Art (modern)

Prior to the modern period, Jews depicted Christians relatively rarely in visual art, not least of all out of fear of retaliation. For their part, Christians tended to depict Jews instrumentally, as types which served to underscore their own special status both theologically and socially. Typical of this tendency were images of the downcast, blind-folded synagoga (synagogue), standing in contradistinction to a triumphal ecclesia (church), as witnessed on the 13^{t h}-cent. façade of Strasbourg Cathedral in France. As David Nirenberg notes, “[Western] art defined and legitimated itself by rearticulating and representing its relationship to ‘Judaism’ and thereby discovered the conditions of possibility for its own existence.” Christian representions of Jews tended to reveal little about actual Jews and Jewish life, but a great deal about how Christians conceived of themselves, theologically, culturally, economically and otherwise.

At times, Jews did feature sympathetically in the work of Christian artists, most notably in the 17^th-cent. paintings of Rembrandt, who used his Amsterdam Jewish neighbors as models, especially when treating the “Old Testament.” Yet even in such exemplary cases, historians such as Steven Nadler caution us not to exaggerate Rembrandt’s philosemitism or anachronistically project onto these works a modern model of interfaith dialogue. When we turn our attention to the modern period, beginning with the 19^th cent., we have the opportunity to observe Jews and Christians looking at and representing one another directly and specifically. This certainly does not always mean sympathetically or accurately, and indeed we will treat some examples of virulent prejudice. But whether positive or negative, modern and contemporary visual art provide ample opportunities to explore Jewish and Christian relations and the potential for constructive interreligious dialogue.

Any assessment of the relations between Jews and Christian in modern visual art must first confront the prejudice that rejects the very possibility of Jewish art in the first place. This stereotype, which continues to be influential today, gained strength in the19^th cent., the same time in which both modern art and the discipline of art history were taking shape. The denial of Jewish art ostensibly takes its support from the Second Commandment (Ex 20:4, Deut 5:8), which in its strictest interpretation forbids the creation of any “graven images.” Historically, however, Jews themselves have often interpreted this commandment permissively, or even ignored it outright. The notion of Jewish aniconism arose primarily from politically charged philosophical and art-historical debates in the 19^th cent. Kalman Bland has drawn attention to the dismissal of Jewish visual creativity in the writings of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and their followers (Bland 2000, 15). Margaret Olin, meanwhile, has traced the powerful role which nationalism played in art history during its formative years (Olin 2001, 7). By linking artistic style with a national homeland, Josef Strzygowski and other early art historians cemented the concept of German – and implicitly Christian – art, while denying the possibility of Jewish art. Insofar as they were included in art history in the nineteenth century, Jewish artists such as Max Liebermann were frequently portrayed as copyists or purveyors of foreign influence (Olin 2001, 22–24). As such, they constituted a convenient foil for purportedly pure and authentic German, French, or Russian art, as the case may be. Whether framed in nationalistic, racial, or theological terms, false dichotomies between Christian and Jewish visual culture have lingered from the 19^th cent. up to the present, and must be addressed in any meaningful interreligious dialogue.

For those willing to look for it in the 19^th cent., Jewish visual art was actually evident in greater abundance than ever before, regardless of attempts to define it out of existence. Until political emancipation in the late 18^th and 19^th centuries, Jewish artists in Europe often faced strict restrictions regarding the materials they could use, the places where they could display their work, the dimensions and locations of their architecture, and their ability to train under or collaborate with non-Jews. For example, Jews were prevented from using marble in early modern Venice, and had to use marble dust to create marmorino; they could not build above the level of Christian churches; they were not allowed to be members of the major guilds or apprentice under leading Christian artists, thus preventing them from gaining a place in the dominant guild and atelier based systems of early modern Euoprean art. As social and legal restrictions relaxed, especially during the latter half of the 19^th cent., the first generations of major modern Jewish artists began to emerge and increase in both numbers and prominence. Rather than forming a self-contained artistic unit, Jews became involved in the full spectrum of modern artistic movements across Europe.

