Tag Archives: Ilya Schor

Engraved memories

My father Ilya Schor died 59 years ago today, June 7, 1961, a week after my 11th birthday. Every year in the weeks preceding this anniversary, I experience a rise in anxiety, depression, paranoia even, always ascribing it to contemporary circumstances until the date is upon me. He was 57 years old, had been a heavy smoker from his teens until sometime before I was born, and basically died of cardiovascular failure of all sorts–though I always felt that in a time of better medical care he would not have died, but then my sister Naomi Schor died of vascular issues as well when she was 58, so who knows. His symptoms were misdiagnosed as anxiety but I also have written that because he had a succession of small heart attacks in the weeks after watching the daily broadcasts of the Eichmann trials, my sister and I had independently come to the same conclusion–he died of Eichmann).

This spring a few things happened in the weeks before this anniversary, related to my father’s life and work.

First, I was contacted by Shimon Briman, a journalist and historian from Israel, born in Ukraine, who has in recent years done a lot of work researching the Jewish community of the town of Zloczow, where my father was born and raised, a town which changed nationalities a few times, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Poland, to now the Ukraine, where it is referred to as Zolochiv (having spent my life remembering the Polish spelling with its characteristic surplus of consonants, I am not going to change how I spell it). He had many questions for me but also was able to answer questions I had about the nature of the town: I have always been confused by the semi-rural shtetl my father depicted and pictures of the town in the early twentieth century depicting a typical provincial Western city of that time period, with fine shops and hotels. In fact these two worlds were co-existent, as I have gotten fleeting intimations of before, but what I did not know was that it was a Jewish town, that is to say the bourgeoisie, the administration, all Jewish. He sent me pictures of the synagogue that my father often painted and of the rubble of the empty lot that exists now where it had once stood. I am glad my father did not ever see that empty lot. The Jews of Zloczow were murdered in the town in a succession of pogroms: there were no deportations to concentration camps, just slaughter in place.

Ilya Schor, Staircase to the Womens Balcony of the Synagogue, Zloczow, gouache on board, 1950s

Ilya Schor, Marriage Scene: Blessing of the Bride and Groom , 1958–59, gouache, cut paper, and gold leaf on board. The Jewish Museum, New York, Gift of Mira Schor, 2004-63 (this illumination was made for my sister Naomi Schor, and donated in her honor to the Jewish Museum in NYC)

Empty dirt lot where the synagogue was, Zloczow, now Zolochiv, in the Ukraine.

Empty field, location of the old Jewish cemetery, Zloczow, now Zolochiv; possible resting place of my grandfather Naftali Schorr who died in 1930.

Briman sent me a picture of the grassy field which was the cemetery–the headstones all were destroyed during the Holocaust, but apparently the human remains are still there. So the dust of my grandfather’s bones may lie there still. He has posted a touching tribute to my father with lovely pictures from the collection of the son of one of my father’s friends from his childhood.

At around the same time I was contacted by a young woman art historian at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts who as part of an assignment to research women art students was interested in researching my mother Resia Schor’s career, having discovered her through some school documents in the Academy Archives. Through this connection I was able to obtain some of my father’s Academy documents. Here is one document from 1930 ((unfortunately I don’t read Polish so I don’t know what it says). In 1930, he was 26 years old. (He was renamed Ilya by a Russian friend in Paris in the late 1930s and that became his name when he arrived in the United States)

Next, I received an email asking me to comment on a work by my father. The query came in a neutral tone, without prejudicial wording, but I had a sense of what it was about and the minute I saw the pictures I understood what my task was. I spent the week before my birthday and the approaching anniversary of my father’s death meticulously trying to explain why I felt this work was a forgery–there are fake Ilya Schors (in the area of Judaica). My mother always said that my father always said if an artist is copied that is a real compliment, a testimonial to having a recognizable style! Some recent fake Ilya Schors I have seen are boldly improbable, bearing almost no resemblance and clearly, brazenly brand new, though with a faked signature. But a couple of objects that I’ve been asked to consider have been more disturbing., In these, someone with some skill has gone to quite a lot of trouble to produce a work that might pass–actually I literally mean one person seems to be responsible for some ambitious attempts, because I am now becoming an expert in this forger’s hand as well. I will post no pictures, obviously. In fact posting pictures of my father’s silver work is always a danger. But I have shared online (in a previous birthday post, from 2013) what I consider one of his masterpieces, in part because because I am fairly certain it was destroyed in a synagogue fire decades ago.

Ilya Schor, silver Torah Crown, 1950s, most likely destroyed in a synagogue fire was no longer in existence at time of retrospective of my fathers work at the Jewish Museum in NYC in 1965.

As I went over the pictures comparing them detail by detail to similar works I had complete verification of (and by the way I have learned that an artist’s estate cannot say that something is a fake because you could be sued, you can only say that you can’t verify), at times I wept because while, when I see one of the impostures, I experience a deep sense of injury to something at the core of my being, when I recognize the trace of my father’s hand in an engraved line into silver, I can feel him making it. As a child I watched him work. That was 60 or more years ago, so it amazes me to re-experience how much I learned at that time. It is a fully embodied memory of artistic gestures. When he was a teenager, before he went to art school in Warsaw, he had trained with a goldsmith and engraver, encouraged by his older brother Moses who thought the talented boy should learn a profession so that he could earn a living, a wise and as it turns out providential decision. He was extremely deft, swift, and certain in each mark. In engraving gold, silver, or hard wood, you cannot make a mistake. He also brought to each mark and flourish a particular joy coming from the culture of the pre-Holocaust Hadisim of Eastern Europe into which he was born. It is the character of this joy, suffused with humble piety and a kind of sadness, as expressed in silver and gold and in engravings and paintings, that makes his work unique and notable, and thus worthy of fakery.

