On the retirement of Paul Huvenne as director of the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, the museum offered him a surprise friendship album with contributions by 76 colleagues and friends, mainly art historians and artists. The theme, as I reported in the postscript to Schwartzlist 334, was Beelddenken – thinking in images. The book opens with Paul’s own definition of the word: “Beelddenken is the ability to form and develop thoughts in wordless images and to picture, express and communicate them directly. In Western culture, thinking in images is the repudiated opponent of thinking in words. This bypasses the fact that most words are image thoughts and that the most abstract concepts are easier imagined than articulated.” The engaging and dedicated young woman who thought up and edited the volume, Katharina van Cauteren, to whom the authors as well as the dedicatee are deeply indebted, asked the contributors to write brief reflections on any visual object of their choice, not necessarily a work of art. Continue reading “335 A Hebrew Bible page for Paul Huvenne”
Jewish subjects
333 Food guide to Washington Heights in 1953
A yeshiva boy’s food memories, topped by Mrs. Hrzka’s potluck kitchen on West 181st Street. Continue reading “333 Food guide to Washington Heights in 1953”
202 Old and new wounds
On the painting of an Apocalypse that has already come and will never be really gone, by the Dutch Nazi artist Henri van de Velde.
“Oude en nieuwe wonden,” Het Financieele Dagblad, 31 January 2004, p. 25
309 Pseudo-Semitism
As a reader of Hebrew, Schwartz has long been intrigued by the occurrence of lettering in that language in works of art. He examines a sample of works from the 15th century, now on view in Bruges, to find out how much Hebrew they contain and whether it means anything, either as text or as a symptom of Jewish-Christian relations. His conclusion: it means neither. Continue reading “309 Pseudo-Semitism”
288 A missed appointment in Baghdad
To test the extent to which Iraq would have become a model Middle Eastern democracy by the year 2005, well into the era of neocon nirvana, in 2003 Schwartz and his artist buddy Joseph Semah plan to stage a Purim Play in Baghdad in March 2005. Happy holiday. Continue reading “288 A missed appointment in Baghdad”
282 Reading the prayer book in Isfahan
On the road, especially in faraway places, Schwartz is known to succumb to an upwelling of Jewish sentiment that he never acts on at home. In Isfahan, he attended Friday-night services in the synagogue of a 2,500-year-old community and got a powerful dose of tribal feeling. Continue reading “282 Reading the prayer book in Isfahan”
276 Non-Jewish museums
The historical museums of Europe ignore minorities and therefore lend implicit support to xenophobic national self-images. The rise of high-quality Jewish museums serves as an excuse for historical museums to eliminate the Jewish dimension of European history from their displays. A campaign to redress the balance is called for. Continue reading “276 Non-Jewish museums”
268 Bredius’s Jews
The idea that Rembrandt was sympathetic to Jews and Judaism is so generally accepted that it is seldom questioned critically. One of the pillars of this supposition is the identification of many portrait sitters and models as Jews. Hardly any of these can however stand up to scrutiny.
252 The third poem
A friend of Rembrandt’s wrote four poems on The hundred-guilder print. Only two of them, sweet thoughts on the goodness of Christ, are cited in the literature. The third one, a concise statement of classical Christian anti-Judaism, has been repressed in the Rembrandt literature. Schwartz insists that we acknowledge that Rembrandt shared the same attitudes toward the Jews of all his contemporaries and that he was not sympathetic to Judaism. Continue reading “252 The third poem”