Rachel Wischnitzer and the Photomechanical Foundations of Jewish Art History

0582533 - ÚDU 2024 eng A3 - Přednáška/prezentace nepublikovaná
Balbi, Camilla
Rachel Wischnitzer and the Photomechanical Foundations of Jewish Art History.
[Art within Reach. Photomechanical Reproductions of Works of Art from Print to Digital. Praha, 05.12.2023-06.12.2023]
Způsob prezentace: Přednáška
Pořadatel akce: Ústav dějin umění AV ČR
URL akce: https://photomatrix.cz/conference 
Grant ostatní: AV ČR(CZ) LQ300332301
Program: Prémie Lumina quaeruntur
Institucionální podpora: RVO:68378033
Klíčová slova: Jewish art history * Rimon * Milgroym * Yiddish Publishing * Racher Wischnitzer * El Lissitzky
Obor OECD: Arts, Art history
https://photomatrix.cz/conference

From 1921 to 1924, Berlin became one of the epicenters of the so-called “Weimar Jewish Renaissance” (Brenner, 1996): a golden age of cultural, artistic, and literary activities engaging for the first time with the necessity of addressing a specifically Jewish audience and creating a Jewish public sphere. Favored by the migration of refugee Jewish intellectuals from Eastern Europe, and facilitated by low-cost printing and postage during the years of hyperinflation, the city became an ideal platform for the rise of Jewish books and publications, printed in Germany and exported all over the world. For intellectuals interested in art history, this meant being able to present a large amount of Jewish visual material to the public for the first time. This material had previously not been considered as an object of study – often locked away in archives or located in remote regions of the Middle East or Eastern Europe. Such endeavor brought this material into the Western art-historical and theoretical debate. The most significant attempt in this regard was made by Rachel Wischnitzer, a Russian-born art historian, in her bilingual (Hebrew and Yiddish) magazines Rimon/Milgroym, published in Berlin between 1922 and 1924. These magazines are widely considered ”the most beautiful and interesting journals of Jewish art that ever appeared” (Fuks, 1988).
In the proposed contribution I will reconstruct the material history of the magazines using archival material from the Leo Baeck Institute. This involves investigating the production, reception, and afterlife of the photomechanical reproductions they contained. These reproductions resulted from a complex interaction of academic scholarship and avant-garde research (noteworthy is El Lissitzky’s engagement in producing some of the pictures of the Mogilev Synagogue) which played a role in preserving, in some cases, the only visual evidence of certain works in the aftermath of the war, bringing to light the construction of a first Jewish transnational visual culture.
Trvalý link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0350607