That same week someone put up for sale, on eBay of all places, a truly exquisite Kiddush cup by my father, one that had been sold at a Judaica auction at Sotheby’s some time in the past thirty years. The price was ambitious, especially for eBay, so I am concerned about that, but I immediately saw/felt my father’s craft. But even though it has been on eBay so that some forger out there might be able to give it a go, I still am reluctant to share the screen shots I took of details. Still I will share just one, on the chance that my blog is obscure enough that no one with evil designs (literally) will see it.

screen shot of one detail of a silver Kiddush Cup by Ilya Schor, recently for sale on eBay (!!!)

As I have just celebrated my 70th birthday, I am concerned that once I am gone, there will be no one as qualified as I am to comment on the possible authenticity of an Ilya Schor work. I realized as I was comparing details between the real and the …what I think is not real work…that it is imperative that I leave a map of my reasoning, which may direct future art historians or art appraisers through my experience and visual line of thought. This is one more thing I feel that I must do as part of the cultural autobiography/biography of my parents’ life and work–“The Schor Project” as I call the work that I have not done except in small fragments such as this post as I struggle to achieve a place for my own work and to deal with the everyday. Each immersion in a detail of the past, each art work, letter, document, is an emotional journey that is difficult to recover from enough to meet the challenges of the present.

Mira and Ilya Schor, June 1950. A couple of months before I was born my parents moved into Apt.11B in the same building I currently live in; the images on the wall are my father’s design for the room I shared with my sister, I’m not sure if he block printed directly to the wall himself or made, or had made, wallpaper based from some kind of block or screen.

My father and me, at the Great Neck home of David and Norma Levitt, close friends and collectors, taken in 1960 or early 1961. I can tell you that it was hard to become a teenage girl with that “punim” but without that father (“punim” is the Yiddish word for face and expression)

It is part of the myth of American exceptionalism that there is, that there must be closure, that there is a schedule for grief, that things can be put into the past and left there. Our current political moment is stark evidence that there is no such thing as closure, historically, or personally.

“upright kneeling, silent screaming, motionless dance”

I’ve been saving Holocaust-related obituaries for years, of resistance heroes and righteous Christians, and stories of miraculous survival. As that generation is coming to its end, there are fewer and fewer of such obits. Here, from the December 30, 2019 copy of The New York Times, is the obituary of George Sakheim, who, as a 22 year old American soldier, worked as a translator at the Nuremberg trials; a refugee from Nazi Germany, he found himself translating the testimony of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. Simultaneously instances of anti-Semitism along with other discrimination and xenophobia are increasing around the world. Thus recent white supremacist chants of “Jews will not replace us” is a chilling echo of Höss’s testimony on the “final solution:” ”If we do not exterminate the Jewish race completely now, then the Jewish race will annihilate the German people.”

The December 29 machete attack on a group of Hasidic Jews in upstate New York celebrating the last night of Chanukah is deeply upsetting, as are all of the recent hate crimes committed during the hateful influence of the trump regime (today the information about the suspect in the Chanukah is complex: first version, he is a diagnosed schizophrenic and thus it was not a hate crime; second updated version, in the past month the suspect had done numerous online searches of an anti-Semitic nature–this consideration of the responsibility or political volition on the part of a mentally ill person and the role of the political discourse of that is that person’s context, makes me think of an Op Ed piece I read a while back in the Times, indicating that while in America the voices that schizophrenics report hearing tend to be violent in nature, in other countries the voices may tell the person “to do domestic chores.”

I looked to my father Ilya Schor‘s work for his many representations of the Hasidic community of pre-War Eastern Europe and chose a small painting on a gold leaf background, Hasid with a Streimel, a symbolized portrait of his own father, Naftali Schorr, a Hasidic folk artist from Zloczow—the seriousness and interiority of the face always struck me and influenced my being in the world even though my parents brought me up in a resolutely secular manner with no religious training.

Another work by my father, a wood engraving of Musicians in the Shtel reminds me of a story from Martin Buber‘s Tales of the Hasidim-Later Masters which along with my father’s work has informed my understanding of Judaism.

“Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vorki was asked what constitutes a true Jew. He said: ‘Three things are fitting for us: upright kneeling, silent screaming, motionless dance.'”

The worth of a Dürer wood-engraving measured in units of cows and more

I often say that I would like my paintings to have the density of a petrified walnut. That sounds ridiculous but what I mean by that is that within the small and also within the modest would be contained an intensity of materiality and of thought as dense as the molecular structure of petrified wood but at the same time with the explosive potential of the atom. I’m not saying I succeed. It is what I want.

What follows is a story (and the urgent advice to see two exhibitions closing soon, discussed here).

