David Stern's Cosmos

...Individuals materialize from surfaces that just could not be flat...

...They have been integral features of modernity, of our predicaments—and they will continue to be so, perhaps more acutely, in the globalizing era that is upon us...

...They are not given to us "on naive grounds...

...On these canvases—in this quest for his own way—we see dusky woods, imposing trees and underbrush, but with a whitish-gray wedge of (perhaps wintry) sky descending and dividing the natural density, as if pointing toward a solitary path in the thickets below...

...DISSENT / Fall 1999 67...

...As Stern's cosmos changed, he began using pigments and makDISSENT / Fall 1999 65 ing his own paints...

...When we reemerge above ground for Stern's new paintings, plural humanity strides toward us through urban reaches, sometimes with the blue of cityscaped skies above, sometimes with the gray of a rainy day...

...Martin Buber placed ethical demands at the core of what he called "Hebrew" or "Biblical" humanism...

...These random New Yorkers have become part of Stern's quest for the human figure —a figure that is transient yet always there...

...Three decades ago, in an essay asking, "Is There a Jewish Art...

...Stern's distinctive style emerged in the mid-1980s following a deep personal crisis (a "crisis of loss") and the subsequent growth in him of a new Judaic sensibility...

...Instead, it was a "will to identity," a nonconformism whose wellspring was deep within the Jewish experience but whose expression took form in artistic individuality...

...But the gesture couldn't last, and not only because it was youthful...

...Indeed, he maintains that "you cannot paint a figure today without taking the abstract experiments into account...

...Stern was born in Essen in 1956...

...In brief, how could one go back to rendering simply human images after the Third Reich had—in art as well as the battlefield—murderously degraded any notion of common humanity on behalf of a master race, of a monumentalized Aryan Man...

...Are Stern's figuresinthe-thickness an attempt at retrieval...

...it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable...

...He adds that the idea of drawing figures, especially from models, was then anathema to his teachers...

...Stern's paintings resist this mindset, but not on behalf of a credulous nineteenth-century image of happiness and progress...

...His initial reactions to New York took form as what he calls "Skypieces" or "Cityscapes...

...That thickness is not painterly surplus or indulgence, but something shared by those figures—and by the viewer, this writer, and, of course, the artist...

...Rejoin" suggests separation of "internal" and "external" domains of life...

...and one can see a bright, cloudless, blue heaven descending, wedging tall buildings apart...

...So humanity in art "may be realized with an unlimited range of themes or elements of form" and to label abstraction "inhuman" is "to underestimate inner life and the resources of the imagination...

...Here, the energies and potentials of individuals move together in public spaces...

...People of every skin tone come toward the viewer...

...Buber also argued that contemporary Jews should look back to the Bible much as Renaissance Italians looked back to Greek and Roman antiquity...

...Yet that energy doesn't organize a simple picture for us...

...66 DISSENT / Fall 1999 Is it any wonder that New York, a city identified with modernity, energy, and motion became so vital to him...

...At times, Stern's human images seem to play hide and seek with the viewer, and the closer one moves toward the canvas the more one may be tempted to jump in to discover them...

...Stern gives us New Yorkers next to each other, their bodies stationary in the space of a subway car—which is moving...

...the canvas almost becomes an energized relief, moving toward us...

...Still, they must also be engaged on "common ground"— as Stern, not incidentally, entitled a series he painted after moving to New York...

...Abstraction expressed individuality —"inner freedom and inventiveness" —and it thereby helped to "maintain the critical spirit...

...Abstraction translated inner life onto canvas by means of lines and circles, points and planes, this or that color combined with this or that brush stroke or gesture or streak...

...It is hardly unusual for a modern artist to be at odds with the society around him, but here the stimuli of estrangement were potent...

...This dialectic is captured, not surprisingly, thanks to the movements of Stern's thick strokes...

...Abstract art, Meyer Schapiro wrote, comes of a deep "reaction to basic elements of common experience and the concept of humanity, as it developed under new conditions...

