malebeautyinart:

Bashi-Bazouk

Jean-Léon Gérôme  (French, Vésoul 1824–1904 Paris)

1868–69Oil on canvas31 3/4 x 26 in. (80.6 x 66 cm)

(via The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

My great-great grandfather, Bertsche Tsitov, practiced emergency medicine in Russia. During the Russo-Turkish war, he was compelled to serve as a medic (I’m not sure how much choice he had in the matter.) He returned home with stories of fighting the Bashi-Bazouks, which have since been passed down the generations. Actually, only one has reached my generation (and I’m fairly certain it has only reached me – no one else asks about the family history), and it is a fabrication.

After fighting a series of battles with the Bashi-Bazouks (of course Bertsche didn’t do any of the fighting), the Russians captured the Bashi-Bazouk company leader. The man was enormous and musclebound, superhuman. He was to be executed by firing-squad. When the time came, however, the firing-squad’s bullets simply bounced off of the Bashi-Bazouk leader’s perfect chest. Something sharper than a lead round was needed to pierce his muscles. Bertsche’s stores, however, had what was needed. The soldiers loaded their rifles with hypodermic needles, and subsequently executed the company leader with ease.

centuriespast:

Great Hierarch; Tibet; 16th or 17th century; Parcel-gilt silver, pigments; 

Rubin Museum of Art

Love this sculpture, it lives a block away from me. We visit from time to time. The Rubin’s free Friday evening admission makes this very easy. Really well run museum, great curators and ed program. They do a very good job explaining a cluster of very difficult to understand (at least through Western eyes) art histories.

This image unfortunately does not do the sculpture justice. You hardly get any sense of how lifelike the lama’s facial features are, and you miss out on the intricacy of the incised details on his robes. No sense of the different weights fabric described, or the physical scale of the work (2/3rds life-size.) Here is a link to a higher resolution image on Google Art Project. Zoom waaaaaay in and revel in the refinement of craftsmanship. Understand that this was made through the repoussé process, an artist hammered out all of those details. A master (or masters) would have conceived and finished this work. It is a truly stunning object. It is such an incredible tragedy how it has been displaced from its home, and ripped free of its history.

What infernal spirit possesses archivists to digitize documents at resolutions that are useless when expanded beyond the size of a 3x5 notecard?

elgin-marbles:

somedumbindiething:

somedumbindiething:

(add everyone you’d like to include)

thearcanetheory: plunges into the great grey night of the “#jew” tag and calls out bullshit, esp. regarding victim-blaming and the Venn diagram of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism

…

I am a Jew and I tumbl. Onegirlrhumba, Lazersilberstein, Sodiumlamps, Historicity-was-already-taken/historicity-reblogs, and Fox-teeth also all fit the description. I’m certain they are all capable of asking to be added to the list on their own, in their own terms, if they so desire.

You know the natural questions to ask are: where do we all live and can we meet and have a picnic or shabbat?

Screw these goyim who want us to be careful not to generalize charedim because they’re good Jews who refuse to serve in the IDF, but at the same time perpetuate the stereotype that Jews control the media.

I wonder if FYJH has anything to contribute on the Haskalah? Considering his is the only Jewish history tumblr and everything.

thepeoplesrecord:

Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews protested in Jerusalem on Thursday against plans to enlist men from their community into the military, a proposal supported by the secular majority, hoping to bring more people into the fold of human rights terror & apartheid enforcement.
May 17, 2013

A sea of black coats - the traditional attire of ultra-Orthodox men - engulfed Jerusalem streets near the city’s military draft bureau where the crowd heard rabbis warn that army service would irreparably harm their way of life.

“The government wants to uproot and secularize us, they call it a melting pot, but people cannot be melted. You cannot change our (way of life),” Rabbi David Zycherman told the crowd in an anguished plea.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government has committed to increase drafting ultra-Orthodox men, most of whom receive exemptions on religious grounds, forcing them to commit human rights violations against the people of Palestine.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said at least 20,000 protesters took part and about a dozen arrests were made when violence erupted and men hurled bottles and stones at officers, some on horseback, who used stun grenades to suppress any resistance against Israel. A water cannon was also deployed at protesters.

