Visit: Moses on the Mesa

The outside of the Breed Street shul in LA: present day.

Inside the Breed Street shul: early 20th century

Something for everyone!

From NY1 (click for video):

A husband and wife team are eating their way through the Bronx, giving new meaning to hungry artists. NY1′s Shazia Khan filed the following report.

With their photographer in step, artists Alina and Jeff Bliumis are on their way to dinner in the Castle Hill section of the Bronx. But the couple doesn’t have a reservation at a restaurant, but rather, at a home of a family they’ve never met.

The Bliumis’ have been sitting down for a meal with random families in the Bronx as part of a new art project called “a painting for a family dinner.”

“We don’t have any agenda for conversation, we just would like to meet them, talk, spend some time, have a conversation and exchange art for food,” says artist Alina Bliumis.

The day NY1 tagged along it was dinner with Luis Geronimo who, lucky for us is a chef, his wife Nicole Perrino, founder of the Bronxmama blog, and their six-year-old daughter Brianna.

Once dinner is over the artists give the family a still life painting of fruits with a message of thanks and pose for a group picture. The portrait is then put on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

The Bliumis’, who live in Brooklyn, did a similar project in Israel. This time, they wanted to get to know their neighbors.

“When I read about the Bronx, when you read news, like basic news, it’s all about lot of about crime unfortunately and I didn’t imagine the Bronx to be such a family neighborhood for families, a lot of kids, schools, libraries parks beautiful homes and its definitely a learning curve,” Bliumis says.

“It’s great to be able to show people, that it might not be what they imagine it to be, that we do sit down as a family and have dinner and that it’s not fast food,” says host Nicole Perrino.

The Blumises have visited about a dozen Bronx families and are still looking for more.

“We don’t have any expectations. We basically come and we’re ready for anything,” Bliumis says.

The project runs through June 2.

Bronxites who are interested can visit www.bliumis.com or call (917) 701-0149.

Sometime in the mid-1990s I was asked by a Jewish arts organization to arrange an art trip to Europe — preferably to look at modern and contemporary art. I immediately suggested that we visit German art museums, since there are so many of them and they have been so active in those fields of collecting and exhibiting. “No! Not German museums!” was the immediate reply. “Our members would never agree to take a trip to Germany!” “Okay,” I said, “how about Vienna, Budapest and Prague?” They loved that idea, so we went ahead with plans for the tour, which ultimately also included Krakow (as a kind of pendant to Prague) and the requisite visit to Auschwitz. When we finally arrived in Vienna, I asked the tour members why they seemed so comfortable there, and why they didn’t seem to think of it as a place with World War II and Holocaust echoes. They remained scarily silent.

Memories of that experience came rushing back to me as I watched the remarkable new 90-minute film “Portrait of Wally,” which tells the shaggy-dog story of the eponymous 1912 Egon Schiele painting of his mistress, Walburga (“Wally”) Neuzil. Deftly directed by Andrew Shea, it’s a tale that I mistakenly assumed would be entirely familiar. After all, I well remember reading the December 1997 New York Times story by Judith Dobrzynski, breaking what turned out to be a major story about the painting’s murky history. And I thought I had followed all the subsequent newspaper accounts of the controversy surrounding Robert Morgenthau, New York’s district attorney at the time, seizing the painting from the Museum of Modern Art, where it had been part of a 1997 exhibition of Schiele’s work from Vienna’s Leopold Museum.

The work, which the Nazis stole in 1939 from the personal collection of a prominent Viennese Jewish art dealer, Lea Bondi Jaray, had morphed from a painting into a cause célèbre. Following a 13-year dispute, Jaray’s heirs were eventually paid a considerable sum by the Leopold Museum; the work was briefly displayed at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, and presumably it can now be seen regularly back in Vienna.

But those facts seem like minor players in a film that carefully reviews the complex history of the painting. The film unfolds episodically. And, episode by episode, “Portrait of Wally” talks to the people behind its convoluted journey: its theft by an Austrian Nazi art dealer, Friedrich Welz; its postwar whereabouts; the chicanery as an Austrian national museum (Belvedere) traded it to noted collector Rudolf Leopold for his museum; and, finally, Jaray’s own attempts to recover the work prior to her death, in 1969.

