"Jewish Modernism" in the Pictorial Arts

The subject of my research project is the establishment of a German-Jewish art praxis in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This encompasses not only the emergence of individual Jewish figures in art but exhibition projects with such programmatic titles as Jewish Art and Jewish Artists. These undertakings were conceptually defined through the process of establishing and legitimizing a discrete German-Jewish cultural system. This project was premised on both the new spaces that were created through political emancipation and the opposite tendency the criticism of assimiliation which in the late nineteenth century was represented especially by cultural Zionism. This research project links up to the theme of my habilitation, which focused on Max Liebermann and the German-Jewish art and cultural system of the early twentieth century. It is through the use of exemplary case-studies that my goal here is to achieve a more holistic view and thus bring to light the project of Jewish Modernism in the pictorial arts and its various positionings therein. It is not my intention to document Jewish Art but to problematize this construction by showing how it was contingent on the (cultural-)political agenda of anti-Semitism on the one hand and the history of Jewrys emancipation on the other. Alongside historical and image-studies approaches, I will be employing the methodological instruments afforded by postcolonial studies, whose conceptual arsenal includes such notions as hybridity and third space, which help to disclose those certain factors producing cultural differences and their cultural translation from one perceptual sphere to another.

The topic of the research project was establishment of a German-Jewish art praxis in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast to Jewish literature, the importance of the graphic arts for the development of a Jewish self-conception in the modern era has been sorely underrated. The research projects primary thrust was the genesis of Jewish themes and image motifs in the art and self-presentation of Jewish artists. The research project was defined both historically and methodologically by an attempt to demonstrate the entangled histories of the individual artistic achievements through establishment of an autonomous and ever more nuanced German-Jewish cultural system. Addressing the Jewish aspect meant keeping in view both the social and cultural friction between a non-Jewish majority culture and a Jewish minority culture as well as the exclusionary mechanisms entailed therein (anti-Semitic and anti-Judaism traditions) and taking these seriously as cultural factors in the production of art. The leading question in this regard was to what degree was the project of Jewish modernism in the pictorial arts the result of an antagonism between Jewish and non-Jewish elements and/or to what extent did it go beyond this dichotomy and lead to creation in the modern era of a new Jewish self-image that was culturally contingent. The goal was not to document Jewish art but rather to problematize this construction in showing how it was conditioned by an anti-Semitic (cultural-)political agenda on the one hand and by Jewish emancipation on the other.