Reviewing an exhibition of 20th-century Anglo-Jewish art, David Herman notes two very different trends (with pictures):
The . . . artists who were born around 1890 and emerged just before World War I, [known as the] Whitechapel Boys—including Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, Jacob Kramer, and Isaac Rosenberg—were all sons of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Pale. They were drawn to traditional Jewish subjects: for example, Gertler’s Rabbi and Rabbitzin (1914), Kramer’s Day of Atonement (1919), and Bomberg’s Ghetto Theatre (1920). . . .
What is striking, [however], about the second wave [of Jewish artists], who dominate this exhibition—Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied central Europe, [including] refugees who came as children like Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach—is how they avoided Jewish subjects. No images of Judaism, almost no traces of the Holocaust, hardly any engagement with Israel. Until recently, most postwar work by Jewish artists has avoided obviously Jewish subjects. But there is nevertheless something dark and troubling about the solitary figures by Freud, the urban landscapes and thick black swirls of charcoal by Auerbach and [Leon] Kossoff. To use David Sylvester’s phrase, these works by Jewish artists are “the art of an aftermath.”
Read more on Standpoint: http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/6121/full