34th Annual Belin Lecture: Dr Samantha Baskind, "Toward a Jewish American Art History"

This lecture traces the opportunities and challenges of working in a young field––Jewish American art––through a handful of case studies, with special emphasis on painter Raphael Soyer and sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel. More broadly, the canon of twentieth-century American art boasts a disproportionate number of Jewish artists as compared to the country’s population, a phenomenon only recently addressed. Artists as diverse as Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman, fashion photographer Richard Avedon, and Photorealist Audrey Flack, among dozens of others, adopted Jewish subject matter. They sometimes did so overtly and at times that Jewishness was encoded, yet those Jewish dimensions have been largely overlooked. Simultaneously an excavation of unfairly neglected artists and an investigation of the understudied religiocultural dimension of celebrated artists––and even an effort to accord legitimacy to a subfield of art history––Jewish American art is a subject rich in material and long overdue for exploration