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Abstract
A series of life portraits of the Hasidic rebbe Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1880–1950) rendered by Jewish female artist Gertrud Zuckerkandl throws new light on the modern rabbinical portrait. Gertrud Zuckerkandl, the daughter-in-law of the art patroness Berta Zuckerkandl and the daughter of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel, rendered four life portraits of the sixth dynastic leader of the Belarusian Chabad dynasty in the fashionable Purkersdorf Sanatorium in Vienna in 1935. These four portraits are first and foremost “pretty,” rendered in a delicate hand and in what would have been seen as a feminine colour palette of pastel pinks, lavenders, and blues. Zuckerkandl's portraits reveal not only a fascinating story of Hasidic cosmopolitanism in the 1930s, but the challenges that female Jewish artists faced at the time in Vienna. While literary accounts of Hasidism dictate strict gender separation and Viennese art critics castigated women artists as incapable of capturing the interior life, these four portraits reveal a far more complex story on both accounts.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For a notable exception that gave rise to subsequent studies, see Cohen (Citation1998, 114–153). In the Viennese context, see Natter (Citation1995).
2. On the fate of Zuckerkandl property at Purkersdorf during Aryanization, see Etzersdorfer (Citation1995, 99–121); Plakolm-Forsthuber (Citation1994). On the situation of women artists in Vienna more generally, see Poch-Lalous (Citation1972, 204–207).
3. For the article that identifies Stekel's case history of “der rabbiner” as Rabbi Shalom Dov Ber Schneersohn, see Katz (Citation2010b, 1–31). For the article that deals with some of the inconsistencies in the writing of the case history, see Katz (Citation2011, 3–24).
4. Stekel suggests there are other connections between the Stekel-Schneersohn families between 1903 and 1907 in his presentation to the Wednesday Psychoanalytic Society in 1907, stating that he had presented an incomplete case of the rabbi as the analysis had lasted only six weeks and was “fully elucidated only later” (Nunberg and Feders Citation1962, 246).
5. On the Yosef Yitzchak's health, see Rigg (Citation2004, 37). For a more insider's account, see Miller (Citation2014, 110–113).
6. I discuss these portraits in my book, but only from the perspective of Yosef Yitzchak's rabbinic image in Chabad historiography Katz (Citation2010a).
7. On the education of Jewish women in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, see Freidenreich (Citation2002).
8. On the trends between marriage and career in interwar Austria, see Freidenreich (Citation2002, 108–132).
9. See Gertrud's (Citation1969) discussion on her father's relations with Freud in her letter to Reinhard Federmann.
10. Historian Tatjana Buklijas (Citation2012) has even suggested that Klimt and other artists of the Vienna Secession were directly inspired by his lectures (230–232).
11. I want to thank Jaap Bos for sending me information on the portrait, including a copy of the hand-written notes of Paul Roazen. Bos found the photograph in the very small collection of the Wilhelm Stekel papers that form part of a larger aggregation of Freud-related material that is called the Sigmund Freud Collection and not directly part of the Sigmund Freud Papers. I also want to thank Science Manuscript Specialist Leonard Bruno for sorting this information out for me and providing me with scans of the material in the collection.
12. The phrase “le goût juif” in reference to the Secessionist painters appears to have originated with satirist Karl Kraus who also wrote in the same article in his journal Die Fackel that “just as every nobleman used to keep his Jew-in-residence, so today every stockbroker has a Secessionist about the house” (as quoted in Shapira Citation2014, 159, 202, ftnt 8).
13. Many of these portraits still survive through copies that appeared in Austrian and French newspapers (see Schumacher Citation1980).
14. On the attitudes towards Jewish beards in Freud's era, see Bergstein (Citation2010 101–105).
15. On the gendering of patients as female and analysts as male in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and after the First World War, see Eros (Citation2010, 185–202).
16. On the sombre colouration of contemporaneous photography of rabbis, see Katz (Citation2010c).
17. In addition to Simmons, see the more recent work on the expressive possibility of decorative painting in Houze (Citation2015).
18. Gertrud's portraits include those of Lely Kempin, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Lotte Lehmann, Yvette Guilbert, and Annette Kolb. For Gertrud Zuckerkandl-Stekel's portrait of Lely Kempin, see archives of Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen österreichs, box 164. On women as subject in Viennese art, see Spitzmuller (Citation1930, 320–324). In 1930, Gertrud exhibited two portraits of a young and old woman at the University of Chicago's international watercolour exhibition (The Tenth International Exhibition Citation1930).
19. On the relationship between the patriarchal history of portraiture and the oedipal drama, see Adams (Citation1993, 73–116).
20. For Yosef Yitzchak's account of the meeting, see Schneersohn (Citation1988, 110). For Stekel's account, see Stekel (Citation1908, 161).
21. Habad sources date this photograph to 1919 when RaSHaB considered leaving Rostov and needed a visa, but he looks much younger and it was common procedure to provide psychoanalysts with patient photographs.
22. Stekel reports three years of anaesthesia to the left hand and arm, not five months.
23. Sholom Dov Ber Schneersohn to Shneur Zalman, handwritten letter signed with the Hebrew date 16 Adar 5663 (Citation1903). A facsimile of the letter is reprinted in Mundshine (Citation2000, 47).
24. Yosef Yitzchak and Gertrud must have reconnected several years later when Yosef Yitzchak returned to Purkersdorf for the 1938 winter season, leaving to Paris to join his daughter and son-in-law (Menachem Mendel Schneerson) only days before the Germans annexed Austria. Gertrud fled Austria to Paris a few days later with her fourteen-year old son and ailing mother-in-law.
25. Fritz Zuckerkandl to Gertrud Zuckerdkandl, 30 September Citation1945. See also Fritz Zuckerkandl to Gertrud Zuckerkandl, 7 October Citation1945.
26. Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, Zuckerkandl showed her large abstract compositions in France, Belgium, Mexico, Turkey, and the United States, as well as returning briefly to Vienna to show in the Gallery Belvedere (Adlow Citation1960, 11; Lagoutte Citation1963; Redl Citation1978b; Schneidewind Citation1962).
27. This was the first published portrait, although Yosef Yitzchak did have postcards of himself printed in 1927, the year that he was exiled from Russia (Katz Citation2010c). It is impossible to distinguish between the editors of Hatamim and their rebbe as he and his son-in-law directed the content and publication process of the journal.
28. The seventh Chabad rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, cited Yosef Yitzchak at length as the impetus behind his own media campaign in America (see Levine Citation2009).
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Maya Balakirsky Katz
Maya Balakirsky Katz is Professor of Art History at Touro College and on the faculty of Touro's Graduate School of Jewish Studies. Her teaching and research focuses on the intersection of religious identity and media. She is editor of Revising Dreyfus (Brill Press, 2013), co-editor of Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, and the author of the book The Visual Culture of Chabad (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Her book Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation is forthcoming with Rutgers.