard Baskin, explaining the Jewish themes and ideas embedded in their compositions and symbolism in label texts. And I am currently engaged in research for a forthcoming exhibition on postwar American artistic responses to the Holocaust.
After my AJS Perspectives article was published, several readers contacted me to express their gratitude for my willingness to openly address the marginalization of Jewish art. As art museums—and the art historical field more broadly—grapple with questions of inclusion and diversity, seeking to deconstruct the canon and present more voices and perspectives, I am hopeful that Jewish artistic heritage and practice will become more visible and better understood. It’s our intent that this blog play a role in that process.
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