Years ago, when I was an undergraduate art history major at NYU, as part of a seminar about Albrecht Dürer, our professor, Isabel Hyman, took the small class to a Study Room at the Metropolitian Museum to see some Dürer prints. At that time Prints and Drawings were in separate study spaces. During our visit, a small box was brought out and opened–as I remember it, we were just standing around the person who brought it out–in my memory a person is holding an object being revealed to our small class as we cluster around. Layers of white cloth were peeled back to reveal something black and very old, about four hundred and seventy four years old at that time. It was an original wood block of one of Dürer ‘s wood-engravings. It was immensely precious because of that age and provenance and because we had been studying the artist’s prints in detail that semester. But my memory is so vivid of that moment of revelation because the block was very powerful in itself. As I thought of it in later years, it had the gravitational power of something like the black stele in 2001 A Space Odyssey that appears with all the possibility of civilization within it, but this object was all the more interesting to me because it was paper or tablet sized, not the enormous size of a work by Frank Stella or Richard Serra, but as strong a presence.

The half-life of that blackened piece of ancient wood in my mind has been long. As it happens, many of my paintings have been around the size of the object I remembered. It was a touchstone.

But I didn’t remember which print it was the woodblock for and it was such a long time ago, I began to wonder whether my memory was an invention.

Then a fortuitous circumstance arose: having learned that I’m an artist and a writer about art, my dental hygienist had often spoken to me with great pride about her daughter who was getting her PhD in art history, and who, parenthetically, knew who I was. One day she mentioned that her daughter was working at the Met in the Study Room for Drawings and Prints. I told her about my memory of the Dürer print, and that I had often wondered if I could ever see it again, to test the veracity of my memory and to recreate the experience. She interrupted her work on my gums first to text her daughter and then again when her daughter texted back to say yes, we have it, tell Mira to make an appointment.

As they say, only in New York.

In February 2016, some forty-six years after my visit with Professor Hyman, I stood at a long table as a box was brought out and opened for me, a white flannel blanket unfolded and peeled back to reveal the first sliver of black and then the full surface of woodblock uncovered, a revelation as thrilling as the first time.

The block is of Samson Rending the Lion (ca. 1497-98).

At first the thrill comes simply from its uncovering, then its presence, and that it is an object 500 years or so old and that it has been preserved. Then a scene begins to be decipherable, a tree, a cloud, a deep curved furrow into the wood.

It is remarkably sculptural, it is a thing.

Yet its depth is illusory on many counts Of course in relation to the impression on a flat piece of paper, it is dimensional, but it is a piece of wood whose depth one can only deduce from the depth of the box that contains it, and that isn’t that deep relative to the surface area. Maybe it is an inch deep, and if so, that it has survived at all, that it has survived hundreds of impressions and centuries of climatic vagaries of storage (I seem to remember that many of Dürer’s graphic works were found in a trunk) is incredible.

But then comes the act of magic that is an impression, the print that is an indexical trace of the block but in reverse. It is so complex to read the print against the block and see how these fine lines and deeper furrows become a lion, a blade of grass, a cloud, the cloud dug so deeply that a shore line is established, like a black cliff and, even more incredibly, how little marks, like barely raised letters of braille in a deeply carved out field become a fulsome beard or a flock of birds in the distance. The visual intelligence that goes into this magic trick of reversal from left to right and from negative to positive is incredible.

Everything I am saying has mostly to do with its objectness, nothing to do with the style of Dürer but that style is part of the magic trick, how the intricate delicate and angularity of the Gothic and the attention to intricate detail in nature characteristic of the Northern Renaissance intersects with the bolder more sculptural forms of Italian Renaissance painting.

Now another box was brought out.

Dürer’s The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine (c.1498) in some ways is even more incredible as an engraving than Samson Rending the Lion because the composition of the scene is more complex, with more figures and a less centralized composition. You can examine the block in closeup detail here, though one of the problems with representing it photographically is that it is hard to get the sense of blackness that varies greatly depending on the angle of vision and the light. At first this block itself seems flatter, the fine lines of engraving that make up the line of the earth seem hardly there and also are more worn down by timely usage but then the deeper furrows that create the whitest whites of the print become even more surprising. Considering the subject–the gory martyrdom of St. Catherine of Alexandria–it is surprisingly easy to get distracted by the emphasis on fashion of the day and hard not to bring a contemporary eye to bear on the cute derriere of the executioner’s leggings and extravagant contrapposto yet at the same time, particularly in the wood, the stripes become like ligaments of an anatomical sculpture.

At the top of the block, the angry outburst from the sky of clouds, rain, and flames are engraved and even gouged deep into the wood with traces of the engraving and carving tools utterly visible.

Saint Catherine’s medieval intricacy creates more abstract areas of carving, and because the plane is flatter and picks up the light more it becomes more like a negative of the positive in an intellectual, procedural relation to photography, yet it is a plaque of wood, black like ebony.

Indeed a component of my memory is the misapprehension that the wood itself was black, not the product of hundreds and hundreds of inkings, including even some rumored to have been done by the Museum itself in the earliest years after its acquisition.

We can feel the hand of the engraver in action, the light hand and the strong hand, you see the deftness and the gouging. Here a bit of a historical mystery intercedes: it is not known for certain whether Dürer did the actual wood engraving or whether professional wood engravers did the work. He also made copper plate etchings and these are certainly by his hand. As to the woodblocks, one theory is that, operating in a strict guild system, Dürer would not have been allowed to do the actual wood-engraving. But on the other hand he owned his own studio as an independent business and there seems to be no doubt that he did do the work on some of the wood engravings. In his youth Dürer received training in engraving techniques from his father, a goldsmith. He was intent however that he wanted to study painting and was apprenticed to the painter Michael Wolgemut, where nevertheless he witnessed his master’s large workshop’s production of wood engraving illustrations. He later found that printmaking was an important part of his business as an artist, of what we could anachronistically term his artistic “practice.” The blocks themselves were an important financial resource and he fought, sometimes unsuccessfully, against counterfeiters to establish legitimate provenance. Thus the blocks themselves were important financial resources.