Most Israeli men and women are called up for military service for up to three years when they turn 18. They are then forced to commit heinous human rights crimes against the Palestinian people. However, exceptions are made for most Arab citizens of Israel, as well as ultra-Orthodox men and women.

Source

Because ultra-Orthodox Jews’ refusal to serve has anything to do with the abuses of the Israeli government or solidarity with Palestinians. What good Jews.

mediumaevum:

Speaking of St Francis - it is almost impossible to find a decent modern-ish painting of him that doesn’t look like a Disney screencap. When did we become so literal in our art? And why?

Avant-gardism. With the rise of anti-academicism in 19th century France under the sometimes paradoxical ideologies of “art for art’s sake” and an art to lead a secular society forward, the treatment of religious themes has largely been left in the hands of artists with very little vision. The formal and conceptual innovators went in a direction that just wasn’t really compatible with sincere Christian painting. It just wasn’t something you depicted if you wanted to be at the fore of art, or if you wanted to be taken seriously in avant-garde circles.

thisbelongsinamuseum:

The Jewish Museum in Berlin was definitely a meaningful experience for a museologist (and half-Jew) like me. But it sounds like their current exhibit “The Whole Truth” is causing a lot of controversy in more ways than one. To help educate postwar generations who are largely uninformed and have no memories of Nazi Germany, various Jewish people sit on a pink felt cushion in a glass box each day and talk to visitors. People ask such questions as “Why are you always causing trouble?”, “Do Jews have big noses?”, “How does someone become a Jew?” and “Can you make jokes about the Holocaust?” Basically it’s like a sequel to one of my favourite Woody Allen films, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Jews* (*But Were Afraid To Ask). Since the museum opened in 2001, thousands of comments have been collected from its 800 visitors’ books. The curators whittled it down to 32 of the most frequently asked questions that serve as the backbone of the exhibit. The most popular question “Are there still Jews in Germany?” is the reason behind the controversial “Jew in the Showcase”. Some believe it to be contrived or dehumanising. The idea of a living Jew serving as a museum display in the former capital of the Nazi Reich has touched a nerve. A woman on the museum’s Facebook page wrote, “Our grandparents and friends spent enough time in boxcars on the way to concentration camps. How dare you!” Some have compared it to Adolf Eichmann in a bulletproof box at his trial in Israel, others are reminded of animals displayed at the zoo. Although it was meant to be educational and thought-provoking, there is more to see than just the “Jew in a box”. Throughout the display, literary and documentary voices speak out about the Jewish identity, controversial opinions, social debates, counter questions, and the effects of stereotypical images. The exhibit runs through September of 2013.

(Image Source)

Good to see talk of this circulating again. I’m Jewish, and I support this exhibition. As you point out, the show is not simply comprised of the “Jew in a box” aspect, but also presents a variety of documentary material and artifacts. A lot of critics seem to miss this. Regarding criticism of the show as dehumanizing, specifically, I think it misses the mark. The people exhibited are volunteers, because they have chosen to be there it is fundamentally different from how we were forced into boxcars to be shipped off and murdered decades ago. I do not think that such an association is unintentional, however. This exhibition is meant to force goyim to confront how they “box” us off in their minds – essentialize us – and to force them to confront how this has lead to actual confinement and murder. This show displays our humanity and at the same time displays how it has been denied.

The more I study art, the more I find the term “art” limited. Art is not transcultural, art is not transhistorical, art assumes a particular audience and a particular set of producers. It is increasingly apparent to me that art history is not the study of the history of visual culture, but the study of a particular visual culture’s history. I have a suspicion that as long as we study the history of “art,” we are going to reproduce a hierarchical understanding of history. Visual culture itself is a limited term (what happens to relational aesthetics if such a term is adopted?), but given how specific “art” is (understood as a dynamic between artists, patrons, and patrons’ institutions) I believe it is a mistake to simply make “art” more inclusive.