The Times: Another Dupe in Charles Saatchi's Con Game. New York Observer, November 15, 1999
[Those mentioned below: lawyer Floyd Abrams, collector Charles Saatchi, and museum director Arnold Lehman are all Jewish, as is -- to his credit --the author of this article, Hilton Kramer]
"As expected, a Federal judge has rejected Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s attempt to withhold funds from the Brooklyn Museum of Art for exhibiting the odious Sensation exhibition. Once again, First Amendment fundamentalist Floyd Abrams has made the world a safer place for the market in the foulest varieties of obscene expression ... What is now beyond question is that the entire project of bringing this shabby inventory from the Saatchi Collection to Brooklyn has from the outset been what even The [New York] Times, after publishing some 60 or more news stories, editorials and reviews in ardent defense of the exhibition, has finally been obliged to concede is 'an ethically dubious enterprise' ... Because of the Sensation scandal, all the world now knows exactly how this market-manipulation venture works. Mr. Saatchi first commissions work that is guaranteed to cause outrage, then promotes it as his latest 'discoveries,' then importunes once-respectable institutions like the Royal Academy of Art or the Tate Gallery to endorse it, and then makes a killing in the art-auction market. This is what now passes for 'avant-garde' art in London–and, of course, in New York–and it has proved to be a highly successful business enterprise. Thanks to the total lack of conscience, tact and taste which Arnold L. Lehman, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, brought to the organization, the financing and the promotion of the Sensation show, all art museums that traffic in this particular vein of 'cutting-edge' hucksterism have also suffered a significant loss in public confidence. The sheer quantity of cynical hokum that it has long been standard practice for our art institutions to invoke in defense of whatever horror or inanities the art traders are currently promoting as avant-garde is no longer as persuasive as it once was for anyone not involved in the market. We haven’t witnessed the death throes of this phenomenon yet, but some of the other institutional defenses of Sensation have shown signs of moral fatigue and a distinct diminution of mental acuity."

A New Jewish Elite: Curators, Directors and Benefactors of American Art Museums. Modern Judaism, 1998, 18.1, p. 119-152
[To access this article, go to google.com and type in for your search: George Goodwin jewish art. When the link comes up, select the cached version.]
"Presently, there are several Jews in the highest ranks of American museum professionals. Michael Heyman is the Smithsonian's secretary (or chief administrator). Elsewhere in Washington, Alan Shestack is deputy director of the National Gallery of Art, Neil Benezra is chief curator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (where Stephen Weil recently retired as deputy director), and Stephen Ostrow is curator of prints and drawings at the Library of Congress. Beyond the federal domain, David Levy is director of the Corcoran Gallery." This article goes on and on like this, in a detailed look at Jewish prominence in the art world throughout the country. There are actually two separate articles on this subject by Goodwin in the Modern Judaism journal.

MOMA Board Member Quits After Indiscreet Purchase.
The Art Newspaper
[Great Britain], June 5, 2000
"The publisher and billionaire [Jewish] art collector Samuel I. (Si) Newhouse has quit the board of trustees of the Museum of Modern Art in New York after buying a 1913 Cubist Picasso painting that was deaccessioned from the museum’s collection. Newhouse, who controls Conde Nast Publications, Random House, and a chain of newspapers, had been on the MoMA board for twenty-seven years. A museum spokesman said that Newhouse had violated a museum policy that bans trustees from buying works from the institution. In this case, the 1913 'Man with guitar' was sold from the collection to raise funds for new acquisitions. The guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors discourage the selling of art from museum collections except for the purpose of buying similar works of art. The museum appears to have been acting within those rules in this deal. The painting was sold by the museum to an art dealer, said to be Larry Gagosian (from whom Newhouse has purchased many paintings in the past) and then sold to Newhouse for $10 million. New York State requires that museums which receive government funds deaccession works at public auction, a law established after the Metropolitan Museum of Art surprised donors with the sale of a number of paintings in the Seventies. The Guggenheim’s lucrative sale at Sotheby’s of works by Kandinsky, Modigliani and others in 1990 to buy the Panza di Biuma collection of minimal and conceptual art was condemned as unethical. Yet private museums, like the Guggenheim and MoMA, are permitted by New York State law and the AAMD to sell their works privately."

The ARTnews 200 Top Collectors, by Milton Esterow. ARTnews, Summer 201
The owner of this influential newspaper, Esterow, is Jewish as are at least eight of the "Top Ten" art collector families listed here as a tease to an off-line article. The Jewish ones are Debbie and Leon Black, Edythe and Eli Broad, Doris and Donald Fisher, Ronnie and Samuel Heyman, Marie-Josee and Henry R. Kravis, Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Stephen Wynn.

Helmut Newton: The Master. The Difficult World of the Greatest Fashion Photographer Who Ever Lived. The Independent [Great Britain], May 9, 2001
"To radical feminists, [Jewish photographer Helmut] Newton is the Antichrist. This is the man who photographed a woman on all fours with a saddle on her back, and another sitting in her underwear on an unmade bed, with a gun in her mouth ... Newton's vision is fuelled by sex, status, power and, above all, voyeurism - there are often extras in his pictures who gaze at the women centre-stage. Those are, of course, also the things that make fashion tick. Small wonder, then, that much of the photographer's most successful imagery has become far more famous than the garments he has chosen to photograph ... Newton's influence is everywhere ... In the Sixties and Seventies, Newton's decadent vision may have been labelled "porno chic", but today the rest of the world has finally caught up with him and it's just plain chic. There is barely a stylist, photographer or designer working in fashion today who can fail to acknowledge Newton as an influence."

The Frog Prince. The Independent, [Great Britain], January 4, 2000
"Serge Gainsbourg [born Lucien Ginzburg] ... is still most famous in Britain for his number one Je t'aime moi non plus: the scandalous anthem which was in the British charts 30 years ago. He and [Jane] Birkin simulated their lovemaking so effectively that the single was banned by the BBC and formally condemned by the Vatican ... Gainsbourg is the greatest popular musician France has ever produced ... Echoes of his favourite technique, of murmuring profanities against a delicate and beautiful harmony, can be heard in many contemporary records, not least the later work of Leonard Cohen ... Gainsbourg appeared to relish the onset of old age as giving him licence for the kind of appalling behaviour normally permitted to youth. Towards the end of his life, the singer's media appearances became ritual provocations: in one television broadcast, he subjected a veteran paratrooper - horrified by Gainsbourg's dub version of the Marseillaise - to a torrent of obscenities, pausing only occasionally, to inflate condoms. On another notorious live show, sharing a platform with a young Whitney Houston, Gainsbourg, then 58, turned to the presenter Michel Drucker and declared, in English, 'I want to fuck her.'"

An Avant-Garde Impresario: Julien Levy. Art in America. March 1999
"Julien Levy, the promoter of Surrealism and pioneering New York art dealer of the 1930s and '40s, was the subject of a recent exhibition that wove together art works and archival materials ... . Although best remembered as the preeminent American dealer of Surrealism, Levy first exhibited and sold a range of European and American photographs ... [Salvadore] Dali would become central to Levy's stable ... In terms of conceptual innovation and creative energy, Julien Levy and his gallery are central to the history of American art between the wars."

Modligliani: The Pure Bohemian. Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 1991
"Modigliani, explains British biographer [Elizabeth Fry] Rose, was the product of an upper-class Jewish- Italian family. After art studies in Livorno, Florence, and Venice, where he spent more time in cafes and brothels than in class, he arrived in Paris in 1906, seeking fame and fortune. Within weeks, the somber reality of poverty set in--moving from seedy hotel to seedy hotel, he wound up living in a wooden shack in Montmartre. There, and later in Montparnasse, he met many of the foremost artists, writers, and 'characters' of the day, including Picasso, Soutine, Utrillo, Cocteau, Hans Arp, and Fernand L‚ger. Because of his success with women, Modigliani had easy access to free models ('Women of a beauty worth painting or sculpting often seem encumbered by their clothes,' he said). Rose seems torn between downplaying what she refers to as the 'Modigliani myth' and relating dozens of stories that have served to create that myth. Included are accounts of how Modigliani danced wildly in the moonlight with a famous courtesan; of how one of his first collectors was a senior police official who first met the painter when he was jailed for drunkenness; and of how the artist's only one-man gallery show was closed 'for indecency' the day it opened."