No matter whose hand realized Dürer’s drawing, a person did this, over 500 years ago. And the blocks hold that person’s trace in solid matter of which the print is a secondary trace.

The Metropolitan Museum acquired these two blocks as a kind of peripheral gift: the prints were sold to the Met in 1919 by Junius S. Morgan, J.P. Morgan’s son, and he gifted the the museum the blocks. One of the implication of this gift is that the blocks were not seen as having that much value–or was it that they were in a sense without price.

Most museums are only able to display a small percentage of their collections so it is interesting in itself to look behind the public scene at some these hidden treasures but this object, which I would have chosen, if by some chance I had ever been asked to do one of the artists’ choice video presentations the Met produced for a few years (discontinued by the museum shortly before I finally saw the Dürer blocks), although it has been on occasional display, is, strictly speaking, not an art object in itself, it is a transitional object, an instrumental object, of which the indexical trace is considered the art work. When it is shown, it is mainly for educational purposes to demonstrate how a positive print of a such a wood engraving is created.

But as it happens, the wood block of The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine is currently on view, through June 23, in “Relative Values,” a show that examines the economic value art and craft objects had in sixteenth century Europe, measured by how many man hours of work it would take to gain enough silver to buy one cow, and, from that basis, how much any particular art work or artifact is worth in cows. The bare bones industrial-style installation reveals the depth of the block: it is as thin as the depth of its box had suggested. How a piece of wood would last so long is much a miracle as the story of St. Catherine’s martyrdom, that when St. Catherine touched the machine that was to break her bones and kill her, it shattered.

The exhibition does not afford us the ability to compare the block to the print, because the pedagogic point of the exhibition is the relative value of works and objects in the Northern Renaissance, not the relation between matrix and indexical imprint although I am not sure why another Dürer print is exhibited instead. In fact I’ve seen Relative Values three times, and each time, while the woodblock of Saint Catherine remained on view, another print was displayed in a separate vitrine, a different one each time I went. Although the focus of the show is on the relative value of works in that time period, displaying the print of the block would illustrate the difference in value between block and print and be of double pedagogic value.

A Dürer or Dürer-related print was worth only one cow X 1/2. If the block was worth a value equivalent to the cost of a cow multiplied by 16, thus 35 days pay for a skilled craftsman working in London or Anthwerp multiplied by 16 or 85,600 loaves of bread in Brussels while a print of a posthumous portrait of Albrecht Dürer was worth a cow X 1/4, then how many cows or thousands of loaves of rye bread would one contemporaneous print from the Saint Catherine block be worth?

The Dürer works in this exhibit are discussed in an interview by Will Fenstermaker of curator Elizabeth Cleland. [The exhibition at the Met closes June 23rd so run if you want to see this amazing block for yourself]

The tools that Dürer would have used had not changed much when my father Ilya Schor was apprenticed to a goldsmith / engraver in Eastern Europe about 440 years after Dürer first learned the craft of goldsmithing from his own father. My father, like Dürer so long before him, learned the goldsmithing craft before studying painting, and, also like Dürer, later turned to wood engraving and illustration of biblical themes as part of his livelihood.

I don’t think that when I first saw the Dürer block or when I was studying his wood engravings as a college student, I made a conscious connection between the impact of seeing that block of engraved wood and my memories of watching my father engrave on hard wood and print on rice paper.

However, a few weeks before my visit to the Met, it happened that I sat at my studio table with the blocks for my father’s wood engraving illustrations for Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath laid out in front of me. They too are blackened by printing. Indeed I have a haptic childhood memory of the smell of the heavy black printing ink and the satisfying gooey slapping sound it made as my father rolled it out on glass before rolling it lightly and evenly onto the wood. I don’t picture the next part of the memory, the wonder of his pulling the print, but it was clearly ingrained, and to this day I find the miracle of drawing/engraving in reverse of the final image a mystery in the deepest sense, a ritual of complex thinking.

This spring I took a group of graduate students to see a special exhibition at the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation. The exhibition “Teaching Through Touch: Works by Chaim Gross,” is aimed at allowing the visually impaired experience sculpture through touch. Young artists today are so immersed in the tiny images of art they see on Instagram that many important components aspects of the real, including scale, surface, mass, and weight are not part of their embodied experience of art, a lack which affects the kind of art they are able to imagine making. They loved the exhibition. (This special exhibition runs through June 30.)

At the end of the visit, the museum guide lifted a small sculpture set on a table and asked us each in turn to extend our arms and prepare to stand firm: she then placed the object in each of our cradled arms, one at a time, and, boom, the thing weighed a ton! The work, entitled Pumpkin, from 1933, is sculpted from one of the densest woods on the planet, Lignum Vitae. On the Janka scale of hardness, Lignum Vitae has a density measured as 4,390lb_f while Pearwood’s density is 3,680 lb_f –which is pretty dense–for reference, baseball bats are mostly made from Ash which has a hardness of 1,320 lbf (denser woods being deemed too heavy to swing).

Perhaps then Dürer’s woodblocks do partially owe their survival to their relative density despite their relative shallowness. But then the blackness, the age, the hand of the artist and the image trapped within it imbue it with the mythic density that struck me when I first saw it.

