ALETHEIA



I’ve gotten many calls since my last posting comparing the work of my good friend David Schoffman with that of my departed colleague R. B. Kitaj. Not a few people questioned my bona fides, challenging my ability, as a lapsed Catholic, to evaluate the Jewish nature of these two giants’ work. Yishai Bar Laytzan even went so far as to call me a “teleological Torquemada” and that I should “stay the hell away from Jewish history.” The Reverend Deacon Stephen Tigglight, despite being a great patron of the arts in his native Wythenshawe , expressed his strong reservations regarding my juxtaposition of Schoffman’s oeuvre to the Pentateuch. He said I hadn’t managed to assimilate the critical aesthetic differences between works that “were divinely inspired and those divinely produced.”

I stand by my assessment.

Forgetting Kitaj for the moment, David Schoffman’s reliance on formal, non-objective, non-narrative pictorial strategies is fully consistent with uniquely Judaic apophatistic skepticism. His work demands a visualization that avoids materiality. As a lapsed Catholic I am uniquely qualified to draw the appropriate distinctions. Christian art is pedagogical, Jewish art is philosophical. Christian art is illustrative, Jewish art is abstract.

The forms in Schoffman’s work confirm the paradoxical Jewish predicament of depiction versus idolatry. His rejectionist stance toward descriptive imagery solves this dilemma through his elastic use of ambiguous symbolism. Drawing from the Kabbalah, Schoffman notates and validates with great originality multiple readings of his work. To stand in front of a Schoffman is like being blinded by the Shekhinah. One is present to a palpable presence yet one remains unsure as to the exact nature of what one is seeing.

If that’s not Jewish art, I don’t know what is.

Closer To Jabès

With the death of R. B. Kitaj, the designation of preeminent contemporary Jewish painter has been bestowed upon David Schoffman. The contrasts in temperament and preoccupation of these two distinguished artists could not be more profound. Kitaj was the exquisite illustrator of themes and narratives germane to the modern, mostly secular Jewish world. His depictions of illustrious figures like Walter Benjamin, Kafka and Isaiah Berlin were indicative of his deep attachment and identification with these towering and uniquely Jewish intellectuals.

Schoffman, by contrast, eschews the literal while cultivating the riches of Jewish abstraction. Having grown up in a religious home in a religious neighborhood in Brooklyn, Schoffman’s complicated and lyrical reflections on the Jewish tradition draw as much from antiquity as they do from contemporary Jewish life. Like Schoenberg, Schoffman is obsessed with the relationship of Moses and Aaron and the uncanny nature of monotheism. The improbable attraction toward the invisible, the unempirical and the silent has been one of Schoffman’s salient themes.

Don’t look for stories or learned quotations in David’s work. In Kitaj you find an almost folkloric gloss of places and people, very much in the tradition of Chagall. Schoffman is more of a philosopher, an evoker rather than a declaimer, more in the spirit of Reinhardt, Rothko and Newman. However, unlike his predecessors, Schoffman has little patience with the severity of reductive self-denial. His is a world fully invested in the senses, a world rich in references to both the pious and the worldly, the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi, the Florentine and Venetian.

Kitaj, with his lovable pedantry will be missed. Schoffman is a great admirer of, if not the work, the man and the artist. Some may incline toward Kitaj’s lovely exemplification of ideas, his richly mannered citations and his beautifully bright colors. I for one prefer the complexity and ambiguity of Schoffman’s inventions. Like arcane Talmudic texts, what is expressed is secondary to the gorgeous inevitability of its logic.

Schoffman’s “The Body Is His Book” is not a rumination on the Pentateuch as much as it is the necessary addition of an important new chapter.