Andy Warhol: Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980)
Top row: Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein and Louis Brandeis
Bottom row: George Gershwin, the Marx Bros, Golda Meir, Sarah Bernhardt and Sigmund Freud
Warhol, one of my favourite 20th-century artists, was not Jewish and yet, for some reason, I often think of him as Jewish - or Jew-ish, to use a complex and at times controversial term [1].
I suppose it's partly because as the child of East European migrants, he would likely have been subject to the same kind of othering within American society during the 1930s, where, as one commentator notes, "cultural and social interactions were built around ethnic identities and tensions" [2].
This same commentator also claims that despite being Capatho-Rusyn and an orthodox Catholic, Warhol's "closest childhood friends were Jewish, and you can imagine him sharing
their sense of being permanent outsiders within the American mix" [3].
And indeed, throughout his life and career, Warhol continued to form important relationships with Jews and was clearly sympathetic to anyone who is marked out as queer, different, or alien; "Warhol knew and cared more about alterity, and the difficult quest for
cultural inclusion, than most other artists you could name" [4].
So, it should be no surprise that in 1980 Warhol produced a series of ten silk-screened canvases (each 40" x 40") which celebrated some of the most important Jewish figures of the twentieth century.
What is surprising, perhaps, is the fact that this work was dismissed or condemned by the critics at the time [5] and remains still, in my view, undervalued - although there has, admittedly, been something of a critical reappraisal in recent years and Jewish art lovers continue to view the work with enthusiasm and pride.
In sum: whilst it would be wrong to claim Warhol was an ardent philosemite - and it should be noted that the idea for the above work was not his, nor did he select the ten figures chosen (or even know who Martin Buber was) [6] - Warhol was certainly not guilty of Jewsploitation, nor jokey antisemitism (hang your head in shame for this last remark, Ken Johnson) [7].
I like the series: although if I were asked to compile a list of ten dead Jewish figures that I would like to see portraits of, it would certainly have to include Serge Gainsbourg, Malcolm McLaren and Jacques Derrida ...
Notes
[1] See Aviya Kushner, 'What does it mean to be "Jew-ish"? How the term went from warm inside joke to national flashpoint', Forward, (28 December, 2022): click here.
[2-4] Blake Gopnik, 'Andy Warhol's Jewish Question', Artnet, (22 November, 2016): click here.
[5] Writing in the New York Times, Hilton Kramer accused Warhol of exploiting his Jewish subjects "without showing the slightest grasp of their significance". The critical consensus was that the work was produced in the cynical knowledge it would fetch a high price from a wealthy Jewish collector.
[6] The series was suggested to him
by art dealer Ronald Feldman and the subjects of the portraits were
subsequently chosen by Feldman after consultation with Susan Morgenstein, director of
the art gallery of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington, where the work was first exhibited in March 1980.
The series was later
exhibited at the Jewish Museum of New York (September 1980 to
January 1981) and was first displayed in the UK at the National Portrait Gallery, London, between January and June 2006, where they were described thus by curator Paul Moorhouse in the booklet that accompanied the NPG exhibition:
"Magisterial in
conception, they advance a new subtlety and sophistication in technical
terms. One of their most compelling aspects is the way surface and image
are held in a satisfying and fascinating dialogue, generating new
depths of meaning and implication. [...]
The disjunction between sitter and
surface is a visual device that unites the portraits, but the series
has a conceptual unity also. Warhol's insistence that the subjects be
deceased invests the series with an inescapable character of mortality.
The faces of the dead appear as if behind a veneer of modernity. The
tension sustained between photograph and abstraction focuses the issue
of their celebrity. Probing the faultlines between the person and their
manufactured, surface image, Warhol presents these individuals' fame as a
complex metamorphosis. The real has been transformed into a glorious, poignant, other-worldly abstraction."
[7] See Ken Johnson's piece in The New York Times entitled 'Funny, You Don't Look Like a Subject for Warhol' (28 March 2008), in which he wrote: "What is remarkable about the
paintings now, however, is how uninteresting they are. What once made
them controversial - the hint of a jokey, unconscious anti-Semitism - has evaporated, leaving little more than bland, posterlike
representations."
