My Name is Christian Art (MHP Column, 9.06)


Note: this column assumes some knowledge of My Name is Asher Lev, but you needn’t have read the book for it to make any sense.)


The fact that he actually painted a canvas titled “Brooklyn Crucifixion” may be one of the lesser known facts about Chaim Potok and his novel My Name is Asher Lev. In a variety of ways, this painting serves as a conclusion to the novel by attempting to hold all the conflicting religious and relational themes of the book together in one frame. You can see it here, and it is actually a great painting (a delightful cubist anachronism somewhere between Stuart Davis and Juan Gris).


Among other things, this painting stands as a testimony to another layer of the aesthetic onion that is Asher Lev. There is the one occupied by Asher Lev, of course, a snowy Hasidic Brooklyn before and after the dawning of the Jewish state. And the one occupied by Marc Chagall, whose biography serves as the archetype for the trials and tribulations of little Asher. And apparently there is that layer inhabited by Chaim Potok himself, who painted this canvas while writing the last few chapters of Asher Lev. It is this one I am currently interested in, having newly discovered it like a Narnia at the back of Potok’s closet.


Many Christian artists and the related cadre of Christian art appreciators have turned to Asher Lev for inspiration, as the difficult pilgrimage made in the book by Asher from an aesthetically ignorant community of faith to the farther reaches of the mysteries of painterly representation stands as a convenient analogy to Christians still laboring under the boot heel of American Christianity’s dismissively modernist understanding of art and image. To be fair, the current shift in the Church towards a theological appreciation of the arts is wrenching open weathered doors and dusty windows, airing out stale theologies bewitched by the black and white of text or entranced by the expository monotone of logocentrism. But Asher Lev will always remain a field guide for any Christian who finds in the gallery or theater a calling, an urge to take up representation as a profession. It is an encouragement to stay the course, to work towards gallery space even though church and family doesn’t seem to get it. But there is another level of inspiration afforded by Chaim Potok and Asher Lev, working together in the history of interpretation to say even more than that already so vibrantly postulated by “Brooklyn Crucifixion” and its troubled background. We will turn to that in a moment.


First it is worth reviewing a few facets of Asher Lev which are particularly helpful to working Christian artists. Here they are:


Asher’s Identity


In the book, Asher is apprenticed to Jacob Kahn by his exasperated parents at the behest of their Rebbe. Kahn, an aging holdover from the heyday of continental cubism, introduces Asher to the practice and culture of art. Kahn soon becomes a new sort of Rebbe to Asher, modeling for him a behavior and disposition that Kahn believes is appropriate for the “artist.” As it turns out, much of Kahn’s teaching is equal parts self-indulgence and self-importance, the typical romanticized pre-Warhol individualist reasoning of the new European art aristocracy that had found their way to America, pockets lined with cash.


Every now and then he has a few good pointers for Asher, but their teacher/student relationship comes to a head when Asher cuts off his payos instead of just continuing to tuck them behind his ears. Kahn says this in response:

You did that because you were ashamed. You did that because wearing payos did not fit your idea of an artist. Asher Lev, a person is an artist first. He is an individual. Great artists will not give a damn about your payos; they will only give a damn about your art. (244)

At first glimpse this is pretty good advice. Asher’s reticence to subsume his religious identity in his artwork or vice-versa had paralyzed him for most of the preceding chapters. However, it just so happens that Kahn is the one who has imparted to Asher his “idea of an artist” in the first place. Not too many pages previously, Kahn has said things like this to Asher:

Listen to me, Asher Lev. As an artist you are responsible to no one and to nothing, except to yourself and to the truth as you see it. (218)

And:

I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible this world truly is. Nothing is real to me except my own feelings; nothing is true except my own feelings as I seem them all around me in my sculptures and paintings. I know these feelings are true, because if they are not true they would make art that is as terrible as the world. (226)

I find Kahn’s criticism of Asher’s payos trimming hard to accept when he himself has sought to move him from his Hasidic moorings into the libertarianism of his modernist romantic vision of “the artist.” Hasn’t Kahn himself clipped his payos? How can he vituperate Asher for doing the same thing? I have the sneaking suspicion that there are two criticisms operating in Potok’s work. He is criticizing the idea that we need to hold our religious and aesthetic identities in tension. But he is also criticizing the bootstrapping idealism of Asher Lev’s era of artists. Asher comes to Kahn because he is paralyzed by the difficulty of coordinating his identity as artist and identity as Jew. But Kahn’s solution simply lands him on the horns of a new dilemma. Kahn’s insistent individualism fails to square with Asher’s intoxication with his heritage, with his family, ultimately with the eloquence of Torah and its community of interpretation.


