Matthew Baigell. Social Concern and Left Politics in Jewish American Art, 1880-1940. Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 2015. 280 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8156-3396-9.
Reviewed by Ori Z. Soltes (Georgetown University)
Published on H-Judaic (February, 2016)
Commissioned by Matthew A. Kraus
Jewish American Artists as Social Critics
shores around 1880 and the slamming shut of the immigration door by the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. He examines their preoccupations as they sought to find their
place in America both before and after that year. He has
accomplished two services in his analysis. One, he has
distilled in a concise manner both the gradual transition
from a purely adorational view of the United States toward one more aware of and eventually critical of systemic American shortcomings, and the explanation of
why and how those phases of engagement and the transition between them was accomplished. Two, he has mediated that broad discussion specifically through the visual arts, offering an unprecedented analysis of the artisThis volume proves no exception. It is well retic community—its individuals and its institutions—that
searched, well organized, and informative. I would even
was part of these developments.
disagree with his apology at the outset (on page xiv of
the acknowledgments) regarding the number and qualWithin this second contribution, through his intrepid
ity of images that he was able to obtain. For one thing, research and analysis of the contents turned up by that
they are so skillfully used to illustrate his points that one research, he has offered a very important discussion of
would hardly stop to think that there are not enough or the Jewish role in political and sociopolitical cartoons,
to notice a less than optimal quality for one or two of from almost the beginning of the century and continuthem—even without his explanation as to why. For an- ing through the next several decades. He has astutely not
other, he has been so diligent in tracking down difficult- wasted time comparing the aesthetic or any other value
to-find images, which most readers will not even have of, say, oil paintings versus prints, because for his narraknown existed, much less how to get to see them, that he tive and the history that he is analyzing, that sort of queshas left us in his debt for bringing them to light, whatever tion could not be more irrelevant. Instead he has offered
an effective apercu into distinctions between formal, relitheir “quality.”
gious Judaism and informal, cultural (and linguistic, i.e.,
Baigell adds an important thread to the expanding
Yiddish-bound) Judaism. Both of these articulations of
tapestry of writing on immigrant Jews, mostly from east- identity, in parallel but different ways, interweave the soern Europe, between the time they arrived on these cial and political concerns of Jewish artists, particularly
When I open a book written by Matthew Baigell I
typically have two expectations. I count on something
very well researched, with a careful and judicious handling of diverse sources, and I expect to come away with
some new insights into the subject, no matter how well I
might have thought I already knew it. Baigell’s long history of parsing different areas of American art and of the
work of American Jewish artists has yielded admirable
discussions of these artists’ reflections on the Holocaust
and on other issues relevant to human questions as those
questions are filtered through both Jewish and American
lenses.
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in New York City. He explores how these artists came to
direct themselves not only to American issues but also to
issues back in the Old Country which many of them left
behind not so long before.
longer in their usual elliptical or vertical positions” (p.
98).
Among the most important discussions, to my mind,
are those that come up in the concluding chapter, perThe issue that is perhaps most pressing in the mid- taining to Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg and
dle parts of his text is how and why so many of those the ambiguous relationship that each had, in his own
figures whom he considers were drawn to communism. way, with Judaism—an ambiguity that informed and was
He (again) presents a concise and coherent analysis of informed by their convictions regarding what paintings
how the movement appeared to American immigrant should and should not be about (that is, they assert that
Jews when it first toppled the Romanov tsarist regime— it should be, as Baigell points out, about form and not
from their pre-immigrant experiences of that regime and about narrative content). I would perhaps go further
from communism’s apparent promise to eliminate anti- than he in arguing that their ambivalence caused them
Semitism by redirecting prejudices from religion and eth- to be blind to the narrative content that was present in
nicity to socioeconomics and then eliminating the prob- the canonical chromaticist paintings of Barnett Newman
lematic of socioeconomics—and why the communist vi- and Marc Rothko; and that these works offer a kind of
sion would be right for America. Equally important is his post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima secular messianic tikkun
discussion of how that situation gradually changed with olam (repair of the world), the very thing that Baigell
the rise to singular power of Joseph Stalin. He shows brings up at the end of his book.
that some were quicker to recognize the flaws in the SoThis leads me, further, to three small criticisms of this
viet system while others hung onto their convictions well
volume. One, I was surprised that, when the author, in
into World War II.
the first two pages of his introduction, asserts that very
Embedded in this, in the context and aftermath of the few art historians have touched on “the connections beJohnson-Reed Act and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler tween religious heritage and radicalism” (p. 1), but mennine years later, and with him, the expansive shaping tions several exceptions, he does not cite my book, Fixing
not only of Nazism in Germany but also of anti-Semitism the World: American Jewish Painters in the Twentieth Cenin America, is an astute presentation of the struggle be- tury (2002), especially since he and I had corresponded
tween those who favored and those who questioned the about a footnote in it at the time. The theme of that book,
Soviet Union. Some saw the Soviet Union as the only as the title might suggest, is that tikkun olam is an idea
power in the world that recognized and was willing to underlying the work of American Jewish painters to an
stand up to Nazi fascism—together with the conviction inordinate degree; while it does not emphasize radicalthat fascism and capitalism were siblings, both of which ism it certainly moves in the direction that Baigell then
needed to be pushed down through socialism and com- charts out so masterfully. Two, given where his volume
munism in order to facilitate the liberation of the prole- ends, and particularly given the important discussion of
tariat from oppression and of Jews from anti-Semitism. Greenberg and Rosenberg that spills over very much into
Others saw the various aspects of this perspective as se- the 1940s, I am curious why he subtitled the book 1880riously flawed.
1940 rather than 1880-1950. And third, the title itself is
somewhat of a misnomer. Since he is wisely not tryThroughout his narrative, the role of Jewish artists ing to define American Jewish art, which raises a host of
and art critics is an ongoing series of punctuation points,
definitional questions that he does not address (nor does
in which Baigell seeks beneath the surface of works
he need to address), American Jewish artists would have
of art to elicit the combination of Jewish and Ameri- been more accurate.
can or Jewish and socialist/communist concerns. One
of the most effective examples of this is his discussion
These are really small quibbles with a text that is, in
of William Gropper’s February, 1935, cover illustration the end, a magnificent piece of work and an important
for Der Hamer. In it, he observes how the seven-snake- contribution—essential, basic reading—for anyone interheaded hydra tattooed with swastikas not only offers the ested in the period from the beginning of the Great Miserpent as a consummate symbol of evil in the Jewish gration to the aftermath of World War II and the place of
tradition, but in its sevenness also connotes that oldest Jewish artists in shaping and responding to the American
of Jewish visual symbols, the seven-branched menorah world during that era.
“now taken over by the Nazis, its serpentine arms no
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Citation: Ori Z. Soltes. Review of Baigell, Matthew, Social Concern and Left Politics in Jewish American Art, 1880-1940.
H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews. February, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=43949
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoncommercialNo Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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