Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust

Download or read book Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust written by Matthew Baigell and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish themes in American art were not very visible until the last two decades, although many famous twentieth-century artists and critics were and are Jewish. Few artists responded openly to the Holocaust until the 1960s, when it finally began to act as a galvanizing force, allowing Jewish-American artists to express their Jewish identity in their work. Baigell describes how artists initially deflected their responses into abstract forms or by invoking biblical and traditional figures and then in more recent decades confronted directly Holocaust imagery and memory. He traces the development of artistic work from the late 1930s to the present in a moving study of a long overlooked topic in the history of American art.