Fig. 1. Gallery view exhibition MODERN: Van Gogh, Rietveld, Léger and Others, with Jozef Israëls, Eleazar Herschel, Stedelijk Museum, May, 18, 2023 – Sept., 24, 2023. Photography Peter Tijhuis.
Fig. 2. Jozef Israëls, Eleazar Herschel, 1847, oil on canvas, 62,3 × 52,7 cm, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, gift of The Association for the Formation of a Public Collection of Contemporary Art in Amsterdam (VVHK), 1949.
As Edward van Voolen wrote in an illuminating reflection on the influence of Jozef Israëls’s Jewishness on his artistry:
There was little or no interest in Jewish subjects in general, whether religious ideology or knowledge of Judaism or visual art, among the Dutch Jewish community itself in the 19th century. […] unlike in Germany, Austria-Hungary or Russia, Jews in the Netherlands were not forced to defend their emancipation. Consequently, the need for a Jewish religious self-definition or for a Jewish cultural renaissance as occurred elsewhere in Europe was not experienced here. This perhaps explains Israëls’ silence and his sometimes negative reactions to the debate over Jewish art. The core issue for Israëls was the social acceptance of Jews; not his profile as a Jew. […] Unlike elsewhere in Europe, nothing prevented his admission to any education. There is no indication that he was ever excluded from participation in official exhibitions or barred as a member anywhere […] There is every reason to believe that Israëls always took pride in considering himself a son of the ancient race: his being a Jew was as natural to him as his Dutchness, and especially his successful artistry.
This, according to Van Voolen, makes it clear why Jewish themes are quite exceptional in Israëls’s oeuvre and appear mainly only in his later work. Only his paintings A Son of the Ancient Race (1889) and Saul and David (1898) date from the nineteenth century, and it was in the 1880s that Israëls first pointed out his Jewish background (fig. 3). Both paintings have been associated in art historical literature primarily with his artistic kinship with Rembrandt. In 1909, referring to A Son of the Ancient Race, depicting a Jewish seller of secondhand clothes and other things, Israëls said, “That old clothes Jew of mine was a Jew. But not because it was a Jew, I painted him […] a painter paints as a painter and not because he is a Jew.” Did Israëls only intend to paint both canvases in the tradition of Rembrandt, or would he have read reports of the pogroms against Jews in Russia around 1889, indicating some connection between this anti-Semitism and his work?
Fig. 3. Jozef Israëls, A Son of the Ancient Race, 1889, oil on canvas, 180 × 137 cm, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, gift of The Association for the Formation of a Public Collection of Contemporary Art in Amsterdam (VVHK), 1949, NOT ON VIEW IN THE EXHIBITION.
Writer Ruben Brainin, during an interview with Israëls in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums on April 27, 1902, noted: “Now it is our duty to fight anti-Semitism, to protest against the injustice and violence done to us.” Not only in Russia but also in countries such as France and Germany, anti-Semitism had greatly increased and intensified since the 1880s. Newspapers, including those in the Netherlands, wrote about it more frequently in those years, so Israëls will certainly have been aware of this.
Jozef Israëls’s son, Isaac, is known to have been an admirer of the writings of the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, who had progressive opinions in the field of the visual arts. For example, in the famous diary published during Edmond’s lifetime that they kept together, they reported on the influence of Japanese art on modern European painters. On December 20, 1885, they wrote: “With the Japanese, craft is already to such a high degree art, that with them there is not, as with us, that clear dividing line between craft and art, for example, between a cabinetmaker and a painter.” On the other hand, the Goncourts are notorious for their anti-Semitism, especially in their novel Manette Salomon, published in 1867, which is a chronicle of Parisian art life in which Manette Salomon appears, a Jewish model who ruins the painter Coriolis because of her greed. As cosmopolitan as the Goncourts were artistically, they were anti-Semitic when it came to Jews. It is instructive to see that such artistically progressive and educated thinkers could be so narrow-minded. In Manette Salomon, the Goncourts provide an anti-Semitic stereotype of Manette as a wife after she marries Coriolis. They speak of the “innate greed of her race” and transform the once beautiful Manette into a Jewish “goddess of fate” with “piercing eyes.”
