Elyse Klaidman (b. 1960):
"The Sisters," 1991.

Ad Reinhart (1913-1967): "Untitled (Red and Grey),"
1954, oil on canvas.

411, E=4 7,

Two 20th-century greats are explored.

MORTON I. TEICHER

Special to the Jewish News

T

wo artists covered in Fixing the World: Jewish
American Painters in the 20th Century are the
subjects of their own recent coffee-table
books: Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman in
Barnett Newman, edited by Ann Temkin (Yale
University Press; $65), and Pop artist Larry Rivers in
Art and the Artist, by Barbara Rose and Jacquelyn
Davis (Little, Brown; $60).
The books are similar in that they are sumptu-
ously illustrated with beautiful plates in vivid
color. Each one has informative essays about the
artist and his work.
Rivers died in August 2002. Born in the Bronx in
1923 as Yitzroch Loiza Grosberg, he began his artis-
tic career as a musician, playing the jazz saxophone
in Catskill Mountains resort hotels. He served briefly
in the U. S. Air Force during World War II, receiv-
ing a medical discharge that resulted in a disability
pension, which enabled him to study at the Juilliard
School of Music.
Unable to make a living as a musician, he began to
paint and sketch, taking classes with Hans
Hofmann, a German refugee whose students went
on to achieve fame as the New York School. He also
studied art education at New York University in
order to qualify as a teacher.
Rivers met a number of other artists and began
to exhibit his own work. In 1953, he achieved
notoriety with an irreverent rendition of
Washington Crossing the Delaware. He went on to
live a rather bohemian life — with a succession of
women, multiple interests, strong opinions and

restless travels.
During the 1980s, Rivers expressed his Jewish
identity with paintings of the Holocaust and with
The History of Matzah: The Story of the Jews. He
also painted a number of artists, including Barnett
Newman, who was born in New York in 1905 and
died in 1970. Newman carried abstraction to an
extreme, using a stripe that he called a "zip" to sep-
arate fields of color. He was familiar with Kaballah
and its founder, Isaac Luria, who held that God
sent out a ray of light to launch the cosmic
process. The mystical ray of light became
Newman's "zip."
His repeated use of this format culminated in
fourteen black, white, and gray canvases that he
called Stations of the Cross, which created consider-
able controversy upon their exhibition at the
Guggenheim Museum in New York City. One inter-
pretation is that these paintings are a Jewish view of
Jesus as a representative of human suffering.
Newman's connection to Judaism found expres-
sion through "a secular cultural modernism." He
painted large canvases with bands and stripes and he
expanded his use of vivid color. The meanings he
attributed to his works and the titles he gave them
affected the way they were perceived by viewers.
Newman was an influential artist whose politi-
cal leanings towards anarchism led him to resist
groups and to regard his instructional efforts as
"not-teaching." Nevertheless, minimal art and
Abstract Expressionism owe a good deal to him.
The excellent essays in these two books and
their extensive color plates offer rich opportuni-
ties to study the work and lives of these impor-
tant 20th-century Jewish artists. El

r/

Above:
Larry Rivers:
"History of
Matzah: The
Story of the
Jews" (part one
detail; left
wing), 1982.

Left:
Barnett
Newman:
"Onement, III,"
1949, oil on
canvas, contains
an example of
the artist's
signature "zip."

7/25
2003

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