Relative Values: The Cost of the work of Art in the Northern Renaissance runs through June 23 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it’s on the main floor in the back near The Robert Lehman Collection and “Teaching Through Touch: Works by Chaim Gross,” runs through June 30 (call for appointments)

For Father’s Day June 17, 2018: Ilya Schor, Naturalized Citizen of the United States of America

This is a wood-engraving by my father Ilya Schor, one of a series of illustrations he made in 1953 for the publication of Sholom Aleichem’s Adventures of Mottel the cantor’s son.

Mottel and his family immigrate to America from Kasrilovska, their shtetl in Eastern Europe after Mottel’s father, the cantor, dies. The events take place at the turn of the 20th century. Sholom Aleichem began writing the book in 1902, when he still lived in Europe, and it was the last book he worked on before his death in New York City 1916. The last chapter is unfinished.

The plot may sound a bit gloomy, but actually it is a charming book, written in the mischievous and irrepressible voice of young Mottel. The first part of the book is entitled, “Mottel in Kasrilovska: Hoorah I’m an Orphan”–I first read the book some time after my father died and found the title very ironic. The second part is “Mottel in America: ‘Try not to love such a country.'”

The image above illustrates one of the chapters on the family’s time on Ellis Island. This chapter is called “in prison.”

What are we doing on Ellie’s Island? We are waiting for our friends and relatives, and then we’ll be registered. As a matter of fact, we have already been registered over and over again. Our names have been written down, crossed out and rewritten *before* we boarded the ship, *while* we were on the ship, and *now* that we have disembarked from the ship. The same business every time. Who are we? Where are we going? Whom have we got in America? …

We had to pass over a long bridge with little doors on both sides. We had to walk in single file, one by one. At every step, we were halted and a different nuisance with bright buttons scrutinized, examined, prodded and pounded us. First of all they turned our eyelids inside out with a piece of white paper, in order to examine our eyes. Then they examined the rest of our limbs. And ever one made a chalk mark on us and pointed where to go next, right or left. Only after this was over were we permitted to enter that large hall and find one another. By the time we got there, we were bewildered, confused and frightened.

On top of the troubles and tribulations which we ourselves had suffered during our journey, on Ellis Island God has given us a glimpse into the troubles of others. If I were to tell you all the sad stories we have heard during our imprisonment on Ellis Island, I’d have to sit with you a whole day and a whole night, and talk without a stop. For example, there’s the story of a man, his wife and their four children who are detained on the Island. They can neither enter nor return. And why not? Because during the examination it has transpired that their twelve-year old daughter is unable to count backwards! When they asked her, how old are you, she replied, twelve. When they asked, how old were you last year, she didn’t know the answer. They told her to count from one to twelve. So she counted from one to twelve. They told her to count from twelve to one, but that she was unable to do. Now, if they asked *me* to do it, I’d let them have it proper. It’s no great trick… Well, it was decided that the little girl couldn’t be allowed to enter America. Here was a problem–what would happen to the parents and the rest of the children? A stone would melt at the sight of the parents’ distress and the agony of that miserable child.

As it has always been, immigration from a beloved home is caused by poverty, the hope of a better life, longing for the family who has gone before you, and by danger.

Mottel learns about pogroms from another boy he meets on the long trip across Europe to Antwerp, their port of departure.

All the emigrants keep talking about “pogroms” but I don’t know what they are. Koppel says, “Don’t you know what a pogrom is? Then you’re just a baby! A pogrom is something that you find everywhere nowadays. It starts out of nothing, and once it starts it lasts for three days.” “Is it like a fair?’ “A fair! Some fair! They break windows, they bust up furniture, rip pillows, feathers fly like snow…” “What for?” “What for? For fun! But pogroms aren’t made only on houses. They’re made on shops, too. They break them up throw all the wares out into the street, scatter them about, pour kerosene on them, set fire to them, and they burn…” “Really?” “Do you think I’m fooling you? then, when there’s nothing left to break, they from house to house with axes, irons and sticks, and the police walk after them. They sing, whistle and yell, ‘Hey fellows, let’s beat up the Jews!’ And they beat and kill and murder.” “Whom?” “What do you mean, *whom*? The Jews!” “What for?” “What a question! It’s a pogrom isn’t it?”

The reasons for emigration/immigration never change, only the individuals and the circumstances of specific historical moments. My parents’ immigration to the United States was tragically caused but at the same time and for the same reason exquisitely timed in terms of finding the perfect audience for my father’s artwork so that he could make his work and a unique name for himself: in the immediate post-war era American Jews just one or two generations removed from their immigrant parents and grandparents, who had fled oppression, poverty, and pogroms to find opportunity in the streets paved with gold of America, had indeed succeeded —among these were prosperous businessmen who were assimilated– to a point–their lives mirrored the white gentile American dream but they were still segregated by custom and quota to Jewish schools, suburbs, country clubs. They were devoted to community and synagogue while being major supporters of the arts.

After the war, this generation of Americans were deeply moved by the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust–they knew that, but for immigration, they would have been among the perished as were remaining distant members of their families. They were primed to welcome my father’s tender and also erudite representations of the life of the Eastern European Hasidim he’d been born into and that he held in his heart and soul long after he had left that world for a more cosmopolitan European culture. Representations of a past that the parents of my father’s American patrons had distanced themselves from in order to succeed in the new land were now desired and valued.

In that period my father illustrated books by Sholom Aleichem and by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, all published around 1950. His illustrations for Mottel were done long before Fiddler on the Roof fixed certain clichés. They were based on his own life and collective memory, of both the rural pleasures of village life and of the deeply pious life of the Hasidim.

