Philip Eliasoph, Ph.D.

Norman Gorbaty’s “Torah” [pastel on paper, 1999] is a whirling, Cubo-Futurist meditation sanctifying the sacred scroll. Ark, silver bells, huddled worshippers are tightly bound together declaring “Shema Y’Israel…” — “Hear oh Israel… the Lord is One!”

Within its blinding vortex, it captures everything a Jew could hope to understand in its illumination. And yet, the smudged colors and evaporating lines of barely discernible tallitot and silver tower crowns are threaded together out of fragmented, minimally indicated strokes.

It’s as if nothingness is transformed into something. Pictures are supposed to represent something else. But pictures are merely human fabrications made from clay, paint or chalk. Images are fictitious and should not be trusted or worshipped. Idolatry was deposed for its lies. Jews are taught that God is truth.

So in deference to the Tablets of the Law placed into the obedient hands of Moses some thirty-three centuries ago, those pictures became very problematic. The Decalogue’s Second Commandment prohibited any “graven images.”

This “chosen” bronze age tribe was directed to forgo any enfleshment of Yahweh. Other tribes had so much more to see and enjoy. Jews had to suffer. Ram headed statuettes in Sumeria, buxom fertility goddesses in the Aegean islands, or cosmic deities with the sleek bodies of muscular lions in Egypt, all caused some real ‘tsores’ in terms of Jewish image-making.

Curator Norman Kleeblatt of the Jewish Museum lets us escape out the other hatch as Jewish artists since antiquity seem to be “inhabiting a different cultural space.” On Shabbosmorning, the rabbi holds up the ancient scrolls on the bimah and beseeches us: “Behold!”

Gorbaty places this before our eyes to wonder: “Behold — this might just be an illusion!” Using Judaism’s most central object of worship and wisdom, he almost taunts us: “How can Jewish identity be expressed — if at all?”

Tracing our steps backwards into the early decades of the 20th century, opens a window into some of “Torah’s” pictorial secrets. Gorbaty’s drawing evokes the non-Euclidean space of the Picasso-Braque ‘roped together mountain climbing team’ in their ascent into the netherworld. A continuous flow of staccato photographic frames were built in Duchamp’s staircase.

The slanting racing car effect of Gino Severini and kinetic pace of speeding trains in Boccioni and Marinetti are palpable. Some spatial vorticism of El Lissitzsky or Natalie Goncharova adds a dizzying, Suprematist accent. And let’s not overlook the jazzy rhythms of Stuart Davis, or Stanton MacDonald-Wright. “Torah” is a sturdy lesson in avant-gardist image-making.

There is in fact so little to actually see — we are confronted with a profound conflict. Thinking about Norman Gorbaty’s art in the context of his Jewish identity is both essential and useless. “In every cell of my body I am a Jew,” he admits. Then, with a sigh as if casting off the weight of Job he exhales: “honestly, I don’t really understand the where, when, or how this impacts my art. It’s all a mystery. But I am absolutely certain its in the DNA of every brushstroke and scrap of wood which peels off of my chisel. Don’t ask me why — it just happens.”

I had learned a little about Norman reviewing articles in glossy magazines, flipping through a lavishly illustrated book about his multi-faceted career, and sensing the man’s indefatigable energies. From a distance, through a series of impressive publications, I had only an incomplete snapshot of his creative output. But it was not until we finally sat down for a quiet morning conversation did I come to appreciate his arsenal of talents. Gorbaty is unequivocally a deeply experienced and unimaginably gifted artist-creator-thinker.

One might envision Norman as a living Al Hirschfeld caricature. His pixie-like ‘ponem’ is etched with creviced life-lines. The man’s entire bearing is all larger than the sum of its parts. His face is Rembrandt-esque with its expressively searching, soulful eyes. With his Eastern Parkway inflection, he speaks in sharp little jabs. His language bristles like a flurry of quick punches from the gloves of young Cassius Clay.

