Excerpt from "No More Than An Accident?" by Dore Ashton:

In the modern mind the circumstance of Jewishness has been burdened with many questionable associations, particularly in the arts. Although Harold Rosenberg writes that, "in regard to art, being Jewish appears to be no more than an accident,"1 vulgar associations of Jews with art stubbornly subsist, an extreme example being Nixon's "now the worst thing is to go to anything that has to do with the arts...the arts, you know - they're Jews, they're left wing - in other words, stay away..."2

Despite the recurrence of such cloudy associations, the issue has remained curiously submerged. It is commonplace in our century to find a kind of reflexive yoking of Jews with art, particularly avante-garde art. The incalculable effects of such attitudes on modern art itself are rarely weighted. Accidental as the Jewish artist may be in his own view, he remains a somewhat suspect accident in the eyes of others. Can we continue to regard the fact of being a modern Jewish artist as "accidental," or is there a significant context which must be acknowledged?

  • 1. Harold Rosenberg, "Jews in Art," The New Yorker, 22 December 1975.
  • 2, Nixon to Haldeman: Watergate tapes, Newsweek, 19 August 1974.

    Dore Ashton, professor of art history at The Cooper Union, has served as the curator of art exhibitions both in the United States and abroad and as an art critic for The New York Times. She is author of, among others, Abstract Art Before Columbus, Poets and the Past, The Unknown Shore, A Reading of Modern Art, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, and Yes But...A Critical Study of Philip Guston. She has also contributed "On Harold Rosenberg" (Summer 1980) to Critical Inquiry.

    © 1976 by The University of Chicago. All excerpts appear in Critical Inquiry, Volume 3, Number 2 (Winter 1976). This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of US copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice is carried and that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or reduplication of this text in other terms, in any medium, requires both the consent of the authors and the University of Chicago Press.

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