Stealing Beauty. Los Angeles, July 2000
"[Jeffrey] Hirsch, who had initially been hired as editor of UCLA Magazine and head of campus publications in April 1994 and was now in charge of overseeing an array of university magazines, marketing projects and annual reports, had an incredibly diligent and time-consuming secret life. In four years, he had generated armloads of falsified documents to acquire hundreds of pieces of art and other prize possessions ... The tally was actually a staggering $480,000, used to buy paintings, photographs, fine furniture, rare books and assorted knickknacks, all of which were hidden in a public self-storage space that even his wife of 11 years didn't know about."

Kahlomania. The age.com. [Australia], July 4, 2001
"Overshadowed by her husband - famous muralist Diego Rivera - during her lifetime, [Frida] Kahlo [whose father was Jewish] is now a global cult figure. The feisty woman with the striking stare and tempestuous love-life has inspired ballets, operas, books, biography, films and plays. Dozens, if not hundreds, of websites pay homage. A religion, 'Kahloism,' worships her as the one, true god. 'Kahlomania' is about to hit Australia: a new play about her opens tonight in Melbourne, a major exhibition will be launched in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra next week, a Hollywood movie will hit Australian screens in December ... Frida Kahlo is not only arguably the world's most famous female artist, but also one commanding the highest prices. Last year, a Kahlo self-portrait painted in 1929 fetched $10 million, creating a record for Latin American art and for a female artist. A Kahlo the size of a chicken's egg was sold last November by Sotheby's for $400,000 ... Memorabilia including a letter opener, dried flowers, a watch and ribbons went for $110,000 in a sale of Kahlo curios, prompting a Latin American art expert in New York to observe that people were vying for shreds of Kahlo's garments."

Vanity Fare. Phoenix New Times. June 7, 2001
"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all? Apparently, it's high-profile art collectors Jacques and Natasha Gelman, judging from all the glitzy portraits commissioned from famous Mexican artists that now grace the walls of the Phoenix Art Museum as part of 'Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Twentieth-Century Mexican Art: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection' ... Contemporary acquisitions -- which are, overall, of better quality and more engaging than the work of the older Mexican art legends -- have been expertly guided by longtime Gelman friend Robert Littman, ex-director of Mexico City's now-defunct Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporaneo (referred to popularly as the Centro Cultural). As president of the Vergel Foundation, which is responsible for carrying on the Gelman legacy, Littman seems to possess an infallible eye, which cannot be said for the Gelmans' original aesthetic vision ... Both [Jacques and Natasha] were Jewish, married in 1941 and [they] remained in Mexico because of the Second World War ... Always nattily attired and fur-coat-swathed, Jacques and Natasha were the stereotypical film producer and glamorous socialite spouse. To cement their status in Mexican high society, in 1943, Jacques commissioned Diego Rivera to paint Natasha's portrait, which appears in the exhibition. Though the most famous of the Mexican mural painters at the time, Rivera often paid the rent by doing portraits of wealthy socialites ... Frida Kahlo's Natasha portrait of 1943 captures the woman, crowned with sausage curls al modo and draped in a fur stole, with a strangely flat effect ... To anyone familiar with Mexican art history, the Gelman exhibition is not a well-balanced overview of Mexican art at mid-century ... [it is] a classically status-driven, gotta-be-better-than-the-Gomezes compilation reflecting one type of art collector's psychic preoccupation with memorializing himself and notable public figures with which he has socialized. Frankly, it's one more befitting a newly moneyed, 18th-century Dutch burgher than a discerning, visionary collector seeking emerging and mid-career artists' best and most enduring work."

National Collection Needs a Major Lucien Freud. The Age, Australia
"Australia's national art collection needed a major Lucien Freud painting, National Portrait Gallery director Andrew Sayers said today. The National Gallery of Australia (NGA) is planning to buy Lucien Freud's painting After Cezanne from the artist for $8 million - if it can raise the last $1 million. This would make it the NGA's most expensive painting ... Mr Sayers said the Art Gallery of South Australia showed extraordinary foresight and bought a Freud in 1950 and the Art Gallery of Western Australia had a painting of a nude man holding a rat ... Mr Sayers said Freud, the 78-year-old grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, was not a household name but was an artist's artist."

Eli Langer. Mercer Union Digital Archives, 1979-1995
[A compilation of art gallery press releases and local news articles about a controversial 1993 Toronto art exhibition by Jewish artist Eli Langer]
"Eli Langer's show of eight paintings and various small pencil drawings is much talked about in Toronto art circles these days -- much talked about because no one knows what to make of it. In a community that sets few limits when it comes to explicitness, Langer's subject matter breaks one of the last taboos: the sexuality of children. The paintings, gorgeously rendered in a duo toned chiaroscuro of red and black, show children and adults in various forms of sexual play. A naked child sits on the lap of a naked man who might be her grandfather. A masked intruder climbs through a window into a bedroom where a naked girl straddles the neck of an adult and very erect man who lies on the bed ... Let it be said then, that they are horrible -- both the paintings and the pencil drawings which feature a dreary catalogue of don'ts (children masturbating, performing fellatio or buggering each other). The whole show is a self-conscious, juvenile prodding of its own excrement." -- Globe and Mail. Langer is Jewish. And "his father is an amateur Holocaust historian." [Toronto Life, 1-20-94, p. A21]

Police Obscenity Squad Raids Saatchi Gallery.
Guardian [London], March 10, 2001
"The Saatchi gallery has been raided by officers from Scotland Yard's obscene publications unit and warned that they will return to seize pictures in its current exhibition, I am a Camera, unless the offending images are removed before the gallery opens its doors to the public again. The Metropolitan police confirmed last night that officers had visited the gallery twice this week after three complaints under anti-child pornography legislation and a report was being forward to the crown prosecution service. The exhibition features the work of a group of artists and photographers selected by Charles Saatchi himself and taken from his personal collection of photographs and paintings. It has been running for eight weeks and has been reviewed in most of the broadsheet papers and magazines from the Tatler to the Telegraph, without any public complaints to the gallery."

I'll Be Your Mirror. [Book Review of Nan Goldin's work; Amazon.com]
"Based on an exhibition of the same title at the Whitney Museum of American Art this collection of more than 300 pictures documents the alternative culture of Nan Goldin's friends and acquaintances in the arty bohemian substrata of Manhattan. Goldin turns her camera outward to record transvestites carousing in downtown clubs and the social impact of AIDS and drugs; and inward to look with unblinking intimacy at her friends, her lovers of both sexes, and herself. She records her boyfriend masturbating. She shows him on the toilet. She shows her own battered face in a mirror after he beats her up. She traces the decline and death of her friend Cookie Mueller. Goldin has created a stark record of her urban demi-monde."

Nan Goldin's Retrospective and Recovery: Framing Feminism, AIDS, and Addiction. Chapter 6. [This scholarly analysis of Nan Goldin's work, apparantly posted at Syracuse University, floats -- alas -- uncredited in cyberspace]
"It may be correct to partially attribute renewed interest in [Nan] Goldin's career to the currently fashionable status of Goldin’s subject matter over the past 25 years: 'the urban demimonde, the world of drag queens and slum goddesses, of Lower East Side nightclubbers and Tokyo teen-agers in black rubber.' Goldin's work has even been a model for the 'fashionable addiction' that I discussed previously. The popular mainstreaming of the transgressive fringes of society (who are the stock subjects of Goldin’s work) in the 'drug chic' school of fashion photography has liberally borrowed from Goldin's exemplary documentary-style realism. It became common in the late '90s for young fashion photographers to request that their lab recreate Goldin’s style of printing and, in fact, Nan Goldin herself shot publicity photos for the Italian fashion firm Matsuda. Even the bruised eyes of sleepless junkies and battered women that have been the touchstone of Goldin's photography for over two decades became a 'look' in high fashion makeup application."