...Not just on "Common Ground," but even underground...

...He aims to do so, however, with a consciousness of history and art history...

...Modern times haven't been marked like that...

...But Stern painted these after first looking up, and then looking down...

...That is what I see in David Stern's art—and that is why I think of him as a painter not just for the end of the twentieth century, but for the beginning of the twenty-first...

...Now, he asserts, they came "alive...

...I am not the first to find a verve evocative of abstract expressionism in the movement of Stern's paint...

...In the last quarter of a century the intellectual world has been abuzz with the idea that we have entered "postmodernity"—an epoch of fragmentation, of "differences" rather than universalism, of suspicion of the notion of humanity writ large...

...Nor is Stern's cosmos...

...Instead, there is a thickness of agitation...

...The human image raises another subject— the nature of Jewish humanism...

...Human form, it seems, must still be seen...

...Can an artist reassert the human figure as an act of reclamation...

...Conceptualism was the rage...

...Those last four words are essential...

...Preconception is likewise at odds with Stern's artistic self-conception...

...His desire: "to bring the figure back to life, the whole figure, but not on naive grounds...

...Communists proposed the reorganization of society according to a preconceived plan and demanded mental orthodoxy...

...Here is a painter who ventures to draw out the human form after a very antihuman age...

...For such an act to succeed, surely it must give us that figure without naiveté while upholding human kinship—perhaps by giving us figures and faces that emerge out of the thick of things, faces and figures and a cosmos that share a thick likeness...

...Justice still matters to him, but now he speaks simply of "trying to be good," of the need to "carry on as mankind" despite this last century, of Tikkun olam—Hebrew for "fixing the world," making it aright, something different from stuffing thick human existence into a preconceived grid...

...It was just that Jewish artists had felt this reality with special intensity, so their works were "loaded with meaning for all people of this era...

...One of their cardinal themes—and Stern believes we all have "permanent life themes"—is the varied relations of bodies to each other and to space...

...It is their interdependence that is suggested in Stern's paintings...

...It was, Stern reflects, a gesture for justice on his part, and he felt especially close to Party members who had suffered in the concentration camps...

...What disfigured human dignity more than the Nazi bid to monumentalize Aryan Man...

...So his most recent canvases capture diverse New Yorkers afoot on urban pavements—plural humanityinmotion, one might say...

...Yet, if one moves back a little and looks from here or there, they will emerge out of the thickness...

...These New Yorkers are not anonymous figures in the scheme of an urban planner, but embodiments of human energy—which still carries on after the painting has been finished...

...Although he didn't live the trauma of the Second World War, neither could he live at ease in its West German aftermath...

...These subways and sidewalks are urban paths in an exploration of embodied space, of bodies in spaces, of placement and displacement...

...Surfaces broke up," he says...

...The work of art was to be a function of an Idea and every artistic move had to derive from it, as if by master plan...

...Here is where humanism, Judaism, and artistic vision come together in Stern's work...

...Moreover, the Second Commandment's proscription of graven images has led many to believe (erroneously) that art and Jewish existence have dwelled quite apart from each other...

...Stern speaks of New York as "transformative" and "liberating"—a New World...

...It is reasserted by the hands of a German Jew after a century in which the fate of Jews at the hands of Germans—Germans led by a failed painter—became emblematic of the fracturing of common humanity...

...Before this, he judges, he painted "dead images...

...humanity is plural but it is still humanity...

...He was quick to add that "the metaphysical theme of identity" was not at all uniquely Jewish...

...Dusky woods are now "canyons" of skyscrapers...

...he doesn't give us simple lines or sharply etched faces...

...For Stern, however, it became imperative...

...Faces emerge in the thick of things...

...Stern says that he wants "to put the figure back together" in his paintings...

...As humanity doesn't emerge simply from the twentieth century, so one must engage the figures emerging 64 DISSENT / Fall 1999 in David Stern's canvases in complex ways, from multiple perspectives...

...Back in 1987, as his style materialized, he painted a series of "Studies for a Way...

