A JEWISH ARTIST'S EXPRESSION OF CHRIST

 A most unusual artist, who painted many Christian  themes and yet was Jewish, was ABRAHAM RATTNER, an American  born in Poughkeepsie, New York,  in 1895.

                                                                   Pieta- 1949

While he had no firsthand experience of the rich culture of Eastern European Judaism, which so deeply informed the works of his contemporaries, like Marc Chagall, he instinctively turned to the stories of the Bible and his Jewish heritage for images, which, he believed, would help him to make sense of a chaotic world, where he felt caught between what he termed “the oppression of reality and utopia.”

 The son of a rabbinical student-turned-baker who had fled Czarist Russia, Abraham encountered anti-Semitic bullying on the mean streets of Poughkeepsie and learned to defend himself, thanks to an Irish policeman who taught him how to box.

He initially intended to be an architect, studying at George Washington University. Deciding instead to concentrate on painting, he then went on to study art at the Corcoran School of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  His studies were cut short by America’s entry into World War I in 1918.

 Abraham saw front line action as an officer in a U.S. Army camouflage outfit, where he developed artful ways to conceal artillery. During the second battle of the Marne, he was blown into a foxhole by an exploding shell, suffering a back injury, which troubled him all his life. After the Armistice, he resumed art classes in Philadelphia, then, returned to Europe on a scholarship in 1920. He settled into a studio in Paris, where he would remain for the next twenty years.

During his time in France,  Abraham  experimented with Futurism, Cubism, and Expressionism, moving in the same artistic circles as Picasso, Braque, Miro, and Dali. He formed a lifelong friendship with fellow American abroad, Novelist Henry Miller.  As World War II approached, Abraham returned to the U.S. He taught at several schools, including The New School, New York (1947–55), and Yale University (1952-53).

He became known for his rich use of color and surrealist aspects of his work.  Although while living in Paris, he had met and studied the paintings of Claude Monet, his work is generally closer to that of Georges Rouault and Pablo Picasso. He used vivid colors to simulate (and occasionally to design) stained-glass windows and was especially effective depicting the vulnerability of people.

Like Chagall, he incorporated imagery of the public humiliation, torture, and crucifixion of Christ into his art to evoke the barbarism of the times and the persecution of the Jews of Europe. As a Jew, Abraham interpreted the Passion of Jesus in universal as well as in personal terms. “It is myself that is on the cross” he explained, “though I am attempting to express a universal theme—man’s inhumanity to man.”

 As his faith deepened, Abraham came to believe “a painting, if it is achieved at all, is made with the help of God.” As he confessed in a letter to Henry Miller: “I pray every night before I close my eyes; I pray every morning upon opening my eyes, and talk to God and ask for his guidance, direction, clarity, that I may be able to perceive and feel something of that which becomes beauty.” For him, his work became “a medium of prayer and praise.

As Henry  Miller, once wrote of his friend: “His restless, searching heart is united with the anguish of the world and expresses that agony in colors of fire, a purifying fire which nothing can quench.”

Images:

Left-     Descent from the Cross

Right-   Transcendence