Asher’s Profession

This brings us to conflict between Asher’s initial conception of what an artist does and what Kahn thinks art is all about. In an early exchange, Asher exclaims“it is man’s task to make life holy.” Jacob is quick to reply that “Art is not for people who want to make the world holy.” Asher’s initial concept of what art can do is keenly Hasidic, steeped in the conception of Torah as a guide to a set of practices that enable one to sanctify the everyday. In contrast, Jacob’s concept is one we all know well. Some of the most awful experiences of historical memory available to modern man are not visits to Civil War battlefields, concentration camps, or war memorials. They are the surprise experiences of things like Picasso’s “Guernica,” Kiefer’s “The Milky Way” or Duchamp’s “Given” in random museums. All artwork touched by war, killing, guilt, obliquely digesting the regrettable imperial indulgences of the early 20th century. They are like stains on our historical conscience.


Kahn is schooled in this sort of art: a punch in the gut, a slap in the face, a shriek of paint, and he seems intent on infusing Asher’s work with this bent wisdom. Whether Kahn’s conception wins out is a matter of how one reads “Brooklyn Crucifixion,” a conversation that needs its own essay to adequately address.


Suffice it to say that Asher’s innocent conception of art as that which can make life holy haunts the rest of the book. It becomes clear to the reader that Kahn has drawn a false distinction between what holiness does and what art does, or rather, what holy people do and what artists do.


Kahn has fallen into the same ideological trap as the Hasidic community that has spurned Asher Lev. Where their concept of holiness is too narrow to include the world of art, Kahn’s concept of art is too narrow to include the world of holiness. I hem and haw over the finer points of whether Asher’s final exhibition in the book represents a victory or a stalemate. I also hem and haw over how aware Potok was of some of the nuances his character has raised. Regardless, in the end Asher seems to stumble upon a professional identity beyond the Schylla of his Rebbe and the Charybdis of Kahn.


Asher’s Choice


There are a number of ways to pose Asher’s choice in the book. His father poses it as one of profession, between artist and whatever it is he would end up doing if he simply decides to stop painting. Kahn poses it as one of tradition, of community. It is between the Hasidic world, and the world of artists. Asher continues to pose it as an existential choice, between the agony of inscribing canvases with images he know will cause strife in his community and the agony of not painting at all.


All such dilemmas as those faced by the practicing Christian artist. That is to say, if they haven’t encountered one of these crossroads, then they haven’t been producing art. But as “Brooklyn Crucifixion” closes the book, it begins to appear to the reader that Asher’s principle dilemma, his fundamental issue, is aesthetic. “Brooklyn Crucifixion” embodies a mode of representation; it is a visual solution to the dilemmas posed to him by faith, community, and teacher. It alienates some, it proves a revelation to others, but to Asher it represents a choice. He stumbles across a language that can describe what it was like to be a Brooklyn Hasid in the 50’s, one that expresses his identity as an artist and his failure to yield to false solutions to the dilemmas posed by his situation. His professional identity is birthed in this choice to pursue a particular mode of representation, to speak one language of images rather than another. In other words, at the end of the day his choice, and Asher’s solution, is to paint. And above all: to paint very well.


Potok’s Painting


The book opens with the following self-description:

I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflicter of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years. Well, I am none of these things. And yet, in all honesty, I confess that my accusers are not altogether wrong: I am indeed, in some way, all of these things. The fact is that gossip, rumors, mythmaking, and news stories are not appropriate vehicles for the communication of nuances of truth, those subtle tonalities that are often the truly crucial elements in a causal chain. (3)

This Asher that opens the book, that narrates his tale of self-discovery, is confident and self-aware of what he does as an artist. It is a far cry from the confused and fumbling attitude of his youth. This Asher is a model for Christian artists in that he has come to grips with his identity as Jew and as artist. He has learned how engage art as a means of representation as well as a means of holiness or truth. And he has learned how to negotiate the choices posed by his unique situation, one which many Christian artists will find themselves in today.


None of this is very new, but it is always worth reviewing. And My Name is Asher Lev is always worth rereading. But what I find most intriguing in all of this is Chaim Potok’s mysterious role. Asher Lev is fiction, but as it turns out, “Brooklyn Crucifixion” isn’t. Potok has put his money where his mouth is, so to speak. It is provocative to ruminate on Asher Lev and the ambiguous layers posed by his various artistic dilemmas. But here, the real ghost in the machinery is Chaim Potok the artist rather than Asher Lev the artist. If Asher Lev is a model for the Christian artist, then Potok himself even moreso.


The final lesson taught by Asher Lev is that we can talk all we want about what Christian art is, but that will never be a substitute for its actual practice. Just as Asher sweats out his dilemmas in paint and thinner, so should we. As it turns out, “Brooklyn Crucifixion” isn’t a fiction at all. Both for Potok and Asher Lev, the discussions were past, the role model defined. All that remained for them was to paint. Likewise, if Christian art is to move forward, it will do so on the backs of canvases, sculptures, and galleries stocked with work.