Dangerous Curves. The Advocate, 1999
"[Lisa] Cholodenko found inspiration all around her when she moved to New York. Originally a Valley Girl—from Encino, Calif., no less—she came of age via college in San Francisco and a few years of globe-trotting, including a stint with her then-girlfriend in Israel. She even did time in Los Angeles, working as an assistant editor and slowly moving up the Hollywood ladder until she began to feel trapped, read about 'the new queer cinema' in New York, and vowed to try her luck ... She was inspired by the retrospective of Nan Goldin photographs at the Whitney. She wondered why so many lesbians she knew suddenly had access to cheap, clean heroin and thought it was hip. 'I’m too uptight to go there,' the 33-year-old filmmaker demurs when asked whether she herself got into the heroin experience. She got hooked instead on her fascination with the whole scene. The lesbian art world, drug culture, interpersonal power plays, careerism—all became material for her screenplay ... The main model for Lucy [the main character in her film High Art] is more likely the late photographer Diane Arbus. 'I was reading her biography at that time,' Cholodenko notes. 'All the stuff about Lucy’s rich Jewish family, her early success and later isolation from the fashion world, that all came from my view of Arbus.' As for Goldin, at last report Cholodenko was planning to invite the famed photographer to see High Art for herself."

Still Life: Jews, Photography, Memory.
National Foundation for Jewish Culture, December 1999
"George Gilbert ... independently published his groundbreaking survey "The Illustrated Worldwide Who's Who of Jews in Photography" in 1997, which documents 550 Jews who developed the art, science, and business of photography, such as Ben Shahn, Alfred Steiglitz, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winograd, and Annie Leibovitz, to name merely a few ... The lucid directness of photography has allowed Jews to record the transformation of individual identity while preserving communal memory." [There are many, many, many well-known Jewish photographers. Here's a few: Jacques Lowe (John F. Kennedy's personal photographer), Richard Avedon (superstar portrait photographer of the fashion world and celebrities), Weegee (a New York City ambulance chaser who has been reinvented as a famous "artist"), etc.]

After 'Dinner Party,' Judy Chicago Feasts on Judaism.
Jewish Bulletin of San Francisco. July 14, 1996
"She is a woman of names. Born, Judy Cohen. Married, Judy Gerowitz. Self-designated, Judy Chicago. But the name that fills her eyes with joy today is the one her grandmother called her -- Yudit Sipke. Twenty years ago, Chicago -- controversial creator of the acclaimed feminist art installation 'The Dinner Party' -- wouldn't have offered the public this particular morsel. Her first autobiography, released in 1975, detailed Chicago's gender politics, not her religious heritage. Judaism 'wasn't even a subject. I can't believe I hadn't thought about it,' Chicago reflected during a Bay Area visit last month that included an appearance at the Marin Jewish Community Center. The recently released sequel, 'Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist,' includes sections about her Jewish upbringing, her return to the fold and her eight-year, multimedia project on the Holocaust ... Even now, the artist can't exactly explain why she underwent a religious transformation later in life. But she can describe how it happened. In the mid-1980s, she met her future husband, Donald Woodman. Her two previous husbands also had been Jewish. But this time, something was different. The pair decided to have a Jewish wedding. When they began studying the traditions with Renewal-movement Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, they realized the depth of their hunger for Judaism." [CONTEXT: "There are in halakhic {Jewish religious law} literature [that has] repeated groupings of women in categories with slaves, minors, fools, deaf mutes, and the like which are so offensive as to take one's breath away ... The issue is an [anti-woman] attitude which was deeply and systematically imbued into Judaism." Gerald Skolnick, Domestic Violence and the Jewish Community, Sh'ma, January 19, 1996, p. 3-4"]

Shock Value. Jerome Witkin's Paintings Bear Witness to the Holocaust in Graphic Detail, Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, April 21, 2000
"Jerome Witkin, perhaps the greatest figurative painter alive, is ... most renown[ed] for his Holocaust works, which have received an 'almost reverential' response from the curators and critics who have visited the show ... the painter's Jewish father, who had abandoned the family when the twins were 3, attempted suicide and began to live, homeless, on the streets. His last words to Jerome were, 'Go to hell.' At the age of 50, his father was found, dead, in a diner; he had suffered a heart attack after enduring a vicious beating by thugs. At the funeral, Jerome stood at the graveside and realized he had hardly known his father. 'I wasn't listening to anything except my head, which kept repeating, Who was this man?' he recalls. To find out, Witkin began exploring his Jewish roots, avidly reading volumes on Jewish history, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. His interest culminated in a series of Holocaust-themed paintings."

So Many Women, So Little Time. Salon.com, June 7, 2001
"Jan Saudek doesn't mind admitting it: He likes a woman with a fat ass. Unlike fellow erotic photographers such as Helmut Newton, whose Euro-babe models seem to subsist on a diet of champagne and heroin, Saudek, 66, happily dives head first into the mountains and valleys of jiggling flesh proffered by his mostly Czech trollops. Plus-size beauties are a recurring theme in his work. Sometimes they bend over while Saudek spanks their glorious, globelike keisters with handfuls of switches. Or they might spank each other, skip rope or simply crouch nude on all fours with wildflowers crowning their heads and saggy green socks on their feet. Indeed, in one of the Prague maestro's favorite hand-tinted, sepia prints, titled 'The Burden,' Saudek stands nearly naked with his back to the camera while his former wife, Maria, sits atop his shoulders -- her creamy, gargantuan derrière apparently having swallowed Saudek from the neck up. Looking at that woman's divine posterior, bathed as it is in blue, one fantasizes about drowning in the folds of her massive sex ... The enormously prolific Saudek has been wildly popular in Europe since the '70s ... Saudek's father, a Jewish banker, survived the concentration camp Theresienstadt, the only brother in his family to do so."

Richard Avedon. Slate.com, December 17, 1999
"[Richard] Avedon has done much to revive the portrait as a central genre of photographic art. His only serious rival is Irving Penn, and his epigones (whether they admit it or not) include everyone from Robert Mapplethorpe to Annie Leibovitz. Among his precursors are Julia Margaret Cameron, the great 19th-century British portraitist, and August Sander, who set out to compile a comprehensive visual record of German life between the world wars. But while Avedon's portraits clearly represent his bid for artistic immortality--a bid he has assiduously devoted much of the past decade to mounting--they represent only one facet of his work ... Avedon's ubiquity, the extraordinary variety of subjects and styles, and his willingness to shoot album covers, posters, and advertisements as well as museum-worthy black-bordered prints, have occasionally offended purists. Hilton Kramer, for instance, called Avedon's 1994 retrospective at the Whitney (which produced a gorgeous book titled Evidence: 1944-1994) 'the ultimate capitulation to celebrity, money and fashion at the expense of art.'"