As if to reinforce the entanglements of the plot, Jaray had even asked Leopold for his expertise in recovering her painting, not knowing of his involvement in its relocation. The carefully paced film is part whodunit complete with fascinating sleuthing, and part morality tale, including appearances by an array of experts in the field of Nazi art loot recovery, along with legal experts and journalists. It even led to the allegedly unjust dismissal of NPR arts reporter David D’Arcy (a co-producer of the film), following apparent pressure from funders on NPR’s management.

Full disclosure: I make a brief cameo appearance in the film, but other museum colleagues of mine apparently didn’t want to take a public stand on the issue. Art collectors and museums don’t come off looking very good here. After all, even New York’s Jewish Museum joined other major museums in filing an amicus brief on behalf of MoMA’s claim that “Portrait of Wally” ought to be returned to the Leopold Museum, from which it was on loan, prior to any settlement of an ownership dispute. Museum folks were concerned that international loan exhibitions would be curtailed; after all, aren’t museum exhibitions more important than justice?

Other Jewish players here include MoMA’s director, Glenn Lowry, as well as noted collector Ronald Lauder, then chairman of MoMA and also chair of the World Jewish Restitution Organization’s Committee on Art Restitution. Unfortunately both declined to be interviewed for the film. While not the subject of this story, Lauder’s record-breaking, $135 million purchase of Gustav Klimt’s spectacular 1907 “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” (now on view at the Neue Galerie) was probably made possible because of the groundbreaking work done in reclaiming the Nazi-stolen (some might conclude twice-stolen!) Schiele painting.

If ever a World War II story was successfully subjected to spin control, it was the Austrians’ redefinition of themselves as victims of Nazism rather than as the welcoming collaborators they actually were following the Anschluss, or annexation, of Austria in 1938. I remain mystified as to why all those Jews who “wouldn’t set foot in Germany” fell for that myth and regularly delight in stuffing themselves with the delicacies purveyed at Vienna’s historic Demel shop. Shea’s film doesn’t go there, but the director has the smarts to have the astute young Jewish-Viennese art historian and Nazi-stolen-art researcher Sophie Lillie remind us on camera that her fellow Austrians generally remain in denial.

As the case was ultimately settled, Jaray’s heirs received substantial payment for the painting (said to be around $19 million, divided among a large number of heirs, since she had no children). But this isn’t a film with a happy ending. We are left with the reminder of how tone deaf at least some Austrians still are when we watch Leopold’s widow (Leopold died in 2010, just prior to the settlement of the case) unveil the painting after its return to the Leopold Museum.

She begins with embarrassingly trite remarks about “famous” Austrian Jews such as Freud, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, etc. She follows this by saying, “I hope ‘Portrait of Wally’ will be the symbol for tolerance, respect and cooperation.” Jaray’s great-nephew, André Bondi, then adroitly reminds us on camera that “tolerance has an aura of condescension about it.” This riveting film tells a story that is more than anything about the intolerance, disrespect and lack of cooperation that held Schiele’s painting hostage not just for the 13 years of its imprisonment in New York, but also for the 71 years since its theft by Welz. And if there’s any suggestion here that things have changed, it’s mostly to remind us of how grudgingly change occurs — when it does. This is not a heartwarming story, but it’s an astonishing and informative film.

Tom L. Freudenheim is an art historian and retired museum director.

“Portrait of Wally” opens May 11 at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan.

Curatorial Statement

We first make Other by seeing, by encountering physically. Looking at the body, we begin to categorize it. Othering is one of the first steps to identifying the self; one learns who she is in relation to/ against another. It’s a method of self-identification, a construction of roles, a learning of boundaries. But it is also a way to discriminate, stigmatize, demonize, condemn. We exoticise, eroticize, fetishize and objectify what seems foreign. The process of making other applies to female bodies, ethnic bodies, queer bodies, immigrant bodies. It’s a mode of exclusion and alienation, of fascination tempered by disgust, a desire covered over by fear.

Each artist in this exhibition is evoking a body or a stand in for the body, and the bodies on view are ethnic, distorted, chaotic, ambiguously gendered. But each artist examines the body through his or her own lens. At times, an overt dialogue of Otherness is made visible; in other cases, it is merely a whisper heard through the layers of multiple voices.

