Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust

Tracing the development of artistic work from the late 1930s to the present, this work looks at Jewish themes in American art. Few artists responded openly to the Holocaust until the 1960s, when it began to act as a galvanizing force and produce more direct imagery.

Jewish themes in American art were not very visible until the last two decades, although many famous twentieth-century artists and critics were and are Jewish. Few artists responded openly to the Holocaust until the 1960s, when it finally began to act as a galvanizing force allowing Jewish-American artists to express their Jewish identity in their work. Baigell describes how artists initially deflected their responses into abstract forms or by invoking Biblical and traditional figures and then in more recent decades directly confronted Holocaust imagery and memory. He traces the development of artistic work from the late 1930s to the present in a moving study of a long-overlooked topic in the history of American art. -- The first book on the subject. -- Chronicles the change from abstraction to greater realism in Jewish-American artists' attempts to portray the horrors of the Holocaust.