My parents did not arrive at Ellis Island. Their ship, the SS. Colonial from Lisbon, entered New York Harbor where immigration officers processed its passengers directly on board. It was December 3, 1941.

Israel Schor became a naturalized citizen of the United States as Israel Ilja Schor December 29, 1947. Over time his name changed informally to Ilya Schor because in America you could become what and who you wanted.

I think it is important to tell you that that my father cast his first vote as a US citizen in the 1948 election, for the Progressive candidate Henry Wallace. He voted for Adlai Stevenson twice. His first vote for a winning candidate was for John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1960. It was a big deal.

Last week amid the furor over the punitive separation of immigrant children from their parents at the border with Mexico, it was announced that the current administration is also planning to go after naturalized citizens, looking for any small irregularities and infractions in order to strip such citizens with full rights as such of their citizenship and deport them. There have been politically motivated deportations but to my knowledge deportation of naturalized citizens has not been proposed as malicious policy not even during the McCarthy era or after 9/11, until now.

‘Try not to love such a country.’

M/E/A/N/I/N/G: The Final Issue on A Year of Positive Thinking-10

The first issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues, was published in December 1986. M/E/A/N/I/N/G is a collaboration between two artists, Susan Bee and Mira Schor, both painters with expanded interests in writing and politics, and an extended community of artists, art critics, historians, theorists, and poets, whom we sought to engage in discourse and to give a voice to.

For our 30th anniversary and final issue, we asked some long-time contributors and some new friends to create images and write about where they place meaning today. As ever, we have encouraged artists and writers to feel free to speak to the concerns that have the most meaning to them right now.

We began on December 5 and every other day since we have posted a grouping of contributions on A Year of Positive Thinking. We thank our contributors and readers for living through this time with all of us in a spirit of impromptu improvisation and passionate care for our futures.

This is the last post of the final issue.

Susan Bee and Mira Schor

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Susan Bee

This final issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G brings back memories of our first issue, which came out in December 1986. At that time, I was a young artist and a new mother, working at freelance jobs as an editor and graphic designer. I had a baby at home and was full of optimism. Emma was born in May of 1985 and tragically she died 23 years later in 2008. I was 33 when she was born and Mira and I started to think of starting our own arts publication.

Susan Bee, “Non Finito,” 2016. Oil on linen, 24″ x 30″.

In 1992, I had my first solo painting show, when I was 40-years-old. Now, I’m almost 65 and nearing the traditional retirement age with a 24-year-old son, Felix, and a 40-year marriage to the poet Charles Bernstein. I have been a member of the vibrant all-women artist’s collective, A.I.R. Gallery, for 20 years and will have a solo show of new paintings there in March 2017. I have been teaching, publishing artist’s books, and showing my art for many years.

This election has sent me into a tailspin. I hoped to be greeting a woman president in my lifetime, and now the possibility seems remote and I am heartbroken to be facing the next four years of this administration. As a secular Jewish feminist, artist, and professor, the future in this country that my immigrant artist parents, refugees from Berlin and Palestine, came to in 1947, looks bleaker than it did just a short time ago on Election Day. Since that day, I have been taking refuge in viewing art. Through the contemplation of art and poetry, I have been trying to escape the isolation and desolation of the present moment. I know that we need to fight on and that I need to work with my community to create a strong push back to the hatred and bigotry that surrounds us. My optimism is being sorely tested by the hatred that has been empowered in this country.

Susan Bee, “Afraid to Talk,” 2016. Oil, enamel, and sand on linen, 24″ x 30″.

Now, my 30-year editorial partnership with Mira is coming to an end. However, I have no plans to retire from art and life. I am grateful that we had the opportunity to publish over a hundred critics, poets, and artists. Hopefully, the artists, writers, and other creative spirits, who have nourished our project, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, for all these years, will continue to lead the way forward and point us to a future that will enrich us all.

November 2016

Susan Bee, “Pow,” 2014. Oil, enamel, and sand on canvas, 30″ x 24″

Mira Schor

Written during the Preoccupation: Activism, Heroism, and Art.

A week after the election, a cold heavy rain struck New York in a kind of climatic embodiment of our political shock and misery. Wearing the depressing New York winter uniform of black down coat for the first time of the season, huddled in the small doorway of a fortune teller’s establishment on Lexington Avenue, I waited for a bus and I thought about what I would write about for this final issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G.

My first instinct was to consider the role of activism in relation to being an artist but immediately my mind made a leap from activism to heroism. In the seconds between these two words, I was in tears as two stories I had been told by my mother since my childhood sprang to mind, one of political bravery, the other of personal bravery.

Please bear with me as I retell these stories, because they frame my ideas about the role of activism and the role of art and the artist in a moment of political necessity for activism.

To begin with, the story of personal bravery: my mother was very proud of her friendship with one of the most important Jewish families in pre-war Poland, that of Rabbi Moses Schorr, a religious leader, a historian, and the first Jewish member of the Polish Senate. The Schorrs (no relation) were kind, wealthy, generous, noble in bearing and behavior. At the outbreak of WWII Rabbi Schorr fled Poland towards the East where he was captured, imprisoned, and tortured by the Russians, dying in a Russian labor camp in 1941 (for more on the relation of Russia with Germany at that time, with interesting echoes in recent weeks, see here). Rabbi Schorr’s daughters survived the war, and I knew one of them well, Fela, a beautiful, kind, imperious, and broken woman, all at once. The story I was told by my mother though I never spoke of it with Fela herself, was that Fela and her mother along with Fela’s two small sons and her small nephew, all children under the age of 10, were imprisoned by the Gestapo in France. It was announced that children who were orphans would not be deported to Auschwitz so Fela and her elderly mother determined to commit suicide. Her mother took poison and died, Fela jumped out a window but survived and was saved and sheltered by doctors until the end of the war a few months later. She and the three children in her care survived the war.

