MIra Schor from SCHOR Abstract Marriage CATALOGUE 2013

Ab strAct MArriAgE SCULPTURE BY ILYA SCHOR A AND A RESIA SCHOR A b st rAc t M A r r i Ag E SCULPTURE BY ILYA SCHO R AND RE SI A S C HO R curated by Mira schor 3 3 On the occasion of Abstract Marriage: Sculpture by Ilya Schor and Resia Schor, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) has been fortunate to have had the help of a number of individuals in developing this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue. I am grateful to Mira Schor, curator of the exhibition and daughter of the artists, for making this body of work available to the museum. Provincetown has been the source of inspiration for many, and this eclectic body of work brings a fresh perspective and a unique curatorial opportunity to PAAM. I wish to thank the contributors to the exhibition catalogue: Glenn Adamson, Margaret Olin, and Mira Schor, and Jean Wilcox who created the catalogue’s wonderful graphic design. Most of the object photography was done by John Berens, for which I am grateful. Vital to the exhibition catalogue are the funders who generously donated to this project. I am deeply appreciative that they have recognized the importance of this project. Mira Schor and I are especially grateful to Dina Recanati for her generous support, as well as PAAM’s Partners in Art. Mira is also grateful for the invaluable help of her “two Jens,” Jen Waters for preparation of the artworks and Jennifer Liese for editorial help with the catalogue. The exhibition, along with its publication and accompanying programs, has benefited from the dedication of the PAAM staff. To them, I would like to extend my warmest thanks. Christine McCarthy Executive Director PARTNERS IN ART 3 AcknowlEdgEMEnts christine Mccarthy 4 AbstrAct MArriAgE Mira schor 10 HoMElAnd glenn Adamson 14 A MArriAgE oF tiME And sPAcE Margaret olin 18 PlAtEs 43 cHEcklist oF tHE EXHibition 44 cHronologY And VitAE AllianceBernstein Anonymous Jeffrey Arnstein and Michael Field Deborah Bowles and Derik Burgess Donald Butterfield Annemette Cliggott-Perlt and Douglas Cliggott Arthur Cohen and Daryl Otte David Cowan and James Bennette Paul Dart W. Kent Davis and Carlos Garcia-Velez Kenneth Dietz Doug Dolezal and Greg Welch Tom Donegan and Mark Weinress Yvette Drury Dubinsky and John Dubinsky Eric Eichler Sharon Fay and Maxine Schaffer Michael Fernon and Kenneth Weiss Joe Fiorello Stephen Fletcher and Michael Walden Christopher and Carol Sue Fromboluti George & Helen Segal Foundation, Inc. Arthur and Anne Goldstein Robert Henry and Selina Trieff Judyth and Daniel Katz FUNDERS Brian Koll and David Altarac Joshua and Kathleen Larson Michael MacIntyre Carol McCarthy Stephania and James McClennen Kevin and Jeannie McLaughlin Albert Merola and James Balla David Murphy and John Simpson Jane Paradise and Frank DiGirolamo Anne Peretz Bertram and Marla Perkel Renate Ponsold Motherwell Poss Family Foundation William Rawn III and John Douhan Dina Recanati Alix Ritchie and Marty Davis Seamen’s Bank Kathryn Shafer and Jim Crane Nancy Tieken Berta Walker Mark Westman and Christopher Duff Gail Williams and Dawn McCall Burt and Brunetta Wolfman Joe Zibrak Aviva Blumberg Petey Brown Maureen Connor Karen Cornelius Hermine Ford Tom Freudenheim Mimi Gross Larry Kritzman Sheila Levrant de Bretteville Nancy K. Miller Michele Moss Dina Recanati Alfred Ross Ilene Stone Elizabeth Weed Ab st rAct M A r r iAg E Resia and Ilya Schor under the Magnolia tree on the grounds of the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, mid-1930s. Mi rA sc H o r To introduce my parents by saying that they were artists has always seemed utterly inadequate to describe the variety of types of objects they made, of materials and styles they worked in, and the uniqueness of their work. Indeed, the rich diversity of Ilya Schor and Resia Schor’s art over a span of nearly eighty years presents many fascinating possibilities for curating an exhibition. What if a Renaissance-style jeweler who painted and engraved tender depictions of the lost world of the Eastern European Hasidim and who crafted gloriously elaborate silver Torah Crowns, late in his career turned for his own pleasure and to converse with the modernist art he most admired to making large, Cubist-inspired sculptures? There you have my father’s abstract works from the 1950s in a nutshell. What if a woman who painted sensual abstractions in gouache on paper in the 1950s tapped into a masculine assertiveness of form once she picked up her husband’s metalwork tools to make abstract jewelry and Judaica, and, once established, and also for her own pleasure made powerful sculptural works about terrorism and military aggression? There you have my mother’s abstract works from the 1970s through the turn of the millennium. My father and mother’s sculptural works in metal were not made at the same time. There is a serial or sequential relationship to their production, a gap of decades between the creation of each body of work, but the sculptures that my father had made toward the end of his life adorned the apartment my mother continued