Jewish Art, Performance, and Interwar Bucharest

BOOK REVIEWED: Alexandra Chiriac, Performing Modernism: A Jewish Avant-Garde in Bucharest. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022.As the Romanian city of Timișoara celebrates its position as a 2023 European Capital of Culture with an extensive exhibition by the Jewish Romanian artist Victor Brauner, Alexandra Chiriac's comprehensive book on avant- garde design and performance in early twentieth-century Bucharest provides a very welcome addition to the process of national and international rediscovery. The explosively creative interwar period and the decisive Jewish cultural contribution to the development of Romanian art from the era have been slowly recognized by scholars as central to both the narrative of the country's national identity and to larger frameworks concerning the European avant-garde.Despite the significance of the Bucharest avant-garde for understanding Romanian art, design, and performance, it is still rare to encounter scholarly works on the subject. The most popular ones, Erwin Kessler's volume Colors of the Avant-Garde: Romanian Art 1910–1950 and Bucharest in the 1920s and 1930s: Between Avant-Garde and Modernism, edited by the historian Magda Cârneci (both 2011), focus on the impact of the Romanian avant-garde on the wider international art world through the work of luminaries including the visual artist Marcel Iancu and the poet Tristan Tzara, co-creators of the Dadaist movement and leading exponents of the Constructivist movement in Europe; Constantin Brâncuși, considered one of the most influential sculptors of the twentieth century; and Brauner, an important Surrealist painter and photographer.Chiriac's monograph, conversely, steers readers away from these well-known figures and focuses on the Academy of Decorative Arts, a small group of mainly Jewish artists led by the largely forgotten Andrei Vespremie, who drew inspiration for the Academy from his time attending the Schule Reimann in Berlin. In its fluid and informative narrative, Performing Modernism maps the vital position of the Academy in the outgrowth of Romanian modernism. It focuses attention on important individual contributions of its members to the modernization of Romanian art. Working from within, these members moved against a contemporary emerging view of the national art and culture which was reinforced by nationalist ideologies based mainly in traditional folk art. Although its focus on a small group of avant-garde artists at the outskirts of Europe might seem somewhat limiting, Chiriac draws clear connections between the members of the Academy, their collaborators, and the development of global modernisms. Ultimately, Chiriac offers a map of creative links tracing external influences—from Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—that informed the Academy's development, as well as those that moved centrifugally away from Bucharest and towards Latvia and the United States.The interwar period in Romania was characterized by a resurgence of nationalist sentiment reflected in political moves that culminated in the country's 1938 laws on citizenship, which deprived over two hundred thousand Romanian Jews of their constitutional rights. The dire politics of the era underlines the importance of the Academy and its Jewish contributors, who lived and worked amid both public and private hostility. Chiriac's introduction expertly sets this scene, allowing the reader to fully understand the challenges the Academy faced from the political and the cultural press, in which Max Hermann Maxy and Iancu were labeled "aliens to our land" and Brauner's art decried as a product of "dark foreignness."Performing Modernism has a clear and focused structure, moving chronologically from the beginnings of the Academy, through its development and the multi- layered activity of its workshops and exhibitions, to its afterlife reflected in Maxy's remarkable career in theatre design. The volume draws upon an extraordinary amount of archival research, providing numerous reproductions from Academy members' oeuvres as well as new translations of essential documents collected in appendices at the back of the volume. What stands out in particular is the extraordinarily vibrant artistic scene that the Academy fostered through interdisciplinary collaborations, striving toward the multimedia style pioneered by modernist artists. An example of this dynamic way of creating is Maxy's work in bookbinding. His leather and gold binding of Anatole France's Oeuvres completes (1928–29) also contains his elaborate modernist design and lettering. Chiriac's unique focus on the Academy allows for a detailed analysis of some of the aspects inherent to any emergent avant-garde organization from the early twentieth century: the collaborative intertextuality of different styles and interests, the competitive working practices, and the challenges these institutions faced from the more traditional, mainstream, cultural scene.In charting both the creation and later activity of the institution, Chiriac demonstrates the deeply human and competitive relationship between Vespremie and Maxy before the former's relocation to Latvia. Labeled "the outpost of the Bauhaus in Bucharest," the Academy of Decorative Arts opened in 1924, first led by a young designer in Vespremie. Born into a Jewish family in 1898 in what had been the Austro-Hungarian province of Transylvania, Vespremie attended the famous Schule Reimann in Berlin, specializing in metalwork, sculpture, and sign-painting. However, his most important contribution to the Academy was the structure he proposed for its art workshops and his networking skills, which brought together under the same roof all the representatives of the Romanian avant-garde then living in Bucharest. While Vespremie was interested in ensuring the sustainability and longevity of the Academy, Max Herman Maxy, who joined the Academy with his wife, Mela Brun-Maxy, in 1926, was more concerned with his own career trajectory. Coming from a Jewish family in the eastern Romanian city of Braila, Maxy studied in Berlin and became one of the main representatives of expressionism and constructivism in Romania. The friendship and tensions between the founders are set against the wider issues relating to Romanian culture and politics. This allows the author to delve deeper into the creative processes that characterized the Academy, with particular focus on workshops that echoed the main curricula of the Schule Reimann in Berlin and the Bauhaus in Weimar: metal, bookbinding, graphic arts, and textiles.In addition to her detailed and illuminating analyses of works by Vespremie and Maxy, Chiriac offers a large number of photographs to