The Garden of Hidden Delights of the Russian-Jewish Avant-Garde

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Notes

1 See for more relevant details a valuable study: Shatskikh, “Jewish Artists in Russian avant-garde.”

2 See more details in Litvak, “Painting and Sculpture.”

3 The department of Art History at the University of Haifa, the early 1990s.

4 See Kampf, Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century. This idea was further explored by many other art historians, particularly by Gregory Kazovsky in his fundamental work Khudozhniki Kultur-Ligi.

5 One cannot avoid comparing it to Vitebsk during the time of Yehuda Pen’s School. See on this Wolitz, “Vitebsk Versus Betsalel.”

6 How is Jewish art even possible given the firm commandment prescribing that “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” from Asereth ha-dibrot? This commandment was obviously never taken literally by the secular Jews of the later European diaspora. One, however, should never fail to remember its grim “theological” shadow cast on any enterprise that can be possibly referred to as “Jewish art.”

7 On this, see a more recent, valuable study by Cahen, Joodse avant-gardekunstenaars uit Hongarije.

8 Using the expression of a Russian-Jewish poet Dovid Knut, who once lived in France. See Khazan, Osobenyi evreisko-russkii vozdukh. On the later Russian avant-garde versus Jews see Klebanov, “Daniil Kharms and the Jews.”

9 See their catalogue at: http://hylaea.ru/

10 The ethnicity of Livshitz was obviously Jewish, the fact that was never sufficiently expressed in his oeuvre.

11 Quoted in Markov, Russian Futurism, 33.

12 Contemporaries of the Future, 16.

13 Contemporaries of the Future, 18.

14 Ibid.

15 Contemporaries of the Future, 75.

16 Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde.” See also his famous work which deals with some related subjects: Heidegger and “the Jews.”

17 According to Lola Kantor-Kazovsky, Grobman met Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem in 1978.

18 It is hardly any coincidence that this biblical name graces the Academy of Fine Arts in Jerusalem.

19 On the topic of Russian-Jewish cultural and literary identity, see in particular Shrayer, “Introduction;” Markish, “À propos de l’histoire et de la méthodologie de l’étude de la littérature juive d’expression russe.” See a special book-section “Russian-Jewish Intelligentsia’s Cultural Vibrancy” in Horowitz’s recent volume The Russian-Jewish Tradition. See also general collections such as: Budnickij, Russko-evrejskaja kul’tura. Sbornik statej as well as many other relevant studies.

20 Here one must keep in mind the anusim: the (forced) Jewish converts also known as cristianos nuevos, Converso or Marrano The term has been used to refer to the conversion of the Ashkenazim in Germanic lands (twelfth century), followed by the much more famous (and mostly forced) mass conversion of the Sephardim in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Spain and Portugal.

21 Maxim Ilich Shapir, personal communication with the author, 2002.

22 As part of the same wonderful series, a related splendid volume was issued in 2009: Elshevskaia, Mikhail Roginsky.

23 Let us not forget that according to the teachings of Christians, they are the True Israel as opposed to the original Jews who rejected the Gospel. The matter of Jesus perceived as Jewish Christ is by no means unknown in the Russian/Soviet-Jewish late Modernism – see in particular Litvak, “Rome and Jerusalem.”

24 Boris Groys actively and meaningfully plays with Kabbalistic suggestive nomenclature when talking about Kabakov’s adopted son, the painter Pavel Peppershtein and his brand of Conceptualist Art: “Medical Hermeneutics,” 161–69.

25 Groys, 170.

26 Ibid.

27 Consult: Ioffe, “Life-Creation in the Russian Israeli Culture;” and “The Revolutionary Aesthetics of the Second Russian Avant-Garde’s «cynic» terror.”

28 See his: The Experimental Group.

29 See on this Baigell, “Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and their Jewish Issues.”

30 Rosenberg, “Mystics of this World.”