Rothko’s God, On The Horizon

In Jewish homes and synagogues here and around the country, there seems to be an unspoken definition of what constitutes Jewish art. To put it simply: the work of Marc Chagall.

His paintings speak directly to Jewish events and rituals in an accessible, musical style. But Chagall presents a romanticized view of the vanished shtetl, which is not only historically inaccurate, but far removed from the experience of American Jews.

Is the American Jewish experience best represented by Chagall’s shtetl dreams? Are there other artists who address the complex transformations, spiritual impulses and rich diversity of American Jewish culture itself?

The catalog for the Museum of Modern Art’s new show, “Abstract Expressionist New York,” presents an answer to these questions. The critics who defined Abstract Expressionism, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, were both Jewish. In a 1966 lecture at The Jewish Museum, Rosenberg defined American Modernism as a Jewish idea. Modernist art was predicated on rejecting centuries of European influence and courageously starting over. This impulse for transformation, Rosenberg argued, was simply an expression of the Jewish immigrant experience that had shaped the lives of so many of the Modernist painters:

“This work, inspired by the will to identity, has constituted a new art by Jews which, though not a Jewish art, is a profound Jewish expression.”

In the 1940s, championing Modernism was a philosophical challenge to the cultural program of the Third Reich, which had identified the movement as a “degenerate” project, influenced by the “decomposing activities of the Jews,” and Jewish “cerebralism.” Greenberg’s 1939 essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” co-opted a German word to confront these ideas (Greenberg is credited with bringing “kitsch” into common usage in English.)

Essentially, Greenberg had thrown down the gauntlet, and the nascent New York avant-garde responded. The curator of the MoMA show, Ann Temkin, describes the artists’ urge to respond to the war: “They were directly affected by the genocide they had witnessed. … By forging a new art, they were contributing to a fresh start to humanity.”

Temkin cites two styles within Abstract Expressionism: the action painters created chaos on canvas, while the “still” painters sought visual order.

Jackson Pollock, born in Wyoming, was the standard-bearer of action painting, and the quintessential American cowboy. As for the “still” painters — Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottleib and others — almost all of them were Jewish. Essentially, the “still” branch of Abstract Expressionism was a Jewish art movement grappling with both the existential trauma of World War II and the implications of Jewish spirituality.

The most innovative of the “still” painters was Rothko. He was born Marcus Rothkowitz in czarist Russia in 1903, immigrating to the U.S. with his family in 1913. English was his fourth language, after Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew. He was raised in Orthodox Judaism, studying the Talmud at yeshiva. He eventually found his way to New York and joined the circle of Abstract Expressionists.

Rothko’s early work dealt with mythic allegory, but in his mature work, representation and symbolism vanished completely. The only image left was the radiant horizon. Suspended auras of pure color emanate from the canvas. Despite the ethereal beauty of his color, Rothko’s 1945 statement of his intentions reveals that color is not, in fact, his point:

“I adhere to the material reality of the world. … I merely enlarge the extent of this reality. ... I insist upon the equal existence of the world engendered in the mind and the world engendered by God outside of it.”

Rothko’s project was the representation of consciousness: the possibility of contact between the world of the mind (reality) and God. Connecting the human mind to God, with no intercessor, is a distinctly Jewish idea, whether it is expressed in paint, words or even through the ritual of Shabbat.

Portions of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s 1955 book, “God in Search of Man,” parallel Rothko’s artistic statement almost identically: “God is not always silent, and man is not always blind. There are moments in which, to use a Talmudic phrase, heaven and earth kiss each other; in which there is a lifting of the veil at the horizon of the known, opening a vision of what is eternal in time.”

Rothko’s paintings seem to be a visual expression of Heschel’s “lifting of the veil at the horizon of the known.”

While it is easy to identify Jewish subject matter in Chagall, discussions of the “subject matter” of Rothko’s work ultimately fall short. Instead, it is Rothko’s impulse — his motivation for painting — that we recognize as Jewish. His paintings are the artifacts of one man’s struggle to experience the sacred to “lift the veil at the horizon of the known.”

Isaac Peterson is an artist and writer living in New York City.