Andy Warhol’s Jewish Minyan

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Darrelyn Gunzburg finds herself surrounded by genius at ‘Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century’, Waddesdon Manor

A minyan is the required quorum of ten Jewish adults necessary to perform various Jewish obligations, most commonly that of public prayer. This gathering of ten was said to create a divine presence. Technically a minyan is an all-male enclave; however, according to many non-Orthodox streams of Judaism it is permissible to embrace adult females in the count. The ‘Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century’ exhibition by Andy Warhol (1928–87), one of the preeminent figures in American Pop art of the late 20th century,does this very thing metaphorically. The portraits include three women: celebrated French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923); Israel’s fourth Prime Minister and one of the founders of the State of Israel, Golda Meir (1898–1978); and avant-garde American writer, poet and playwright Gertrude Stein (1874–1946).

The exhibition is at the Coach House at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, until 30 October.

Technically, there are 12 portraits as the exhibition includes the three vaudeville, stage and film comedians, the Marx Brothers: Chico (1887–1961), Groucho (1890–1977), and Harpo (1888–1964). They are, however, contained in the one frame. The other six portraits are of renowned philosopher and educator Martin Buber (1878–1965); the first Jewish judge of the United States Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis (1856–1941); the eminent novelist; Franz Kafka (1883–1924); the theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein (1897–1955), widely regarded as the greatest scientist of the twentieth century; the hugely influential founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939); and distinguished American composer George Gershwin (1898–1937).

Warhol’s friend, art dealer Ronald Feldman, conceived the idea for this collection of ten prominent Jews, all of whom contributed profoundly to 20th-century thought and culture. Apparently Warhol insisted that the subjects had to be deceased, thus contributing to one of his lifelong themes, a concern with mortality. Over a number of months Warhol experimented with original photographs and line drawings, which he transferred onto clear acetate and then hot-housed through silk-screen experimentation. The result produced a marriage of photograph, blocks of colour and crayon strokes, as if a child were trying to capture and remember each person’s visage, a ghost image through which memory emerged in textured lines.

Some of the portraits contain great detail, such as Golda Meir who, with Mona Lisa smile, looks off to the left; others, such as Gertrude Stein’s portrait, exist only in a half-light of colour. For Stein’s image, Warhol used her passport photo from the 1930s and created a double image with one slightly offset against the other, effected through the silk-screen process. He then broke up the background with blocks of colour and limned in her face and hair with red crayon on the right and blue crayon on the left. As she looks directly at us, the impression is one of simplicity and complexity at the same time. Albert Einstein, a study in black and white, emphasizes the right side of his head with a swatch of white amongst greys and black in what could be almost taken as a photographic negative effect, stressing clarity of thought yet suggesting hidden concepts. In 1980 this was a newlanguage of colour, geometric shape, and crayon line, echoing Cubist techniques but with a Warhol spin, and it is still effective 30 years later.

Displayed along four walls against a background of soft grey, these ten portraits of people at the height of their powers and skills form a closed circle, a conversation amongst intellectuals. In his book The Object Stares Back, art historian James Elkins struggles to understand what is a face. In the end he concedes, ‘A face… is the place where the coherent mind becomes an image’. When this is moved into portraiture this facial image is deflected through a number of filters: we, the viewer, look at the vision of the subject through the vision of the artist. Our gaze is to their gaze through Andy’s gaze.

Yet only six of these 40-inch, square-format images look directly back at us (Martin Buber, Louis Brandeis, Sarah Bernardt, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein and the three Marx Brothers). Albert Einstein looks over our right shoulder, Sigmund Freud looks over our left shoulder, whilst George Gershwin shows us his right side profile. Thus rather than confronting the viewer, by dint of their placement in the room the effect is one of people in conversation. All at the same level and looking through a window of time, each pays attention to another member of the minyan, considers an idea that has already been proposed within the circle, or focuses on the viewer and entreats a response. In 1435 the painter Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) expounded the idea that a figure in Italian religious paintings should look out of the frame directly at the viewer, inviting them to enter into the narrative of the painting. In this set of paintings Warhol has achieved just that.