The Jewish Renaissance Flowers Anew : Skirball Museum’s epic ‘Tradition and Revolution’ exhibition has present-day reverberations

It is a rare day when an art exhibition reveals an ignored chapter in history--especially modern history. But the new show at Hebrew Union College’s Skirball Museum does just that. Titled “Tradition and Revolution,” it raises the curtain on a generally overlooked Jewish artistic renaissance that tracked--and to some extent blended with--the rise of radical avant-garde art in revolutionary Russia around 1912-28.

The exhibition--a thoroughly gratifying sleeper--encompasses some 174 drawings, paintings, prints, illustrations and set designs by 13 artists, including Marc Chagall and Eliezer Lissitzky. The range of work attests to the multi-disciplinary personality of the renaissance, which cut across art, literature, theater and music. Originated by the Jewish Museum in Jerusalem and organized by curator Meira Perry-Lehmann, the show remains on view at the museum near USC to May 13.

Small in scale but epic in scope, it must appeal to anyone with a serious interest in links between art, culture and creativity. Actually, it must appeal to virtually anyone mesmerized by today’s headlines about the Soviet Union’s troubles with its ethnic minorities and the participation of artists in the outbreak of freedom in Eastern Europe. The echoes between the exhibition and the present are almost spooky.

At one level, the substance of the show and its catalogue are as complex as the mind of the Talmudic scholar in an old joke about a train trip from Minsk to Pinsk. The scholar finds a young man from his village seated across from him and wonders where he is going. After an hour of byzantine thinking about the social relationships in the village, he says, “You must be going to Pinsk for the wedding of Mrs. Ginzburg’s daughter.”

“How did you know?” asks the astonished youth.

“It was perfectly obvious,” replies the crafty scholar.

Basically, that is a folk-joke with a sophisticated twist, showing as it does that the scholar prefers the complexity of his own mind to asking a simple question. This combination of simplicity and intellectualism grossly summarizes the look of the art of the Jewish renaissance.

It came about thusly: In Czarist Russia, some 5 million Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement--a geographic region between the Baltic and the Black seas, roughly comparable to present Eastern Europe. They had lived there for centuries, occasionally traumatized by pogroms, suppression of printing in Hebrew, and other indignities, such as being banned from residence in the great cultural centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg--unless they were talented, assimilated and had a Russian patron. The furthest thing from democratic, it was nevertheless a life that could take on a lumpy approximation of the normal.

In the 19th Century, Jews were caught up in nationalist impulses that swept Europe. Eventually this quest raised the question of a secular Jewish art. Just as today we see minorities--ethnic and otherwise--looking for a black, female or gay art, the Jews wondered if there was a Jewish sensibility that could be expressed in a distinctive aesthetic. The influential Russian critic Vladimir Stassof thought there was. By 1912, Jewish intellectuals and artists were enthusiastically embroiled in a folkloric movement that organized a historic expedition to record everything from Jewish folk legends to Jewish folk music.

In 1916, things got considerably artier when Lissitzky and Issachar Ber Ryback explored and recorded motifs found in wooden synagogues along the Dnieper River. A Ryback watercolor on view shows the ceiling of Mohilev synagogue displaying--among other things--the astrological symbols. Fruits of the folkloric quest are on view in animal motifs that look like heraldic beasties made charming by a decorative peasant rendering. The Jews have absorbed much in their wanderings.

And wander they did. Some artists, put off by the provincialism of Russian culture and attracted to radical movements in Europe, decamped for the yeasty life in Paris and--after World War I--Berlin. Chagall and Nathan Altman roosted in Paris’ La Ruche, a warren of cheap studio spaces, where they rubbed elbows with Modigliani, Leger and Diego Rivera. Influences broadcast from cosmopolitan centers show up all over the place in Jewish renaissance art. A bit of Picasso blue period informs touching drawings of Alexander Tyshler. A hint of Aubrey Beardsley spices the otherwise homey work of Joseph Tchaikov. Boris Aronson gets a flavor of Matisse into an interior.

