Museums

Sigalit Landau’s “DeadSee” captures a spiral of watermelons as they unravel in the Dead Sea.

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

‘Projects 87: Sigalit Landau’ At MoMA
In 1997, Sigalit Landau,
then 30, was selected to represent Israel at the Venice Biennial, a considerable feat for such a young artist. Though she had graduated Israel’s elite art school, the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, two years prior, that rapid launch to celebrity raised questions: Was she merely a beneficiary of the art world’s fervor for ever-younger, unexposed talent. Was she worth the hype?
A slate of critics, collectors and curators believe so. Five years after the Venice Biennial, she scored another triumph with “The Country,” a massive multimedia installation at Tel Aviv’s prestigious Alon Segev Gallery. Philip Leider, the former editor of Artforum and a still-prominent critic, devoted a lengthy essay to Landau’s

work in 2003, in the magazine Art in America. Leider compared “The Country,” a bleak commentary on the ravages of war on Israeli society, to Picasso’s “Guernica.” And he didn’t just mean thematically. “I had no doubt that this work could take its place beside Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ and hold its own very well,” Leider wrote.
Since then, Landau’s stature has continued to grow. Her video of a naked Israeli woman twirling a hula-hoop made of barbed wire was featured in the inaugural exhibit of the feminist gallery at the Brooklyn Museum last year. She’s a fixture in Israel’s best museums and has a strong following in Europe, particularly in Berlin, where she lives part of the time. Her latest installation, “The Dining Hall” (2007), recently on display in Berlin, referenced Michelangelo’s “Last Supper” and critiqued the long history of Judaism through a gory depiction of eating rituals. Alongside bloodied human carcasses were rounded columns several-feet high that looked like chunks of uncooked meat. When asked by a German paper if her art was beautiful, Landau replied: “In a painful kind of way — yes.”
Her upcoming solo exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, which opens in March, is tamer. The show, called “Projects 87,” features a video trilogy from 2005, “DeadSee,” which captures a spiral of watermelons as they slowly unravel in the Dead Sea. As they uncoil, the azure water becomes a fleshy red. A human body appears drifting at sea. The other main work is lamp-like sculptures made of barbed wire. Like most of her work, it comments on the bloody Israeli landscape — both its land and its people.
“Projects 87: Sigalit Landau” runs from March 19 to July 28 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues. (212) 708-9400.

‘Warhol’s Jews: Ten
Portraits Reconsidered’
When Andy Warhol’s “Ten
Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century” was first exhibited in 1980, a hard line was drawn in the art world. Those on the side of Hilton Kramer, The New York Times art critic who went on to found the conservative arts journal The New Criterion, trashed it. “The show is vulgar, it reeks of commercialism,” Kramer wrote in the Times. The Artforum crowd saw it differently, with that magazine describing it as “an unexpected mix of cultural anthropology, portraiture, celebration of celebrity, and study of intelligentsia all at the same time.”
The Jewish Museum, which was one of the first museums to exhibit Warhol’s “Ten Portraits,” re-examines the whole ordeal this spring. In “Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered,” opening on March 16, the museum will stage a decidedly more demure show — in its smaller gallery — exhibiting one set of the 10 portraits, of which Warhol made and sold dozens. A few wall texts and essays will draw new insights from the background and historical context of their making.
But this we already know: Ronald Feldman, a prominent art dealer since the early 1970s, commissioned Warhol to make 10 silkscreen prints of famous 20th-century Jews. From a list of about 100, they whittled them down to Louis Brandeis, Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, Sarah Bernhardt, Freud, Gershwin, Buber, Kafka, the Marx Brothers and Gertrude Stein. Though Warhol started the project as a simple portfolio of prints on paper, the interest from buyers was immense. Warhol’s factory went into high speed, printing and selling many new sets on canvas, and, as usual, at remarkably high figures.
Then came the controversy — was it vulgar? Profiteering off the Jews? In retrospect, it may have been just Warhol being Warhol. Commercialism, after all, was at the core of his art. Whether the whole of Warhol’s oeuvre was a critique of America’s money-mad culture or a sly endeavor meant to loot and exploit it is anyone’s guess. Being so, it may be futile to read any specifically Jewish exploitation into it either, however tempting.
That at least seems to be The Jewish Museum’s take. The exhibition preview bills Warhol’s Jewish portraits as “iconic.” They “attest to the lasting achievements and fame of these singular figures.” Much the same, of course, has been said of Warhol, sometimes in less exalted terms.
“Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered” runs from March 16 to Aug. 3 at The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd Street, (212) 423-3200.

‘Sosúa: A Refuge
for the Jews in the
Dominican Republic’
The best-known case of
German Jewish refugees leaving the country just before the start of the Second World War is, like the rest of those dark years, a dreadful one. It’s the story of the S.S. St. Louis, which set sail from Nazi Germany to Cuba with more than 900 Jewish refugees, but was turned back. Some 700 passengers were eventually taken in by European countries, but more than 200 returned to Germany and onto the death camps.
But there were cases of better faith, too. The upcoming exhibit “Sosúa: A Refuge for Jews in the Dominican Republic,” opening at the Museum of Jewish Heritage this month, tells one. It goes like this: at the Evian Conference in 1938, where 32 nations met to discuss the growing influx of refugees from Germany, only one — the Dominican Republic — offered a concrete offer to take in Jews. Jews began arriving in May 1940 and built, with the help of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a vibrant community on an abandoned banana plantation. The project eventually saved more than 700 Jews, most of them German and Austrian, before the vast majority resettled in North America after the war.
Though a small population remained on the island and some of their descendants do today, supported heavily by tourism, the story of Sosúa is not often remembered. The Museum of Jewish Heritage’s large-scale exhibit is an attempt to change that. Since 2005, the museum has enlisted the help of researchers at CUNY’s Dominican Studies Institute and the Sosúa Jewish Museum, with most of the funding from the city, state and large Jewish organizations, to prepare this dynamic exhibit. It features maps planning the detailed construction of the community, which, in addition to a still-functioning synagogue, had its own meat and dairy farm, schools and scores of makeshift homes. There are also Chanukah lamps, a mandolin — even a telephone switchboard once used at Sosúa — which all attest to a strident effort at life amid the general angst and dour news streaming in from abroad.
Three films on view, and a companion book for sale by New York University historian Marion Kaplan, add additional insight, such as a discussion of the less-than-heroic figure who proudly heralded the refugees’ admission: the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Though he initially, and with bombast, proposed safe refuge for 100,000 Jews, only 700 were ultimately admitted. And many doubted and continue to question his motives: Trujillo’s military had recently massacred 25,000 Haitians before making the offer, so the eagerness to admit Jews was perhaps an attempt to save face. Or worse, in the racially vexed cauldron of the Americas, an influx of white Jews might have countered the prevalence of blacks, Latinos and mestizos.
All of this meant little to the refugees of Sosúa. They were alive, albeit living in a different key. The Viennese urbanite Edith Gersten recounts an early memory from the island: “So we stared at the cows. What happens next? Does one get a hold of the tail and pump until somehow milk comes out?”
“Sosúa: A Refuge for the Jews in the Dominican Republic” opens Feb. 17 and runs through July at the Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, 36 Battery Place. (646) 437-4200.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization