WARHOL & THE JEWS: IVAN KARP , IRVING BLUM, HENRY GELDZAHLER, LEO CASTELLI, ETC

The Vogels began collecting at a particularly auspicious time—at precisely the moment when New York became the capital of the art world and when the son of a Russian Jewish garment worker from Harlem and the daughter of an Orthodox shopkeeper from Elmira, New York, could easily befriend the people who were shaping culture in New York, many of whom were Jewish émigrés from Europe or upstarts from Brooklyn. These tastemakers grew up as part of a generation that was encouraged, thanks to New Deal programs that subsidized artists, to take art seriously, and they became adults in the wake of World War II, just as New York was replacing Paris and Berlin as the global hub for art and ideas. And, while not explicitly Jewish, the American avant garde was to a great extent shaped by Jewish collectors, dealers, artists, and critics—not least by curators at the Jewish Museum, who mounted a series of influential shows for New York School artists like Jasper Johns starting in the late 1950s. “If you were collecting, what you were valuing was, to a great extent, what Jewish critics told you to value—abstract art, color,” said Catherine Soussloff, a professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

-Tablet magazine
Dec 16 2009