Imagining Jewish Art

Download or read book Imagining Jewish Art written by Aaron Rosen and published by MHRA. This book was released on 2009 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does Jewish art look like? Where many scholars, critics, and curators have gone searching for the essence of Jewish art in Biblical illustrations and portraits of rabbis, Rosen sets out to discover Jewishness in unlikely places. How, he asks, have modern Jewish painters explored their Jewish identity using an artistic past which is -- by and large -- non-Jewish? In this new book, we encounter some of the great works of Western art history through Jewish eyes. We see Matthias Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece re-imagined by Marc Chagall (1887-1985), traces of Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca in Philip Guston (1913-1980), and images by Diego Velazquez and Paul Cezanne studiously reworked by R.B. Kitaj (1932-2007). This highly comparative study draws on theological, philosophical and literary sources from Franz Rosenzweig to Franz Kafka and Philip Roth. Rosen deepens our understanding not only of these three modern painters but also of how art might serve as a key resource for rethinking such fundamental Jewish concepts as family, tradition, and homeland.