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.