Famous contemporary jewish artists

Famous jewish visual artists
Famous jewish paintings
Ancient jewish art

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Jewish Artists and the Bible in Twentieth-Century America

Introduction

Jews constitute an immigrant group that has wielded an enormous impact on twentieth-century American art. While largely integrated into the American canon with work that fits the traditional narrative, many Jewish artists also created imagery that contradicts their typical subject matter and adds a new perspective to both the canon and the artists’ individual oeuvres. Accordingly, this book describes several Jewish American artists’ exploration of a distinctive theme: biblical imagery. Indeed, an overwhelming number of Jewish artists pictured biblical stories during a period that dismissed representational content as retardataire, at a time when Jews faced keen pressure to efface references to their ethnicity in their art, and in a country without a sustained legacy of biblical art. Religious imagery by twentieth-century Jewish American artists is so pervasive that of the initial American works purchased by the Vatican in 1973 for the new Gallery of Modern Religious Art, nearly half were by Je

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Jewish Art in the Modern Era

Summary

Before the 19th century, most artistic productions by Jewish makers were aligned with religious observance (“Judaica”) or consisted of printing Jewish texts after the development of the printing press and publishing houses. Over the course of the 19th century, coinciding with increasing Jewish political and intellectual emancipation, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists began to make contributions to visual culture, sometimes with markedly Jewish content, such as biblical subjects or imagery of Jewish life, but also with original contributions to favored artistic movements, such as Impressionism or 20th-century abstract art. Zionism generated a range of energetic contributions to an emerging culture, and Holocaust traumas produced powerful artistic responses. At the turn of the 20th century, leading centers of Jewish art centered on America and Israel but included the wider Diaspora.

Subjects

Judaism and Jewish Studies
Religion and Art

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The Evolution of Jewish Art: A Review of the Chassidic Art Institute

As I stepped off the 3 train and entered the Jewish Chassidic neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, I felt welcomed by a warm breeze. All around me were signs of Jewish identity; the streets were full of people dressed in religious clothing, with the fringes of tzitzits and the fur of shtreimels catching my eye, and I stopped by stores selling Jewish food, such as matzah, as well as bookstores full of Jewish literature.

I continued to walk through the area, admiring the beauty of the neighborhood on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

After some time, a small art gallery, hidden in between a driveway and a clothing store, caught my eye. Across the door read the name “Chassidic Art Institute,” and as I peered through the window, I could see stacks and stacks of paintings, each one of them depicting an individual Jewish experience. In just a tiny space, there was an amazing collection of art lining the walls, racked up on desks, and even on the floor.

Curiously, I entered the gallery. I was immediately enca