Subtitle: The Holocaust Years
Author: Matthew Baigell
Subject: Art History/Jewish Studies
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-3124-1
Pages: 187 pp., 47 b&w illus.

View the table of contents for Jewish Artists in New York

Description: A sympathetic account of the responses of artists to the Holocaust as it was occurring

Praise for Jewish Artists in New York

"Matthew Baigell's Jewish Artists in New York: The Holocaust Years deals with an important, neglected subject in American art history and in Jewish social history. It is a truly superior study, affording an innovative understanding of a major period in American art."-Donald Kuspit, author of Psychostrategies of Avant-Garde Art

Exploring the influence of the local cultural scene as well as events taking place in Europe, Matthew Baigell reexamines the work of Jewish artists inspired to respond to the murders of their fellow Jews during World War II.

Because there were only a few authentic instances of visual documentation of events until the war's later stages, artists both used traditional imagery and invented new kinds of imagery to record their responses to the catastrophe taking place. Unfortunately, New York City's Jewish intelligentsia seemed to offer little support, and art critics such as Clement Greenberg largely avoided the issue. Jewish artists were left to cope with the events of the war in isolation, without a collective visual memory to deal with the traumas presented by news reports.

Artists featured include Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Barnett Newman, Abraham Rattner, Mark Rothko, and Max Weber.

Matthew Baigell is a professor of art history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He has written seventeen books. His latest work is Peeling Potatoes, Painting Pictures: Women Artists in Post-Soviet Russia, Estonia, and Latvia (coauthored with Renee Baigell). He is also the coeditor (with Milly Heyd) of Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art (both titles from Rutgers University Press).