Norman’s firm opinions form phrases which ‘sting like a bee.’ He’s quick to interrupt, counter, and jump-in. You can’t get a word in edgewise. Conversing with Norman is exhausting and exhilarating. Inevitably, one realizes you’ve lost any point of contention before you could even begin. As he shrugs and gesticulates you realize — why argue? Just accept it: he’s right. Always.

It did not escape me during our ‘kibitsing’ session this vintaged gentleman could have been easily been any one of my uncles who were honored at my Bar Mitzvah to say the motzi prayer. ‘Get this over with, slice the challah, honor its traditions, but let the party begin,’ was their attitude. Norman also admits: “I was never a religious man —but I know I am a Jew.”

There’s little doubt in his presence about his authenticity as a living treasure. Having this exhibition opportunity for Fairfield University to review his prolific contributions — as an artist who “just so happens to be Jewish” — and as an under-appreciated artistic voice in our midst —is surely a celebratory milestone. 

Norman exudes a Picasso-like verve for eternal youthfulness. He carries himself with a ‘Zorba-esque’ vitality for life. Chronological age must only be a illusory notion in his psyche. He drinks from the most potent elixir of youth: his art. But in more subtle and revealing ways, I believe Norman’s anguished expression traces back to Sholem Aleichem’s over-burdened Tevye. He reminds us of that archetype of the quintessentially good, decent, hard-working, devoted family patriarchal provider. Tevye always wished he could abandon his duties milking cows to sit in ‘shul’ all day and become a ‘learned man.’

As Jewish history is cyclical and simultaneously immediate —we are eternally present at the foot of Mount Sinai as we open the Haggadah each Passover — Norman conveys an awareness of the weight of our peoplehood. Family duties and responsibilities in czarist Anatevka, were the same obligations Norman felt in Great Neck and the New York art world. I know instinctively that Norman would have liked to just paint and sculpt all day in his art studio.

But there were bills to pay, children to provide for, and the vicissitudes of being successful in upscale Lake Success. There are diversions on the obstacle course. Keeping up with the status minded Jacokowitz’s and Judstein’s on Meadow Woods Road, demanded working hard, and churning out those massively profitable marketing campaigns and commercial designs. Life was filled with gratification. But he kept itching to return to his studio.

His rich visual ideas were splashed across the pages of Time, Fortune, and U.S. News & World Report, or in the credit scroll for three of Woody Allen’s films. Fame, professional achievement, and a mountain of professional career rewards. Questioning God’s ambiguous plan for his art career, he might have looked up to the Almighty to ask: “If I were a wealthy man?”

Norman was rewarded for his creative genius in taking the motivational research of Vance Packard’s “The Hidden Persuaders” [1957] by translating American’s feelings into consumer purchasing power. But at the same time, he knew he was competing on the rat-race treadmill from “What Makes Sammy Run?” Bud Shulberg’s novel was published in 1941. But it was the Philco Television Theatre production on 1949 which gained public awareness. It’s message for those on the career escalator: “death is the only finish line.”

Norman was cut out of the same mold as many of the fathers of my school buddies in Great Neck. When one friend’s father drove us schmendricks to a Bar Mitzvah at an elite country club [Jews preferred British sounding names with references to oaks, foxes, hunt, ivy, etc.] in a huge white Lincoln Continental, the ‘sweet taste of success’ was an intoxicant. I felt I was stepping in JFK’s doomed Dallas vehicle – as we opened the opposing swing doors and stepped into this 5,200 pound machine. The 1964 ad campaign offered its owners a seductive lure with its 123” wheel base, V-8 “enlarged for added power.”

The bar mitzvah itself was on a scale of the Corleone wedding scene on Lake Tahoe from ‘The Godfather.’ A generation after European Jewry had perished in the ovens, they were inventing the Big Ideas in marketing, advertising, and media that the Madison Avenue agencies executed to make Pepsi and Pepto-Bismol into global brands at the very summit of America’s empire.