The first Jewish artist to achieve widespread success in Europe was Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800–1882) of Germany. After studying in Rome in his early years with the Nazarenes, who placed a strong emphasis on biblical imagery and Christian spirituality, Oppenheim increasingly depicted Jewish life in his later work. His 1856 painting of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing meeting his Jewish philosophical counterpart, Moses Mendelssohn, promoted an image of fraternity and rational discourse across religious divisions, while Oppenheim’s widely circulated series Jewish Family Life (printed 1866–81), exposed many viewers to domestic Jewish customs for the first time. In the same years in London, the Jewish artist Simeon Solomon, often associated with the pre-Raphaelites, produced several paintings on biblical themes, as well as a broadly circulated series of engravings illustrating Jewish life in England (1862). Widely celebrated, and collected by luminaries including Oscar Wilde, Solomon eventually fell from grace and out of many history books after his arrest for suspected homosexual acts.

The late 19^th cent. and the beginning of the 20^th cent. witnessed an unprecedented flourishing of Jewish artists, especially in Paris. There, at the epicenter of the art world of the period, many enjoyed camaraderie, creative freedom, and civil liberties which were previously unthinkable in the Christian world. Camille Pissarro, born and raised in the Caribbean, was a stalwart in the French scene and contributed early and often to the Impressionist exhibitions while also influencing Post-Impressionists, including Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin. In Pissarro’s wake, there followed a parade of luminary Jewish artists in Paris, including: Amedeo Modigliani, Sonia Delaunay, Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, Naum Gabo, Jacques Lipchitz, and Chaim Soutine.

While some Jewish artists of this period avoided Christian themes and symbols, it is remarkable how many pioneering modern Jewish artists, observant and otherwise, felt compelled to create images of Jesus. Although each case comes with its own complexity, two primary reasons repeatedly emerge. On the one hand, the figure of Jesus provided an opportunity for Jewish artists to engage with Christian audiences, whether to call attention to antisemitic persecution or deliver a message of ecumenical cooperation. On the other hand, creating images of Jesus and playing with Christian iconography allowed Jewish artists to enter into a self-conscious and sophisticated dialogue with the history of Western art, establishing and solidifying their place within what had been a highly exclusive and exclusionary canon. Ultimately, whether for theological, political, or art-historical reasons, the figure of Jesus has been almost as important for modern Jewish artists as it has been for Christian artists. An early example is the influential German painter Max Liebermann (1847–1935), who became president of the Berlin Secession, an artistic group formed at the end of the 19^th cent. in Berlin, in protest against the limitations of the academic tradition. In his painting of The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple (1879), Liebermann managed to run afoul of both the Christian and Jewish establishment of his day. Christian critics admonished him for painting a Jesus who struck them as too ethnically Jewish. When Liebermann attempted to finesse the issue, repainting Jesus with blonde hair, he only caused more of a stir, this time with Jewish critics, who felt he had surrendered to antisemitic pressure.

The Russian sculptor Mark Antokol’skii, the first Jewish student at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, confronted similar prejudices. Like Liebermann, he battled allegations that his style displayed a corrupting foreign influence, especially after he moved to Paris. In a bronze statue entitled Ecce Homo (1873), Antokol’skii cast Jesus with a yarmulke (skullcap) and payot (side curls worn by Orthodox Jews) in order to emphasize his identity as a Jew; a clear indictment against pogroms perpetrated against Jews in the name of Christ. In Galicia, Maurycy Gottlieb painted a visibly Jewish Jesus, while also presenting Polish compatriots with ennobling images of contemporary Jewish life, such as Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur (1878). In a period of nascent Polish nationalism, Gottlieb expressed pride in his identity as both a Jew and a Pole. In a letter from 1878, he declared:

How deeply I wish to eradicate all the prejudices against my people! How avidly I desire to uproot the hatred enveloping the oppressed and tormented nation and to bring peace between the Poles and the Jews, for the history of both people is a chronicle of grief and anguish.

In the 20^th cent., a wide range of Jewish artists created images of Jesus, with a special focus on the Crucifixion as a symbol of Jewish torment. These artists included such major painters as Marc Chagall, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Emmanuel Levy, Barnett Newman, Abraham Rattner, and Mark Rothko, as well as sculptors including Jacob Epstein, Louise Nevelson, and Ossip Zadkine. Among this company, Chagall stands out for his repeated – at times obsessive – depiction of the Crucifixion, which appears in hundreds of works, most famously in White Crucifixion (1938). While some Christian writers such as Richard Harries glimpse signs of hope in the canvas, what is ultimately illuminated is not so much the promise of divine promise or intervention  as the reality of Nazi persecution. Rather than a Christian Christ whose suffering saves, Chagall’s Jesus – his loins wrapped with a prayer shawl – is an innocent Jew suffering without cause or purpose.

