Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry speaks with Strosberg about Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Lucien Freud, and others, about renderings of the body in ancient Jewish art, and about the mother as muse.

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 in 1954, Pablo Picasso rendered the same woman, a painter known as Soshana, in darker strokes, with her hair exotically styled, and wearing a jacket deliriously striped. Here, her pose is reminiscent of Picasso’s famous portrayal of another tough female artist—Gertrude Stein. The gazes in both Picasso portraits are oblique, off to the side, as if women as strong as Stein and Soshana were not comfortable being made the objects of another’s appreciation. No mistress and no muse, Soshana never hoped to be known as a subject, but as a master in her own right.

One of the most diffuse, enthusiastic artists of the twentieth century, Soshana was born Susanne Schüller in Vienna in 1927, a daughter of the Jewish bourgeoisie. She received her earliest formal education amid the most rarefied of that milieu, attending Vienna’s Schwarzwaldschule, the first of the progressive girls’ schools founded by philanthropist Eugenie Schwarzwald (who was the inspiration for Ermelinda Tuzzi, heroine of Robert Musil’s epic novel of the period, The Man Without Qualities). Such a nontraditional institution needed to staff itself with nontraditional faculty, and its roster reads like a roll call of the Austro-Hungarian avant-garde: Schoenberg taught music, Adolf Loos taught architecture, and Oskar Kokoschka led a class in drawing. This school was where Schüller learned that being a woman didn’t preclude a painting career launched with the most liberal of ideals.

No idealism could curb the Anschluss, however, and the Schüller family escaped Austria for Switzerland, arriving in London just in time to witness the destruction of the Blitz. Finally, in 1941 the Schüllers arrived in the United States, where their only daughter met her husband, the painter Beys Afroyim (the Zionist cognomen of the Polish-born Ephraim Bernstein). Together with their son Amos, born in 1946, the Afroyims spent the latter 1940s traveling the country, sustaining a poor, boardinghouse existence by selling Schüller’s portraits of America’s Mitteleuropean refugees: Portraits by “Soshana” exist of composers Schoenberg and Hans Eisler, conductors Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, authors Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, and Franz Werfel on his Los Angeles deathbed.

In America, Schüller’s identity was split. She became a dutiful wife and mother, even while experimenting with the persona of “Soshana,” the moniker she first used, on her husband’s recommendation, in conjunction with her first solo show in Havana in 1948 (that name, the Yiddish for Hebrew’s Shoshana, means “lily-of-the-valley”). Her self-portraits reify this divergence. Soshana painted herself in the manner in which all Modernist men painted themselves—flattering their vanity with unflattering strokes, heroic in their ordinariness and exhaustion. In 1945, she stares seriously, her eyes intense, exophthalmic, while her mouth makes a petulant, desexualized mockery out of Modigliani’s sensuous Jewish puckers. Her brows, which even in photographs are her most memorable feature, are ostentatious, firm and furry, reflecting the severe central part of her hair. In a 1951 portrayal, her eyes are even more swollen than before, angrier, and she is holding flowers as if they were soured, disgusting objects, the decorations of a domesticity she was about to cast off. In Paris in 1955—having abandoned her husband and son in the United States in order to pursue her independence as an artist—Soshana paints herself again, now a liberated, and libertine, member of a creative community: In Artists in Paris she stands off to the side—a peer of the surrounding characters, struggling unknowns including the Indian painter Krishna Reddi, and the Japanese Tomoko Nakano (asked to label the painting’s other subjects later in life, Soshana had forgotten their names).

Taking over André Derain’s former studio, which she’d later abandon for Paul Gauguin’s old digs in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière, Soshana also set about befriending the stars of the art world, networking her way to the top: She flitted, and flirted, amid the likes of Brancusi, Bazaine, Calder, Chagall, Ernst, Klein, Kupka, Sartre, and Zadkine. Picasso, who admired the severity of her beauty, is said to have remarked: Je trouve qu’elle a du talent. “I think she has talent.” Giacometti was more effusive, and sincere, in his affection for “Mademoiselle Soshana.”

Though superficially something of a bonne vivante, Soshana suffered in her studio. There her life became a sort of feeling, functioning canvas for the sufferings of others. Unlike many of her contemporaries, who also made the mid-century journey from figurative art to abstraction, Soshana was guided not by any painterly hand or eye but by ideas, by politics, and by moral conscience. This condition gives her art a disembodied quality; making her portraits—even her self-portraits— seem somehow incorporeal. Soshana’s best paintings, then, are of decimated, depopulated landscapes, and their literary or programmatic moods can be inferred from a recounting of her titles: Fury of the Marshes, Chrysanthemum and the Spider, Dead City, Sad Flowers, Pain, Solitude, Disintegration, Bombed-Out Church, and The Wandering Jew.

