Jewish Museum presents Collection Tableaux, an exhibition on view November 23, 2012 – February 3, 2013.
Isidor Kaufmann, Friday Evening, c. 1920
Four works from the Jewish Museum’s collection find ways to explore the table as a place where festivity, sanctity, and history converge. Isidor Kaufmann’s painting Friday Evening sets the stage: a lone woman in traditional Jewish dress of the eastern Habsburg Empire sits at a Sabbath table. Kaufmann’s impulse was both romantic and ethnographic: to preserve the folkways of a vanishing provincial Jewish culture.
To create Laid Table with Etrog Container and Pastry Molds, a commission for The Jewish Museum, Beth Lipman crafted glass replicas of holiday and food-related objects in the museum’s Judaica collection. Here, the table is crowded with functional items, but the people who might use them are absent or invisible—as suggested by the use of transparent glass. Subtle references to mourning scattered among the festive items, convey a sense of joy and sorrow mixed together.
Izhar Patkin’s large paper collage Salonière portrays a single-legged table arrayed with symbolic Enlightenment-era objects, including a porcelain statuette of a monkey—a reference to a peculiar Prussian law of 1769 that required Jews to purchase porcelain dinner services and figurines in order to obtain official government documents.
In Linen, by the Israeli artists’ collective Studio Armadillo, a ghostly tablecloth is suspended above the ground. Dishes, loaves of hallah, a wine bottle, a kiddush cup, and candlesticks—all formed from starched linen—are sewn to it. The Friday evening ceremony marking the beginning of the Sabbath is evoked as a pause for reflection and rest, separating the practical concerns of daily life from the spiritual moment.
As these artists recognize, the household table, laden with objects both mundane and precious, can carry a great deal of symbolism. Just as the dining table is transformed into a sacred space by the observance of the Sabbath, so the delicate materials used here—glass, paper, and linen—are transformed into something ethereal and poetic. – www.thejewishmuseum.org