Chagall--perhaps the most truly cosmopolitan of the artists--paradoxically got stuck with a reputation as the most famous and beloved perpetuator of the original impulse to formulate a Jewish art, now as then sometimes scorned as excessively folksy and sentimental. It was not always thus. In a 1923 autobiographical series of heimisch drawings called “My Life,” he shows us memories of the shtetl with his own tenderness and the sting of a George Grosz. They were drawn in Weimar Berlin.

In some ways, Chagall was almost politically saddled with his poetic role. Most art people already know the story of how he returned to Russia after the Revolution to find radical art much in fashion with the Bolsheviks, and artists--including the Jewish contingent--enthusiastic about the revolution and its seeming promise of freedom.

So much for foresight.

Chagall was made commissar and director of the Vitebsk Art School, where he proceeded to appoint radical colleagues, some Jewish like Lissitzky, some not like Ivan Puni. After a couple of years, Chagall was ousted by his fellow artists and replaced by the ultra-radical Kasimir Malevich. Chagall was considered insufficiently abstract, therefore insufficiently revolutionary.

Americans are still getting accustomed to thinking of art styles as metaphors for ideology, but that was the way it worked in revolutionary Russia. The Jewish style, with its hybrid of folk and modern elements, was relatively conservative and preserved tradition. In the exhibition, it comes across as decorative and poetic, anguished and amused, forebearing and mystical. Hassidic high spirits dance in, even in the impressive Expressionist suffering of an artist like Ryback.

The flowering of the Jewish renaissance lasted a brief five years but it did manage to establish a distinct style that endured at least through the work of the American Ben Shahn. He seems to have learned from the thorny line of Yosef Elman and others.

Lissitzky--who dominates the exhibition--did not stay with the style he pioneered. His earlier work includes charming peasant-rococo children’s illustrations like “The Mischievous Boy,” which has the liquid spontaneity of a painted tile. The impulse to children’s illustration was widespread and seems to participate in general artistic leanings to the primitive innocence that also showed up in early Kandinsky and the German Expressionists.

Gradually Lissitzky’s work became first more political--as in his Had Gadya illustrations--then more hard-edged. His Jewish period ends with a remarkable work of 1922 that served as a book illustration. It shows his own handprint atop the Hebrew script found on Jewish grave markers that translates, “Here is buried.” With this work, the old Lissitzky died and the new committed radical of the Russian Avant-Garde was born.

Politics and art. Art politics.

The impulse to freedom seems to be the motive that drives artists into politics. Certainly the playwright Vaclav Havel, who recently wound up as president of Czechoslovakia, acted out of an impulse to liberty, as did the poets, playwrights, film makers and painters who are now in government all over the East Bloc.

There are so many significant coincidences surrounding this exhibition, it seems to have been fated. In Paris, a great retrospective of Jacques Louis David still has a few days to run. David--prototype of the modern artist in politics--started as the austere moral conscience of the French Revolution and wound up as court painter to the tyrant Napoleon.

The Russian and Jewish avant-garde appeared to have lost the game. As the Stalinist era dawned, avant-garde art was suppressed in favor of propagandistic Social Realism. Artists fled, went underground or adapted.

Isaac Rabinovich did vigorous, engaging calligraphic illustrations of wise peasants and fiddling cats. He was killed in a Stalinist purge.

Aronson did punchy woodcuts, like one showing orthodox Jews in and unhinged world. He collected art, including much on view here, and designed for the vibrant Yiddish theater. When the bad days started, he moved to New York. Remember the wonderful sets for “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Cabaret”? His.

Nathan Altman did stage designs so influential that his sets and costumes for “The Dybbuk” are used to this day in Israel. But when the crunch came, he caved in to Social Realism and painted Lenin’s portrait. In the short term, the bad guys won. But remember Lissitzky’s handprint? We’ve seen it again in the work of the California artist Wallace Berman, who made copying machine collages as enigmatic as the Kabala. Jasper Johns also used his handprint to say that modern art is personal.

Modernist aesthetics and Communism both intended to be international movements. Modernism triumphed and entered history. Communism appears to be crumbling. So who won? Today, Social Realism is just that quaint style satirized by the emigre artists Komar and Melamid.

So there.