Over the years I have had the privilege of interviewing and writing essays about other noteworthy artists of Norman’s caliber. They too were conflicted in finding themselves in a struggle between their fine art studio passions versus their ‘bread-and-butter-pay-the-mortgage-and-kids-tuition-bills’ careers as artistic dynamos serving the seductive world of the ‘Mad Men.’ Who wants to be a ‘starving artist’ when your expense account allows lunches at the Four Seasons?

During those ‘go-go’ years, at the peak of Henry Luce’s imperial ‘American Century,’ an unquenchable thirst for consumer products transformed the lives of these incredibly talented artists into ‘work for hire’ designers. If I am not wrong, Michelangelo also painted a ceiling as a commission, and Bernini installed a few fountains around the piazzas of Rome at the behest of his noble patrons.

At the same time, I had the uncanny vision of Norman as a deeply intellectual version of Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, or Alan King. What made them so different from the non-Jewish comedians, why were they so inscrutable with their self-deprecating jokes and ‘outsider looking in’ humor while we watched Ed Sullivan on the old black and white Zenith box in our family room? Ask Norman.

I began to wish we had the time to sit at Katz’s Deli on Houston Street. I wanted to listen more to Norman’s anecdotes, and pick at my pastrami and sour pickles, to learn about his early years in the New York art world. Like that misty lens in Irving Howe’s “World of Our Fathers,” this now lost ‘golden’ era in the 1950s-60s was a time when the discourse about art was serious within a ‘no-nonsense’ frame.

Jewish giants — Mark Rothko, Louise Nevelson, Adolph Gottlieb, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman — walked the earth. These secular Jews contributed to and helped to invent [along with their non-Jewish colleagues, Pollock, Gorky, Hofmann, de Kooning, Motherwell, Still, etc.] a new terrain —the uniquely American and “Made in Manhattan” style of Abstract Expressionism. They aspired to and eventually changed the very nature of art history —there was no turning back.

Many art historians and critics came to understand how the New York School transformed modern art. Artists of Gorbaty’s generation considered abstraction as a virtual “religion for atheists.” Rothko actually quipped that the people who “weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience I felt when painting them.”

The 2010 TONY-Award winning Broadway drama, “Red” is an on-stage recreation of Rothko’s painting liturgy. Like a muted clergyman, he is dwarfed by towering color-field canvases — consumed by orange-reds-maroons — like Moses agape before the Burning Bush. Awe.

The funny thing —so Jewishly ironic —is that none of the Jewish modernists wanted to be known or have their works contextualized as being “Jewish.” No wonder this confused consciousness shaped a polemical 1996 exhibition at the Jewish Museum of New York. “Too Jewish: Challenging Jewish Identities,” by exploiting and exploding a number of visual tropes and stereotypes.

It’s difficult to re-create today the driving forces which shaped the intelligentsia of the art scene just after Gorbaty completed his M.F.A at Yale in 1955. It was a curious hybrid with these elements:

1] Art - mainly abstraction, or at least post-European with its roots in Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, and Surrealism. The Museum of Modern Art made ‘good design’ [Eames chairs, Ekco flatware, Watrous lamps, Earl Tupper plastics] into a way of life.

2] Politics - RedScare - with old-style Stalinists who closed their eyes to Stalin’s capitulation to Nazism in signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939 locked in debate with the John Birch Society predicting that subversive Bolsheviks were fluoridating public water systems and stealing our hydrogen bomb secrets. Left leaning Jewish socialists were constantly compromised in loyalties to core Norman Rockwellesque American freedoms vs. social justice issues necessitating vigorous dissent. The Rosenbergs betrayal had created a ‘shanda’ while major legal and financial support for fighting Jim Crow laws in the South was coming from Jewish organizations, rabbis, and civil rights advocates.

3] American global supremacy — infused with the post-war ‘can-do’ optimism, the construction of vast suburban tracts, inter-state highways, and commercialized galaxy of products promoted by television’s omni-presence in millions of homes. General Motors and General Mills were the envy of the world while products invaded living rooms during commercial breaks for “I Love Lucy” to “The Honeymooners.”