In the exhibition, Israëls’s portrait of Eleazar Herschel hung near a quotation on the wall by the Goncourt brothers, in which they condemn Salon art, such as Willem Martens Dream of Love, in favor of the moderns, such as Israëls and Jan Toorop. In 1846, Israëls probably only intended to paint this portrait in the tradition of Rembrandt, and presumably did not want to make a social statement. But the combination of the painting of the Jewish man and the source reference “Edmond and Jules de Goncourt” under the quote might remind the astute observer of the growing anti-Semitism in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
In room 0.6, actress Sarah Bernhardt appeared twice on a wall of posters representative of modernity. She appeared on a poster by Jules Chéret for rice powder to cover the face, and on a theater poster by Alphonse Mucha for the play La dame aux camélias, in which she starred (fig. 4). Bernhardt’s mother was a Jewish native of Amsterdam who moved to Paris, where her daughter was born. Henriette Rosine Bernard, as she was actually called, received a Catholic upbringing and was baptized at age eleven. Bernhardt presented herself as Jewish or Catholic, depending on the circumstances. During her career, she was the victim of numerous anti-Semitic attacks in the French press and was insulted and threatened by anti-Semitic elements in the public.
Fig. 4. Alphonse Mucha, La dame aux camélias, Sarah Bernhardt, 1896, lithography, 205,8 × 75,6 cm, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, gifted 1934.
As France tried to boost its national ego after its defeat at the Battle of Sedan in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, the need for a scapegoat increased. As a minority group, Jews were a target to divert attention, when in fact facing and coping with political and socioeconomic difficulties should have been the focus. The press frequently wrote about alleged misdeeds of the Jews, who were said to be to blame for all sorts of major problems. In 1873, Bernhardt was so tired of being made out to be a German Jewess in disguise that she asked theater and music critic Benoît Jouvin to rectify his review of the Comédie Française’s revival of the play Dalila:
I am French, absolutely French. I proved it during the siege of Paris and La Société d’Encouragement du Bien awarded me a medal. Would they have done this if I were a German? All of my family came from Holland. Amsterdam was the birthplace of my simple ancestors. If I have a foreign accent—which I very much regret—it is cosmopolitan, but not Teutonic. I am a daughter of the great Jewish race and my somewhat uncultivated language is the result of our forced wanderings.
That Bernhardt was the target of anti-Semitic caricatures and verbal abuse was undoubtedly related to her iconic status as France’s most famous actress. In 1883, for example, her former colleague Marie Colombier published the defamatory Memoires de Sarah Barnum. During the Dreyfus Affair, which divided France into two camps between 1894 and 1906, that of opponents and supporters of the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was falsely accused of spying for the Germans, Bernhardt sided with Dreyfus.
After writer Émile Zola demanded a public trial and rehabilitation on January 13, 1898, in his notorious open letter “J’accuse” (I accuse), published on the front page of the French newspaper L’Aurore, Bernhardt did not believe that as a beloved actress she could publicly help Dreyfus. She feared her expression of support would be used to further discredit Dreyfus and his advocates and dared to express her support only directly to those involved. To Zola, in response to his open letter, she wrote: “I considered thanking [Auguste] Schreurer-Kestner [Vice President of the Senate and ardent Dreyfusard], but knowing that everything that admirable man does is considered criminally suspect, I thought that if it became known that […] an actress admired his brave deeds, this would be used against him.” The Dreyfus affair even led to disagreements with her own son, who was staunchly anti-Dreyfus. In public, Bernhardt responded to the affair mainly by emphasizing her “Frenchness,” as did the Alsatian-born French Dreyfus himself, whose sentence was not overturned until 1906.
Room 0.14 of the exhibition featured Wassily Kandinsky’s lithograph Small Worlds IV from his time teaching at the Bauhaus, between 1922 and 1933 (fig. 5). On April 15, 1923, Kandinsky wrote to composer Arnold Schoenberg asking if he would apply for the post of director of the Musikhochschule in Weimar, where the Bauhaus was also located at the time. After Kandinsky attended a performance of Schoenberg’s innovative music in Munich in 1911, the two became friends. The great artistic affinity they felt formed the basis of their friendship. At the outbreak of World War I, Kandinsky had returned to Moscow from Germany, and after the war he was involved in the new post-Russian Revolution art education there. When he returned to Germany in 1922, contact between himself and Schoenberg had been broken for years. Kandinsky hoped they could inspire each other again in Weimar. The lithograph Small Worlds IV, with its sharply defined geometric forms, anticipated the geometrically abstract works Kandinsky created beginning in the mid-1920s. In compositions with circles and straight lines, with which he wanted to break the old laws of harmony, he saw a parallel with Schoenberg’s dissonances, which expressed a musical interaction between “spheres.”
