Specific Jewish Art Will Emerge, Chicago Critic Predicts

(Jewish Daily Bulletin Mail Service)

In speaking on the subject, “Is There a Jewish Painting?” before the Jewish Women’s Art Club of Chicago, Samuel Putnam, art critic on the staff of the Chicago Evening Post’s Magazine of the Art World and author of a series of articles, published in that magazine last fall, on “The Jew and the Graven Image,” declared that while there had been no Jewish painting from the time of Moses to the year 1900, and while he believed there was as yet no painting which might be called Jewish, there were, on the other hand, indications that the whole ultra-modern movement in painting, as exemplified in the works of Picasso, Matisse and their followers, may have sprung from sources ultimately Semitic.

He pointed out the fact that Picasso, the founder of cubism, was a Spaniard of Andalusia, the old Moorish section of Spain and that the mathematics and abstraction for which ultra-modern painting is remarkable may have been derived from the Moors. The speaker also pointed out that the Jew is especially well adapted to modern painting, for the reason that the art of the brush has become more subjective and abstract. Painting, he said, is at once more cerebral and more international, and the Jew, noted for his “intellectualistic approach,” is “the one international, race of the world.” Mr. Putnam stated that he was inclined to retract his previously expressed opinion, to the effect that, while there would probably always be a number of great Jewish painters, there never would be a Jewish painting worthy the name. He said that, since viewing the work of Marc Chagall, in which he encountered a veritably Jewish painting, he felt hopeful with regard to the possible florescence of a truly racial art.

Hollins N. Randolph, president of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, announced that Bernard M. Baruch had purchased $10,000 worth of the memorial half dollars.