Here's the introduction of what was written in the Museum newsletter:
Europe's Pioneering Jewish Artists Celebrated in New Exhibition
Maurycy Gottlieb, Jesus in Front of his Judges, 1877-1879
Jerusalem, August 29, 2013 – The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, presents an exhibition exploring the work of fourteen pioneering Jewish artists living in 19th-century Europe. Each of these artists, representing the first and second generations of Jews to enter the art world previously closed to them, straddled the fine line between maintaining their Jewish origins while pursuing a field in which they depicted nudes and even Christian subjects for their patrons. Making an Entrance: Jewish Artists in 19th-Century Europe also challenges the long-held premise that the "first Jewish artist" was Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, protégée of the Rothschild family, and presents the works of the lesser-known artists Salomon Pinhas from Kassel and Jacob Liepmann from Berlin, who worked in Germany at the very beginning of the 19th century.
I wonder why you call this picture Christian. The fact that Yeshu figures in it doesn't make it Christian.
ReplyDeleteIt's absolutely no wonder there's Jewish entourage in this picture. The action takes place in Jewish society of that time. It's true, it's a new tendency in Jewish and European art of that time - to reconstruct the real artifacts of the epoque shown to the contrary of the pictures in the previous centuries where the heroes and the background were the same style as the era of the author.
Miriam, the subject is Christian, but the picture itself is so very Jewish. That's what I find so fascinating about it.
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