THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Monday, December 7, 2020 |A
FROM LEFT: MOMA, N.Y.; SONJA SEKULA ESTATE/MOMA, N.Y.New YorkB
ecause drawing is more
modest in scale and inti-
mate in its mode of ad-
dress than many of the
other forms of contempo-
rary art being shown to-
day, it is easy to overlook or take
for granted. Kudos to the Museum
of Modern Art, then, for thrusting it
into the conversation with “Degree
Zero: Drawing at Midcentury.” The
show covers the years 1948-61,
when in the aftermath of World
War II artists felt art itself had to
be reinvented from the ground up
and chose that most fundamental of
processes, drawing, for the task. At
every turn “Degree Zero” upends
our expectations to tell us some-
thing new about what was going on
at that time.
The approximately 80 works
here were all drawn from MoMA’s
collection by Associate Curator Sa-
mantha Friedman, the show’s or-
ganizer, and have been installed
with sufficient space between
them to permit safe viewing at
close quarters. They were made by
artists from Latin America, Asia
and Africa in addition to Europe
and North America, until recently
the museum’s almost exclusive fo-
cus. So along with MoMA pan-
theon members like Henri Matisse
and Jackson Pollock, we encounter
the likes of Jean Dubuffet, Willys
de Castro, Otto Piene and Yayoi
Kusama, as well as names likely to
be as new to the general public as
they were to me. This broad-gauge
approach is nothing less than reve-
latory, forcing us to think differ-BYERICGIBSON ently about certain exalted reputa-
tions as a result.
The show’s theme is poignantly
captured in an untitled charcoal
and chalk drawing by the French
abstractionist Hans Hartung from- It consists of closely abut-
ting dark, black vertical marks of
almost uniform length. On the one
hand it reads as a kind of existen-
tialist manifesto, “I draw, there-
fore I am.” Yet at the same time,
the individual parts seem to be in
the process of resolving them-
selves into an image—art coming
into being before our eyes.
Among the unforgettable dis-
coveries is Sonja Sekula
(1918-1963), who divided her time
between the U.S. and her native
Switzerland, where, the label tells
us, she underwent treatment for
mental illness. “The Voyage”
(1956) is a jewel-like, ink-and-wa-
tercolor work organized into a
loose grid. Each of its panels is a
different color and obsessively
filled with a dense web of lines
and minuscule circles within which
the only recognizable image is that
of a ship. It is a mesmerizing, ver-
tiginous record of the journey
through a charged interior land-
scape that demands—and re-
wards—prolonged, close scrutiny.Artists used the most
elemental of creative
practices—drawing—to
reinvent their worldART REVIEW
Sketching
A Path Into a
New Era
Sonja Sekula’s ‘The Voyage’ (1956), above, and Hércules Barsotti’s ‘Drawing No. 1’ (1958), above leftT
echnologies come and go in the
film world, but rarely whole
cultures. That’s one reason why
movies in Yiddish prove so fascinat-
ing. They are fundamentally differ-
ent from other objects of bygone
days. Whereas, say, silent pictures
from Denmark or Japan document
the past, there remains an unbroken
link between such movies and new
ones produced in those countries to-
day. Not so for Yiddish films, which
are truly relics from a vanished
world. Equally significant, Yiddish
movies are distinguished by their ex-
tra-nationality. They were produced
not in a single country, but rather on
two continents an ocean apart, pri-
marily in the U.S. and Poland.
The American debut of a collec-
tion of recently restored Yiddish
films offers a precious peek into
what has largely been a void for
most of us. “The Jewish Soul” con-
tains 10 pictures on five Blu-rays
and marks another significant col-
laboration between the Paris-based
Lobster Films, which managed the
difficult reconstructions and initially
released them in France, and Kino
Lorber, which added bonus materials
and is distributing the package
stateside. (The set is also availablefor purchase, and several titles can
be rented, digitally via the Kino Now
platform at kinonow.com.)
Yiddish cinema’s great tragedy
was its short life. It didn’t really
take off until the mid-1930s, and the
form was virtually extinguished by
the Holocaust, though filming in
America limped along till roughly- There had been silent films—
“The Golem” (1915), from Germany,
is perhaps the best example—that
dealt with Jewish themes and char-
acters, but the absence of spoken
dialogue left them bereft of a vital
aspect: thesoundof Yiddish itself,
the innately musical, profoundly
emotional and irrepressibly funny
language of Ashkenazi Jewry.
This set’s bright star is “The
Dybbuk” (1937), Michał Waszyński’s
storied Polish production of S. An-
sky’s celebrated stage play of Jew-
ish mysticism and romance. It re-
mains Yiddish cinema’s sole
undisputed masterpiece, and its in-
clusion here is both essential and
welcome—the latter because mod-
ern viewers can finally see this pic-
ture at its original two-hour length,
instead of the severely cut version
circulated previously.
In another context, “The Dyb-
buk” might be considered a superla-
tive ghost story, thanks to its disqui-
eting black-and-white mise-en-scène
and supernatural plot elements, but
its commitment to authentic Hasidic
culture stands paramount. With its
elaborate sets, crowd scenes and
even special effects (all relative,
given the minimal budgets of Yid-
dish films), the picture set a bench-
mark never equaled in this genre.
It’s paired here with another
Polish film, “Mir Kumen On” (1935),
roughly “We’re on Our Way,” a
strange cross between documentary
and charitable appeal, depicting life
in a progressive sanatorium for tu-
bercular Jewish children, many of
whom were presumably murdered
in the years following the German
invasion. The film was directed by
Aleksander Ford, who later men-
tored Andrzej Wajda and Roman
Polanski before dying by suicide in
Florida in 1980.