to live and work in (page 10). Her own work in sculpture was part of their passionate conversation about art, which began when they met in art school in Warsaw in the early 1930s and continued after my father’s death in 1961 for the rest of my mother’s long creative life. This artistic love story suggested the title of this exhibition, Abstract Marriage. Ilya and Resia Schor were Polish-born and -educated artists who lived in Paris before World War II. After fleeing Paris in May 1940 to Marseilles, they were able to immigrate to America in late 1941, settling in New York City. In the 1930s they each had studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Both looked to the School of Paris for stylistic inspiration. However their road to modernism was different. My father came from a Hasidic Eastern European folk tradition in Galicia—his father was a folk carver and sign painter. When my father was a teenager, with the encouragement of his older brother, who recognized his talent but prudently wanted to make sure he had a marketable profession, he was placed as an apprentice to a goldsmith/engraver. The skills he learned there determined his life as an artist and also his survival and that of my family. Before the war, staying on in Paris where he had arrived on a fellowship in 1937, he made small pieces of jewelry and his first works of Judaica. These garnered critical attention and brought in needed cash. In America his work included paintings, jewelry, and Judaica. Notably, synagogue commissions for Torah crowns and pointers, Chanukioth, Mezuzot, and wood-engraving illustrations for canonical texts by Sholem Aleichem and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel made his name and supported us. Then, as now, aesthetic hierarchies placed craft (and Judaica) into a secondary position and, if one considered oneself a fine artist, as my father did, it could be painful to feel the lesser status of craft applied to one’s work, yet it was precisely because of the nature of his work that my father could make a living as an artist, always a major accomplishment. He made exquisite things, which people could use, and that they treasured. My father’s most productive years were the late 1940s to 1961. There are examples of work in an abstracted style as early as 1950 but in what turned out to be the last few years of his life, he felt relatively secure enough financially to allow himself to explore abstraction in all aspects of his work. In Judaica he worked on major commissions, including The Doors of the 36 for Temple Beth-El of Great Neck, New York, on which 36 silver panels for doors to the Ark depict great figures from the Bible in abstract form (page 6). And he created the larger brass and copper sculptures included in Abstract Marriage, which he had just begun to exhibit before his early death in 1961. In these he moved beyond biblical programs to artworks where recognizable narrative and representation were subsumed to abstract form. During this period, my mother was a painter, in the 1950s working on abstract paintings in a Guston-inspired style, albeit in gouache and relatively small. She did not work with my father in his craft-based practice. However after he died she reasoned that she could not support herself and her children as a painter. She decided she would complete some of his works. She sat down to his worktable and picked up his tools and trade (see back cover). Soon she developed her own style, bringing the abstraction of her paintings into metal. The resistance of the material proved vital. As a result of the tragedy of early widowhood, she unexpectedly found her real work in her life as an artist. Like my father, she too made jewelry and Judaica, though in her case she concentrated on Mezuzot, which required less religious and technical expertise than the Torah Crowns and other liturgical objects my father created; for her, the religious connotations were mainly a scaffold to create monumental sculptures in a small format in silver (page 7). She initially made works for the clientele that my father had developed, many of whom were part of the Jewish community, so, in addition to jewelry, objects with Jewish meaning were something that would appeal to these clients. Like him, she made things that people could use and which they loved. Eventually, and following my father’s model, when she felt more secure financially, she too began to work on abstract sculptures, first small and then larger mixed media bas-reliefs. 