When you imagine “folk art”, what kind of paintings come to mind? Bright and vibrant colors? A flattened, comic book-style perspective? Magical and mythical creatures stretched to otherworldly proportions?
These attributes are all characteristic of folk paintings throughout the world, but the style is also found in European art before the Renaissance, when almost everyone painted that way. Medieval artisans from all socioeconomic backgrounds – rich and poor, rural and urban, self-taught and formally trained – conjured up many-headed dragons and man-eaters. Tarascans, to be conquered and killed by heroic men, or sometimes tamed and leashed by fearless women. But eventually, high culture arbiters began to expect paintings with techniques like vanishing point perspective to portray the physical world in a more literal way.
The fantasy medieval aesthetic doesn’t end there, however. As Jews fled growing persecution in Western Europe, they brought their art with them. Most went to settlement pale, the Eastern European strip in which they were allowed to live. Without the pressure to conform to the society they had left behind, they covered their wooden prayer houses with murals of sacred texts illustrated with flowers, astrological constellations, serpents, lions and even unicorns. There were once more than two hundred such synagogues. Very few survived the Holocaust.
Contemporary New York painter, book artist, writer and publisher Susan Bee is a direct descendant of the Jewish craft tradition. The daughter of renowned European Jewish immigrant artists Myriam And Sigmund Laufer and great-granddaughter of a Torah scribe, Bee continues that legacy and reinvents it for the 21st century. His last solo showwhich runs until April 16 at the AIR Gallery in Brooklyn, offers a portal to the eclipsed magic of the medieval world.
The beating heart of the exhibition is a series of four paintings depicting scenes from the apocalypse, based on a richly illustrated book French manuscript from the 12th century. They offer a surprisingly cheerful depiction of seven-headed semi-humanoid dragons, praying multicolored supplicants, and equally bizarre would-be heroes. She magnified the cheerfulness of the original illuminations with her trademark shimmering, twinkling with gold and neon polka dot embellishments.
“I want to make it colorful,” she said Hyperallergic. “I want people to enjoy it, even if it’s a bit demonic.”
While it may seem odd to illustrate fate and destruction with cartoonish hilarity, communities facing extinction have long turned to cheerful mockery as a bulwark against despair. The Jewish tradition is no exception. The mystical images that adorn the walls of the Gwoździec Synagogue in Ukraine were painted as a result of 1648 Chmielnicki massacres, in which tens of thousands of Jews were killed. THE Purim speech, an annual event celebrated in many Jewish communities during our most carnival holidays, uses dry and often macabre humor to poke fun at those who have tried to exterminate us and celebrate our continued survival. “There is something about a lot of Jewish traditions, including the sense of humor, that is very dark,” Bee observed. “Because of the kind of tragic trajectory of the Jewish people, it’s hard to take an overly optimistic view.” But as his work shows, Jews have long since learned to laugh in the face of evil.
Bee exercised this ability to smile through disaster as she continued her distinct brand of surreal whimsical paintings to allay her own fears during the Donald Trump administration and the COVID-19 lockdown. “I realize that I’m doing this job to lift my spirits, especially during the pandemic where I was very isolated,” she noted.
The wall opposite the “apocalypse” paintings contains a series of paintings based on Catholic saints, each taming a ferocious beast. Just as Jews are supposed to get so drunk on Purim that you confuse the story’s hero with its villain, Bee also plays loosely with the balance between good and evil. Pointing to the dragon being sliced by Saint Margaret, she said, “I feel a little sorry for the dragon. It’s very pathetic… it’s a bit sad. I like animals. Saint Marguerite emerges from the belly of the beast, white as snow. “I wanted it to be really neutral and very pure.”
Another painting represents Saint Martha facing a dragon. As in the original painting, Bee notes, she doesn’t kill the dragon, “she just tames it and then puts it on a leash.” I was interested in the idea of evil, how one tames the personification of evil. What powers does Saint Martha draw on while holding a demon on a leash? What enables him to contemplate with tenderness the wild beast grinding its fangs, the paws of the poor soul dangling from its bloody mouth?
Some may wonder what draws Bee to such explicitly Christian imagery. “I use a lot of medieval Christian iconography, but putting it in my own way.” Replacing their crosses with flowers, Bee brings their stories into the secular world, while retaining their distinctly spiritual air of female power.
Bee saw this form of power in the other 20 women artists, by legendary pioneers such as Nancy Spero and Howardena Pindell, who founded the AIR gallery in 1972 when few other galleries were open to exhibiting work. of feminine art. “It’s kind of a matriarchal situation where women got together and operated a gallery because they couldn’t be exhibited,” the artist said.
A member since 1997, Bee notes that many of those foundresses, and many of the women who have been represented by the gallery over the half-century since, are Jewish. “I think it needs to be talked about,” she said. Many of these women often came from families that invested far more time and effort in making their sons successful than their daughters. But even so, in many ways, women tended to run the show.
While remaining true to her position as a woman and a contemporary artist, Bee says: “It’s a bit strange to say, but I feel like a part of me is a bit medieval in my thinking. Really, the Torah scribes were coming out of a kind of medieval thinking,” Bee recalls. “And even what my parents did with calligraphy and gold leaf, I grew up watching them do manuscripts. […] If I had been embodied at any other time, I would probably have been a manuscript writer.
Like the saints in his paintings, following a long line of Jewish artisans and storytellers, Bee turns visions of evil into playthings. She also tames animals.
