Arts & Entertainment
THREAD
SCHOLAR ORI SOLTES
COMPILES A BOOK ON
AMERICAN JEWISH
PAINTERS ------- ALL OF
T TEA ARTISTS OUTTO
SAVE HE WO R D
AARON LEIBEL
Washington Jewish Week
0
ri Soltes insists he didn't start out to write a
book about tikkun olam, the Jewish precept
of repairing the world, but the idea flowed
from his subject matter.
"I wanted to do a book on American Jewish painters
whose numbers are proportionately greater than the
number of Jews in this country," says Soltes, whose
Fixing the World: Jewish American Painters in the 20th
Century (Brandeis University Press/University Press of
New England; $50) has been recently published.
"Most of the well-known Jewish painters are in
the book, but during the past 10 years, I have
become aware of Jewish artists who are not well
known, and this was an opportunity to promote
their work. Having chosen the artists, it struck me
that a theme that ran through most of their work
was tikkun olam."
The former head of the B'nai B'rith Klutznick
National Jewish Museum, Soltes, who teaches in the
theology and fine arts departments at Georgetown
University in Washington, D.C., says he has
observed over the years that an inordinately large
number of Jewish artists — more so than non-Jewish
artists — see their work as promoting a better world.
Not everyone in the book sees his or her art that
way, but most do, says Soltes.
7/25
2003
54
"Tikkun olam" painters
found in the book include Ben
Shahn, known for his social
protest paintings; William
Gropper, whose canvases
slammed American poverty
and Nazism in the 1930s and
`40s; Alice Lok Cahana, a sur-
vivor who painted her
Holocaust experience in semi-
abstract paintings; and Joyce Ellen Weinstein, who
used her experience in teaching in a predominantly
African-American school to memorialize the many
black students who died young in The Dead Boys.
As for defining "Jewish" for inclusion in the book,
Soltes concedes to not being "overly rigorous" in his
definition.
"Every painter in the book was born Jewish — but
not necessarily according to Halachah," he says. "And
every artist acknowledges that he or she is Jewish."
Soltes was born in New York City in 1951 and grew
up in the New York metropolitan area. His father was
a Reform rabbi, his mother a Hebrew teacher.
Fearing that the education at the Hebrew school
in his own temple was not demanding enough,
Soltes' father sent the future author to Hebrew
school in a Conservative synagogue. But he became
bar mitzvah at his father's temple.
Soltes graduated from Haverford College and got
a master's degree in the classics at Princeton
University in 1973. While at Princeton, he was pro-
pelled into studying the arts almost by accident.
Translating materials pertaining to slides from
French into English led to an invitation to lecture,
and then a crash self-study course in the visual arts
— the subject of the talk.
Later, he was asked to lecture on Jewish art at the Art
Institute of Chicago, and that led him to think about
the subject of "Jewish art" and much more self-study.
Soltes taught at the Cleveland College of Jewish
Studies from 1980 to 1990 where, in addition to
teaching courses such as Jewish history, Jewish mys-
ticism, and Judaism and Islam, he developed a
course on Jewish art.
In 1990, he moved to Washington, where he lec-
tured at the Smithsonian. The following year he
became curator of the Klutznick Museum, staying in
that position until 1998.
Soltes says he decided to write a book on American
Jewish painters "because I have been teaching the sub-
ject for 20 years and have written so many articles and
essays that it seemed natural. Also, artist Joyce Ellen
Weinstein pointed me to the University Press of New
England (the publisher), when she read they were
interested in new tides for their American Jewish Life
and Culture Series." Fixing the World has three main
chapters — "Immigrants and Artists: Finding and
Fixing a Place," dealing with first generation artists,
many of whom arrived in the late 1800s and early
1900s; "Between Representation and Abstraction," pri-
marily covering art of the 1930s, '40s and
`50s; and "Toward Century's End," focus-
ing on the 1960s, '70s and beyond.
Each chapter starts with a short descrip-
tion of the social and political background
of the period and how it influenced the
work of the artists. Then, the artists are
visited, with a short discussion of their
work and how it fits into the period.
One artist with a Michigan connec-
tion whose work appears in the book is
sculptor, printmaker and book illustra-
tor Leonard Baskin (1922-2000).
Baskin's Holocaust Memorial sculpture, a
7-foot seated figure in bronze with a fist
over its face and a hand raised to the
sky, sits in Raoul Wallenberg Plaza, on
the east side of Rackham Auditorium, on the
University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor.
Acquired by U-M in 1994, it is the first such memo-
rial placed at a public university in the United States.
There are 90 reproductions of art in Fixing the
Worlc4 most in vivid colors.
Soltes believes that in addition to showcasing beauti-
ful works of art, the book offers readers "a crisscross
between two sets of issues — an interesting but non-
comprehensive review of 20th-century American
painting and a review of issues that have been of con-
cern to American Jews, not just artists."
The chapter and subchapter headings reflect this
duality, Soltes notes.
For example, the chapter titled "Between
Representation and Abstraction" deals with a concern
in American painting, while the subchapter "The
Return to the Holocaust" is about a subject of inter-
est to the wider American Jewish community. E
— Arts & Entertainment Editor
Gail Zimmerman contributed to this article.