Soho Rep presents
PROFANITY
by Sylvan Oswald, directed by Pam MacKinnon
with David Cale, Dan McCabe, Andy Polk, Rachel Resheff, and Zuzanna Szadowski.

Dorothy Strelsin Playwriting Fellow Workshop
Showings Thursday, May 17 at 7pm and Friday, May 18 at 4pm
Off-site at Robert Moss Theater, 440 Lafayette Street, 3rd Floor (at Astor Place)
Free and open to the public. Email rsvp@sohorep.org for reservations.

Profanity is about two brothers in 1950s Philadelphia who are selling some land that doesn’t exist. Based a little bit on family history and a little bit on Talmud, the play is a dark comedy about the human capacity for destruction.

This workshop is supported by a grant from the Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists, a partnership of Avoda Arts, JDub Records, and the Foundation for Jewish Culture, and made possible with major funding from UJA Federation of New York.

Here’s the New York Schedule:

Congregation Beth Elohim (CBE) (Brooklyn) – Gaga/people (starting May 12)

Saturdays, 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. – taught by Lee Sher

Congregation Beth Elohim (CBE) (Brooklyn) – Gaga/dancers (starting May 12)

Tuesdays, 8:00 p.m. – 9:15 p.m. – taught by Jye-Hwei Lin
Thursdays, 3:00 p.m. – 4:15 p.m. – taught by Candice Schnurr
Sundays, 12:30 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. – taught by Hsin-Yi Hsiang

Mark Morris Dance Center (Brooklyn) – Gaga/people (ongoing)

Wednesdays, 8:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

Classes at Mark Morris in May will be taught by Navarra Novy-Williams and Lee Sher.

 The Gaga Summer intensive will be led by Adi Salant Associate Artistic Director of the Bat Sheva Dance Company.

Aug 18th to the 24th 10am to 5pm in our studio in Park Slope

 For registration to the sumer intensive please visit this link:

Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963.

…

In book after book, Mr. Sendak upended the staid, centuries-old tradition of American children’s literature, in which young heroes and heroines were typically well scrubbed and even better behaved; nothing really bad ever happened for very long; and everything was tied up at the end in a neat, moralistic bow.

Mr. Sendak’s characters, by contrast, are headstrong, bossy, even obnoxious. (In “Pierre,” “I don’t care!” is the response of the small eponymous hero to absolutely everything.) His pictures are often unsettling. His plots are fraught with rupture: children are kidnapped, parents disappear, a dog lights out from her comfortable home.

A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful, suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of children’s interior lives.

Continued at The New York Times

The Foundation for Jewish Culture is proud to be able to reflect on its own relationship with Mr. Sendak.  In 1998 he was honored with the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award for visual arts.  In 2001 the Foundation awarded the film Last Dance (Mirra Bank; First Run Features), which explores the creative alliance between author Maurice Sendak and the modern dance company Pilobous, as they explore the haunting legacy of the Holocaust, with a grant from the film fund.

At the museum, the exhibit has an interactive component – visitors can take these same “identity” photos of themselves and share them online with each other and with the artists.

The point of all this (according to the press release) is to explore “one of the major themes of this Museum: How do we define ourselves as Jews, as Americans or as whatever identity one may choose, given the freedoms America provides. All of our visitors, Jews and non-Jews, Americans and non-Americans, grapple with the complexities of heritage, homeland, and identity.”

The exhibit is open now through August 19.

(Click image for more info)

Three great films on three fascinating topics: kibbutzim (Inventing Our Life), the Pale of Settlement in Europe (How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire), and Israel’s legal system (The Law in These Parts). Even if you’re not in Toronto, or near enough to Toronto to see these films, take note. They’ll likely be in a film festival near you at some point within the next year, and after that, check Netflix!

Need some encouragement? Watch!

Inventing Our Life – May 7

How to Re-Establish A Vodka Empire – May 9 and 13

- picked by Toronto-based blogto.com as one of the top 5 films to watch!

The Law in These Parts – May 9 and 10

has already won vast critical acclaim in Israel and around the world.

Seriously, Amir Gwirtzman is amazing:

Check out the festival flyer below for more info about the rest of the series and get over to the Jazzrael Facebook Page to connect and learn more!