Where Jewish artists sought to make explicit the Jewishness of Jesus – an actual Jew – antisemitic critics in the same period were preoccupied with determining visual signs of Jewishness on their own, pseudo-scientific terms. A seminal example is Philipp Stauff’s assessment of Jewish influence on German culture in 1913, which decried “The Alien Element in German Art” and the allegedly corrupting nature of Jewish artists as well as patrons, dealers, and critics. Hans Günther, a German professor of eugenics, published widely read accounts of the malign impact of Jews on Nordic culture, which helped lay the foundations for much Nazi racial policy, including in the arts. By 1928, the antisemitic critic Paul Schultze-Naumburg was able to assert confidently that the very style of a work of art could reveal its racial origins, focusing on the degradation of modern art, which he attributed to its Jewish aesthetic. When the massively popular Degenerate Art exhibition was staged in Munich in 1937 – a defamatory companion to the simultaneous Great German Art Exhibition – it contained only a relatively small number of works actually produced by Jews, which did not stop the curators from tarring the whole lot Jewish, Bolshevik, or mentally deficient (ambiguous, overlapping categories in the Nazi imagination). While Nazi ‘race theory’ undergirded the exhibition as a whole, the first room focused on art thought to defame and undermine Christian theology and morality, while the second room, with a painting by Chagall, promised “The Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul.” Viewers were thus encouraged to drink their fill of antisemitism in multifarious forms, from theological to racial, until they could no longer tell the difference.

In the aftermath of the Shoah, some Jewish artists – most notably Chagall – continued to create images of Jesus. Overall, however, Jewish artists were reticent to use imagery more familiar to the perpetrators than the persecuted, let alone images which might suggest there was something redemptive about the sacrifice of millions of Jewish lives. Many Christian artists, on the other hand, gravitated towards the symbolism of the Crucifixion to process feelings of guilt, shame, and horror at the atrocities of the Holocaust. When the British artist Graham Sutherland was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for St Matthew’s Church in Northampton, he clearly evoked recently published photographs of the emaciated corpses discovered in the death camps. Completed in 1946, Sutherland’s Crucifixion depicts Christ with skin stretched nearly to the point of tearing, his flesh palpably scraped away in the deep striations of his rib cage. And yet, even as he references the traumas so recently inflicted upon European Jews, it is the 16^th-cent. iconography of the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald which Sutherland uses to structure his composition, both visually and theologically. Christ’s crown is woven from the familiar spear-like thorns of the Isenheim, and his loincloth is gathered in the same distinctive knot. However much Sutherland’s Jesus evokes the recent horrors endured by Jews, he still offers Christian worshippers the reassurance that suffering has meaning and purpose.

In the ensuing years, Jewish and Christian religious communities increasingly sought out opportunities for shared experiences and interreligious dialogue. One remarkable trend was that Christian leaders began to approach Jewish artists for commissions in Christian churches. In France, Father Marie-Alain Couturier instigated a series of visionary commissions from modern artists, including at the Church of Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce in the Alps, where he enlisted such modern titans as Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Matisse, and Georges Rouault. While some, like Rouault, were devout Catholics, Couturier also sought out artists with no religious commitment, and – in the case of Chagall and Lipchitz – artists who came from other religious backgrounds. Far from being an inconvenient fact, the Jewish identities of Chagall and Lipchitz were central to Couturier’s aesthetic and theological wager that the best modern art, regardless of the artist’s religious persuasion, could successfully function in a Christian sacred space. As he wrote in 1947:

We knew very well that some of the artists were not strictly Christians; that some were separated from us by serious divergences of a political as well as of an intellectual order. Trusting in Providence, we told ourselves that a great artist is always a great spiritual being, each in his own manner.

​If the great artist was an inherently “spiritual being,” and the Catholic Church drew from the same spiritual wellspring, so Couturier’s syllogism went, the artist could not help expressing realities in consonance with Christian truths. In other words, Chagall’s respect for what he called the “poetical teaching” of Christ could provide ample grounds for a religious response from his viewers.

