For the first time in 25 years, the works of famed Jewish expressionist painter Ben-Zion Weinman will be shown in a solo exhibition in Brooklyn.
Weinman, known simply by the mononym “Ben-Zion,” was a founding member of “The Ten,” a group founded in 1935 to draw attention to a group of Jewish American artists — including Markus Rothkowitz, later known as Mark Rothko — who hoped to bring expressionist paintings to American museums and galleries. (While the group was called “The Ten,” its artist-members fluctuated, and the group usually maxed out at nine people at any given time.)
This near-minyan of artists, who were also known as “the Whitney Dissenters,” were almost all rejected by the New York City contemporary art institution. At the time, The Whitney focused on the art style known as regionalism, a subtype of realism, or capturing the world as it is. And so, The Ten put on a famous show next door, showcasing their aims to interpret “emotional realities” via expressionism.
The art world is fickle, of course, and eventually Ben-Zion’s work — along with that of the other members of the group — garnered the approval of the art establishment. Over the decades, Ben-Zion’s work has been shown at major museums, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
And yet, the exhibition at Maor Art Gallery, inside a Chabad synagogue where Crown Heights meets Prospect Heights, marks the first time in a quarter-century that a comprehensive survey of Ben-Zion’s work will be on display.
“Ben-Zion’s work represents a unique bridge between traditional Jewish themes and modern expressionist art,” Rabbi Ari Kirschenbaum, founder and director of the Maor Art Gallery, said in a statement. “This exhibition offers members of the public a rare opportunity to discover an important artist whose work has been largely unseen for more than two decades.”
Typically, the gallery, which opened in November, aims to “provide a platform for young, emerging artists,” according to Kirschenbaum. “But we simply could not turn down the opportunity when the Ben-Zion estate reached out to us. I think what they saw in us was that we were doing it with the right intention.”
He added: “I felt that if Ben-Zion can also enable us to get even more exposure, so that more young Jewish artists can be able to showcase their talent, I thought it was a no-brainer.”
Mounted in partnership with the Ben-Zion estate, “Ben-Zion: Hineni – I Am Here” opens on Saturday night and will run until March 8. Until his death at age 89 in 1987, Ben-Zion was a prolific artist: Dozens of works that span decades will be on view, including oils, watercolors and etchings, as well as ink, crayon, mixed media and sculptures. A 20-minute continuous loop documentary screening during the exhibition, “Ben-Zion: In Search of Oneself,” takes its title from a series of self-portraits by the artist, which are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and not on view in the show.
Born in Tsarist Russia (today Ukraine) in 1897 to a cantor, Ben-Zion was yeshiva-educated and initially heading toward the rabbinate. As a child, his family moved to Austria, where he encountered antisemitism in art school in Vienna, and dropped out after a few weeks. He pivoted toward writing Hebrew fairy tales, poems and plays, and then moved to New York in 1920. To support himself, he taught Hebrew, and in the early 1930s, he began painting again, using Jewish scenes from the Torah and everyday Jewish life moments as his subjects.
In 1948, just a few months after the Jewish Museum in New York opened at its current site, the former Warburg Mansion at 1109 Fifth Ave., Ben-Zion’s “Biblical Paintings” were among the first selections shown. In a review, the New York Times describes Ben-Zion as “one of the few moderns who seems able to venture onto the quicksands of religious emotion without going under in a bath of bromides and spurious extravaganzas of feeling.”
By the 1950s, most important galleries and museums began preferring the New York School of abstract expressionist works, like Rothko, over expressionist pieces.
“It was considered the only artistic, spiritual way, even, to go — to complete abstraction. And Ben-Zion remained expressionistic, sometimes figurative, sometimes not,” Tabita Shalem, a curator and the director of the Ben-Zion estate said. “And so a lot of artists, not just Ben-Zion, the important Jewish New York artist, Jack Levine, also — they were all booted to the sidelines.”
Ben-Zion died at his Chelsea brownstone in 1987; his wife, Lillian, opened their five-story home to scholars and art lovers, and managed it until her death in 2012. In 1997, Ben-Zion was honored with a centennial exhibition at the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.
“Ben-Zion’s work tells the story of his journey from Hebrew writer to visual artist during the rise of Nazism,” Maor Art Gallery curator Srulick Ygbi said in a statement. “Despite the dominance of Abstract Expressionism during his lifetime, Ben-Zion managed to maintain his distinctive artistic voice.”
The opening of “Ben-Zion: Hineni – I Am Here” at Maor Art Gallery ( 664 Sterling Pl.) will take place on Saturday from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. Click here for more information.
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