The circumstances of the story were hard to believe, because it made no sense that orphans would be spared deportation and because of the cruelty of the promise, but the randomness of genocide was embedded in my consciousness as well as the emblem of maternal courage. [This story is true, you can read more here.]

The story of political bravery was embodied for me in the name Bartoszek. Franciszek Bartoszek was a friend of my parents from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. He was a painter. And he was Polish. That is to say, he was not Jewish. This was central to the story, because that was a primary distinction my mother always made, a paradox at the center of her own patriotism. If she described someone simply as Polish she also was indicating that they were not Jewish, and it meant that Bartoszek’s bravery was motivated by more than personal survival. When my mother showed me the picture of him she always told me that he was a hero. She would tell me that he would risk his life just to bring a poor woman some small amount of butter. Her admiration for him was such that I have never been able to say his name without being overcome with tears, the emotional outlet of my more fierce and stoic mother. When I was able to research him online, the story was verified: Bartoszek was a renowned Polish patriot and hero of the Polish resistance, who died in a military action in Warsaw in 1943.

From l. to r., Ilya Schor, unknown woman, Franciszek Bartoszek, Paris, 1937.

I have photographs of him with my father. They are in a park in Paris sometime shortly before the war, most likely in 1937. The photos are very small, so I blew up a detail of one to try to decipher if one could see the courage to come in the face of the man in the time approaching the crisis. When I sent this picture to Luka Rayski, a Polish artist who translated for me a stele erected in Poland in Bartoszek’s honor, he wrote back that it was “so hard to imagine, those last pre-war years.” But I thought no, it is not hard to imagine that time. Not, I hasten to add, that I think another Holocaust is coming, yet we are in such a time, a time I call the Preoccupation.

Photo detail, Bartoszek, Paris, c. 1937; Stele installed in Czarnow in 1964: Franciszek Bartoszek, “Jacek” [code name “Jack”] Born October 27, 1910 in Pieranie, spent his youth in Czarnow, Painter, Ardent Patriot, Colonel of People’s Guard, Died fighting Hitlerist occupiers, May 15, 1943 in Warsaw.

Years ago a non-Jewish friend of mine told me that she often wondered whether people would have saved her if she was a Jew during WWII. I found this strange since she was not Jewish and did not have my family’s history of the Shoah. More importantly, I had never really asked myself that question, not only because I couldn’t bear to contemplate the answer, but mostly because I was so consumed by its corollary opposite, that is, would I have the courage to risk my life in order to save someone else or in defense of a cause? From a very early age I was totally aware that if that was the test, I would fail.

The sine qua non of resistance is that you have to be prepared to die for freedom, even though of course there is a big gap between marching on Trump Tower holding “Pussy Power” signs and prison or death.

If heroism is summoned as the ultimate necessity for freedom, nevertheless practically speaking most of us who care about what is going on are considering activism. It is quite striking how many people at all levels of society are mobilizing, from the political leaders of the state of California to artists in New York City mobilizing to provide imagery and objects for the Women’s March on D.C. and beyond.

Susan and I decided to start M/E/A/N/I/N/G in 1986, during the Reagan administration. I remember the precise moment—standing near the corner of West Broadway and Canal Street in December 1980, a month after Reagan had been elected and a few days after John Lennon had been killed—when I had realized that a switch had been flipped. Something was over. If I didn’t grasp the full import of the switch in terms of where we have arrived now, I experienced that every value I had been imbued with had just been turned upside down, including in art. The 1980s was a very contentious decade, highly polemic and divisive but perhaps because of that it was also a bracing and inspiring time during which there was a lot of activism, including responses by artists to the AIDS crisis, to urban gentrification, and to the backlash against second wave feminism. The Guerrilla Girls’ first poster appeared overnight in Soho and Tribeca in 1985, we published the first issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G in December 1986. But despite the political polarization, looking back, no matter what happened in politics in the ’80s, I didn’t feel that the end of the world as I had known it was upon us and like Susan I had the optimism that comes from the energy of youthful mid-life and from doing something constructive. I was 36 when we started the magazine. I had been out of art school for 13 years, I had had a full-time teaching job in Canada and had given it up to move back to New York, I had had gallery representation and my first one-person shows in New York and had lost that. M/E/A/N/I/N/G opened up my community and gave me a sense of place in the art world. It has been the only sustained collaboration I have been involved with and the many things Susan and I have in common and the differences between us, as well as the small scale of our operation–two people, two issues a year during our hard copy days–all worked for me. And when we ended our print run in 1996, if anything I felt more optimistic and confident about my own life than I had when we started.

Mira Schor, “Patriotism on the Blood of Women,” 1989. Oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.