Las Vegas Spotlight: Backers of Guggenheim, Hermitage Museum Undaunted by Criticism. Gaming Magazine, 2001
"Here we are in Las Vegas, a city where, until a few years ago, the term 'culture' referred mostly to the faux marble in the casino bathrooms, and the venerable Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is preparing to open not one but two museums. That irony, and the concept of 'my, how things change', is not lost on the projects' backers. 'The fact that it is based in Las Vegas is creating something of a stir,' said Thomas Krens [Jewish?], director of the Guggenheim foundation. That said, 'nowhere do the rules say you can't come to Las Vegas.' 'Evolution is what a place like Las Vegas is all about,' said Sheldon Adelson, chairman of the board of Las Vegas Sands Inc., developers of The Venetian, site of the new museums. 'Las Vegas keeps doing things that amaze other people, and it keeps re-inventing itself.' Krens and Adelson were speaking at a Jewish Federation meeting and press conference to introduce the project ... The museum will open with 'The Art of the Motorcycle,' which Krens said was 'hugely successful' at the Guggenheims in New York and Bilbao, Spain ... Criticism of the Guggenheim entering the Las Vegas market has come from various fronts. An article in The Independent of London was headlined: 'Finest art museums join forces to open an outpost in the cultural desert of Las Vegas' and suggested the museums follow Strip tradition and use fakes. But the same article ascribed much of the criticism to 'art snobs'and quoted Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage, as saying, 'Las Vegas is America.'" [Las Vegas, of course is largely Jewish-founded --see Jewish Influence in Popular Culture]

Judge Allows Suit Over 15M in Nazi Loot.
New York Daily News, September 6, 2001
"The secretive [Jewish] Wildenstein clan, owners of an art fortune worth billions, suffered a legal setback yesterday in a battle over eight rare religious manuscripts allegedly looted by the Nazis during World War II. A state judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit brought against the Wildenstein Gallery in Manhattan by the heirs of Alphonse Kann, a French Jew whose vast art collection was pillaged by Hitler's henchmen after he fled to England in 1940. The works, 15th, 16th and 17th century Christian prayer books from the French aristocracy, are worth an estimated $15 million. The suit was filed in 1999 by Francis Warin, Kann's great-nephew, who wants the manuscripts returned. 'The Nazi inventory establishes the Kann family's ownership,' said Stephen Somerstein, Warin's lawyer. 'It's clearly identified as having been taken from the Kann mansion by the Nazis in 1940.' Hyman Schafer, lawyer for the Wildensteins, said the suit exceeded the statute of limitations under French law."

In Depth Art News: "Gemma Levine": Portrait Photographer 25 Years, absolutearts.com, [exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London]
"Gemma Levine is one of Britain's leading portrait photographers, with a marvellous capacity for capturing the character of her subjects ... Her career in photography was initiated by a commission from [Jewish publishing mogul] George Weidenfeld to take photographs for two books in Israel collaborating with [prime ministers] Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir.

E.M. Gombrich, Author and Theorist Who Defined Art History Is Dead at 92,
New York Times, November 7, 2001
"Ernst Gombrich, an author of panoramic erudition and probably the world's best-known art historian thanks to his best-selling 'Story of Art,' died on Saturday in London, where he had lived since moving from his native Vienna in 1936 ... Like Meyer Schapiro, the other great art historian of his generation, Mr. Gombrich was a lucid writer."

Estee Lauder Heir Opens Own Art Museum,
Virtual New York [from UPI], November 16, 2001
"The Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian Art opened to the public Friday, the latest addition to New York's museum mile on upper Fifth Avenue. The museum is the pet project of cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, former U.S. Ambassador to Austria and a onetime aspirant to the New York mayoralty. It reflects his passion for Central European art produced during the early years of the 20th century as a revolt against academic art. Visitors to the Neue Galerie view avant-garde art from the twilight years of the Hohenzollern-Hapsburg empires and the years between the two World Wars in a magnificent French Louis XIII-style brick and limestone mansion with a view of Central Park. It was the home of Grace Wilson Vanderbilt, the uncrowned queen of American society, until her death in 1952. The mansion at the corner of 86th Street was owned by the Yivo Institute for Jewish studies when Lauder and his project partner, the late art dealer Serge Sabarsky, purchased it for $9 million six years ago. It took four years and more than $10 million more to renovate the structure as a museum, restoring the polished marble and paneled interiors with gilt detailing to their original elegance ... Lauder has given some of his collection, including an important Klimt painting, to the New York's Museum of Modern Art of which he is board chairman."

Two Brothers from Montreal Make Good -- and Waves,
[Jewish] Forward, November 30, 2001
"Canada's Jewish community kvelled when, at the turn of the new century, Montreal-born, look-alike brothers Victor and Robert Rabinovitch were named to head two of the most important government-owned cultural institutions in the country. The brainy, 50-something brothers are sons of a lower middle-class Jewish family. Younger brother Victor is president of the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corp., the country's largest and busiest museum, while his older brother Robert is president of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Their appointments, the apex of careers built largely in the federal civil service, were 'a source of naches [pride] for the entire Jewish community,'' said Irving Abella, a Toronto historian and former president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. 'They are energetic and dedicated, and never tried to hide their Jewish background.'"

Yizhak Rabin - The Original Famous Painting, ebay.com, March 1, 2002
[For sale] "The original famous painting of ISRAEL Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that was gunned down by an ultra-nationalist assassin because is peace policy, the painting was located a few meters from where the assassin took place,on the painting there are the original inscriptions that the people wrote, expressing there feelings, there is a date on the painting,dated a few days after the murder. the painting size is 98*144 inch, it is possible to get a personal designating from the artist ...Opening bid $500,000."

L.A. Museums: Saved by the Jews,
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, August 16, 2002
"The art scene in Los Angeles, like its popular culture counterpart of film and television, is known by insiders as having a very significant Jewish presence. Drift through the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and it is difficult to avoid noticing the prevalence of Jewish names. It is well-known that the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, a smaller modern art museum that opened its doors in 1983, owes its existence largely to the efforts of the late Marcia Weisman — she had been the guiding force behind the idea, the fundraising, and the support of local artists — and its recent renovation to a $5 million contribution from David Geffen of Dreamworks. When we add the Armand Hammer Museum, (opened in 1990 and now run by UCLA,) and the Norton Simon Museum (1974), and the Getty Center’s Jewish Presidents (past and present) we might conclude that without the involvement of L.A.’s Jewish population, art in the city would be greatly diminished if not invisible. On one level, of course, none of this is new. Jews have historically been collectors, producers and consumers of art. Culture matters. But there is a fork in the road here. The cultural life of the city, not just its Jewish community, is being shaped by this new — Jewish — cultural elite ... By playing a central role today in the shaping of our national culture, Jews have moved inside the society, and in the process, have helped America become partly Jewish. It is a dramatic step towards inclusion."

Bringing Dance to Prayer: Activist Wins ‘Genius’ Grant,
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Oct. 1, 2002
"'Liz Lerman is the only true genius I know,” declares Rabbi Daniel Zemel of Washington’s Temple Micah, 'and I know some very, very intelligent people.' It’s taken the rest of the world a little longer to accept what the Reform rabbi believed in his heart from the moment he met the activist choreographer more than a decade ago. Choreographer, dancer, community organizer, teacher and now public persona, Lerman last week received a five-year MacArthur Fellowship for $500,000, a prize that carries with it the public recognition of genius status. The fellowship, which comes with no strings attached, is given to 20 to 30 individuals annually. Those selected in the highly secretive process demonstrate outstanding creative and intellectual achievement in a diversity of fields ... Much of her work has been deeply rooted in exploring Jewish themes and issues, like her 1991 piece 'The Good Jew?' which pressed the issue of being Jewish enough in a contemporary society ... Growing up in a Reform Jewish household in Milwaukee, Lerman found that passion for social activism in her father, who worked with the Anti-Defamation League ... When Lerman joined the board of Synagogue 2000, the national collective of Jewish organizations and rabbis that is re-envisioning the synagogue for the 21st century, she had worked her way into establishment Judaism without forgoing her roots or her cutting-edge philosophy that dance can — and must — make a difference."

Spying can be art says ex-Mossad agent,
Times of India (Reuters), October 30, 2002
"A good spy is like a good artist, rising above the mundane to touch excellence, says the former Israeli secret service agent who captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. In his 73 years Peter Malkin, one-time operations chief at the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, has accomplished enough to fill three lifetimes. 'If you do things well, they become artistic,' he said during a visit to Budapest to promote the Hungarian translation of his book, Eichmann in my Hands. 'In every field, there are some who do it in an artistic way and others who do it as a job,' said the man born Zvi Malchin in British Palestine in 1929. 'If you do it perfectly, in can be artistic, whether it's spying or painting.' Painting brought Malkin international recognition, but he can now reveal some of his Mossad past, for which he was twice awarded the Prime Minister's Medal, Israel's highest honour."

