ABSTRACT
In an interview conducted for the Jewish Chronicle in May 1963, Viennese émigré Rudolph Cartier, a senior drama producer at the BBC, spoke of his passion for film and television and the joy he found in creating images for the screen. As part of this he reflected briefly on the particular challenges a Jewish artist faced when working with the visual:
I don’t feel that Jewish artists are necessarily better [. . .] but there is something urgent in our sense of the need to create. The Jewish religion has no visual images, and this fact has created a sort of extra urge for pictorial outlet in other spheres. I am a non-practising Jew, and I don’t know whether Chagall is a practising Jew, but I do feel the urge streaming out of him to create the shapes and colours that he didn’t see in the synagogue in his own childhood.1