...Baudelaire spoke for Stern's artistic vision when he wrote that "modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent...

...As he rejected political orthodoxy, so he also turned from German artistic orthodoxies of the 1970s and 1980s...

...Rather, it represented "the situation of the twentieth century, a century of displaced persons, of people moving from one class to another, from one national context to another...

...To appreciate an artist fully," David Stern believes, "you need to feel his locale...

...He finds in New York a "democratic experience unlike any other city...

...Stern makes demands of his viewers—his works require a pluralism of vision...

...Yet how do you take them into account if you want to put "the whole figure" back "together" on canvas...

...In one sense of the term, Jewish culture is animated by humanism because of its strong emphasis on the idea of the community...

...When I was in art school [in Dortmund and Düsseldorf], nobody was really painting . . . Everybody was busy with concepts...

...And too easy...

...Placement and displacement are not simply aesthetic matters...

...Drawing from the book of Genesis ("And God created man in his own image . . ."), Ernst Akiva Simon, one of Buber's students, sought to encapsulate Jewish religious humanism in the idea that "Man, who is created in God's image, takes away from God's dignity by losing his own...

...And by making it so, he rubbed up against a basic problem for postwar German artists...

...an animating energy suffuses the sensuous, dense materiality of his paint...

...Look at Stern's paintings today—at the demands made of the viewer by their multidimensionality —and it is evident that communism could only have forged a vise for his spirit...

...The point is not to present New York to the viewer in a literal sense...

...This essay was written for the catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition of David Stern's paintings opening October 12 at Rosenberg + Kaufman Fine Arts at 115 Wooster Street, New York City...

...Inevitably, his brushes would pursue the city dwellers below...

...In fact, visual imagery has been a component of Jewish culture from antiquity on, as Cohen's keen inquiry into the place of art in European Jewish history shows...

...ITHINK THAT this is also a way to approach David Stern's paintings...

...Every figurative painter is of course necessarily preoccupied by these relations...

...After all, what aspect of New York life is thicker than the subways...

...And just as his painterly preoccupations were not an academic product —they had more to do with his engagement with the works of Rembrandt, Beckmann, Soutine, and Giacometti, among others—so Stern's Jewish commitments were "self-made" (his words) in that they came of his engagement with texts like Pirke avot (Sayings of the Fathers—a collection of religious ethical maxims) not Yeshiva instruction...

...A true artist," he believes, "has to connect" but "never has a plan...

...Looking from one point of view, from a fixed place, is insufficient...

...MITCHELL COHEN is co-editor of Dissent...

...His purposes—as anyone can see—are not those of a draughtsman...

...BUT IF humanity in art deploys a wide range of themes and forms, then certainly the human figure itself reemerges legitimately as one of them, given other imperatives of imagination and critical spirit...

...What gave "humanity" to art was not, then, solely representation of the human image or "natural shape," but an artist's "constructive activity, his power of impressing a work with feeling, and the qualities of thought...

...For five years, beginning in his teens, he was a communist— a clear way of saying, "I don't identify...

...Realist or naturalist resemblances would be beside the point...

...Harold Rosenberg proposed that it was not Jewish themes or "style" that characterized modern Jewish artists (his concern was mainly American Jewish painters, especially abstractionists...

...In the old one, he says, he couldn't paint street scenes...

...In some ways," Stern says, "I wanted to belong, but I did everything so as not to...

...There has always been some ambiguity in the relation between art and Judaism...

...For instance, an artist's constructive activity may strive to rejoin inner human verve to outer human image...

...The visual development of Jewish life," observes Richard Cohen in his book Jewish Icons, "has often been overlooked in the study of the Jewish past, reflecting the centrality of the written text and Jewish literary tradition...

...On his canvas, David Stern's cosmos and his complex visual imagination interface...

...he began taking the surfaces of his canvases to new places...

...Rejoin" may not be a wholly adequate word here, if the aim is to bring "the whole figure" back to life...

...But in Stern's work they are urgent, so very urgent...