A Note On Boris Schatz
Written By: Ludwig Lewisohn
To see the work of Boris Schatz assembled, is to gain a new impression of the man’s stature. He was, what is so rare in this age, a great craftsman rooted in a tradition; and it is only from a deeply rooted tradition that powerful art can spring. In his handling of many media with such singleness and wholeness of intention there is a candor and strength and singleness of purpose that recall the greater men of greater ages who with something clawlike and leonine subdued to their purposes — their harmonious and characteristic purposes — paint and marble and bronze and brass.
The tradition behind the work of Schatz is almost unknown — unknown in the world at large, not very well known among the Jewish people. It is the tradition of those humble obscure craftsmen in every corner of the exile who quietly and unostentatiously and almost unconsciously fashioned those chanukiyoth and kiddush cups and spice-boxes and candle-sticks in silver, brass, bronze, copper, which are so infinitely touching in their humble beauty, in their at times aspiring grace. Behind the power and splendor of Schatz bronze reliefs whether used as frames or independent works of art one always feels the throb of that humble traditional art here enhanced, glorified, made permanent.
He was a strong and even a dramatic painter —dramatic, I mean, as a colorist. But to gain a vision of his completeness as an artist and as a Jewish artist it is necessary to see —really to see with one and the same act of vision in such works as The Prophet or Jeremiah or The Ninth of Av at the Wailing Wall the painter and craftsman, the maker of picture and frame as one work, as the Jewish descendant of a thousand Ghetto craftsmen who, adding paint to bronze and brush to hammer, expressed something inimitably Jewish and therefore universal in this blending of vision of subject and intimate union of diverse techniques.
He had delicacy and subtlety too as can be witnessed in his ivories — not so much in the ethrog or bessomim box which, despite their smallness, have something monumental — but in the fine small portrait reliefs. One can almost feel with him as, turning from the energy and resonance of paint and bronze, he felt an added strength in being able to create these small, tender, precise works.
All these aspects of him blend, as one broods a little over his work, into a single impression which, being quite simply no critic in any technical sense of the plastic or graphic arts, I shall leave as my one un-authoritative world on the subject. He was a man of power in an age of men with little or no power. They have graces and subtleties, these others, which he may have lacked. He had power in the Michelangelesque sense. His hand grasped with a large grasp the material of the world and reshaped it into a gesture of noble energy and of Jewish energy. And in that respect he has and has not had any competitor. In creative Jewish power he stands alone.
He had something of the spirit of the prophets and scribes whom he loved to delineate. They spoke in words; he used another medium. In spirit and intention he and they were as one.
From 'Life and Letters'
A Note On Boris Schatz
Written By: Ludwig Lewisohn
To see the work of Boris Schatz assembled, is to gain a new impression of the man’s stature. He was, what is so rare in this age, a great craftsman rooted in a tradition; and it is only from a deeply rooted tradition that powerful art can spring. In his handling of many media with such singleness and wholeness of intention there is a candor and strength and singleness of purpose that recall the greater men of greater ages who with something clawlike and leonine subdued to their purposes — their harmonious and characteristic purposes — paint and marble and bronze and brass.
The tradition behind the work of Schatz is almost unknown — unknown in the world at large, not very well known among the Jewish people. It is the tradition of those humble obscure craftsmen in every corner of the exile who quietly and unostentatiously and almost unconsciously fashioned those chanukiyoth and kiddush cups and spice-boxes and candle-sticks in silver, brass, bronze, copper, which are so infinitely touching in their humble beauty, in their at times aspiring grace. Behind the power and splendor of Schatz bronze reliefs whether used as frames or independent works of art one always feels the throb of that humble traditional art here enhanced, glorified, made permanent.
He was a strong and even a dramatic painter —dramatic, I mean, as a colorist. But to gain a vision of his completeness as an artist and as a Jewish artist it is necessary to see —really to see with one and the same act of vision in such works as The Prophet or Jeremiah or The Ninth of Av at the Wailing Wall the painter and craftsman, the maker of picture and frame as one work, as the Jewish descendant of a thousand Ghetto craftsmen who, adding paint to bronze and brush to hammer, expressed something inimitably Jewish and therefore universal in this blending of vision of subject and intimate union of diverse techniques.
He had delicacy and subtlety too as can be witnessed in his ivories — not so much in the ethrog or bessomim box which, despite their smallness, have something monumental — but in the fine small portrait reliefs. One can almost feel with him as, turning from the energy and resonance of paint and bronze, he felt an added strength in being able to create these small, tender, precise works.
All these aspects of him blend, as one broods a little over his work, into a single impression which, being quite simply no critic in any technical sense of the plastic or graphic arts, I shall leave as my one un-authoritative world on the subject. He was a man of power in an age of men with little or no power. They have graces and subtleties, these others, which he may have lacked. He had power in the Michelangelesque sense. His hand grasped with a large grasp the material of the world and reshaped it into a gesture of noble energy and of Jewish energy. And in that respect he has and has not had any competitor. In creative Jewish power he stands alone.
He had something of the spirit of the prophets and scribes whom he loved to delineate. They spoke in words; he used another medium. In spirit and intention he and they were as one.
From 'Life and Letters'