Poet's Winding Path Leads to a Job as a Foundation President,
Chronicle of Philanthropy, October 17, 2002
"Edward Hirsch, a prize-winning poet and the beneficiary of prodigious amounts of philanthropic support, will become president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in January. Mr. Hirsch has been awarded a 'genius' fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Rome Prize, which allowed him to live and write in Rome for a year, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Over the last five years, he has served on the foundation's selection committee, which chooses 180 or so fellows out of a field of several thousand ... He is active in three national poetry groups, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and Poet's House."

Behind a Century of Photos, Was There a Jewish Eye?,
The New York Times, July 7, 2002
"To be a great photographer, Garry Winogrand liked to claim during the 1970's, it was first of all necessary to be Jewish. The best ones, in his opinion - past and present, himself included, naturally - shared this birthright. Jewish photographers by his definition were nervy, ironic, disruptive of artistic norms and proud outsiders. Eugène Atget, he happily argued (on no genealogical grounds), must have been Jewish because his photographs of French life on the tattered fringes seemed so Jewish in spirit. As generalizations go, Winogrand's semi-serious barroom boast has a lot of evidence to back it up. In no other visual art form except cinema over the last 100 years were Jews such a shaping force. From first decade to last, in fine art, reportage, portraiture, fashion and especially street photography, a staggering number of influential figures have been Jewish. To list just a few: Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Man Ray, El Lissitzky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, André Kertesz, Brassaï, Erich Saloman, Martin Munkasci, Robert Capa, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, Weegee, Aaron Siskind, Margaret Bourke-White, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Arnold Newman, Robert Frank, William Klein, Elliott Erwitt, Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Annie Liebovitz, Mary Ellen Mark, Joel Meyerowitz and Nan Goldin. Winogrand was by no means alone in observing that a vast number of the outstanding 20th-century photographers were Jewish. Over the years, a few curators have noted the fact in private, as have some Jewish photographers themselves. 'I've had this conversation with many of my colleagues,' said Mark Haven, a photographer who teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology. 'It's hard not to notice it. And it's hard to talk about. People can accuse you of being an ethnic chauvinist ... [Jewish critic Max Kozloff] suggests, for example, that photographs of New York taken by Jews show a sensibility distinct from those by non-Jews. It's not clear who will feel more insulted by some of his ideas: Jewish photographers who have never regarded themselves as such, or non-Jewish photographers who, in Mr. Kozloff's opinion, have usually evidenced in their work a more stable and also a less soulful vision of the city ... . He seizes on a quote in The New Yorker last year by the photographer William Klein, who posited an opposition between what he calls "goyish photography" (the landscape school of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams) and 'Jewish photography' ('funky' urbanists like Weegee and Arbus). Mr. Kozloff accepts this division of schools and argues that images of New York by Jewish photographers during the middle of the century tend to reveal a unique "social tension," which is usually not found in the work of their non-Jewish colleagues."

Picture this: Jews, Jews everywhere?,
Jewish World Review, July 25, 2002
"I'm just crazy about New York: Capital of Photography, published by Yale University Press, in conjunction with the Jewish Museum, where a show featuring these photos is now on display. I can't imagine a more exciting collection of street photography about a city I find of boundless interest ... The problem is that the [Jewish] author of the monograph, art critic Max Kozloff, who also happens to have assembled the show, has other notions. The majority of the photos he's chosen were taken by Jewish photographers, and he has attempted to prove that there is a particular Jewish perspective at work in the way New York has been visualized over the last 100 years or so. What's fascinating is how all the evidence he's gathered helps undo his thesis. Doubtless, there are great, great Jewish street photographers, and many are represented here: Helen Levitt, Ruth Orkin, William Klein, Lisette Model, Garry Winogrand and Weegee, perhaps most of all. ... What, then, does the Jewish perspective consist of? Kozloff says that Jewish photographers bring a 'social tension' to their work ... . Kozloff also wants to make a case for Jewish photographers as great street photographers, and this is doubtless so. But his compilation shows that the real pioneers in this genre -- except perhaps for Andre Kertesz (who isn't included) -- were all non-Jews, and that later Jewish photographers drew strength and style from them. Perhaps the most important of the pioneers is Walker Evans, and I would say that if this collection proves anything, it is that almost all of these artists came out from under his artistic overcoat."

Embalmed Tramp Found in Artist's Studio,
Reuters, October 14, 2002
"A British artist kept the preserved body of a tramp at his studio for nearly 20 years, The Times newspaper said Saturday. The embalmed body of Edwin McKenzie was discovered in the workshop of his former close friend Plymouth artist Robert Lenkiewicz who [was Jewish and] himself died this summer. McKenzie had been preserved and hidden in 1984 ... Lenkiewicz often used vagrants as models for his paintings, which often carried an anti-establishment message." [ALSO, at robertlenkiewcz.com: "In 1983 Lenkiewicz exhibited Project 16. This project attempted to survey as wide a range as possible of human activities relating to sexual behaviour. He attempted to do this seriously without attention to the law ... Heterosexual behaviour, homosexual behaviour, auto-erotic behaviour, bestiality, even necrophilia are commonplace in our society and most societies, and characterise more than 50% of all human entertainments. It is interesting that when the authorities visited the Exhibition to consider closure, the paedophilia section went entirely unnoticed ... The project attempted to demonstrate that there was no end to human creativity, that loneliness combined with human passion could animate a hoover to far more gratifying potentials than one's wife. The project seemed to indicate that all sexual behaviour was auto-erotic; from marriage partners to strangers' underwear."]

Judaism in Music,
by Richard Wagner, 1850
The Wagner Library
[Wagner, the great German composer, is widely condemned in Jewish literature as an antisemite]
"According to the present constitution of this world, the Jew in truth is already more than emancipate: he rules, and will rule, so long as Money remains the power before which all our doings and our dealings lose their force. That the historical adversity of the Jews and the rapacious rawness of Christian-German potentates have brought this power within the hands of Israel's sons—this needs no argument of ours to prove. That the impossibility of carrying farther any natural, any 'necessary' and truly beauteous thing, upon the basis of that stage whereat the evolution of our arts has now arrived, and without a total alteration of that basis—that this has also brought the public Art-taste of our time between the busy fingers of the Jew, however, is the matter whose grounds we here have to consider somewhat closer. What their thralls had toiled and moiled to pay the liege-lords of the Roman and the Medieval world, to-day is turned to money by the Jew: who thinks of noticing that the guileless-looking scrap of paper is slimy with the blood of countless generations? What the heroes of the arts, with untold strain consuming lief and life, have wrested from the art-fiend of two millennia of misery, to-day the Jew converts into an art-bazaar (Kunstwaarenwechsel): who sees it in the mannered bricabrac, that it is glued together by the hallowed brow-sweat of the Genius of two thousand years?— We have no need to first substantiate the be-Jewing of modern art; it springs to the eye, and thrusts upon the senses, of itself. Much too far afield, again, should we have to fare, did we undertake to explain this phenomenon by a demonstration of the character of our art-history itself. But if emancipation from the yoke of Judaism appears to us the greatest of necessities, we must hold it weighty above all to prove our forces for this war of liberation."

