The Jewish Museum Misses the Soviet Jewish Moment in Photography

Many years ago I met the eminent historian C. Vann Woodward, who had gone to the Soviet Union in 1932. “I went to see the future,” he shrugged. He rode the trains. He got bedbugs. He wrote about it, saying, “No place on earth could be as interesting.” A current New York exhibition, The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Films, transmits the dynamism and vertigo of that time and place. The photographs are heroic and compositionally extraordinary; the films are epic. In some ways the exhibition completes an initiative that began with two previous and invaluable shows at the Jewish Museum: Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change (1995) and Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater (2008). Like the earlier exhibits, this one draws together 20th-century Soviet masterpieces that aren’t familiar to the American public but should be.

Well over 50 percent of early Soviet photographers were Jewish, and many of them struggled to balance tenuous identities as Jewish Soviets. Though all major Jewish photographers of the early Soviet period are represented in the show, the museum made a decision not to make this a Jewish exhibition, which, to my mind, is a lost opportunity. While the influence and gigantic talent of the post-futurist and non-Jewish Alexander Rodchenko is everywhere and it is gratifying to be able to view the tensile photographs of Georgy Petrusov and Boris Ignatovich with their visual complexities and Hitchkockian angles, the show’s focus is diffuse, and I miss the careful historical development the Jewish Museum has come to be known for. Nonetheless, the scholarly underpinning of the exhibit is impeccable. Looking around the gallery at the many Jewish works of art in which, through a kind of prestidigitation, there’s no overt Jewish content, it’s hard not to think about the complexity of Jewish creativity and effacement—the different pressures, contingencies, and constraints facing Jews in Soviet culture as their world was disappearing.

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