4 7 Ilya Schor, The Sacrifice of Isaac, late 1950s. Brass set into a hollow brass tube base; sculpture: 6 x 5 ¼ x 2 in.; base: 3 in. high x 2 in. diameter. Photo: Jen Waters Ab st rAct MArriAg E Ilya Schor, Maquette panel #6 for The Doors of the 36, “The Sacrifice of Isaac,” 1956. Gouache on board, 9 ⅞ x 5 ¼ in. My father’s sculptures were works we lived with daily, the Lares and Penates of our household. Their daily presence initiated a visual dialogue as over the years my mother’s works came to join his, in dynamic juxtapositions: pride of place was given to my father’s most triumphant and largest sculpture, Warrior (page 20), next to which she placed a work of hers that culminates in a similar pointed form (page 8). Coming from two different approaches to modernist traditions, my parents met in curious ways in their sculptures. Despite different approaches to technique, form, and tactility, they each chose solutions to such basic structural questions as how to attach one part of a piece to another that stayed close to a jeweler’s or in general a craft person’s mentality and sense of scale and detail, rather than what we would think of as a typical sculptural tradition. Though they used some soldering techniques carried over from their work in silver, they never used welding. Neither of them ever used systems of duplication such as metal casting. Neither of them had their work fabricated. My father’s sculptures are freestanding although many are not functionally threedimensional: they have a frontal aspect that the viewer faces. Yet, typical of all my father’s work, the back of each sculpture is extremely interesting, because of the way in which forms are joined to each other. Although for him these were very large works, they are crafted with the same delicacy, ingenuity, and attention to detail as his silver work, small parts soldered, hammered, smithed, and joined by handmade copper rivets to create the larger work. Much of this process work is visible on the back, along with marks of soldering and oxidized recesses. Thus the backs of works such as Angel display not only process but also a revelatory psychological duality: the back of Angel is like the dark side of the angel Lucifer (page 28). Only Weather Vane, in keeping with the function of its subject, offers dramatically shifting three-dimensional views as it spins round from perspectives where light falls brightly on flat, wide planes of brass to others where narrow, curved, and soldered areas cast an aura of darkness (page 27). My mother’s sculptures are outright bas-reliefs. She brought a painter’s mentality to these works and was happy to turn to materials with color inherent to them, like the bright primary colors of the Plexiglas she used, in addition to color applied through brush and paint on paper. The works are composed of layers of white metal or brass, clear and colored Plexiglas, and gouache painting on paper. In a manner related to my father’s small rivets, her method of attaching these layers—using handmade, flat-headed, two-pronged metal clips—is equally personal and ingenious (page 32). In keeping with the greater aggressiveness of form in her work, these clips, sharp edged and spiny, are dangerous to handlers of the work and to the surfaces they rest on. I have chosen to focus this exhibition on their abstract sculptures even though this may seem like a counterintuitive choice, given that these works are not directly concerned with two major aspects of their practice and how they made their living as artists: they are neither jewelry, that is to say, craft, and they are not related to Judaica, otherwise an important aspect of their work, especially in the case of my father. However they are significant works in relation to the art of the times in which they were produced, my father’s work in relation to sculpture of the New York School, and my mother to 1980s postmodernist painting and sculpture, both for how their works conformed to contemporary styles and ideologies, and for how their relation to art histories, scale, and craft made them different. Nevertheless, although Abstract Marriage deliberately focuses on work that is not connected with either jewelry or Judaica, both Margaret Olin and Glenn Adamson, who have contributed essays in this catalogue, are drawn to the themes of Judaism and craft. Left: Resia Schor, Mezuzah, “Lord You Have Been Our Refuge in Every Generation,” 1986. Silver, 8 ½ x 5 x 1 ¼ in. Right: Ilya Schor, Mezuzah, Sacrifice of Isaac, n.d. Silver, 6 ⅛ x 2 ⅛ x 1 ¼ in. Photo: Mira Schor Olin usefully examines the meaning and impact of the Second Commandment against the making of false idols on visual culture for Jewish artists. Adamson notes the quality, charm, and deep religious conviction of my father’s work in jewelry and Judaica. This is a true reflection of my parents’ dual loyalties to twentieth-century art (Cézanne, Braque, Picasso) and to Judaism. They endured virulent popular and institutional anti-Semitism in Poland, and they were refugees from Hitler’s Europe, losing their entire families and their close friends in the Holocaust. As such, their relation to Judaism and the life of the Jews in pre-war Europe was very different from many of the American Jews who were founding members of the New York School and the Club. My father had the lived experience of the culture of Hasidism not as something quaint or a shameful background to be cast off in the new world but as an authentic philosophy and folk life. And yet they both were part of a remarkable generation of secular, mostly leftist, highly educated Jews who flourished between the wars, most of whom perished in the Shoa. In terms of adaptation to post-war American