In the United States, the visionary patrons John and Dominique De Menil followed Couturier’s lead. In the mid 1960s, they approached the great abstract painter Mark Rothko to create an entire religious space, which would come to mark the apotheosis of both his aesthetic and spiritual vision. The chapel was intended to serve as the culminating monument at the end of the mall of the University of St. Thomas, a Catholic institution. While the chapel would eventually be dedicated as a non-denominational site, separate from the university, Rothko willingly accepted the doctrinal context of the chapel as it was initially conceived, even consenting at one point to indications of the fourteen Stations of the Cross on the exterior of the chapel, mirroring the fourteen canvases inside. Moreover, Rothko lobbied heavily for the implementation of an octagonal plan for the chapel – with its precedent in both Italian baptistery and Russian Orthodox church design – instead of the initial square layout envisioned by the chapel’s first architect, Philip Johnson, with whom Rothko famously butted heads. In the installation scheme, Rothko explicitly chose to evoke Christian precedent for his viewers. On the north, east, and west walls of the chapel, Rothko organized his works into triptychs, encouraging the viewer to approach the works devotionally, as they would a traditional altarpiece. For the southern entrance wall, he devised a single panel composed of a black rectangle set in maroon, recalling the placement of Last Judgement scenes he had recently admired in churches while sightseeing in Italy.

At a time when religious observance in the United States was beginning to show significant signs of decline, with many predicting the veritable disappearance of widespread church attendance, Rothko made a bold wager on the relevance of religious art, albeit in a new form. While Rothko eschewed representations of Christian subjects, he made a deliberate attempt to harness the conventions of religious viewing. He wanted the chapel paintings to be approached with the same fear and trembling that a Last Judgment can induce, or the same concentrated fervor with which one might approach a devotional triptych. Rather than rejecting the resources of Christianity, Rothko sought to invite viewers to approach his works with visual and spiritual expectations schooled by Christian tradition; a resource he did not see in Jewish tradition. Given the right conditions and associations, he hoped his works would spark significant spiritual encounters in the manner of the great religious masterpieces of the past.

In recent decades, Christian and Jewish encounters through the arts have been increasingly situated within a more complex and inclusive context, whether by engaging with Muslims in an ‘Abrahamic’ trialogue or taking greater account of intersectional experiences of race, gender, and sexuality. The contemporary Israeli photographer Adi Nes, for example, draws upon his identity as a Mizrahi-Iranian Jew and queer man as he re-imagines biblical stories and motifs in contemporary Israel. When he turns his eye on military service, for instance, he depicts young soldiers in homoerotic poses drawn from Caravaggio or situates them in a mess hall modeled on Leonardo’s Last Supper, raising questions about the institutionalization of sacrifice in Israeli society. The Swedish photographer Elizabeth Ohlson Wallin also recreates biblical scenes with contemporary subjects. In Jerusalem (2010) she bought together Jewish, Christian, and Muslim members of the city’s LGBTQ+ community and photographed them at significant religious sites around Jerusalem. The subjects, kissed, touched, and lay down together while homophobic texts from their own religions were projected onto them or placed near them. The subversive work fostered a powerful interreligious experience between the subjects based on similar and overlapping traumas inflicted by their respective faith traditions.

By taking account of the multidimensional, embodied experiences of religious practitioners, contemporary visual art has an opportunity to breathe new life into Jewish-Christian dialogue, a process which too often falls into repetitive – if well-intentioned – assertions of commonality. For the encounter with works of art is to become a serious stimulus for dialogue, however, disciplinary boundaries need to be crossed as much as religious ones. Existing studies of interfaith dialogue rarely deal significantly with the visual arts. Religion and the arts is now an established and expanding field, with key works by scholars including James Elkins, David Morgan, and Sally Promey. Nonetheless, the field still tends to treat the material culture of communities in isolation rather than focusing on dialogue. The field of interreligious studies and the arts – especially when it comes to modern and contemporary art – is still in its infancy, with scholars including Ruth Illman, Lucinda Mosher, S. Brent Rodriguez Plate, and Aaron Rosen. As Illman argues, much contemporary practice and theory of interreligious dialogue proceeds from essentialist constructions of religion, in which “each tradition constitutes a monolithic unity of creed, conduct and belief, clearly separated from other similar unities.” What Illman terms “creative interreligious dialogue” has a vast and largely untapped potential to reframe how we conceptualize both Judaism and Christianity.