exemplify the work of other Academy artists in order to illustrate its cultural importance both nationally and internationally. The institution laid the basis for the history of modern design in Romania, and the connections it established "between theatricality, commerce and modern design" was groundbreaking in developing the idea of the contemporary art school. The distinct diversity of the work is brought to the fore in the sections dedicated to Maxy's wife, Mela Brun-Maxy, and her often unacknowledged contribution to modernism, which is likely due to a dichotomy that "pits the transitory feminine against the enduring masculine." In these moments, Chiriac presents a gendered and complex account of family and creative relationships within the wider context of the development of interior design as an artform.The author's narrative slowly builds towards what is the most important aspect of the volume in outlining the close connection between fine art and performance within the ideology of the Academy. Maxy's artistic endeavors moved from metalwork and interior design to stage and costume design. This shift follows the creative pattern of Pablo Picasso, who created Cubist costumes and stage design for Leonide Massine's ballet Parade (1917) and Marc Chagall, who designed the costumes for Massine's Aleko (1942). Accordingly, the second half of Performing Modernism focuses on Maxy's work in theatre for Jewish companies including the Vilna Troupe, the Caragiale Theatre venture of actress Dida Solomon, and director Iacob Sternberg's work at the Bukarester Idishe Theater Studio. Chiriac provides fresh insights into the position and success of Jewish theatre in interwar Romania, amounting to extraordinary reconstructions of forgotten performances based on Maxy's surviving designs, recovered photographs, newspaper reviews, and performer memoirs.For example, Ion Minulescu's play The Sentimental Mannequin (1926) was to be performed through a shop window and framed by shop signage. This allowed Maxy to use his modernist artistry in painting, stage design, and the costumes of characters in the guise of display dummies. Maxy "envisioned an uncluttered space in a muted color palette, with a few pieces of geometric furniture and a functional wall niche," which implied a theatrical opportunity to teach the audience about contemporary interior design and stylish new urban identities. The clarity of Chiriac's narrative helps one navigate the complex political and cultural scene within which the Vilna Troupe and other Jewish theatre companies found public success with visual and textual experimentation. Usually itinerant ensembles, the companies depended on their audiences not only as ticket-buying spectators but also collaborators, always responding to the feedback from the auditorium with even more elaborate and visually engaging performances.Formed in Vilnius in 1915, the Vilna Troupe acquired international reputation with innovative, modernist performances in Yiddish, which were positioned often against the naturalist tradition of professional Jewish theatre established in the second half of the nineteenth century. After touring Poland and Austria, they arrived in Romania in 1923 and remained until 1927, when their main actor, Joseph Buloff, relocated to the United States.1 The troupe's presence in Romania and its contribution to Romanian Jewish performance are notable also given the historical importance of the country as the birthplace of professional Yiddish theatre. According to the theatre historian Nahma Sandrow, Abraham Goldfaden's company, founded in 1876 in the northern Romanian city of Iasi before moving to Bucharest, is considered to be the world's first professional Yiddish theatre troupe.2 His legacy created a canon of plays that were performed continuously for the next fifty years. Thus, the Vilna Troupe was not only playing to a knowledgeable audience but was also introducing them to a new, much more experimental Yiddish theatre. During the four-year period, they produced performances like Osip Dymov's The Singer of His Sorrow (1925), Sholem Asch and Jerzy Zulawski's Shabse Tsvi (1926), and Ion Minulescu's The Sentimental Mannequin to large crowds and positive reviews, inspiring prominent modernist playwrights, including Eugene Ionesco, who witnessed the troupe's performances in Bucharest. Shabse Tsvi, their very first performance with stage design and costumes by Maxy, is described based on surviving visual material as hovering "between the abstract and the figurative": featuring cubo-futurist outlines of a city, stylized turrets, and a multistory modernist apartment building with a flat roof.Following Meyerhold's recent theatrical innovations, the actors were those providing the set with volume and structure through the movement of the ensemble. However, critics noted that the grandiose stage design "stifled the inner narrative" of the play itself. After the Vilna Troupe left Bucharest, the later theatre projects of Dida Solomon and Iacob Sternberg further consolidated the importance of these Jewish performance ventures for the development of contemporary creative practice both in Romania and abroad. Sternberg's stage adaptation of Sholem Aleichem's short story "The Bewitched Tailor" and the premiere of I. L. Peretz's 1907 play A Night in the Old Marketplace (both 1930) produced lasting impressions. In both performances, the physicality of the actors (often using "dynamic contortions"), the modern simplicity of the set design, and the functionality of the costumes created surreal imagery, enhanced by "a frenzied dance macabre" in the latter production.Performing Modernism attests to the centrality of performance and the performative as both analytical and creative concepts. Chiriac views modernist art and design through the lens of performance, which encouraged collaboration, connectivity, and fluidity. Reading Maxy's work in design as itself a kind of performance highlights vibrant artistic partnerships and contributions that would have been otherwise "obscured by the gaps between disciplines or national narratives." Moreover, the volume raises issues of ephemerality in researching and documenting performance and draws attention to the struggles of the author in trying to piece together productions that have been hitherto overlooked. Chiriac's book celebrates, in rich detail, the complex and essential contribution of Jewish artists to the development of art and theatre practices in Romania. Further, the author convincingly argues that "by accepting cross-media and cross-cultural slippages as an integral part of avant-garde narratives," the result is "an infinitely more enriching and exciting" modernism that is yet to be fully reconsidered and unpacked.