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10 Nissan 5764
April 1, 2004
Dear Board Member,
Ziva Amishai-Maisels: Thirty-Fourth Recipient of Foundation
Support To Receive Israel Prize
Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Professor of Art History at Hebrew University,
is the thirty-fourth recipient of Memorial Foundation support
to receive the Israel Prize. The ceremony will take place on April
27th, Israel Independence Day, in Jerusalem. Prof. Amishai-Maisels
will be the third individual to be honored for her contributions
to the field of Art History since the inception of the Israel
Prize, one of the most distinguished in Jewish life.
Foundation recipients who previously received the Israel Prize
include such noted scholars as Professors, Menachem Elon, Gershon
Shaked, Haim Beinart, Chaim Dimitrovsky, Eliezer Schweid, Moshe
Bar-Asher, Joseph Dan, Adin Steinsaltz, Yehuda Bauer, Aviezer
Ravitzky and Nahum Rakover.
One of Prof. Amishai-Maisels' major works is "Depiction and
Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts."
to which she devoted more than 20 years of research and which
involved, in her words, "much soul searching and soul steeling."
The Foundation awarded her three grants in 1974-75, 1982-83, and
1991-92 to assist her in her pioneering research in this field.
Her volume was one of the first serious investigations of the
subject, and was instantly successful in opening up this area
as a new field of research.
A major problem faced by artists of the Holocaust, according to
Prof. Amishai-Maisels, is the concept of evil. Prof. Amishai-Maisels
deals with how artists groped with ways to portray the Nazis in
a manner that would convey the depth of their depravity. The problem
confronting these artists was whether to depict this evil as an
anomaly - as in the works of Janco, Lasansky, Baskin and Wiesenthal
- or to see it as part of the evil inherent in mankind, as in
the works of Francis Bacon and the Cobra artists.
Another way of dealing with the whole subject was to flee from
representation into abstraction, a way followed by many of the
Jewish artists of the New York School, and by survivors such as
Arikha and Bak. Some coped by stressing their Jewish identity,
and/or trying to revive the shtetl, at least on canvas.
Prof. Amishai-Maisels also deals with the need of the artists
to symbolize the Holocaust in an attempt to make sense of it.
Many artists derived Holocaust symbols from the Holocaust experience
itself - e.g., the barbed wire and crematorium smokestacks. Others
turned to the Old Testament for inspiration. There were some,
including Jewish artists, who symbolized the Holocaust through
the portrayal of the crucifixion of the Jewish Jesus, a symbolism
that crossed religious lines, and was extremely popular in the
1930s and 1940s.
Prof. Amishai-Maisels also analyzed the different ways artists
in the camps depicted the Holocaust compared to those who had
not been there; the depiction of refugees, and the way in which
those who were themselves refugees, like Chagall and Lipchitz,
incorporated their experiences into their works; and the difference
between the way Jewish and non-Jewish artists worked on this subject.
What emerges from this monumental volume is that the Holocaust
has become a significant part of the language of discourse in
modern art. Yet, artists, Jewish and non-Jewish, have not fully
exhausted this theme.
Prof. Amishai-Maisels' work has not been confined solely to the
Holocaust. She has also published important works on Chagall,
Steinhardt and Gaugin, to whom she was attracted because they
were caught between two or more cultures, or had left one land
for another (as she herself has done as an immigrant from the
U.S. to Israel). She has also studied the problem of multiple
cultures in relation to modern Jewish art in the works of Ben
Shahn in the U.S.; Ardon, Bezem, and Pins in Israel; and in Russian
Jewish artists, both in the revolutionary period and in recent
decades.
Aside from her extensive scholarly work and teaching in Israel,
the U.S., and Europe, Prof. Amishai-Maisels has always generously
shared her knowledge and expertise in a variety of civic and communal
endeavors. In the Yom Kippur War, she lectured, sometimes four
to five times a day, to soldiers at the front. At the beginning
of the Russian immigration to Israel, she was active in helping
Russian scholars and students to obtain jobs and scholarships.
For almost three decades, she has been serving the Memorial Foundation
on our various scholarly panels, always cooperating in whatever
endeavor in which we requested her participation. We remember
fondly her excellent lectures on modern Jewish art at the first
Nahum Goldmann Fellowship we organized right after Glasnost in
the former Soviet Union in 1991.
We take great pride at the singular honor bestowed upon Prof.