This “Cassandra of the canvas,” as the Parisian press called her, soon tired of the French capital’s competitiveness, and, turning tourist, took her horrors on the road. Traveling Asia and Africa, Soshana exhibited her artwork—which decried poverty and war amid landscapes more poor and war-torn than any she had previously seen—to the terror and delight of Anglo-American and French expatriate communities. India’s Statesman called her “a prophet of doom—atomic warfare, loneliness and unemployment are her themes.” The Ethiopian Herald noted her “scenes from death, pain, doom, destruction, anxiety and loneliness.” In 1957 Soshana was invited by the Chinese Cultural Ministry for an unprecedented show at the Imperial Palace in Peking. In 1959 she visited with and painted Albert Schweitzer in a leprosy lazarette in Lambaréné, Gabon. Strange attractors, Surrealist connections, abound: Soshana once met the painter Francesco Clemente at a school for yogis in Madras, and chatted up the writer Graham Greene on a flight to Soviet Russia.

In 1959 Soshana resettled in Paris, where she collaborated on mock cave paintings with Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, while involving herself with the Danish-Belgian-Dutch art collective CoBrA. That movement’s neo-Lascaux motifs and hermetically significant glyphs would be integrated with Soshana’s emerging interest in Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, resulting in an art of grids and mildewed textures, overlaid with an alphabet indecipherable in its violence: jagged scribbles signified as wounds, ripped by clusterbombs of color, symbolic of primal pain as well as of the revolutionary struggles of the mid-1960s. After time spent in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Soshana embarked on a third world tour, visiting the South Seas, the Caribbean, Thailand, Bali, Australia, India, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Iraq, partially paying her way by painting portraits, including a rendering of the king and queen of Sikkim. In 1972, slowing down, Soshana moved to Israel, and the following year her Israeli debut exhibition was scheduled to open on the day of the beginning of the Yom Kippur War. In 1974, Soshana returned to New York, where her style, or styles, changed yet again, accommodating both Pop cartooning and a renewed darkness, this time representing urban grit, specifically the neglect of downtown New York.

Soshana’s art and life were so varied not out of any appetite for change or intellectual restlessness, but out of a profound dislocation and social anxiety. She did not know whether she was a weakened victim of Nazism, or an iron survivor set out to master the masculine world. In Paris she painted like a Parisian, and in New York she painted like her favorite New Yorkers—first generation Abstract Expressionists such as old friends Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, both of whom had died by the time of her Manhattan arrival. In her very itinerancy Soshana became the prototypical Jewish painter, a painter who—more than Chagall and Chaim Soutine, more than Rothko and, later, even more than Philip Guston and R.B. Kitaj—adapts her mind and styles to those of the cultures that host her wandering.

In the 1980s, Soshana returned to Vienna, where she still lives and paints, her career promoted by her son Amos, with whom she was reconciled after the death of his father in 1984. In March 2008 Austria released the 55-cent Soshana stamp, featuring her 1981 New York painting Rainbow. Her best recent paintings have been political, in series entitled Kosovo, and Middle East. Two newer canvases, currently on view in a Soshana retrospective at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York through February 2009, are called N.Y.C. I 2001, WTC and Chorramshar—Irak 1992; both paintings are bold and confrontational, tempting iconoclasm by directly representing the tragedies of their titles. A 1991 self-portrait is called The Way I See Myself, and while it’s not yet an epitaph, the stark presence of death overwhelms. Here she presents herself as a hysterical skeleton, a ravaged black figure boxed in by bars of black paint shot through with red and blue bristles. The canvas is entirely naked beneath, as if imprisoned by these lines, by Soshana’s figure. One of Soshana’s eyes is left open to this surface—the outline of a hole giving way to bare canvas, a grainy, pixilated ground like the Polish snow that would have been her fate.

Soshana’s career can be seen as a model for the last aesthetic that might still be called Jewish: empathy, or compassion. She absorbed, and as an octogenarian continues to absorb, the sorrows of others and, by way of interpretation, offers them out again as uniquely, biographically, hers. Soshana’s highest desire is to be modern, or new, which is to say, to be fashionable, and necessary. She wants, like many people want, to always be young. This makes for an art of insecurity—an art that is occasionally, if glimpsed between poses, beautiful in its desperation for the beauty it lacks.

Jeanne Hebuterne, 1919

The Jewish Museum’s retrospective does go beyond this cliché, but its real target is another: what a skeptic like curator Mason Klein might call the Myth of Modigliani, Jew. In previous exhibitions, Modigliani’s Jewishness has been discussed in terms of his easy assimilation. Montparnasse was home to many Jewish émigrés. Nearly all of these artists—his companions included Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine, and Jacques Lipchitz—struggled to overcome their Eastern European provincialism, but Modigliani, who spoke fluent French and came from an educated family that claimed descent from Spinoza, seemed at home. Without disputing this characterization, Klein questions its usefulness in understanding Modigliani’s relationship to his Jewish identity. “Instead of considering the artist as the exemplary cosmopolitan of the School of Paris,” he writes in the exhibition catalogue, “I will examine Modigliani’s work as an expression of his unique identity within the foreign ranks of the School.” In other words, the current retrospective focuses on what made Modigliani stand apart.