The remainder of the set is de-
voted to Yiddish films produced in
America, occasionally with imported
performers. Beyond the common
language, musical interludes are an
almost defining ingredient in these
pictures—in some cases, echoing and
even amplifying dramatic themes,but at other times providing comic
counterpoint to bleak episodes. Un-
expectedly, not all the American
films are set in the New World, and
those depicting life in the old coun-
try—“Tevya” (1939), based on the
same source material as the Broad-
way musical “Fiddler on the Roof”;
“The Yiddish King Lear” (1935),
loosely adapted from Shakespeare’s
play; and “Overture to Glory” (1940),
a reworking of “The Jazz Singer”—
could easily pass for European ex-
ports. What unites them all, though,
is their obsession with family and,
more often than not, filial betrayal.
Among the most interesting
movies in this collection are several
made on budgets so skimpy they
make Hollywood’s Poverty Row ef-
forts look, by comparison, like A-listpictures from MGM. They are the
work of the producer-director Jo-
seph Seiden, whose films occupy a
full two of the set’s five discs. To call
them melodramas understates their
emotional temperature. In one, “Her
Second Mother” (1940), an adopted
daughter goes to jail to protect the
sister who despises her, just to spare
their parents’ feelings. (And you’ll
never guess who the judge turns
out to be!) Inanother, “Eli Eli”
(1940), an old couple’s children force
them to endure separate retire-
ments—shades of Leo McCarey’s
classic “Make Way for Tomorrow,”
released three years earlier. But
“Motel the Operator” (1939) is the
one that really tugs at heartstrings,
with its cockamamie tale of a father
who loses everything only to find
contentment, decades later, through
happenstance.
All the films are subtitled in
English, but eight of 10 contain dis-
tracting on-screen boxes that con-
ceal previous translations—some in-
ferior, some in other languages. Yet
that blot underscores just how
lucky we are to have these films at
all. In most cases, the camera nega-
tives are long gone, leaving as tes-
taments only inferior elements or
damaged prints, if that. Some of
this absence stems straight from
the Holocaust. But the American
films were spared that fate. Neglect
was their undoing. In any case, even
a flawed and incomplete picture of
Yiddish cinema is something to be
treasured. After all, some things can
never again be made whole.Mr. Mermelstein writes for the Jour-
KINO LORBER nal on film and classical music.FILM REVIEW
Scenes From
A Vanished
World
BYDAVIDMERMELSTEINA scene from ‘The Dybbuk’ (1937), part of a new set of Yiddish filmsARTS IN REVIEW
A pity, then, that it’s hung almost
too high to be seen properly.
But the artist whose work is
most likely to linger in the mind is
that of Joong Seop Lee
(1916-1956). A refugee during the
Korean War who was continually
on the move, he “drew” with a
sharp-pointed object on the foil
from cigarette packages, adding
paint to the incisions. “People
Reading the Newspaper (Number
84)” (1950-52), one of three such
works here, is a semi-abstract im-
age that is as much about the
lively, all-over dialog between dark
lines and colored shapes as it is a
group portrait. Adding to the
work’s impact is the contrast be-
tween its intense pictorial energy
and diminutive size—about that of
an iPhone screen.
Next to such works, forged in the
fire of adversity by individuals for
whom art-making was nothing less
than a lifeline, the efforts of the
high priests of the New York School
can seem slight, even trifling. Jas-
per Johns’s shadowy image of an
American flag looks wanly ho-hum,
while the blizzard of lines makingup Cy Twombly’s three untitled
works comes across as so much
pseudo-Abstract Expressionist pos-
turing. Ellsworth Kelly’s “Study for
La Combe II” (1950), a network of
diagonal black lines on a white
ground derived from the play of
shadows he saw on a stoop, has the
feel of a clever design-school proj-
ect and little more.
The only such figure who
emerges unscathed is first-genera-
tion Abstract Expressionist Franz
Kline. In his collage-drawing “Unti-
tled II” (1952), thick black lines
lunge across a now-yellowed page
torn from a Brooklyn phone book
(“Annlew Louis...Ann&Emily Bridal
Shoppe...Ann Leone Silkscreen Stu-
dio...Annable Oliver S”). The thick
marks are urgent and authentic,
playing off both the page’s flatness
and rectangular shape, as well as
the underlying pattern of type.
Aside from the venerable Ma-
tisse and Alberto Giacometti, the
other artists who shine here are
the Latin Americans. Their work is
a live wire newly threaded through
MoMA’s permanent collection dis-
plays and exhibitions thanks to anenhanced commitment to this re-
gion in recent years. It enlarges
the language of geometric abstrac-
tion pioneered by Kazimir Ma-
levich and Piet Mondrian in the
early 20th century, not only with a
new formal inventiveness and
rigor—their imagery is much more
architectonic—but also, God bless
them, humor. You often encounter
witty interplays between figure
and ground, two dimensions and
three, as in the Brazilian Hércules
Barsotti’s “Drawing No. 1 (Desenho
No.1)” (1958) where one moment
its horizontal black spines appear
flat on the sheet and in the next to
be ballooning out at you like a re-
lief sculpture.
Plan on an unhurried visit to
“Degree Zero.” You’re going to
want to spend a lot of time with
these drawings—and maybe even
come back.Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury
Museum of Modern Art, through
Feb. 6, 2021Mr. Gibson is the Journal’s Arts in
Review editor.