Amishai-Maisels by the State of Israel, and tip our kipot to her
for her valued contributions to Jewish art and culture.
Frederic Brenner
The second individual from the arts that I would like to highlight
in this report is Frederic Brenner, an internationally recognized
photographer, whose work over the last 25 years has documented
the lives of Jews in more than 40 countries on 6 continents. The
Foundation has assisted him in his work from the very beginning
of his career, and in more modest ways when it approached its
zenith during the last two to three years.
Frederic Brenner's latest book, Diaspora: Homeland in Exile, is
his most important work. This two-volume work of photographs and
commentary was issued in conjunction with a major exhibit of Frederic's
work at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The exhibit, The Jewish Journey:
Frederic Brenner's Photographic Odyssey - A Portrait of Jewish
Diversity, which was held in New York City last winter, is also
his most important exhibit to date, and will undoubtedly enhance
his already well-established reputation as a world-class photographer.
I first met Frederic Brenner when he was a fellow at the Foundation's
second Nahum Goldmann Fellowship program, which took place in
1989 at Carmel College, Oxfordshire, England. Frederic, who grew
up in France and was trained as a social anthropologist, had already
been photographing Jewish communities for a number of years. At
that fellowship we devoted one evening to a showing of his early
photographs with a running and, even then, an accompanying compelling
narrative by Frederic. This, one of his first shows as a professional
photographer, was a great hit and a harbinger of his future career.
In 2001, by this time internationally known, Frederic gave another
marvelous slideshow of selections of his work at an Academic Convocation
organized by the Foundation in New York on The Jewish People in
the Twentieth Century.
Frederic received two fellowship grants in 1989 and 1991 from
the Memorial Foundation for his first publications based on his
photographic work of the Jews in Yemen and the former Soviet Union,
and for his photographic essay, Diaspora: Chronicle of a People.
He also received a fellowship in 2001 for his latest book.
Frederic has had earlier exhibits at the Beth Hatefusoth, the
International Center for Photography in New York and the Musee
de L'Elysee in Lausanne. He also exhibited in Paris, Mexico, Amsterdam
and Buenos Aires. He was the winner of the 1992 Pris de Rome.
His earlier publications include Jerusalem: Instants d'Eternite,
Marranes, Jews/America/A Representation and Exile at Home.
Frederic Brenner's work has evolved over the years. His first
work was photographing iconical Jewish subjects. He then began
documenting disappearing Jewish communities in remote areas of
the world, driven by a sense of the imminent loss of these communities,
that thousands of years of Jewish history were about to vanish.
In 1992, he shifted again, away from ethnographic documentary,
to portraying the multiple dimensions of Jewish identity in the
Diaspora. In this latest phase, he moves away from his candid
photos to posing his subjects, composing his photographs in his
mind's eye before snapping the shutter.
Brenner asserts that his work has achieved a number of laudable
goals. Firstly, it rehabilitates many of the Jewish groups who
live on the margin of memory. Jewish history in the twentieth
century, he claims, has been written mostly by white western Ashkenazim.
In his work, he breaks the stereotyped representations of what
is a Jew and what a Jew looks like.
Secondly, he emphasizes that in our era Jews and non-Jews too
often focus on how Jews died. His work focuses instead on how
Jews live.
Finally, Brenner contends that his photos are not nostalgic, but
images to break images, to underline the discontinuity, dispossession
and dispersal of Jews in the Diaspora.
rom our perspective, Brenner's oeuvre of more than 80,000 images,
that make up the most extensive photographic inventory of Jewish
life around the world, marvelously captures the rich diversity
- geographic, cultural and communal - of the Jewish experience
in Diaspora. While his photographs are contemporary, they consciously
reflect the full spectrum of Jews in time and space, from pre-modern
to post-modern. His photographs acknowledge and enable us to understand
the multiple threads from which Klal Yisrael is woven, and to
listen to the multiple voices that speak within us, even when
discordant.
The Memorial Foundation, which expends its considerable energy
and resources on nourishing the concept of Klal Yisrael in its
multiple programs around the world, is fully empathetic with this
marvelous portraiture of the Jewish people created by Brenner.
We are proud of Frederic's success and the modest role we played
in the development of the man and his work.
Best wishes to you and your family for a joyous Passover.
Warm regards.
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Jerry Hochbaum
Executive Vice President
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