He was trained and educated at Smith, Amherst, and Yale probably believing he was destined to become a fine artist. But like the Israelites 40 years wanderings through the Sinai’s wilderness, Norman’s detour from his fine art studio sent him off on a 60 year journey. Along the way, he achieved international distinctions as one of the leading graphic designers of our age. His resume as a brilliantly innovative commercial artist and graphic designer is chock full of coveted medals, professional awards, and Oscar-like golden calves attesting to his creative genius.

Wrestling like his memorable bas-relief bronze —“Peniel”, 1987, of Jacob’s body twisted into a knot with an angelic form, Norman’s position as a Jewish artist is equally entwined. Whether he accepts or rejects this destiny — he is inevitably inscribed in the unwrapping megillah of so-called ‘Jewish art.’ Every inspiring sermon I have ever heard greeting the New Year on Rosh Hashanah morning comes from the pulpit with this indispensible central motif: ‘the Quote’. This was usually an obscure talmudic or scriptural reference which connects the wisdom of the ages with the congregants of today.

Rabbis must search for ‘the Quote’ as popular novelists must ponder the first sentence of their next best-seller. It has to have multiple layers of deeply connected, mind-numbing symbolism. The concept is to inspired those in the present with the spiritual conflicts and ethical crises of the past.

As a schoolboy, I can still remember how our revered Oxford-educated rabbi would take a dramatic pause —and somehow I could anticipate the next sentence —it was then completed with a polished jewel from the lips of Rabbi Hillel, Rabbi Akiba, the Rambam — Maimonides, or the Baal Shem Tov. More modern flourishes came in quotes from Max Jacob, Chaim Potok, or Issac Bashevich Singer. Our ‘old school rebbe’ would never touch Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, or Philip Roth. They were just far too assimilated or ‘edgy.’

So here is my favorite source of Jewish artistic ‘seykhl’. It came out of the mind of the art sage Harold Rosenberg [1906-1978]. He was the ideologically bent, cultural connoisseur of leftist ‘art has sociological purposes’ offering his genius in the pages of the ARTnews, Partisan Review and most regularly, The New Yorker. His seminal 1952 read on the New York school gave birth to the movement/verb/phrase: “Action Painting.” Rosenberg was unassailable.

The year is 1966. Imagine an upscale, highly educated audience of Manhattan’s ‘smart set’ culturati streaming into the newly opened temple for Jewish art [paradoxically] at Fifth Avenue and 92nd St. The former mansion of Felix and Frieda Shiff Warburg, was transformed into the Jewish Museum. Its rather unfocused mission was to present and preserve Jewish identity in the visual arts. The program began as Rosenberg arrived at the podium followed by a hushed silence. His opening salvo pretty much said it all:

“First, they build a Jewish museum; then they ask, ‘Is there a Jewish art?” Jews!” The author of the modern art criticism bible, “The De-Definition of Art” then disassembled the anxious crowd even further. “The gentile answer is, ‘Yes, there is a Jewish art, and no there is no Jewish art.’” He continued: “But the Jewish answer is, ‘What do you mean by Jewish art?’”

In these artworks which were born out of a marvelously endowed artistic consciousness, it seems pointless to label, categorize, or minimize his clearly realized vision.

If art is a tongue spoken by all who can see, feel, and love — he has transcended any of the narrowing limitations of his age. The most validating evidence of Norman Gorbaty’s “Jewishness” is manifested in the eloquent mysteries within these paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Gorbaty also chants a resoundingly heard universal prayer: “L’Chaim” —To Life!

Philip Eliasoph, Ph.D, is Professor of Art History in the Department of Visual & Performing Arts. His career began studying non-objective art focusing on Kandinsky’s theories and the evolution of modernist painting. He has become an expert on American social realist and academic painting, authoring books, curating exhibits, and writing articles about Paul Cadmus, Robert Vickrey, Robert Cottingham, and Colleen Browning, especially those working in the traditional Renaissance based, egg yolk tempera method. Last summer he was invited to lecture at the Pollock-Krasner House & Studio re-considering the tensions dividing the abstract and realist art camps.