Customer Reviews

Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This academic book is interesting, well written and laudably researched. The family background and the interrelationships with other contemporary academic and cultural luminaries was of particular interest to me. However, the illustrations were rather disappointing, especially with regard to scale and would have been more effective in a larger book format. The large number of images in black and white also lost considerable visual impact.

Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art, by Ezra Mendelsohn, published by Brandeis University Press was a co-winner of the 2003 AAASS/Orbis Books Prize, sponsored by Orbis Books in London, for an outstanding English-language book on any aspect of Polish affairs.

The other winner was Jolanta T. Pekacz's Music in the Culture of Polish Galicia, 1772-1914 (University of Rochester Press).

The Prize committee - Izabela Kalinowska-Blackwood, Andrzej Tymowski, and Halina Filipowicz - wrote the following about the winning volumes:

Both books are exemplary monographs based on meticulous archival research. Both provide an important point of entry for exploring a lost symbolic world in a rather out-of-the-way place, at least in geopolitical terms: the multiethnic province of Galicia in the Habsburg Monarchy. Ezra Mendelsohn's elegantly written book concentrates on the work of Maurycy Gottlieb, a founding father of modern Jewish art, who was born in a small town known in Polish as Drohobycz, now associated primarily with the internationally acclaimed writer Bruno Schulz. Jolanta T. Pekacz's study addresses an understudied area - popular music genres in nineteenth-century Galicia - within a well-informed historical framework. In examing their topics, both Mendelsohn and Pekacz also tell us much about the multiethnic society of nineteenth-century Galicia - about its social tensions, divisions, and hierarchies, and about about its strength and fragility.

Mendelsohn's and Pekacz's studies not only expand our knowledge and understanding of the social and symbolic world of old Galicia, but they also challenge our tendency to think of culture - any culture - as a static and homogeneous entity (if only to make it possible to talk about it). To do justice to the complexity of their project, both Mendelsohn and Pekacz keep alive several perspectives, chief among them the perspective of cultural studies. They show that, contrary to a common misconception, cultural studies are not primarily concerned with banal populism. They agree that all forms of cultural production need to be studied - not as self-contained and independent entities, knowable apart from their own time and place, but rather in their particular historical contexts. They also agree that the perspective of cultural studies offers fresh insights into the underlying importance of literature and the arts in the formation of national identities.

Ezra Mendelsohn's Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art and Jolanta T. Pekacz's Music in the Culture of Polish Galicia, 1772-1914 are highly original studies on the cutting-edge of several disciplines: social history, history of ideas, cultural studies, Jewish studies, Polish studies, and Polish Jewish studies. Both books offer the rare intellectual pleasure that goes with disentangling intricate historical patterns behind the mythologized image of Galicia as a land of pride and tears, where good men and women were busy shaking the dead hand of the past.