THE PUSH-CARTS OF HESTER STREET AND THEIR GUARD AT NIGHT
Gussow lives with his father's family, where he keeps his sketches—but to work, he goes to a room on the corner of Hester and Essex streets occupied by a poor Jewish family. Here the artist sits by the window and watches the poor and picturesque scenes in the big push-cart market directly beneath him. The subjects of his sketches are roughly the same as those of Epstein, altho he draws rather more from the street and Epstein from the sweat-shop. Groups standing about the push-carts, examining goods and bargaining; an old woman with a cheese in her hand, and an enormous nose (which Epstein reproachfully calls a caricature); several sketches representing men or women holding eggs to the sun, as a test preliminary to buying; carpenters waiting on the corner near the market for a job; an old Jew critically examining apples; a roughly indicated, rather attractive Jewish girl; a woman standing by a push-cart counting her money; a confused Hester Street crowd, walled in by the lofty tenement-houses; a wall-painter with an interesting face, who peddles horse-radish when not occupied with painting; a pedler out of work, just from the hospital, his beard straggling in again, with the characteristic sad eyes of his race; this rather small list comprises the greater part of Gussow's work, and most of it is of a distinctly sketchy nature.
"You see," said Epstein sympathetically, "Bernard has until recently been working for the tenement-house committee, and has only just got away from his job." Both of these young men seem to think it a piece of good luck when they are discharged by their employers.
These artists both recognize that the distinctive Ghetto art is in its earliest stage; and that whatever has yet been done in that direction is technically very imperfect. But they call attention even to the crayon art stores of the Ghetto as crudely pointing in the right direction. In those chromos, which contain absolutely no artistic quality, is represented, nevertheless, the religious and domestic life of the Jews and their physical types. And whatever art there is at present is supported by the popularity with the people of this crayon work. On the basis of that the artist proper may work out the type into more truly interpretative forms.
For this young art, the object of which is to give a realistic picture of the life of the Ghetto, it is easy to conceive an unduly sentimental interest. It is not unnatural in this time of great attention to east side charitable work to give greater value than it deserves to an art which represents the sordidness and the pathos of that part of the city. Against this attitude, which they also call sentimental, Epstein and Gussow earnestly protest, and maintain that unless the Ghetto art becomes some day technically excellent it will have no legitimate value. They want it judged on the same basis that any other art is judged; and they are filled with the faith, or at least the enthusiastic Epstein is, that the time will come when the artists of the Ghetto will paint typical Jewish life, and paint it technically well.
It is true, of course, that the ultimate value of this little art movement in the Ghetto will depend upon how well the attempt to paint the life is eventually carried out. But, nevertheless, even if nothing comes of it, it is important as suggesting an interesting departure from what is the prevailing limitation of American art. In Epstein's work something of the typical life of a community is expressed; of what American painter from among the Gentiles can this be said? Where is the typical, the nationally characteristic, in our art? Our best painters experiment with all kinds of subjects; they put talent, sometimes genius, into their work, but at the basis of it there is no simple presentation of well-recognized and deeply felt national or even sectional life; merely essays in art, of more or less skill, showing no warm interest in any one kind of life.
There are many other artists, besides these two, in the Ghetto, some of whom also occasionally paint a distinctive Ghetto type. But for the most part, trained as they have been in the uptown art schools, they experiment with all sorts of subjects in the approved American style. They paint girls in white and girls in blue, etc., as Epstein expressed it scornfully; and put no general Ghetto quality into their work. They do not seem deeply interested in anything except painting. Many of them are technically better educated than Epstein and Gussow; tho it is probably safe to say that no one of them has the sympathetic imagination of Epstein. It is to this eclectic, experimental tendency of the artists in the Ghetto in general that Epstein and Gussow present a contrast—in their love of their people and their desire to paint them as they are.
A typical representative of this less centred art is Samuel Kalisch, twenty-six years old, who came to this country from Austria twelve years ago. Older than the two young enthusiasts, Kalisch has had more experience and has developed a more efficient technique. He works in oils to a greater extent than the others and has a number of comparatively finished pictures; but his studio resembles that of any rather undistinguished uptown artist in point of diversity of subject and artistic impulse. There is an Oriental scene of conventional character; a portrait of himself taken from the mirror; a number of examples of still-life, apples, flowers, a "cute" scene of children playing on the beach; a landscape, etc. Of distinctive Ghetto things there are two old men, one just from the synagogue, with pensive eyes, a long beard and a Derby hat; the other, ninety-four years old, who sits in the synagogue, with a long white beard, a black cap on his head, a cane in one hand and the Talmud in the other. These two portraits show considerable technical skill, but are faithful rather than interpretative, and indicate that the artist's sympathy is not absorbed in the life of the Ghetto. They are merely subjects, like any other, which might come to his hand.
Now in full sympathy with what may be called the "movement" is Nathaniel Loewenberg, a little, black-haired, sad-eyed, sensitive and appealing Russian Jew of twenty-one years of age. It is only recently, however, that he has turned from landscape to city types, of which he has a few sketches, very incomplete with one exception, that also unfinished but unusually promising; it is in oil and represents a Jew fish pedler of attractive countenance and shabby clothes trying to sell a fine fish to three Ghetto women; these latter cleverly distinguished, one who will probably buy, another who apparently would like to if she could reduce the price, and the third indifferent.