Klein’s revisionist tale goes as follows: Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1906, the year Colonel Alfred Dreyfus was cleared of all charges. For émigrés of this period, France represented a more tolerant and modern society than they had known, an ideal place to be a Jew as well as an artist. But Modigliani saw things differently, because pluralist Italy did not demand that its Jews abandon or hide their religion. Italy was not as tolerant as Klein suggests—Rome, for instance, did not abolish its ghetto until 1870—but the international port of Livorno, where Modigliani was born and raised, never had a ghetto. Throughout the 19th century, its great Sephardic mystical leader, Elia Benamozegh, encouraged Italian patriotism while stressing “the indelibility of [one's] Jewishness, regardless of acculturation.”

To support his argument, Klein cites Modigliani’s daughter’s claim that her father encountered anti-Semitism for the first time in France, in the journalism of Edouard Drumont. Modigliani’s ability to mask his Judaism, despite its “indelibility,” went “against the grain of emancipatory secularism that characterizes the lack of Jewish self-consciousness in most Jewish émigré artists in Paris,” Klein writes. “Rather than assimilate, Modigliani ‘unmasked’ his Jewishness by assuming the ideological position of the pariah.”

Klein returns to the Modigliani legend to explain the artist’s bohemianism in terms of his self-conception as pariah. That he never joined a movement—not the Futurists, not the Cubists—is used as further proof. His almost exclusive focus on portraiture when still-lifes and cityscapes were dominant testifies to his obsession with questions of identity and a sense of apartness. And the highly stylized, idealized faces of his portraits, the distinctive style for which the artist is best known, become, in Klein’s interpretation, the masks behind which true identity lies.

There is something to the notion that Modigliani was concerned with unmasking hidden, indelible Judaism. One of the first paintings he showed in France was a portrait of an ethnically ambiguous woman titled La Juive (1908); and he is reported to have frequently introduced himself with the words “I am Modigliani, Jew.” But to find a sublimated version of this overt, immature expression of concern with identity in his later work—and to view it as the key interpretive framework with which to approach his career overall—is a stretch.

The masklike face is everywhere in Modigliani’s mature portraits. In the stately Lunia Czechowska (The Woman with a Fan) of 1919, it gives an elevated elegance; in the unusually casual and natural portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne (1919), it allows the artist’s emotional relationship with his lover to rise to the surface. Elsewhere, as in the Young Seated Boy with Cap (1918), the degree of stylization can be so great that the subject’s personality is lost. Yet there is something haunting about this depersonalized image, as if it represents a new sort of being that Modigliani created.

The Young Seated Boy with Cap is one of the finest examples of Modigliani’s use of sculptural elements in his painted portraits, and it is this mixing of media that provides the formalist explanation for the artist’s signature style. When he arrived in Paris, Modigliani considered himself primarily a sculptor. From 1909 to 1915 he worked almost exclusively in that medium, often under the influence of Constantin Brancusi, and sculpted heads in primitive styles from Archaic Greek to Egyptian. When Modigliani returned to painting in 1915, his faces increasingly resembled these sculptures. The origin of Young Seated Boy with Cap‘s stony expression seems obvious when it is compared to one of Modigliani’s sculpted Heads.

That the statue rather than the mask is the better metaphor for understanding Modigliani’s mature painting is evident in his nudes, which caused a scandal when displayed in the artist’s first and only solo exhibition. Of the five on display at the Jewish Museum, Reclining Nude with Loose Hair (1917) is perhaps the most overtly erotic, but when compared to a contemporary work like Picasso’s groundbreaking Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), it feels rather tame. Picasso’s faces resemble African masks, meant to suggest that when unmasked they will unleash a terrifying sexuality. Modigliani’s nude has a stylized face, though hardly a mask, and she has nothing to hide. Presented to us in full body, the woman is available, but she responds to the viewer’s look with a thoughtful, rather than suggestive, gaze. The impression she gives is less that of something hidden, waiting to be unmasked, than a still, inner calm of indefinite duration, her stony body the corporeal equivalent of the depersonalized face of the Young Seated Boy with Cap.

The Jewish Museum’s desire to emphasize the artist’s Jewishness is certainly understandable, as is the desire to distill from his work some notion of a Jewish tradition or sensibility. In this sense, the Modigliani retrospective fits a larger project pursued in recent exhibitions of Soutine and Chagall and in New York: Capital of Photography. But the museum risks diminishing the accomplishments of the artists they are trying to promote. Had the exhibition explored Modigliani in the context of Sephardic Italian visual culture, the argument might have been more convincing, but Klein’s suggestion of an invisible sensibility or spirit is suspect.

Klein’s argument also leads to an uncomfortable paradox: Modigliani is said to belong in the Jewish Museum precisely because of his profound sense of not belonging. In the Fifties and Sixties, the Jewish Museum gave solo exhibitions to Philip Guston and Adolph Gottlieb as well as select non-Jewish artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, thereby helping to establish their reputation. Rather than promoting a notion of the Jew as outsider, the museum showcased the centrality of Jews in the art world—an important project, but one that risks playing into stereotypes of the Jew as eternal exile. Such an interpretation of Modigliani ignores one important strand of the Jewish tradition of artmaking of which his work is a prime example: the well-established practice of making art that looks like art by everyone else.