ABSTRACT
While successively greater numbers of Jewish artists came to prominence as the twentieth century progressed, Jewish artists continued to avail themselves of the full scope of art history rather than drawing upon, or creating, a definable tradition of Jewish art. Philip Guston, despite belonging to a Jewish milieu in New York during the 1940s and 1950s, tended to look most intently towards the distant past. For R. B. Kitaj, the desire to exploit Jewish themes in his work often meant eschewing the examples of Jewish artists. In arguing for the ability, and at times even the necessity, of art to enrich and stimulate Jewish life, this project marks a departure from the ways in which the majority of scholars in Jewish studies have tended to address visual art. Christian theologians, for their part, have been much more willing to take theological cues from visual art.