A Case for Jefferson
Harrison loves my country too,
But wants it all made over new.
He's Freudian Viennese by night.
By day he's Marxian Muscovite.
It isn't because he's Russian Jew.
He's Puritan Yankee through and through.
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens:
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new.
-- Robert Frost, from Steeple Bush, Henry Holt, 1947

Vulgar tastes in art,
by Theodore Dalrymple, National Post (Canada), November 4, 2002
"There was a dreary inevitability about the choice of a painting entitled Arsewoman in Wonderland as one of the four finalists for this year's Turner Prize, Britain's foremost annual competition in the visual arts. By their consistent reward of the scatological and the vulgar, the judges have repeatedly demonstrated that they are more concerned to establish their reputation for broadmindedness and lack of prudery than to encourage art of true value sub specie aeternitatis ... This vulgarity, which now pervades the whole of British life, is of ideological origin. To be vulgar establishes one's identification with and sympathy for the proletariat: though in the case of art, the identification and sympathy is not reciprocated, since the modern British proletariat considers attendance at an art gallery on a par with, indeed a prognostic indicator of, homosexuality and child-molestation. However, the proletariat that the artist wishes to join is not the real, existing proletariat, certainly not in its financial attributes, but one of a sub-Marxist fantasy. Radical chic, it seems, springs eterna l... But it is precisely because we have learned to view everything through a prism of political correctness that vulgarity has triumphed, and the British art scene is dominated by -- well, rich, callow bastards." [See: Art  links, or, for a more in-depth view, Modern Art, or "vulgarity," or the Marxist "proletarian view."]

Poet regrets naming Baraka N.J. laureate,
NJ.com (New Jersey), November 10, 2002
"Anti-Semite. Liar. Ignorant. D-plus poet. The man who helped select contentious New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka as his successor now uses those words to describe him. Gerald Stern says he regrets that he recommended Baraka for the honor of poet laureate, but he's not sure the title should be taken away from him, as some are demanding. 'I made a mistake," Stern said. 'I'm sorry I appointed him. There were many other poets we could have appointed. We did it out of good will. We thought it was important to select a prominent New Jersey figure who represents the black community' ... Baraka has been accused of anti-Semitism because his poem implies that Israel had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, and Gov. James E. McGreevey has called for his resignation. But Baraka has refused to step down and has repeatedly denied he is anti-Semitic. 'He claims he is not an anti-Semite, but of course that is bull,' said Stern, who is Jewish' ... 'He's full of (expletive) and he's an evil son of a (expletive) for starting that myth here. I think he is an (expletive). The poem is not even good. I give it a D-plus or a C-minus grade as a poem. In terms of its truth, I give it an F-minus' ... Stern, a Lambertville resident, was appointed by former Gov. Christie Whitman as the state's first poet laureate in 2000 after a committee of poets nominated him ... . 'I'm nervous about censorship," he said. "But I'm not going to be the first person in line to defend his right to free speech. I'll let people who worry about the First Amendment do that.'"
Question for book award judges: Is this reading really necessary? Michael Kinsley confessed that he didn't read the 402 books he was supposed to evaluate. High literary crime or a case for Evelyn Wood's seven-day course?,
Philly.com, December 3, 2002
"Who says you can't judge a book by its cover? A National Book Awards judge just did it - possibly with hundreds of books - and he's practically bragging. Late last month, former Slate editor-in-chief Michael Kinsley, a National Book Awards judge this year in nonfiction, rocked the sedate world of book prizes. He wittily informed readers in a Slate piece that he hadn't read many of the books assigned to him. He suggested that he hadn't even read every page of the book to which his committee gave the prize on Nov. 20: the latest mammoth volume in Robert Caro's gargantuan LBJ biography ... In his sardonic piece about the awards experience, Kinsley declared that his motives for becoming a judge after that 'were ignoble - mainly vanity and a desire for free books.' Kinsley joked that his taking on the task was 'especially hypocritical because two things I have long claimed to oppose in principle are books and awards. Nonfiction books are especially regrettable. There is too much nonfiction going on in the world already without writers adding to it.' When the 402 books he was expected to read over six months started arriving, he panicked. He admitted that solely by 'bold and fearless procrastination,' and 'without my having to crack a single spine,' he cut the pile from 402 to under 50. In the closest thing to justifying his behavior within a mischievous, lighthearted piece, Kinsley asserted that awards were 'the purest example of gratuitous or superfluous meritocracy,' that comparing different sorts of nonfiction reeked of 'inherent arbitrariness' ... Even in his latest Slate piece, Kinsley warns readers: '[D]on't expect total honesty.'" [RELATED ARTICLE: The man who won the award that Kinsley (who is Jewish) judged -- without reading too much -- was also Jewish -- Robert Caro. Also, at least 2 of the 4 National Book Award winners noted in the following piece, plus a special "lifteime achievement" winner, were Jewish: Ruth Stone, Robert Caro, and Philip Roth] A First Novel Gets National Book Award, by Dinitia Smith, from: New York Times, November 21, 2002
"The National Book Award for Fiction went to a relatively unknown author, Julia Glass, last night for her first novel ... After being a finalist twice before for the nonfiction award, Robert A. Caro finally won it last night for 'Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson" (Knopf) ... The poetry award went to Ruth Stone, 87, for her eighth collection ... Nancy Farmer won the Young People's Literature award ... [Host Steve] Martin also introduced Philip Roth, who received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Noting that Mr. Roth had won two National Book Awards himself, Mr. Martin wondered aloud, 'If he's so great, where's his Golden Globe, his Emmy, his house's layout in In Style magazine?' ... In his speech he praised the American language and the freedom that America gave his Jewish parents in Newark. He decried the self-division of Americans into subgroups, like 'American Jewish.' Those labels, he said, are 'self-limiting.'"

U.S. Deports Dozens of Israelis,
Los Angeles Times (from Associated Press, March 6, 2002
"Authorities have arrested and deported since early last year dozens of young Israelis who represented themselves as art students in efforts to gain access to restricted buildings and homes, U.S. officials said. The Israelis tried to get inside sensitive federal office buildings and the homes of government employees, the officials said. A draft report from the Drug Enforcement Administration -- which first characterized the activities as suspicious -- said the youths' actions 'may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity.' Immigration officials deported the Israelis for visa violations; no criminal espionage charges were filed ... The arrests, made in an unspecified number of major U.S. cities from California to Florida, came amid public warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies about suspicious behavior by people posing as Israeli art students and 'attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings' ... The DEA report said a majority of the students questioned by U.S. investigators acknowledged having served in units of the Israeli military specializing in military intelligence, electronic signals interception or explosive ordnance. The DEA said one person questioned was the son of a two-star Israeli general, one had served as the bodyguard to the head of the Israeli Army and another served in a Patriot missile unit. Most Israeli men and women are conscripted into their nation's military service at age 18. A Justice Department official, who also asked not to be identified, said investigators have been aware of some 'alleged linkage' between the students and alleged espionage activities in the United States since early 2001, and said authorities have made arrests in Dallas, Chicago, San Diego and in south Florida."

Spat over painting sparks debate on free speech for Vancouver Jews,
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 19, 2002
"The relationship between art and Jewish sensitivities can be a rocky one ... Vancouver artist Jeannie Kamins says she is facing a different kind of censorship. Kamins’ art is being shown at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Vancouver. But she recently had to remove one of her pieces, a portrait of Canadian Parliament member Svend Robinson, after members of the Jewish community told the JCC that they found it offensive. Kamins’ 'offense' is that Robinson is a fierce critic of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. During an April 2002 visit to the West Bank, Robinson appeared on television confronting Israeli soldiers as he attempted to reach the besieged headquarters of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. Robinson later declared that the Israeli government and military were 'guilty of torture and murder.' Kamins said she painted Robinson’s portrait in 1992 'as part of a series of portraits of people who I feel have integrity, political commitment and who are controversial.' She added that she included Robinson’s portrait in the exhibition not to offend, but because it represented one of her best works. 'It’s outrageous that I should be judged by what I put in when it was not a political piece, but a picture of a man sitting on a bench. This is not free speech,' Kamins said ... Claire Belilos, a member of Vancouver’s Jewish community, disagrees. 'When you exhibit somewhere, you have to consider their values and policies, and if you don’t like those policies, you go elsewhere,' she said. “I think Kamins showed a total lack of sensitivity by exhibiting that piece, because Svend has proven by his actions and words that he’s an enemy of Israel. How would you like it if she painted a portrait of Hitler and showed it there, at the JCC, calling it free expression?' Rabbi Barry Leff, who leads the Beth Tikvah Congregation & Center in Richmond, British Columbia, agreed with Belilo ... Gerry Zipursky, the JCC’s executive director, told Vancouver’s weekly Jewish newspaper that he would discuss the issue at a future board meeting. He said Kamins agreed to remove the painting from the exhibit after she was informed that there had been some complaints, particularly from Holocaust survivors. He added, however that the removal of the piece was not about freedom of expression. 'We are clear about our loyalty and support and relationship with Israel,' he said. “That doesn’t mean to say that there can’t be freedom of expression, but if people try to make issues political in nature, in our view, we try to remain apolitical.” Kamins isn’t buying that explanation. 'I think the people who complained about that portrait want to stifle controversy,' she said. 'They’re pig-headed, narrow-minded bigots.'”

