Jewish artists in New York

Discusses the personal and artistic reactions of Jewish artists in New York (including such refugees as Chagall, Lipchitz, Mané-Katz, and Abraham Rattner) to the Holocaust. Cites contemporary press to demonstrate that people in the U.S. did know about aspects of the genocide of the Jews while it was happening. Some of the artists, e.g. Max Weber and Hyman Bloom, used images from Jewish tradition, such as the Torah, to relate to the Jewish world being destroyed in Europe. Artists like Ben Shahn sometimes emphasized universal and sometimes Jewish aspects of war suffering. Jack Levine, like some other artists, was ambivalent about his Jewishness, apparently having internalized some of the antisemitism of his environment. Ch. 3 (pp. 66-97), "Chagall, Rattner, and Lipchitz", focuses on works wherein the artists used Jesus, Jewish symbols, and classical mythology to deal with the tragedy of their people. Ch. 4 (pp. 98-151), "The Abstract Expressionists", focuses on Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and the sculptor Seymour Lipton. Claims that, while their art did not describe or symbolize in a conventional way, it did present original and striking parallels to the horror and brutality of the Holocaust. Rothko's case may also reflect traumatic association of pogroms of his youth with the Holocaust. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)