Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews? Full Press Page
EXAMINER
Theater J's 'Good for the Jews' thought-provoking, provocative
By: Barbara Mackay
Special to The Examiner
March 15, 2010
In 1980, Andy Warhol's exhibit of 10 silk-screen portraits titled "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century" was received with scorn by many art critics and praise by the public who understood and appreciated it. Thirty years later, comic storyteller Josh Kornbluth takes up the issue of the once controversial exhibit and what it means -- to him personally and to the larger community of art lovers.
Produced by Theater J, Kornbluth's one-man show, "Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?" is in part a rambling discourse explaining how Kornbluth was introduced to the exhibit, how his stage show took shape, how Kornbluth navigates the world as a father, the son of a communist, an atheist-maybe-on-the-way-to-becoming-a-Jewish man. That part is all right. Kornbluth is an entertaining fellow whose low-key comedy is easy to take.
But far more interesting are Kornbluth's revelations about Warhol, the development of his art and the seeds of the 1980 exhibit found in Warhol's early life. Kornbluth's Warhol is not the jet-setting Andy we know so well, the Warhol of the Velvet Underground, Factory and Studio 54 days. It's his predecessor: a sensitive, sickly boy in Pittsburgh who often knelt to pray in a Byzantine-Catholic church rich with icons.
Kornbluth stands in front of a series of 10 large portraits, the faces of the people in "Ten Portraits," all of whom altered the world in extraordinary ways: Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, George Gershwin, Martin Buber, Louis Brandeis, Sarah Bernhardt, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud and the Marx Brothers.
Scene designer Alexander V. Nichols uses huge projections spanning the back wall of the stage -- two rows, five panels per row -- each projection a paler version of one of Warhol's portraits. In terms of color, the set is at odds with the original brilliant prints. Perhaps Kornbluth wanted to emphasize where Warhol began, with black and white photographs of his subjects. Or perhaps director David Dower thought vivid colors would draw too much attention from Kornbluth. Still, the genius of the portraits becomes clear as Kornbluth stops to evaluate the contributions of each monumental personality.
It's impossible to talk about Warhol without discussing iconography and Kornbluth deals deftly with Warhol's style, motives and achievements in the exhibit. Was it crass exploitation as the vitriolic critics wrote or can we believe Warhol himself, when he said he just liked the faces? As for the struggle to decide on which 10 to include in the show, Kornbluth re-creates with subtle humor the curious process by which Warhol's subjects were chosen.
"Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?" lasts about 90 minutes. During that time, Dower has his actor move a few steps in one direction or another. But basically, Kornbluth stands center stage and talks. Not for a minute is it boring.
Best of all, the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington, the home of Theater J, is showing the original Warhol exhibit in its Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery. "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century in Retrospect" will be on view through May 2. If Kornbluth doesn't convince you that Warhol's art is still provocative and powerful, the original portraits surely will.
DC THEATRE SCENE
Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?
March 11, 2010 by Tim Treanor
Despite the whimsical title, Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews? is a serious conversation, about serious stuff. It is about art, and – this is the genius of Kornbluth, that eventually he always gets down to the bones of the thing – about love.
Josh Kornbluth (Photo: Stan Barouh)
In 1980, Andy Warhol – he of the fifteen minutes of fame and the giant soup cans – painted, in his own inimitable style, ten portraits of famous twentieth-century Jews (George Gershwin, Sarah Bernhardt, Martin Buber, the Marx Brothers, Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, Louis Brandeis, Gertrude Stein, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka). They were not, shall we say, well received. “[V]ulgar and offensive,” sniffed Hilton Kramer (New York Times), “or it would be, if the artist has not already treated so many non-Jewish subjects in the same tawdry manner.” Artform’s Carrie Rickey sneered that the paintings were perfect for “the synagogue circuit.”
Kornbluth had a similar reaction when he first saw them, years later. After looking at the portraits, he went to the exhibition catalogue and drew all over Warhol’s picture. “I put a Jewish beard and sidelocks and a yarmulke on him. I thought, if Warhol is going to Warholize the Jews, then I’m going to Jewify Warhol.”
Judge for yourself. You can see prints of Warhol’s portraits in the gallery on the first floor of the Jewish Community Center, below Theater J. Except for Einstein, who is done in outline, they are almost photographic – crafted with laserlike precision. Most of them contain small, easily identifiable Warholian touches – a splash of yellow across Kafka’s chest; the slight hint of a double image in Stein’s grim, no-nonsense portrait (taken, we learn, from her passport photo).