The family that bankrolled Europe,
BBC News, July 9, 1999
"The decision to auction 250 artworks owned by the famed Rothschild banking dynasty is a measure of how the once-great family has fallen. Rosie Millard reports on one of the auctions of the year. The collection of paintings, pieces of furniture and decorative objects were stolen by the Nazis in 1938 and only returned to the family in February this year. They were put up for sale because family members no longer have homes opulent enough in which to display them. The treasures, which together made up one of Europe's foremost private art collections, went under the hammer for £57m at Christie's auction house in London on Thursday. The collection, which included a beautifully illustrated 16th Century prayer book that sold for almost £8.6m, was formed by Baron Nathaniel Rothschild, who died in 1905. Ownership passed to his brother, Baron Albert, but, in 1938, the collection as seized by the German Reich within hours of Hitler annexing Austria. The brothers were descendants of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who rose from a Frankfurt ghetto to establish the now legendary banking house ... Nathan Rothschild, one of Mayer's five sons, established the British arm, which went on to become massively influential in the UK economy. The dynasty has been credited with 'bailing out' the British government on more than one occasion. Like his other brothers, who set up branches in Paris, Vienna and Naples, Nathan profited from the Napoleonic wars, which finished in 1815. He is said to have ridden alongside the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo. On realising a British victory, he dashed back to London and brought government stocks before anyone else knew of Napoleon's defeat. By the time the business had passed to the next generation, the Rothschilds were influencing the national economy and politics of several European countries. In 1875, Lionel Rothschild - the first Jew to enter British parliament - was, with a few hours notice, able to lend the £4m that allowed the British government to take control of the Suez Canal. Benjamin Disraeli, prime minister at the time, is said to have commented: 'You can't have too many Rothschilds.' But the family's powerful reputation made them a prime target for the Nazis, who seized the Rothschilds' property shortly before the war. Most of the art collection on sale at Christie's was hidden by Hitler's forces in salt mines."

Chagall & Chanel Brodovitch's genius,
by Robert Fulford, National Post (Canada), January 11, 2003
"Modern art made its way into the visual culture of North America by what once seemed an unlikely route, the pages of elite fashion magazines. Beginning in the 1930s, a few eager cultural entrepreneurs, Alexey Brodovitch being the most talented and persuasive, smuggled avant-garde painting, design and photography into the New World as backdrops for elegant couture. More than any other individual, Brodovitch (1898-1971) presided at the marriage of high art and chic, a marriage that remains intact today. Kerry William Purcell's elegant new book, Alexey Brodovitch (Phaidon, 272 pages, $99.95), describes an elaborate process of infiltration and assimilation, by which Brodovitch and Harper's Bazaar magazine taught New York, and then America, how to stop worrying and love modernity. ... Within a couple of years, Brodovitch had opened a new era, the first great age of the art director. He stayed with Snow for nearly a quarter of a century, 1934 to 1958, and eventually influenced at least half the graphic designers and three-quarters of the photographers in the world. As Truman Capote wrote in 1959: 'What Dom Perignon was to champagne, Mendel to genetics, so this over-keyed and quietly chaotic Russian-born American has been to the art of photographic design and editorial layout....' Brodovitch found fresh ways to give consumer fantasies an elevated, cultured background, showing a generation of designers how to set ridiculously priced dresses in an environment of good design and high art. It was value-added symbolism: Art heightened the worth of relatively mundane physical objects. He also found a way to make startling ideas acceptable by placing wild Surrealist images in pages that were laid out with architectural solidity ... Another photographer who worked for him, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, developed an on-location fashion style, taking clothes to distant corners of the world for exotic backgrounds, an approach that's been enriching the world's airlines ever since. Brodovitch figured out how to orchestrate the separate fields of photography, fashion, typography and illustration. He may have been the first designer who saw the two-page spread as a single unit; certainly, he exploited that idea more effectively than anyone else. He learned from the Surrealists how to use the power of juxtaposition, unlikely combinations of images side by side. He encouraged highly imaginative photography and refused to settle for less. He became a great teacher of photographers, such as Art Kane, Irving Penn and, above all, Richard Avedon. [All Jewish] No one ever called him amiable, and few found him charming. ... He was often away from his post, executing freelance commissions for Saks Fifth Avenue, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein [All Jewish] and other clients of his own. He also contributed to the pretentious and much-parodied Great Ideas of Western Man series of advertisements, through which the Container Corporation sought to shine its image by publishing quotes from Plato, Rousseau and Jefferson, and illustrating them with elegant abstractions derived from modern art. There was something else that limited his power: the four-martini lunches that eventually became habitual and must have led to some drowsy, boss-annoying afternoons. In 1958, management finally replaced him with Henry Wolf, who went on to be one of the stars of the next historic generation, at Esquire and elsewhere."

Artistic Advisory Committee,
National Foundation for Jewish Culture
"Theodore Bikel, Chair. Samuel Adler, Eleanor Antin, George Bartenieff, Maurice Berger, Alan Bergman, Nancy Berman, Martin Bookspan, Joann Green Breuer Melvin Jules Bukiet, Gil Cates, Robin Cembalist, Elaine Charnov, John Corigliano, Art D’lugoff, Gordon Davidson, Beth Dembitze,r Morris Dickstein, Eliot Feld, Tom Freudenheim, Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, Sheldon Harnick, Lisa Heller, Arthur Hiller, Omus Hirshbein, Agnieszka Holland ,Karen Brooks, Hopkins Annette Insdorf, Tobi Kahn, Josef Kalichstein, Veda Kaplinsky, Larry Kardish, Bel Kaufman, Irvin Kershner, Francine Klagsbrun, Stuart Klawans, Norman Kleeblatt, Milton Krents, Ezra Laderman, Pearl Lang, Liz Lerman, Nathan Leventhal, Harold Leventhal, Karen Malpede, David Mamet, Norman Manea, Sophie Maslow, Lynne Meadow, Chana Mlotek, Meredith Monk, Leonard Nimoy, Cynthia Ozick, Richard Pena, Jed Perl, Michael Posnick, Chaim Potok, Archie Rand, Nessa Rapoport, Steven Rathe, Joan Rosenbaum, Eddie Rosenstein, Ellen Schiff, George Segal, Isaiah Sheffer, Ilan Stavans, Elizabeth Swados, Martin Verdrager, Ruth Weisberg, Barry Weissler, Fran Weissler, Elie Wiesel, Joseph Wiseman ACADEMIC ADVISORY COMMITTEE: Paula Hyman, Chair. David Berger, Leon Botstein, Robert Chazan, Deborah Dash Moore, Hasia Diner, Arnold Eisen Todd Endelman, Michael Fishbane, David Fishman, Sylvia Barack Fishman, Rela Geffen, Michael Grunberger, Samuel Heilman, Stanley Katz, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Sid Z. Leiman, Baruch Levine, Egon Mayer, Alan Mintz ,Jehudah Reinharz, David Ruderman, Jonathan Sarna, Robert Seltzer, David Sidorsky, David Sorkin, David Sperling, Michael Stanislawski, Ellen Umansky, Chaim Waxman, David Weiss Halivni,Yael Zerubavel FILM FUND PANELISTS Alan Berliner, Rachel Chanoff, David Dortort, Howard Dratch, Lyn Goldfarb, Elaine Holliman, Annette Insdorf, Larry Kardish,, Aviva Kempner, Ellen M. Krass, Greg Laemmle,William Nichols, Janis Plotkin, Daniel Polin, Michael Renov, Sharon Pucker, Rivo Ellen Schneider, Arnold Schwartzman, Andrea Simon, Janet Sternberg, Kenneth Turan, Suzanne Weil, Claudia Weill, Marc Weiss, Ira Wohl

