A private tour of the former Manhattan home and studio of the Jewish artist Ben-Zion presents as the artistic version of an ice-cream headache. Spread over several floors, including a basement with a hidden trap-door staircase, the works are a dizzying array of drawings, paintings and sculptures, some that include the self-taught artist’s poetry, set among hundreds of books, artifacts and knick-knacks.
Ben-Zion was born in Ukraine in 1897. After the death of his father, a cantor and composer of liturgical music, Ben-Zion’s mother moved him and his younger siblings to Boston in 1920, where she had a brother. Six months later, Ben-Zion moved to the Bronx, N.Y., where he met Hebrew and Yiddish writers, with whom he published a Hebrew-Yiddish journal. (The group hoped it would be the first of many, but there was no second iteration.)
In 1965, Ben-Zion relocated to Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, the house that is now a museum and where he lived until his death in 1987. “Chelsea was a rough neighborhood at the time,” Tabita Shalem, who manages the Ben-Zion estate, said on an April 2019 tour of the house.
Ben-Zion often mined biblical and other Jewish subject matter in his art; his style and temperament at times evoke the works of Marc Chagall. But it has taken a recent exhibit of his works, which ran at the Maor Art Gallery in Brooklyn, to remind the public about Ben-Zion, who is little known even among many Jewish art aficionados.
“Ben-Zion was among the first to create works in America in response to the Holocaust and its effects on the continuation of Eastern European culture in America,” Matthew Baigell, art history professor emeritus at Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of many volumes on Jewish art history, told JNS.
The artist “was among the very few artists through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s to create works based on the Hebrew Bible at a time when many Jewish artists avoided stressing their Jewish heritage,” according to Baigell. “His choice of subject matter did not find a ready audience for many Jews who sought assimilation into mainstream American culture and who were unfamiliar with biblical history.”
“Today, people are more open about acknowledging their heritage, and Ben-Zion’s work is central to that heritage,” he told JNS.
Ori Soltes, a teaching professor at Georgetown University, author, and former director and chief curator of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, told JNS that “it’s too soon to know whether he just had a brief moment or the beginning of a longer moment.”
Ben-Zion “certainly deserves one,” Soltes said.
Soltes, who curated a one-man, centennial show of Ben-Zion’s work in 1997 at B’nai B’rith International, told JNS that he was “overwhelmed by the range of interrelated modes of his artmaking—verbal and visual—and how he evolved from verbal to visual.”
At first, Ben-Zion used sticks, as if writing calligraphy, and later used small rocks, stones, driftwood and steel fragments, “from which he extracted visual personalities that only became obvious with his revelations of them,” according to Soltes, who finds Ben-Zion’s art “revelatory.”
“I appreciate the range of his literary and conceptual underpinnings, from Babylonian epic to the celebration of the Shabbat,” Soltes said.
Whether an artist’s star rises or falls often depends upon whether the right museum, gallery or critic latches onto the work and promotes it, according to Soltes, who noted that some members of the artistic movement with which Ben-Zion was affiliated, The Ten, are widely known and exhibited, including Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb.
Shalem said during the 2019 tour of Ben-Zion’s home and studio that the artist never achieved recognition like Rothko and others did, because “he never became entirely abstract.”
Ari Kirschenbaum, a Chabad rabbi and founder of the Maor Gallery, told JNS he saw the Ben-Zion exhibit as a “form of saying kaddish for his soul.”
“I was inspired not just by his works, which I had never seen prior to that, but by him as a human,” Kirschenbaum said. “Most people have a very parochial viewpoint, but Ben-Zion saw the world, he saw everything as art, as God’s art.”
“Whether it was a painting of a landscape or taking stones from Central Park and engraving them or finding discarded wood on a Manhattan street and turning it into art,” he said. “There were so many facets of his talent and life that I thought, ‘How do I not know about him? How is he not being spoken about, shown or exhibited?’”
The artist wasn’t a ritually observant Jew, but Kirschenbaum told JNS that his soul “is embedded in all of his work, and that is very clear when you just walk into the exhibit,” particularly depictions of yarmulkes, Torahs, beards and biblical tales.
“They never left him,” the rabbi told JNS. “He may have left, but they never left him.”
Shalem, who manages the Ben-Zion estate and curated the exhibit with Kirschenbaum, told JNS that she met Ben-Zion when the artist was 81 and worked with him until his death, and also worked with the artist’s widow, Lillian, until she died in 2012.
“I had the privilege of being part of their lives for many years, and it was a labor of love,” she said. “Ben-Zion was a man of great passion and profound thought.”
Ben-Zion was “deeply immersed in the Hebrew language and was a poet, a writer and a thinker,” Shalem said. “When his family emigrated to the United States in the 1920s after his father’s sudden death, Ben-Zion carried his original music manuscripts and his own Hebrew writings. He always combined his love for Hebrew, his Jewish background and his passion for art.”
Shalem told JNS that Ben-Zion shouldn’t be “pigeonholed” as a religious Jewish painter, and there is much more to his work than that. “The discoveries that people can make in getting to know his work go beyond Jewish and biblical themes,” she said.
Ben-Zion’s Abraham and Stars, from his series on biblical themes, is one of nearly two dozen works by the artist in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
The barefoot forefather sits on the ground looking heavenward with his head in an unnatural position. His beard points toward the stars at an angle that almost suggests that Abraham has removed his head from his shoulders and is holding it with his right hand.
The abstracted stars, which God has likened to the forefather’s descendants-to-be, hover about like will-o’-the-wisps or fireflies, with one emanating from Abraham’s walking stick. The work, like many of Ben-Zion’s, combines a direct drawing style with a complex composition.
According to the rabbi who curated the recent exhibit, Ben-Zion’s work is striking a particular Jewish nerve in recent months.
“There has been an explosion of Jewish pride,” in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Kirschenbaum told JNS. “People came to the exhibit to connect with others, to find meaning in these turbulent times. It was not just about the art, but about reconnecting with something deeper.”
“If there is another Ben-Zion out there that we haven’t heard of yet, hopefully we’ll meet them soon,” he said.
