Heeb

By Karen Bookatz

Famed pop artist, Andy Warhol, in collaboration with New York gallerist, Ronald Feldman, chose ten prominent Jewish figures – including writers, actors, composers, philosophers and political figures – as the subjects for his controversial show entitled, Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century. Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Sarah Bernhardt, Golda Meir and Gertrude Stein are among those who made the cut.

The show premiered in September of 1980 at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington in Rockville, Maryland and traveled to Miami and then New York, finishing up its tour at The Jewish Museum. The reviews were mixed and some even perceived the exhibition – which was conceived by a Catholic artist who had never appeared sympathetic to the Jewish cause – as anti-Semitic. That was almost thirty years ago. Now, in 2008, the show has been resurrected for a second examination at the Jewish Museum, through August 3.

Warhol’s Jews is located in a small room, which grants it both a casual and intimate feel. The works are set against a series of brown painted panels so that the architectural elements recede into the background, bringing the vibrant and characteristically Warholian silk-screens, replete with overlays of drawing and blocks of color, into relief. These colorful, kitschy silk-screens of (some of them) serious intellectual and political figures come across as overtly tongue-and-cheek—especially when thought of in the context of the artist’s iconic Marilyns.

Unlike the subjects of his many of his famous portraits from the 1960s and 1970s, Warhol never met a single one of his Jewish “sitters.” All the images in the exhibit were taken from random sources ranging from passport photos to film stills, which are on display next to the portraits. Some of the portraits are also accompanied by preparatory drawings and collages. The source photographs, drawings and collages have not been exhibited alongside the portraits until now.

Revisiting Warhol’s Jews was an important and worthy exercise—especially considering how much more playful Jewish culture has become in the U.S. since 1980. The idea that the religious iconography is inseparable from the pop culture in which it resides no longer seems controversial—well, maybe a little bit.