What is meant by Jewish art today, and how does Jewish experience and identity feed into the critical attitudes of contemporary artists?
This autumn, two major exhibitions are taking place in London: Philip Guston at Tate Modern, and Nicole Eisenman at the Whitechapel Gallery. Guston and Eisenman at times foreground Jewish themes in their work, and it has been argued that their styles of painting are connected to their Jewishness. Both, at different moments in time, set about to witness and protest the problems of the world around them. Their work helps us think today about Jewish radical thought in new ways.
Dr. Mark Godfrey is an art historian and curator, and author of ‘Abstraction and the Holocaust’ (Yale University Press, 2007). Between 2007 and 2021 he was a Senior Curator at Tate Modern. He was one of the originating curators of the current Philip Guston retrospective, and co-curated the Nicole Eisenman retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery.
