Documents the Jewish artists in New York from 1900-1945.  Their place in America.

Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York 1900-1945

Arts & Photography

Kleeblatt, Norman L.

History & Criticism

Indiana Univ. Pr

The abstract paintings of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Lee Krasner, Clyfford Still, Helen Frankenthaler, and others revolutionized the art world in the 1940s and 1950s and continue to inspire passionate arguments to this day. What were these artists trying to achieve? Who were the critical voices of the time that rallied public interest in Abstract Expressionism and sparked rancorous debate? 
Drawing on recent critical, historical, and biographical work, this lavishly illustrated book offers a sharp new focus on a pivotal art movement. It also presents an extensive commentary on the two most influential critics of postwar American art―Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg―whose powerful views shaped perceptions of Abstract Expressionism and other contemporary art movements. In one essay, Norman L. Kleeblatt traces the influence of Abstract Expressionism into the mid-1970s and examines its connection to subsequent art styles. Other essays range from the literary and intellectual culture of New York during that period and an analysis of sculpture and representation to a discussion of Jewish issues in relation to postwar American Art. In addition, the book features a magisterial essay by eminent critic Irving Sandler and a copiously illustrated cultural timeline by Maurice Berger.

Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976

Berger, Maurice

Yale University Press

An engaging exploration of the use of language in a complex and colorful series of paintings Mel Bochner (b. 1940) is celebrated as a key Conceptual artist of the 1960s. Less well-known are his paintings made after that period: complex works based on an exploration of language, often crowded with typography in lush, contrasting hues that both embrace and challenge the painterly tradition. Mel Bochner: Strong Language focuses on this important body of work, in which Bochner investigates the lines between text and image. Ranging from bold admonishments and witty emoticons to provocative floods of words, these works demonstrate conceptual seriousness, as well as delight in the playful potential of language. Norman L. Kleeblatt discusses the evolution of Bochner's art from his early word experiments through his return to painting, while Bochner offers a personal perspective. Both Kleeblatt and Bochner address the question of Jewishness in Bochner's work, particularly the ways in which the Jewish intellectual tradition embraces language as a visual expressive form.

Mel Bochner: Strong Language

Jewish Museum

An important reexamination of two artists whose crucial participation in the Abstract Expressionist movement is often overlooked This captivating book examines two modernist painters—Lee Krasner (1908–1984) and Norman Lewis (1909–1979)—whose important contributions to Abstract Expressionism have long been underappreciated. During their lifetimes, and still to this day, Krasner and Lewis received little acknowledgment as major participants in the mainstream Abstract Expressionist scene in New York. Rather, Krasner was mainly known as the wife of Jackson Pollock and Lewis, as an African American artist, struggled for recognition. Krasner’s and Lewis’s works from the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement share many qualities, including pictographic iconographies, allusions to writing, relatively small scales, and allover patterning. From the Margins therefore imagines a kind of conversation between these two artists, juxtaposing works from each to encourage visual and conceptual dialogues. An introductory essay delves into the challenges Krasner and Lewis faced in an artistic community dominated by white men, mainly concerning issues of identity, otherness, and marginalization in postwar American abstraction. Reasserting the influence and talent of these two significant artists, this book offers a vital and much-needed addition to the existing scholarship on modern art.

From the Margins: Lee Krasner | Norman Lewis, 1945–1952 (Jewish Museum)

Brown,Stephen

Born near Minsk in White Russia, the painter Chaim Soutine (1894-1943) created his major works in France between the two World Wars. He is identified with the School of Paris, the group of artists, many of them foreign-born and Jewish, who lived and worked in the French capital between the wars. Known as a "painter's painter", Soutine worked with unreserved gesture and emotion, using exuberant colour, thinkly applied paint, and sweeping brushwork. "Chaim Soutine" is a comprehensive, ground-breaking book that rediscovers this important artist, providing an overview of his life, work and aesthetic influence, as well as his critical reception. Essays by leading scholars and curators assess Soutine's art from new vantage points, including the changing critical reception of his work in Paris between the wars, as well as in the US and France in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. The essays also examine the influence of Soutine's Jewish and French immigrant background on his work and reception, and introduce us to his important patrons and major collectors. These included Albert Barnes, the famous Philadelphia collector, who discovered Soutine's work in 1922-23 and purchased 52 of his paintings. The book features presentations and information never published before, including a photo-essay composed of rare photographs of the artist, newly discovered correspondence between Soutine and the French art historian Elie Faure, and the first radiographic analysis of the artist's work, which brings to light new evidence about Soutine's use of materials and his process of painting.

Chaim Soutine: An Expressionist in Paris

Silver, Kenneth E.

Prestel Publications & Jewish Museum of NY