Maya Balakirsky Katz on The Visual Culture of Chabad

Maya Balakirsky Katz published a new book – The Visual Culture of Chabad. If there ever was an oxymoron for a book title, this must be it. After the book arrived here, it sat on my table and I would glance at it with a stare appropriate for someone who is struggling through a twelve step program, and who noticed a bottle of red left over by a guest – “Not this poison again!” – I thought wistfully. And yet when I stooped resisting and cracked that bottle, the aroma, the odd geekery filled my head with the sweet and familiar dizziness. The bloody red is colorfully floral, full-bodied, with notes of tobacco, anise and dried herbs. It’s a strangely strange book.

The book opens with the iconography. I started writing this post lats night. All my book notes about the icons of the Tzemach Tzedek, including the detailed history of the original, now in possession of the Kapuster einikle Yehuda Leib Ginsburg (Shlomo Zalman Schneerson’s grandson) in Moscow. And the Alter Rebbe’s icon, a fabrication in my (and the book’s) opinion. Maya Balakirsky Katz writes that the most likely origin of the Alter Rebbe’s icon is the oil painting by Boris Schatz, the future founder of the Bezalel art school in Jerusalem. The portrait was a favor to Shmarayhu Schneerson who had fallen on hard times and was an acquaintance and host of Boris Schatz in Warsaw. Shmarayhu Scheerson eventually published a lithograph from that portrait. As Maya points out there is perhaps even a resemblance between Boris Shatz’s autoportrait and his now iconic image of the Alter Rebbe. I have notes about the book but I can’t write them. I feel there is no one I can level with about this. This makes the subject and the writing about it unbearable. I will forward them to Maya, or better have a conversation about it over a bloody red.

But let me just go to the heart of the book. There are black and white reproductions of four watercolor portraits depicting the Rayatz (from his own archive in the Barry Gourary Memorial Library). The portraits are signed by a woman artist named Gertrud ( Trude) Zuckerkandl. Gertrud was managing her family Pukersdorf Sanatorium where the Rayatz sayed in 1935. Now get ready for this, Gertrud Zuckerkandl is the daughter (from first marriage) of Dr. Wilhelm Stekel who according to Maya Balakirsky Katz analyzed the Rashab. It doesn’t stop there. The proprietors of the Barry Gourary Memorial Library hid the watercolors, perhaps because the artist was a woman or perhaps because they didn’t consider the watercolors iconic enough and then decided that the portraits are of the Rashab and not of the Rayatz. There was a reason for their typical subterfuge. In one of the portraits the Rayatz is sitting in exact posture as his father in the famous photograph. There is a beautiful observation by Maya of the matching limp hands in the portrait and the photograph. The haunting connection between the artist, the sanatorium host Gertrud Zuckerkandl, her father, Freud’s disciple Wilhelm Stekel and the two generations of the Lubavitch royal family, the implications are stirring. I had to go outside and catch some air, my head was spinning. Maya writes:

“In the weeks after I lost my mother prematurely and inherited her precious family photograph albums that she spirited out of the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, I felt inexplicably moved by the gentle intimacy of Yosef Yitzchak’s portraits. Although I had previously cynically dismissed the portraits’ identification with RaSHaB as an attempt to alleviate the stigma of the female gaze, I came to see RaSHaB’s presence as consciously inscribed in Yosef Yitzchak’s portraits. In confronting photograph after photograph of my teenage self imitating what I always saw as my mother’s larger-than-life beauty with the same pout and disinterested eyes I knew by heart from her family photographs, I could see RaSHaB’s likeness posthumously embedded in the life portraits of Yosef Yirzchak. I wondered if Gertrud ever met RaSHaB when he stayed in Vienna three decades earlier or if Yosef Yitzchak presented his female portraitist with the photograph of his father he faithfully kept by his side for her execution of his own portrait.”

I will stop now, I can’t write about this anymore.

Further reading:

• Maya Katz on ‘a Rabbi, a Priest, and a Psychoanalyst’
• The Cropping Circles of Chabad History
• Maya Plisetskaya dances Carmen

Tagged as: art, chabad, history, maya balakirsky katz, psychology, russian jews, sigmund freud, wilhelm stekel