2024 in review: Jewish art

Frank Auerbach in his studio in Camden, London, 1962Getty Images

Frank Auerbach, who came to the UK as a child escaping Nazi Germany, and whose distinctive impasto technique crafting thick layers of paint and highly expressive approach, has left an indelible mark on British art, died last month, aged 93. Ten months previously, London’s Courthauld Gallery had mounted an exhibition of his charcoal heads, the large-scale portraits created as he was starting to gain prominence some 70 years ago.

In the late 1950s Auberbach was struggling and his 1958 self-portrait (collage, bottom right), one of his few in which he gazes out towards us, hints at this. He appears almost ghost-like, as if the light surrounding him diminishes his presence. His right eye is smudged, the left stares uncompromisingly beneath a small, ambiguous frown.

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In the Eye of the Storm, Royal Academy

Semen Yoffe's In the Shooting Gallery[Missing Credit]

Against a background of collapsing empires, the First World War, the fight for independence and the eventual establishment of Soviet Ukraine, groundbreaking modernist art was made in Ukraine between 1900 and the 1930s, and Jews played a key part in its creation. In June, the Royal Academy told some of their stories in its exhibition, In the Eye of the Storm. One of the artists whose was featured is Semen Yoffe (1909-1991) whose In the Shooting Gallery, 1932, defies the rules of Soviet Realism with its exaggerated perspective, unrealistic colours, and duo of substantive female figures cradling rifle barrels. He was part of the Kultur Lige, a group promoted the development of contemporary Jewish-Yiddish culture.

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​Judy Chicago, Revelations, Serpentine North

Judy Chicago's In Wrestling with the Shadow for Her Life[Missing Credit]Judy Chicago Photo: Donald Woodman[Missing Credit]

In May, the creator of iconic artwork The Dinner Party had her largest solo show in a London institution. It was pervaded by sense of back to the future. Throughout her long career, the pioneering feminist artist has been concerned with absences and elisons in the story of art and the story of nations, whether that’s the omission of women artists, the invisibility of women’s lives and role in shaping society, or the absence of the Shoah as a subject in later 20th century art. In Revelations, she offers a radical retelling of mythological creation with goddesses and female figures at the centre. In Wrestling with the Shadow for Her Life, the artist redresses the erasure of women’s social and physical experience in canonical art history. When she went to Europe for the first time and saw Michelangelo’s painting of human creation on the Sistine Chapel ceiling she said: “It’s a great painting except for the fact there are no women except for the Virgin Mary. I see a male God reaches out his finger and creates man – that’s not how birth happens!”