Per Contra: Larry Silver on Jewish Painters in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Larry Silver covers a cultural phenomena in the Fall 2007 Issue of Per Contra:

"The seemingly contradictory concept of the “Jewish painter” could only emerge out of the larger historical phenomenon of Jewish Emancipation over the course of the nineteenth century. In terms of numbers and public successes, the careers of Jewish painters surely climaxed later, during the twentieth century—on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet the pioneering efforts of these ambitious outsiders to the dominant artistic culture merit closer scrutiny. Their roster includes celebrated, even surprising, names, including as Jozef Israëls in The Hague, Camille Pissarro in Paris, and Max Liebermann in Berlin. These painters had to make serious choices about how much to assert or embrace their religious and ethnic heritage, and whether they defined their Jewish identity as primarily religious or ethnic—even as they followed individual pathways within a labyrinthine complex of contested cultural terrain. Even the art world was shifting during the nineteenth century among contemporary artistic movements, played out in public exhibitions as well as private galleries in an increasingly international European arena." - Read the Complete Essay

Per Contra Visual Arts Fall 2007