Description:
Unprecedented social and political freedom allowed 19th-century European Jews access to countless new experiences, including membership in artists' academies and guilds, and an atmosphere that produced the first generation of great Jewish painters, including Camille Pissarro and Max Liebermann. The Emergence of Jewish Artists in Nineteenth Century Europe, edited by Susan Tumarkin Goodman, curator at the Jewish Museum in New York, considers how this generation of artists used painting to help make sense of their new freedoms. In Western Europe, which offered the greatest possibilities of assimilation, Jewish artists rarely depicted explicitly Jewish cultural or biblical scenes. In Eastern Europe, where Jews were less integrated, painters more often depicted synagogue life and traditional dress. The book's dozens of illustrations testify to this same contrast. And it is impossible to decide which are more beautiful, the more settled, gray compositions by Poles such as Maurycy Minkowski and Samuel Hirszenberg, or the dynamic, colorful scenes made by their German, Austrian, Italian, and British peers. --Michael Joseph Gross
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