The painter M. D. Oppenheim went down in the history of emancipation as the first Jew to address Jewish religious practice in his work. From now on, Jewish artists were slowly accepted by the Christian majority society, even if contemporaries of MD Oppenheim still converted to Christianity (e.g. P. Veit, E. Bendemann) in order to gain recognition as artists. In England, Salomon Alexander Hart (* 1806, † 1881) was successful alongside general social and specifically Jewish topics. He prepared the ground for the success of Salomon J. Salomon (* 1860, † 1921) two generations later. In Holland it was J. Israëls is known for his depictions of Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. In Austria, Isidor Kaufmann (* 1853, † 1921) created a monument to traditional Galician Judaism with his numerous portraits, while Leopold Horowitz (* 1839, † 1917), Lazar Krestin (* 1868, † 1938) and Jehudo Epstein (* 1870, † 1945) paid attention to Jewish life in the wider province of the Habsburg monarchy. Samuel Hirszenberg (* 1865, † 1908) and Wilhelm Wachtel (* 1875, † 1942) captured the mood of loss and homelessness in connection with the anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe, which became the subject of an entire generation, especially after the outbreak of World War I. M. Liebermann, the head of the Berlin Secession and one of the most important representatives of German Impressionism, who never wanted to be considered a “Jewish painter” and saw himself as a Prussian and a Jew, was the last painter of the era of emancipation. At the end of his life, the artist, who was highly respected in the Weimar Republic, had to experience social exclusion that was unexpected for him from 1933-35.
According to payhelpcenter, the generation of Jewish painters who had not lived through the struggle for emancipation pushed their way into the École de Paris in the 20th century with all non-Jewish talents. While C. Soutine, A. Modigliani and J. Pascin did not artistically address their Judaism, Emmanuel Mané-Katz (* 1894, † 1962) and M. Chagall openly dealt with it in their works. M. Chagall in particular repeatedly processed the memory of his Orthodox origins in Vitebsk and the world of Eastern European Yiddish literature with which he had grown up. The development in the USA can be seen in a similar way. For icons of abstract art like M. Rothko and H. Frankenthaler or artists like M. Ray , origin played no conscious role in relation to their works. The sculptors J. Epstein and J. Lipchitz, in turn, dealt with mostly non-Jewish subjects as well as Jewish ones. B. Newman, first as an art theorist, later as the creator of abstract sculptures influenced by Jewish mysticism and as a painter of typical color field paintings, defined the religious approach to his work in a thoroughly Jewish way. also emerges from his titulatures. On a more realistic level, B. Shahn and the figurative-expressionist artist H. Bloom took each otherJewish topics. In England, where many artists from Central and Eastern Europe found refuge, especially J. Adler and Jacob Kramer (* 1892, † 1962) dealt with Jewish memory.
In Zionism, from 1890 on, the idea of the cultural renaissance was linked to the ideal of an art by and for Jews. The most important representatives of this cultural Zionism were M. Buber and Ephraim Mose Lilien (* 1874, † 1924) who set up a groundbreaking exhibition of Jewish artists for the 5th Zionist Congress in Basel in 1901, committed to a new Hebrew myth and the programmatic renewal of Hebrew culture. The renewal, including the reinterpretation of older works, related to the visual and performing arts, literature, language, music, art theory, style and aesthetics, art history, such as Hebrew and Yiddish. Biblical themes, Jewish folk art and traditional handicrafts and handicrafts were “reissued”. In the field of Jewish applied art, the Germans created Leo Horovitz (* 1886, † 1961), Ludwig Yehuda Wolpert (* 1900, † 1981) and Friedrich Adler avant-garde objects for synagogue and festive use. The Polish brothers Maurycy (* 1856, † 1906) and Leopold Gottlieb (* 1883, † 1934) took part in this Jewish-cultural renaissance by choosing biblical themes for their paintings, as did the German painter L. Ury and the Russian Sculptor MM Antokolski . The Polish-born Jacob Steinhardt (* 1887, † 1968) and the German Hermann Struck (* 1876, † 1944) put their modern printing skills at the service of the Zionist movement, as did the Austrian W. Wachtel and the Czech sculptor and coin engraver Samuel Friedrich Beer (* 1846, † 1912) did. In particular, the Bezalel Art School, founded by Boris Schatz (* 1866, † 1929) in Jerusalem in 1906 , took on the preservation of old traditions of Judaism in new styles and forms in order to work in the spirit of Jewish modernity.
The emerging nationalisms contributed among other things. contributes to the fact that on the Jewish side, but also beyond Zionism, a separate national style was sought. Especially in Russia of the revolutionary age, artists such as N. Altman , Boris Aronson (* 1900, † 1980), Jissachar Ryback (* 1897, † 1935) and E. Lissitzky looked for their own national-Jewish art based on models of Jewish folk art, initially in the cubist, then to create in the design language of constructivism.
