Overview

Jack Levine, George Segal, Audrey Flack, Larry Rivers, and R. B. Kitaj have long been considered central artists in the canon of twentieth-century American art: Levine for his biting paintings and prints of social conscience, Segal for his quiet plaster figures evoking the alienation inherent in modern life, Flack for her feminist photorealist canvases, Rivers for his outrageous pop art statements, and Kitaj for his commitment to figuration. Much less known is the fact that at times, all five artists devoted their attention to biblical imagery, in part because of a shared Jewish heritage to which they were inexorably tied. Taking each artist as an extensive case study, Jewish Artists and the Bible in Twentieth-Century America uncovers how these artists and a host of their Jewish contemporaries adopted the Bible in innovative ways. Indeed, as Samantha Baskind demonstrates, by linking the past to the present, Jewish American artists customized the biblical narrative in extraordinary ways to address modern issues such as genocide and the Holocaust, gender inequality, assimilation and the immigrant experience, and the establishment and fate of the modern State of Israel, among many other pertinent concerns.

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9780271059839

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Reviews

This book is a meticulous examination of a marginalized aspect of the work of five respected American Jewish artists and it opens the way for a re-examination of 20th-century biblical art and what Baskind has revealed as the catalytic role of the Bible on art from the previous century . The book succeeds, I believe, in inviting us to rethink and re-examine 20th-century American art. Darrelyn Gunzburg, Cassone

Beautifully illustrated and compelling.. . . . [Baskind's] fine book argues for a more inclusive art history that is more attentive to the factors that contribute to artistic identity, such as religion. </p>--Erica Doss, <em>Material Religion</em></p>

Scholars of contemporary religious history, of art history, and of the immigrant experience will find much to interest them in this fine volume. Peter Webster, Reviews in History

Beautifully illustrated and compelling.. . . . [Baskind's] fine book argues for a more inclusive art history that is more attentive to the factors that contribute to artistic identity, such as religion. --Erika Doss, Material Religion

In a 'modernist' century, known chiefly for its increasing emphases both on pictorial abstraction and on secularism, surely a book on this topic, American biblical subjects, comes as a surprise. That all the artists in question were Jewish Americans, many of them recent immigrants and first generation in their profession, arrives with the force of a revelation. Presenting these discoveries, Samantha Baskind remains fully the master of her material, a mature scholar well known for her specialization in Jewish modern artists of twentieth-century America. She judiciously chooses case studies that span issues of medium, gender, generation, and--ultimately--complex, often multiple, identity. Like these individuals, Baskind manages to hold in creative tension all the disparate components of the designation 'Jewish American artist.' --Larry Silver, University of Pennsylvania

Author Information

Samantha Baskind is Professor of Art History at Cleveland State University.

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