modernism, my father was perhaps hampered by his deep relationship to Judaism. He had one foot in Sholem Aleichem’s shtetl, one foot in European modernism. This duality also was a strength: he made a living and developed a reputation because he was respected by Jews from a wide spectrum of religious affiliations and cultural identifications. For assimilated, reform, post-war American Jews, he represented a pure touchstone of a lost world of the old country and the old religious ways that they only knew through legend, memory, and literature. For more Orthodox American Jews, his scholarly knowledge of religion and his first-hand Resia Schor, Fragmented Mezuzah, 1976. Brass, Plexiglas, Mezuzah text, and gouache on paper, 12 x 9 x 1 in. 6 9 Ab st rAct MArriAg E Resia Schor, Untitled (Blue Abstraction), 1981. Painted wood, white metal, gouache on paper, Plexiglas, 43 x 17 x1 ⅞ in.; and Ilya Schor, Warrior, c. 1959–60, brass, c. 51 ½ x 12 x 6 in. (approx. 72 in. high with custom metal base) relation to Eastern European Hasidism and folkloric culture gave him a real authority of philosophical knowledge and cultural immersion in the life of the Hasidim. Judaism’s injunction against figural representation was not an issue for my mother: though she received a traditional religious education and her father was very observant, she was brought up in a more Westernized environment, without a Hasidic background. While my father had to break away from his passionate affection for narrative when he turned to abstraction, for my mother pure form and materiality were always her focus, and once she started making her bas-relief bronze and mixed-media plaques, she sometimes did something radical when working with the Mezuzah text: exteriorizing it and cutting it up as just another aspect of form and collage (page 7). My parents were passionately interested in contemporary political developments, with a steadfastly leftist point of view. In that light it is particularly fascinating to note the role that symbols of patriotism and military hardware played in my mother’s work, building perhaps from my father’s piece Warrior. For her own pleasure, for the most part devoid of an audience, she made powerful works about symbols of militarism and even terrorism. Several works were devoted to abstracted representations of the Nike of Samothrace, which she had sketched as a young artist enrolled in art history courses at the Louvre before the war (see pages 19, 21, and 33). In the 1980s and ’90s, she saved newspaper clippings that inspired works depicting planes such as the B-2 Stealth bomber (pages 40–41) and the A6 Intruder, noting the exact names of the military hardware on the back of the works. Her most violent piece, a maze of jagged metal overlaying a painting of exploded airplane fragments, was inspired by the Lockerbie bombing (page 23). She felt the impact of war on innocent individuals deeply, and at the same time she was attracted to powerful geometrical form. Only a few of these larger works were displayed in her home and even fewer were exhibited publicly. Although I followed her studio work closely, even I had not seen every one of the larger works included in Abstract Marriage, so that finding and unpacking them for the first time in the years since her death has been an incredible experience. These works are evidence of a lifetime of devotion to making art, with art fairs and fashions totally beside the point, rather foregrounding profundity of feeling, clarity of formal expression, and persistence in making art to save your life. Perhaps The Black Sun of Melancholy (page 39), a dramatic, strongly colored work made in 1988, when she was seventy-eight years old, twenty-eight years after my father’s death, best epitomizes the depth of my mother’s enduring love for my father and exemplifies how she converted her great grief into art that could be joyful and dark at the same time. I gave the work its title based on a line in one in Gerard de Nerval’s series of sonnets Resia Schor, New York, 2005. Photo: Chie Nishio “Les Chiméres,” called “El Desdichado,” a copy of which she attached to the back of the work, with an arrow pointing to the last line of the first stanza: Je suis le Ténébreux,—le Veuf,—l’Inconsolé, Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie: Ma seule Étoile est morte,—et mon luth constellé Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancholie. (I move in darkness—widowed—beyond solace, / The Prince of Aquitaine in a ruined tower. / My one star is dead; the black of sadness / Eclipses the constellation of my guitar.—translation Daniel Mark Epstein, The New Criterion, December 2000) In Spanish, “el desdichado” means the unfortunate, the disinherited, or refers to fatal destiny. Yet this work, despite the black sun at its core, is strong, emphatic in color and form, somehow triumphant. My mother was not disinherited. Rather, she valued and nurtured my father’s rich legacy and grafted her strength and her grief into a new body of work, continuing their artistic conversation, the “constellation of her guitar” never eclipsed. 8 11