Of the ten portraits, the one of Martin Buber is easily the most striking. His head is at an angle; his face is swaddled in a magnificent beard; and there is a faint lividity to him, as though he had been out in the sun a tad too long. He regards us with a cool appraising eye. He could be a medieval blacksmith, or a prophet
What he was actually was a mid-century philosopher, who first coined the term “the I-thou relationship”. Buber observed that most relationships were of the “I-it” variety, in which we see another person as someone who can help us get what we want, or else as an obstacle to our objectives. But in an “I-thou” relationship, Buber proposed, we see each other as real human beings, with wants and objectives as valid as our own. In so doing, he says, we become full human beings ourselves.
Good conversation being all about second looks, Kornbluth proceeds to enter into an I-thou relationship with Warhol’s famous subjects, revealing their human sides to us. Eventually he takes on such a relationship with the famously reclusive and impenetrable artist himself. Warhol spoke in a ghostly monotone, frequently said that his principal artistic interest was to make money, and, when interviewed about the ten portraits, asked the interviewer to “just tell me what you want me to say.” Warhol was thus like a Kabuki actor in a play about his own life. Kornbluth relentlessly teases out the details of Warhol’s early life in an ethnic ghetto in Pittsburgh (like another famous masker, Jerzy Kosinski, Warhol was Rutherian), his illnesses, the misery he suffered growing up, and the wariness he incorporated into his personality. He thus makes Warhol, if not like us, like someone we would have been had we been less lucky.
Having humanized the man whose photo he had once defaced, Kornbluth then attempts the most difficult I-thou relationship of all: with his own Jewishness. His adored father was a virulent atheist and doctrinaire Communist (“Is he good for the workers?” Paul Kornbluth would ask), and Kornbluth is squeamish about his own inclusion among the Chosen People. (He quotes with approval a man who said “I’m not a Jew. I’m Jew-ish.”) Yet in viewing Warhol’s portraits he finds himself drawn closer to a people who could include a Brandeis and an Einstein, a Kafka and a Stein…and in doing so before our eyes, he enters an I-thou relationship with us. And if God is not precisely in the picture yet, both “I” and “thou” are fully appreciated, which means that God is not far from view.
Here: suppose you had the late, great Vladimir Horowitz in your house, or, say, the fabulous violinist Joshua Bell. Would you not ask them to play you a tune, to give succor against the melancholy evening, and remind you of how sweet the world is? And would they not ply their art, knowing that through their skill they could share the rapture within them with you, who lack their sensitivities? Josh Kornbluth is the Joshua Bell of talk. His Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews? is an arpeggio which takes us, forcefully and gracefully, to the land of I and Thou, where we, and all, are loved.
WASHINGTON POST
One-man Warhol show too much about the performer
ART HISTORY AND PERSONAL HISTORY: Josh Kornbluth's "Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?" is playing at D.C. Jewish Community Center. (Stan Barouh)
By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 13, 2010
The title of Josh Kornbluth's new one-man show -- "Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?" -- puts you in mind of a topic for a lively guest lecturer. And that's essentially what Kornbluth offers in this amiable if scattershot discourse that places art history and personal history into the genial writer-performer's trademark socio-political blender.
The world-premiere production at Theater J, efficiently directed by David Dower, is Kornbluth's attempt to deconstruct a 1980 Warhol silk-screen installation, "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century." Standing on a stage before a panel of projections of the Warhol prints, Kornbluth serves up interesting tidbits about the artist's life and how he chose the photographs he would rework to create his gallery, from Golda Meir to the Marx Brothers.
We also learn, though, that Kornbluth's son wants a puppy, and that the performer's father stopped speaking to his parents at a tender age. He launches into quite lengthy stories about these humdrum autobiographical details, and therein lies the problem: You wait in vain for these digressive anecdotes to rewardingly illuminate the evening's purported thrust. It never completely happens, and so the balance of the monologue feels shaky. Too much Kornbluth. Not enough Warhol and the sources of his inspiration.
The performer has been down a similar road before, in pieces such as "Red Diaper Baby," which explored in more depth his fairly exotic childhood as the son of members of the American Communist Party. The idea in this outing is an examination of a parallel in the vantage points of Warhol, a gentile, and Kornbluth, a nonobservant Jew. To varying degrees each approaches Jewish identity from an outsider's perspective.
Somehow, an exhibition of the Warhol portraits at a Jewish museum near Kornbluth's California home provokes a deeper reflection of both the writer's own Jewishness and Warhol's motives in distilling Jewish achievement down to a pop-cultural conceit. "I get that it's commerce, but I don't get that it's art," he says at the outset of the 75-minute piece, gazing upon portraits of George Gershwin and Gertrude Stein, Martin Buber and Sarah Bernhardt, Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka.
