With a kind of regret the artist spoke of the beauty of Winslow Homer's landscape. He called it "epic," and was filled with sorrow that such an art could not be in the Ghetto.
"There is no nature in the sweat-shop," he said, "and yet it is there and in the crowded street that my love and my imagination call me. It is only the minds and souls of my people that fill me with a desire to work."
It is this ambition which makes Jacob Epstein and the other young artists to be mentioned of uncommon representative interest. Epstein is filled with a melancholy love of his race, and his constant desire is to paint his people just as they are: to show them in their suffering picturesqueness. So he goes into the sweat-shop and sketches, induces the old pedlers of Hester Street to pose in his studio, and draws from his window the push-carts and the old women in the street. It is thus a characteristic Ghetto art, an art dealing with the peculiar types of that Jewish community, that Epstein's interest leads to; a national plastic art, as it were, on a small scale.
In the studio and at an exhibition at the Hebrew Institute Epstein had two years ago a number of sketches and a few paintings—the latter very crude as far as the technique of color is concerned, and the sketches in charcoal rough and showing comparatively slight mastery of the craft. But, particularly in the sketches, there is character in every one, and at once a sympathetic and a realistic imagination. He tells the truth about the Ghetto as he sees it, but into the dark reality of the external life he puts frequently a melancholy beauty of spirit. Portraits of old pedlers, roughly successful as Ghetto types, in order to retain whom as models the artist was frequently forced to sing a song, for the pedlers have a Jewish horror of the image, and it is difficult to get them to pose; one of them with an irregular, blunted nose and eyes sad and plaintive, but very gentle; an old Jew in the synagogue, praying "Holy," "Holy"; many sweat-shop scenes, gaunt figures half-dressed, with enormously long arms and bony figures; mothers working in the shops with babies in their arms; one woman, tired, watching for a moment her lean husband working the machine—that machine of which Morris Rosenfeld sings so powerfully in "The Sweat-Shop"; a woman with her head leaning heavily on her hands; Hester Street market scenes, with dreary tenement-houses—a kind of prison wall—as background; one pedler with a sensitive face—a man the artist had to catch at odd times, surreptitiously, for, religious to an extreme, the old fellow would hastily trundle off whenever he saw Epstein.
A LITTLE GIRL OF HESTER STREET
A characteristic of this young artist's work is the seriousness with which he tries to get the type as it is; the manifest love involved in the way it takes his imagination. With his whole soul he hates caricature of his race. Most of the magazine illustrations of Ghetto characters he finds distorted and untrue, many of them, however, done with a finish of technique that he envies. A big and ugly nose is not the enthusiastic artist's idea of what constitutes a downtown Jew. The Jew, to him, is recognized rather by the peculiar melancholy of the eyes. In the nose he sees nothing particularly typical of the race. It is a forcible illustration of how, while really remaining faithful to the external type, his love for the race leads him to emphasize the spiritual and humane expressiveness of the faces about him; and so paves the way to an art imaginative as well as typical, not lacking even in a certain ideal beauty.
Bernard Gussow, Epstein's friend and fellow-worker in the attempt to found a distinctive Ghetto art, is in a still earlier stage of development. His essays in the plastic reproduction of Hester Street types are not yet as humanly interesting as those of the younger man, who, however, has been working longer and more assiduously. It is only for the past year or two that Gussow has definitely espoused this cause.
Unlike Epstein he was not born in New York. The town of Slutzk, in the government of Ulinsk, Russia, is his birthplace, where he stayed until he was eleven years old. His father is a teacher of Hebrew, and young Gussow consequently received a much better education than Epstein; and also became much more familiar with the religious life of the Orthodox Jews. For that reason Epstein urges his friend to take the New York Orthodox synagogue and the domestic life of the religious Jew as his distinctive field in the great work in hand. For this, too, Gussow hopes, but in the present condition of his technique he limits himself to Hester Street scenes.
In New York Gussow continued to build up an education uncommonly good in the Ghetto. He went through the High School, entered the City College, which he left for the Art School, and spent one season at the League and two at the Academy of Design. He has for many years given lessons in English; to which occupation he, unlike his more emotional friend, prudently holds on. But Gussow, also, is deeply if not emotionally interested in the life of the Ghetto, and in a broader if less intense form than is Epstein. With the contemporary Yiddish literature and journalism of New York he is well acquainted. His mind is more conservative and judicial than that of Epstein; but his sketches lack, at present at least, the touch of strong sympathy and imagination which is marked in the art of the younger man.