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.