As a theatrical backdrop, the collection conveys a deeply moving sense of gravity. The breadth of accomplishment that the serene-looking faces represent seems a silent testament not only to a people's intellectual scope, but also its skills at reinvention. Kornbluth touches ever so briefly on what the subjects' achievements have counted for, though mostly he talks about what they have or haven't meant to him. What he has to say can be enlightening, particularly when he manages to boil down the ideas of a complex thinker such as the philosopher Buber. In other cases, though, his insights seem cursory and the portraits mere excuses for stories about his own life.
One of the better sequences is the product of old-fashioned research: Onto the wall Kornbluth projects the original handwritten list of names Warhol gathered for potential inclusion in the set of 10. That artifact inadvertently uncovers something illusory about modern identity, for as Kornbluth points out, non-Jews were included on the preliminary list -- people such as George M. Cohan and John Steinbeck -- because their names sounded Jewish.
Kornbluth explains during the course of the show that he has come to see himself as a Jew in more than name only. And perhaps diehard fans will be contented with this navel-gazing. With the assortment of great figures peering out enigmatically from those Warhol prints, however, you're left with the nagging feeling that there are more compelling mysteries to be unraveled.
METRO WEEKLY
Preview
Jewish Soupçon: The late, gay painter serves as inspiration for a comedic monologue about Jewish identity now at Theater J.
By Doug Rule
Published on March 4, 2010, 2:44am
''I think if one were to ask Andy Warhol about the impact he's had on Josh Kornbluth in finding his Jewish identity, he would be both flummoxed and bemused,'' says David Dower. ''It wasn't the point.''
The late, gay Warhol, raised Catholic, had other intentions for his art. For starters, he was determined to live in infamy, well beyond ''famous for 15 minutes,'' the ubiquitous phrase he coined. In fact, Warhol serves as inspiration for Kornbluth's latest comedic monologue -- Andy Warhol: Good For The Jews? -- developed with Dower, who serves as director. The play is having its world premiere this weekend at Theater J.
Kornbluth (Citizen Josh) was commissioned by the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco to write a monologue riffing on ''10 Portraits of Famous Jews," a 1980 exhibit by Warhol, who didn't only paint soup cans or money it turns out. He also painted Jews.
''It's a somewhat random collection,'' says Dower. ''Warhol was roundly criticized for just being a money whore at the time, only doing it because he knew [the portraits] would sell.'' But the short-lived exhibit of such notables as Albert Einstein, George Gerswhin, Golda Meir and Sarah Bernhardt was popular. (The exhibit is currently on display at the DCJCC, in tandem with the show's run.)
''This is the first time [Kornbluth's] actually talking about his life as a Jew,'' says Dower, who has worked with the San Francisco-based performer on three previous autobiographical monologues as well as two films. ''All of his stories have been about being raised an atheist and a communist, with an actively ambivalent relationship to money.''
Dower, raised Episcopalian, says the whole process, especially in ''putting all these days and nights in understanding Josh's Jewish identity,'' has been fascinating. And the play's title?
''It's both weighty and whimsical,'' says the director. ''It's a Kornbluth recipe.'''
EXPRESS
Preview
Performance Art: Josh Kornbluth, 'Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?'
30 YEARS AFTER Andy Warhol painted Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka and other notable Jewish people in "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century," performer Josh Kornbluth reconsiders the images in "Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?" In the improv show at the Washington DCJCC, Kornbluth examines how the work affected him, and also looks at the artist and subjects. The portraits are on display at the DCJCC.
» EXPRESS: Where did you first see the Warhol portraits and what did you think of them?
» KORNBLUTH: I didn't think much of them when I first saw them at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco a year ago; I thought they looked decorative. I was hoping they would give me a huge connection to Warhol and to my fellow Jews. But at the same time, there was something else about them that kind of freaked me out. What Warhol had done is take these pictures of really interesting people and put them behind glass. It was like he deadened them. It made me want to figure out what he was doing so I could connect to them in some way.
» EXPRESS: What ideas do you address in the performance?
» KORNBLUTH: When the portraits came out, there was a really divided response, and I revisit that — why were people so divided between love and hate of this portraits?
» EXPRESS: And you do this through improv?
» KORNBLUTH: I develop shows through improvisation and I do a bunch of autobiographical monologues about my life. ... It's incredibly brave of theaters to book me when starting a show. Theaters normally look at scripts and say, "Okay, I like this; let's cast it."
» EXPRESS: Has your opinion evolved?
» KORNBLUTH: I knew the thumbnail version of Andy Warhol — the soup cans, white hair — but from researching the piece, I've come to believe that Warhol was a very profound thinker and that what his work presented was a philosophy or theology.
» Washington DCJCC, 1529 16th St. NW, opens Sat. March 6, through March 21, $30-$55; 800-494-8497.
Written by Express contributor Amy Cavanaugh
Photo courtesy Jonathan Reinis Productions
Posted By Express at 12:00 AM on March 4, 2010