The word of the day in the ’80s was intervention, actions specific to a moment and which did not necessarily seek to become an institution, though inevitably many cultural interventions did. I saw editing M/E/A/N/I/N/G as a kind of activism that I was able to engage in. In that spirit, our final issue is one of many artistic responses to the election and one which, as we have always tried to accomplish in M/E/A/N/I/N/G, is an open format, non-didactic environment for artists, writers, poets, art historians and critics to express their views in any cultural or personal register that means something to them, unrelated to market concerns. As we bring our project to an end after thirty years, we feel it provides one model for long-term activism within an art community. It is small potatoes in terms of major resistance to oppression but it is something that we could do then and now. It did enlarge our community and I think it meant something to the individuals we published, whether professionally or just because they were given the opportunity to think about something and express their views or tell about their work.

Mira Schor,” The Self, The Work, The World,” 2012. Oil and ink on gesso on linen, 18″x30″

My sense of necessity to understand the changes in culture in the ’80s led me to my critical writings and changed the course of my work as an artist, though my work has from the start had a political underpinning, primarily feminist. Some of my recent works have been visceral responses to the news. But I also think that other aspects of my artistic heritage and inclinations have political valence, though they might seem to be the opposite of political, that is, that the intimate, the modest, the private, though apparently recessive in a time of spectacle, can be construed as political acts. The artist is a filter between the world and the work, as I tried to indicate in a painting I did in early 2012 right after Occupy Wall Street as I was trying to diagram the place of the private artist during a political upheaval.

MIra Schor, "'Power' Figure: No Dead Enough, 2016. Ink and gesso on tracing paper, 17"x 22 1/2"

Mira Schor, “‘Power’ Figure: Not Dead Enough,” 2016. Ink and gesso on tracing paper, 17″x 22 1/2″

Since the election I’ve noticed the pleasure, indeed the gratitude people have expressed if someone shares a beautiful work of art on social media, not necessarily an outwardly political one. We recognize and value the works that use representation, figuration, and language to openly announce their political intentions, but a painting of a flower, a small abstraction, or an ancient vase can evoke as much humanity as anything more overt and the importance of such works as heroic human activity can be intense.

Susan Bee, “A Not So Still Life,” 2016. Oil, sand, and enamel on linen, 30″ x 24″

We conceived of this final issue a few days before I stood in that cold rain, during a visit right after the election to the Guggenheim museum to see the Agnes Martin exhibition. I was particularly interested in one small early painting of narrow vertical black and white lines of uneven length. In the face of the impulse, in response to the political atmosphere, for artists to start churning out Guernicas, the smallest of Martin’s abstract paintings packs as much of a punch about human endeavor and heroism as anything that would will itself to make a political statement. Though small, the painting has great tension and drama. To me it represents as much of the power of the universe as a model of the atom and it is heroic in the way that artworks can be, evidence of one individual artist’s search for perfection in a realm that seemingly has no specific utility to daily life.

Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1960. Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Gift of the Bayard and Harriet K. Ewing Collection

On our way up the ramp, we slipped through the keyhole-shaped door into the study library to watch two short films of interviews with Martin, filmed late in her life. It was very intimate to listen to her words in a small room. She spoke about her desire not to work from negativity, her efforts to empty her mind entirely when working, and about the role of inspiration.

mira-agnes-martin-img_3094

mira-agnes-martin-img_3095

In one film she is shown carefully applying a thin reddish pink wash to the canvas. The soothing concentration on this simple activity generated enough calm and clarity for me that suddenly the puzzle of how to celebrate the 30th anniversary of M/E/A/N/I/N/G which had eluded us earlier in the year was solved: I have a blog, we could use my blog as an initial platform for a spontaneous, short deadline, final issue. I looked at Susan and mouthed, I have an idea. So we end as we began, with a Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland “let’s put on a show” production. It is the small activism of giving a few people a place for their voice, and we are grateful to all the artists and writers who found the time to respond to our call.

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Susan Bee and Mira Schor, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, December 1986-December 2016

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We would like to thank our many wonderful contributors to the final issue: Alexandria Smith, Altoon Sultan, Ann McCoy, Aviva Rahmani, Aziz+Cucher, Bailey Doogan, Beverly Naidus, Bradley Rubenstein, Charles Bernstein, Christen Clifford, Deborah Kass, Elaine Angelopoulos, Erica Hunt, Erik Moskowitz + Amanda Trager, Faith Wilding, Felix Bernstein and Gabe Rubin, Hermine Ford, Jennifer Bartlett, Jenny Perlin, Johanna Drucker, Joseph Nechvatal, Joy Garnett and Bill Jones, Joyce Kozloff, Judith Linhares, Julie Harrison, Kate Gilmore, Legacy Russell, Lenore Malen, LigoranoReese, Mary D. Garrard, Martha Wilson, Matthew Weinstein, Maureen Connor, Michelle Jaffé, Mimi Gross, Myrel Chernick, Nancy K. Miller, Noah Dillon, Noah Fischer, Peter Rostovsky, Rachel Owens, Rit Premnath, Robert C. Morgan, Robin Mitchell, Roger Denson, Sharon Louden, Sheila Pepe, Shirley Kaneda, Susanna Heller, Suzy Spence, Tamara Gonzalez and Chris Martin, Tatiana Istomina, Toni Simon, William Villalongo.

M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A History
We published 20 print issues biannually over ten years from 1986-1996. In 2000, M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism was published by Duke University Press. In 2002 we began to publish M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online and have published six online issues. Issue #6 is a link to the digital reissue of all of the original twenty hard copy issues of the journal. The M/E/A/N/I/N/G archive from 1986 to 2002 is in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

All of the installments of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: The Final Issue on A Year of Positive Thinking can be accessed by hitting the “older” button at the bottom of this post and they will be made available as a PDF on M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online.