Art

In addition to its Center for Jewish Artists, the Museum will collect and exhibit significant works of art by important — particularly American — Jewish artists, primarily of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Museum will, however, not forget the important works of art created by Jews elsewhere. Thus works by artists such as Camille Pissaro, Marc Chagall, Amadeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, Jules Pascin, Moise Kisling and Mane-Katz, will hang in its galleries side-by-side with those by Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Raphael Soyer, Ben Shahn, Morris Louis and Roy Lichtenstein, and a range of emerging stars within the art-world firmament.

There will be a particular focus on American painters and sculptors of the 20th century. In the dialogue between abstraction and representation that defines the American art scene from the 1930s to the present time, Jewish artists have been intensely involved. Moreover, as they shifted from being immigrants to being native-born, the questions they have addressed shift from a primary focus on being part of the American scene to that of how to address their Jewishness within an art world that, for sixteen centuries, has been distinctly Christian.