Fig. 5. Wassily Kandinsky, Kleine Welten IV / Small Worlds IV, 1922, lithography, 35,9 x 28,9 cm, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Schoenberg immediately reacted dismissively to Kandinky’s invitation, accusing him of anti-Semitism based on information from Alma Mahler, who was married to Bauhaus director Walter Gropius until 1920: “I have heard that even a Kandinsky sees only evil in the actions of Jews and in their evil actions only Jewishness, and at this point I give up hope of any understanding. It was a dream. We are two kinds of people. Definitely!” Kandinsky replied, “I like you as an artist and as a human being, or perhaps as a human being and as an artist. In such cases I think of nationality in the very last place—I am totally indifferent to that.” Schoenberg did not yield. He might also have heard that the Bauhaus had complied with the request of the authorities in Weimar to provide a list of the number of Jewish students. In a long letter, Schoenberg wrote to Kandinsky, among others: “If I walk down the street and every person looks at me to see whether I am a Jew or a Christian, I can hardly tell everyone that I am the one for whom Kandinsky and some others make an exception, although of course that Hitler thinks otherwise.” Schoenberg went on to write that he had not yet lost the respect he once had for Kandinsky. He hoped that they would not avoid each other if they met again.
The latter happened by chance in 1927, during their vacations. In a photograph of that meeting, both couples pose for the camera. The Schoenbergs look serious; the Kandinskys smile. When the Nazis came to power, Schoenberg fled first to Paris in 1933 and shortly thereafter to the United States. Kandinsky fled as an entartete artist to Neuilly-sur-Seine. In 1936, he received a greeting from Schoenberg through a visitor. Kandinsky responded with a letter recalling memories of their first meeting. In a deeper, artistic sense, their actual first meeting was the 1911 concert where he first heard Schoenberg’s compositions. Although there came a break between the two of them in human terms, a work like Small Worlds IV and Kandinsky’s many references to music in his theoretical writings attest to his enduring artistic bond with Schoenberg.
I owe many thanks to Evelyn and Chris van Weel, Stichting Erfgoed Jozef en Isaac Israëls; Ariane Zwiers, Jewish Cultural Quarter, Amsterdam; and Emma Harjadi Herman, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, for their valuable comments.
Maurice Rummens is an art historian and a scientific researcher at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam since 1999. He obtained his PhD at the University of Amsterdam on The Seduction of the Decorative, a thesis on the interfaces between design and visual art in theory and practice. He has published about modern art in magazines, including Jong Holland, Kunstschrift, The Burlington Magazine, and in publications of the Open University, Heerlen, and the Stedelijk Museum. He co-curated the exhibitions Roger Bissière: ‘La cathédrale’, tapestry (2000), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Tahiti in the Alps, 1918 – 1928 (2001), The Oasis of Matisse (2015), MODERN: Van Gogh, Rietveld, Léger and Others (2023), and was curator of the exhibition Chagall, Picasso, Mondrian and Others: Migrant Artists in Paris (2019-20) at the Stedelijk Museum.
Edward van Voolen, ‘Jozef Israëls: zoon van het oude volk’, in: Dieuwertje Dekkers et al., Jozef Israëls 1824 – 1911 , Zwolle 1999, pp. 55-70.
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Manette Salomon, translated by Tina Kover, with an introduction by Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze, London 2017.
Idem, Pages from the Goncourt Journals, translated and edited by Robert Buldick, foreword by Geoff Dyer, New York 2006.
Dorian Bell, ‘The Jew as Model: Anti-Semitism, Aesthetics, and Epistemology in the Goncourt Brothers’ Manette Salomon’, MLN – Modern Language Notes. Baltimore 124 (sept. 2009) 4, pp. 825-847.
Carol Ockman and Kenneth E. Silver et al., Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama, tent. cat. New York (The Jewish Museum), New York / New Haven / London 2005.
Stéphanie Cantarutti and Cécilie Champy-Vinas (red.) tent. cat. Sarah Bernhardt, Paris (Petit Palais) 2023.
Jelena Hahl-Koch (ed.), Arnold Schoenberg Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures and Documents, London / Boston 1984.
Esther da Costa Meyer en Fred Wasserman (eds.), et al., Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider, tent. cat. New York (The Jewish Museum), London / New York / Paris 2003.
Nicholas Fox Weber, The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism, New York 2009, pp. 228-232.
