What does Chagall have to do with Russian Yiddish theater?
| 11:23 AM Nov 20, 2008
A sad day has arrived when, in order to attract an audience to an engrossing exhibit about the Yiddish theater, one must claim that the exhibit is about Marc Chagall. That’s exactly what’s happened at New York’s Jewish Museum, where a provocative exhibit, “Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater,” opened last week.
Despite ...
The many lives of a restless painter
| 11:19 AM Oct 30, 2008
Self-Portrait, around 1945
Alberto Giacometti sketched her with her hands either clasped in a saintly pose, or clenched out of neurosis. In one drawing, her shoulders are hunched, her neck inquisitively thrust forward, and her face open, as if nervously searching out viewers for their thoughts. The setting is a Paris atelier, 1958. In Vallauris ...
Benjamin Harshav explores the Moscow Yiddish Theater
| 12:11 PM Jul 1, 2008
Solomon Mikhoels as King Lear
The Moscow Yiddish Theater was founded as an actors’ studio in Petrograd in 1919 and moved to the new capital of the Soviet Union a year later. There, under the guidance of director Aleksey Granovsky, it emerged as the shining symbol of a secular Yiddish-speaking culture. The Theater quickly gained an ...
She loved Chagall
and wasn’t ashamed of that.
—t. carmi, “In Memory of Leah Goldberg”
In 1968, when I was in my first year at university, I had a cheap poster of a Chagall painting, Double Portrait with Wineglass, on the wall of my dormitory room. The airborne figures, a young man and woman floating above a Russian ...
How Chagall—"the little Jew from Vitebsk"—became an art star
| 5:16 PM Mar 6, 2007
Click here for links to hundreds of Marc Chagall works on the web >>
To some, he is the most famous of the Jewish artists. To others, he is the most Jewish of famous ones. Modernists celebrate him for fusing the Yiddishe sensibility of his provincial Russian birthplace with the urban genre of Cubism and the ...
Stranded in Russia by the First World War, Chagall turned a generation of boys into artists
| 1:12 PM Jul 26, 2006
View Drawings
In 1914, Marc Chagall returned to Russia from Paris on what was supposed to be a brief visit. When the First World War broke out, he found himself stranded and soon became swept up in the upheaval that followed, embracing the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and assuming the post of Art Commissar in ...
Frida Kahlo, Eva Hesse, and the parlor game of defining Jewish art
| 9:57 AM May 18, 2006
A hilarious sketch on Dave Chappelle’s Comedy Central show imagines a racial draft of sports and entertainment figures. The blacks draft Tiger Woods. The Jews pick Lenny Kravitz. The Asians adopt the Wu-Tang Clan.
I was reminded of this when I read about a new biography published in Germany of Frida Kahlo’s father, Guillermo, that refutes ...