Walter Benjamin and art

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John Berger

"The principal action in A Painter of Our Time takes place across a stretch of some four years in the life of the fictional Hungarian painter Janos Lavin. The story is told in part by Lavin’s friend John, who resembles John Berger in several ways--not least in his being an art critic during this period--and who has discovered Lavin’s journal in the latter’s studio after his return to Budapest in October, 1956. The text alternates between passages from the journal and the interpolations of John, who fills in the gaps, narrating more fully the events surrounding the reflections recorded in the journal"--Summary taken from enotes website.

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Melissa Raphael

It is now widely agreed that the biblical Second Commandment neither limits Jewish art to the production of ceremonial artifacts nor to abstract or distorted images. Raphael goes further and argues that while creation and revelation are inherently aesthetic moments both for God and the world, the assumption that Jewish religious tradition is nonetheless mediated in words, not pictures, has left Jewish art with no significant role to play in Jewish theology and ethics. Despite a substantial body of literature on the history and diversity of Jewish art, almost nothing has been published on the role of the visual image in Jewish theology, historiography, and gender studies. In conversation with modern Jewish theology, Jewish historians' recent re-evaluation of the role of the visual in Jewish culture, and with the growing body of Christian theological aesthetics, Raphael engages several areas of contemporary debate relevant to students, scholars and the general reader. Arguing that the creation story in Genesis 1 mandates a Jewish theology of image, Raphael asks how and why images of Jewish women as religious subjects appear to be doubly suppressed by the Second Commandment and absent from modern Jewish culture, when images of observant male Jews have become legitimate, even iconic, representations of Jewish holiness. Against a tide of scholarly opinion that argues against the aestheticization of the Holocaust, she further suggests that ‘devout beholding’ of images of holocaustal suffering can correct post-Holocaust theologies of divine absence that have been skewed by the sub-theological aesthetics of the sublime. Raphael concludes by proposing that the relationship between God and Israel ultimately composes itself into a unitary dance or moving image by which God’s presence in the world can be represented to witness.

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Mary Anderson

When she practically witnesses the theft of a valuable painting, twelve-year-old Mattie does her own detective work to trap the thief.

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Rebecca Solnit

A multidisciplinary compilation of nineteen incisive essays ranges from the formality of traditional art criticism to intimate, lyrical meditations as they explore nuclear test sites, the meaning of national borders and geographical features, and the idea of the feminine and the sublime.