Caravaggio and Evil
Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio (1571-1610) was well acquainted with evil. His short violent life careened wildly between prestigious painting commissions from the most powerful men in Rome and drunken street brawls with the lowest of the low.
Ita Aber at Yeshiva University Museum
Could there be such a thing as Women’s Art? From my liberal modernist perspective such a notion is foreign, threatening and, indeed, heretical. I have long clung to the belief that art is a universal value, a vast spectrum…
Terna's Touch
Frederick Terna has a soft touch. His images are neither strident nor angry. The horror behind many of them is paradoxically softened by symbols and metaphors. He is not an illustrator; indeed much of his work over the last sixty years is abstract. …
Chava Roth's Meanings
Pleasure and Meaning. In the visual arts they are equally essential. The pleasure of looking at an object, its contours, colors, texture and subsequent visual excitement is fundamental to engaging the viewer. Lacking visual enjoyment and complexity a painting, drawing or print…
Eisenberg’s Space
Space is created in the visual arts in a multitude of ways. Illusionistic space was invented in the Renaissance and continues to be depicted in contemporary realism. This method creates the impression of looking through a window and seeing an ordered progression of…
Lynn Russell: A Growing Unease
Lynn Russell's work presents a vexing aesthetic problem. She insists on treading the murky line between photography and painting; between mechanical reproduction and handmade creation. Hardly alone, her quest is in fact one of the major discourses of Modern Art.…
Shoshana Golin’s Windows
Shoshana Golin’s cycle of etched glass windows at the Young Israel of Hillcrest fill the fifty year old sanctuary with light and textual meaning that transforms the synagogue space, illuminating a new environment for the congregation.
Women’s Section, 2005, etched glass windows by…
Masks of Esther
All of us, sometime or other, hide behind a mask. Whether it is a strange new identity we momentarily assume for Purim or simply filling the public role of father, mother or child, teacher or even artist. The mask, which represents the…
Paintings by Lloyd Bloom
Perspective is crucial to understanding. When Jews greet one another with “vos macht a yid?” it means something entirely different than the jeers of "yid" in the streets of Berlin. The one point perspective in early Renaissance painting defined an individualistic…
Yad Vashem's Art
Obscenity is not the usual province of art. And yet behind almost all Holocaust art lies the obscenity of the crime, the stench of genocide. This simple fact makes it singular in the history of art, a deep contradiction of art's traditional…
A Painting by John Dubrow
From 1997 to 1998 John Dubrow got to know the World Trade Center fairly well. He made many paintings from a high vantage point on the 91st floor in a temporary studio granted him by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.…
Fleeting Prayer
Manhattan Mincha Map: Photographs by Jaime Permuth
Mincha is the most fragile of prayers. It is typically caught on the run, sandwiched between a hurried lunch and return to the ordeals of the workday. Even if prayed somewhat leisurely after work in the late…