[Variants of the Jewish art hustler, exhibit #9,454 -- the architect.]
The Libeskinds’: His Bronx Story Fused With Hers,
New York Observer, March 6, 2003
"Call them Mr. and Mrs. Ground Zero: Daniel and Nina Libeskind, with their short gray hair, black ensembles, leather jackets and artsy glasses, are steeling themselves for what is perhaps New York's hottest political crucible of the moment - the rebuilding effort at the World Trade Center ... But in the decade or so since Daniel, the distinguished professor, and Nina, who shares a starring role in Studio Daniel Libeskind as the driving force of its business side, have been designing actual buildings rather than promoting architectural education, they have become a political force to be reckoned with. The couple has, since taking on commissions as politically volatile and public as the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the controversial addition to Britain's Victoria & Albert Museum, come to know their way around a tricky commission-and both are essential to the operation ... Friends and acquaintances credit Ms. Libeskind with translating her husband's talent into competitive bids for commissions all over the world, and with managing massive staffs and budgets ... As the company grows and takes on more and more commissions around the world, Ground Zero will become its most closely scrutinized and uniquely challenging endeavor ... When Daniel and Nina took the stage in the small German city of Osnabrück to accept the commission for a museum dedicated to the work of Felix Nussbaum, a painter who perished during the Holocaust after hiding out in a basement studio, the mayor turned to Mr. Libeskind and said softly, 'This will never get built.' 'You want to bet?' came Ms. Libeskind's swift retort. The museum opened in 1999 ... With their possessions on board a freighter to California, where Mr. Libeskind had accepted a position as a senior scholar at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the two went to Berlin to attend the announcement of the Jewish Museum design-competition winner ... The couple met at a summer camp for the children of Holocaust survivors near Woodstock, N.Y. ... Their backgrounds were surely different. Nina was the daughter of David Lewis, a Russian-born immigrant to Canada who founded the New Democratic Party, a party with labor support and a social democratic formula ... After years of effort, [Lebeskind's] parents were able to break past the Iron Curtain and, in 1957, made their way to Tel Aviv. The family lived in Israel for two years before booking passage to New York on the U.S.S. Constitution ... After early criticism, Larry Silverstein, who owns the lease on the [Ground Zero] site, has signed on to Mr. Libeskind's plan and vowed to finance the tall tower that is its defining element."

Becoming Richard Diebenkorn, Almost,
by John Seed, Art Site Guide
"By the time I had my graduate degree in Painting, it was 1982, the art world was coming to a boil, and new artists were making headlines. Clemente, Schnabel, Basquiat--young, splashy, challenging talents--made the work of artists like Diebenkorn seem suddenly ancient. I continued to admire his work, but after meeting the man, it was a little like a spell was broken, and I went through phases of admiring, copying and stealing ideas from at least a dozen other artists, living and dead. When I worked for the notorious art dealer Larry Gagosian in 1983, I was only half an hour from the Diebenkorn's house, but it seemed worlds away. One day Larry, and his buddy, film producer Keith Barish spilled out of Larry's office laughing hysterically, like ten year olds on a laughing jag. 'John', Larry said to me, 'Keith and I have a riddle for you: what kind of collectors buy Diebenkorns?' I shrugged. Larry gave the punchline: 'Rich Jews.' The pair laughed all the way out to Barish's Blue Bentley. How could Barish, a Jew himself, and the Producer of 'Sophie's Choice' possibly find the joke funny. To this day I still don't understand. I don't know if Barish was laughing because he was trying to buy one, or because he was making sure NOT to buy one. Cynicism can be confusing. It’s true that by the end of the 80's, owning an 'Ocean Park' painting was a label of liberal success. I saw one at the home of Norman Lear, the producer of 'All in the Family.' I recently saw a photo of Jane Ganz Cooney, the visionary behind 'Sesame Street' in front of her Diebenkorn. If those are the 'Rich Jews' that Gagosian was referring to, he chose the wrong people to slam. I suppose it dates me to confess to the world 'I once wanted to be Dick Diebenkorn.'"

Image Title: PIX SAATCHI GALLERY OPENING 15/4/2003. Description: Nude models outside the saatchi Gallery at a party to celebrate the opening of the new Saatchi Gallery, South Bank, London SE1 on 15th April 2003,
Don Features
[Photograph of dozens of nude people apparently bowing as human squid in homage to Jewish advertising mogul Charles Saatchi's new London art gallery.]

A familiar sensation?,
The Scotsman, April 7, 2003
"The year is 1990. The occasion is the opening of an art show called Gambler, a self-curated exhibition by some of London’s hip new artists. The highlight is a work called A Thousand Years by Damien Hirst. It consists of a decaying cow’s head in a perspex tank, slowly being consumed by maggots and flies. A green Rolls Royce pulls up outside the gallery. A man enters. Charles Saatchi stops open-mouthed in front of the cow’s head. He stares at it for a few minutes. Then he buys it. Now A Thousand Years has pride of place in the Hirst retrospective which opens Saatchi’s new gallery in the former County Hall on London’s South Bank. Along side it are the other icons of Brit Art: Tracey Emin’s My Bed, Marcus Harvey’s portrait of Myra Hindley, Marc Quinn’s cast of his own head in nine frozen pints of his own blood and Hirst’s sheep in formaldehyde. The Saatchi Gallery, as it is known, will open to the public on 17 April. Of course, the fur has already started to fly. It is good. It is bad. It is, according to one critic, 'risible'. It shows up the weakness of the work. It gives the work unexpected new dignity. It’s rivalling Tate Modern. It’s so 1990s, it’s just not where it’s at any more. This last snipe, levelled by ICA director Philip Dodd, comes closest to the bone. Saatchi’s name is synonymous with the artists who became known as the Brit pack, who rose to fame in the early 1990s. This was the era when British contemporary art became world famous, when the Turner Prize was cooler than the Brits. Fashions change however ... Within the world that was Brit Art, it is all too easy to cast Saatchi as the shadowy figure pulling the strings, all the more because he remains in the background, shunning all publicity. However, Brit Art was self-starting. Damien Hirst curated the first show, Freeze, in a Docklands warehouse in 1988 when he was still a student. He and his fellows were a remarkable group; young, hip and media-friendly. They probably would have succeeded on their own because their work was fresh, confrontational and shocking. What is unusual is that they did not simply succeed, they became superstars. That is where Saatchi comes in. He had collected art since the 1970s, from Carl Andre to Robert Rauschenberg. Few people paid much heed: plenty of rich people buy art. But when the so-called Young British Artists arrived on the scene, he moved his buying into the fast lane. Suddenly rather than buying occasional works he was buying entire libraries, trawling the studios of the East End for the next big thing. He was commissioning as well: Damien Hirst’s shark was a personal commission. Saatchi made his fortune in advertising. In the business, he had a knack for producing adverts with enough controversy attached - the pregnant man and the 'Labour isn’t working' series - to generate extra publicity through media commentary. He knew how to make the media work for the artists he patronised. ... 'He has had a huge influence on the culture of collecting. It was always there in the US and Germany, but not in Britain. After Saatchi a lot of people have started collecting - more quietly, but just as furiously. That is well established now and it’s not going away. "But the part played by Goldsmiths [College] was also very important. It was pushing out students, telling them they had to go out and sell themselves. Damien Hirst was his own great self-publicist. Saatchi was one more element in that whole brash, let’s-go-for-it environment.'"

 

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