A Visit to the World’s First Chassidic Art Gallery

by Dovid Margolin – chabad.org

For decades, the late Chassidic artist Zalman Kleinman worked in near-anonymity. Together with his family, he lived in a modest second-floor walk-up apartment above a synagogue, struggling to sell his paintings. He worked as an illustrator on various publications to help make ends meet, and on average would paint three major, large-scale works a year, each one garnering as little as $1,200. At his peak during his lifetime, Kleinman’s work could fetch perhaps $10,000.

Kleinman didn’t begrudge this reality. “I think I would never buy my own paintings,” he told interviewer Jill Vexler in 1993. “ … I [would] not have the audacity to spend a few thousand dollars for a painting.” He laughed. “You know, I’m afraid to say this, because I will spoil my market.”

His admission did not spoil the market, and today, Kleinman’s classic works—which appear on everything from book covers to calendars to wine bottles—regularly sell in the six digits.

This development can be traced to many factors, but the most important by far has been the emergence, over the last few decades, of Chassidic art as a creative endeavor to be taken seriously. As explored at length in a recent piece on Chabad.org titled “The Rebbe’s Revolutionary Vision for Jewish Art,” none of this could have happened without the blessing and active encouragement of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, who from the start of his leadership of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement began articulating a new understanding of the role of art in the Jewish experience.

Aside from elucidating a philosophical framework, the Rebbe employed concrete tactics to advance Chassidic art. A significant step came in late 1977, when the Chassidic Art Institute, also known as the CHAI Art Gallery, opened on Kingston Avenue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Today, it sits between a boys’ clothing store and a kosher fast-food joint with an overly diverse menu. While the presence of the latter establishments is unsurprising, it was only the Rebbe’s pioneering vision that made an art gallery in the heart of a Chassidic neighborhood seem so natural.

Step inside on any given day, and you’ll find CHAI’s director, Zev Markowitz, sitting at his desk, surrounded by canvases of all sizes and styles, almost certainly reciting Tehillim (Psalms.) Markowitz, a Russian-speaking Jew who’s been at CHAI since its inception, has recited Tehillim in its entirety twice daily for the last 32 years. He can often be spotted walking on Kingston Avenue with his worn Tehillim close to his eyes, reading as he walks—a scene worthy perhaps of a Chassidic painting of its own.

Markowitz looks up at his visitor, places a bookmark in the little volume and agrees to answer a few questions about his background, Chassidic art (and photography), and what drove him to devote so much of his time to saying Tehillim.

There Goes the Neighborhood

Markowitz was born in 1947 to Holocaust survivors in the western Ukrainian town of Mukachevo, better known in the Jewish world by its Yiddish name, Munkatch, after which the Chassidic group is also named. The region had been a part of Hungary prior to World War II, and the area’s late introduction to Communism ensured that the Jewish upbringing Markowitz received was better than that of many of his Soviet Jewish contemporaries. It was, nevertheless, lacking, and after emigrating to the United States in early 1977, his desire to study more Torah led him quickly to Crown Heights.

Markowitz’s father was a serious art collector back in the USSR, and Zev had studied art in Leningrad, Russia’s cultural capital. In late 1977, not long after Markowitz’s introduction to Crown Heights, Rabbi Elya Gross, the then-director of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council (CHJCC), decided to establish a permanent art gallery to assist and showcase local Chassidic artists. When Gross got wind of Markowitz’s art background, he offered him the directorship of the new institution.

CHAI formally stands for the Crown Heights Art Institute and was a part of a slew of initiatives launched by the Crown Heights Jewish community throughout the 1970s to help stabilize the neighborhood. The 1960s had seen the destruction of dozens of urban Jewish communities across the country, victims of doe-eyed social engineering projects, ineffective policing, weak political leadership and the resulting rise in crime. Brownsville, for example, just down Eastern Parkway from Crown Heights, had seen its 80-year-old Jewish community disappear nearly overnight, leaving behind only its most vulnerable members. Crown Heights appeared to be headed in the same direction. Then, in 1969, the Rebbe went public with his campaign that Crown Heights remain a Jewish neighborhood, making it clear he was not planning on leaving. Under his direction, community activists got to work ensuring Crown Heights remained a safe and vibrant home for its longtime Jewish residents.

Within a few years, community-based organizations such as the CHJCC were doing what they could not only to preserve the Jewish community, but help it expand and grow. This often came at a steep price; the CHJCC offices were firebombed in 1972, and violent crime, including murder, continued to climb. The Rebbe, however, maintained that Jews fleeing Crown Heights would place other Jewish communities at risk. “It is a test case,” the Rebbe told Mayor John Lindsay. “Not only for New York,” but for the rest of the country and “the world in general.” If this deeply rooted community could be forced out against its will, then every other one was unsafe as well. The very future of the American city was at stake.

What the Rebbe sought, however, was not a fortress in Brooklyn, but a living, breathing, dynamic community. “Where else could we open a blessed gallery but in a blessed neighborhood?” Gross pointed out in a 1978 interview, noting the Rebbe’s personal support for the Chassidic artists it was founded to display.

Art, the Rebbe explained, has within it the power to expose the truth, an essence all too often covered over by the physicality of this material world. CHAI’s existence proclaimed that Crown Heights was not a decaying neighborhood, but in the words of Psalms, a place “where G‑d commands His blessing.”

The Making of Chassidic Art

Then there was the Rebbe’s special view of art: Since the revelation at Mount Sinai, he explained, Jews had been tasked with elevating the material into the spiritual via physical mitzvot. If used correctly, art could serve as a representation, even a fulfillment, of this phenomenon.

“The point is that those who have been Divinely gifted in art, whether sculpture or painting and the like, have the privilege of being able to convert an inanimate thing, such as a brush, paint and canvas, or wood and stone, etc., into living form,” he wrote in 1967 to the organizers of a Chassidic art exhibition in Detroit. “In a deeper sense, it is the ability to transform to a certain extent the material into spiritual … . How much more so if the art medium is used to advance ideas, especially reflecting Torah and Mitzvoth, which would raise the artistic skill to its highest level.”

As chronicled at length in the recent Chabad.org article, the Rebbe thus encouraged Chassidic artists to express their inner vision of Jewish life and G‑d’s world through their art, and encouraged efforts to bring their works to ever-wider audiences. One concrete way to do this was through Chassidic art exhibits. In fact, CHAI came about as the direct result of one notable example of these exhibitions, held in the fall of 1977 at the Brooklyn Museum. Titled “Chassidic Artists in Brooklyn,” it marked the first time observant Chassidic artists had ever received such attention in a major museum. The exhibition was the brainchild of the CHJCC’s Gross, and organized by the Chassidic artist Raphael Eisenberg.

“Are these relatively drab-looking, strict people allowed to indulge in such colorful work?” the Village Voice asked in its 1977 review of the exhibition. “Of course we are,” responded Eisenberg, who, together with Chanoch Hendel Lieberman, Zalman Kleinman, Yaakov Moshe Schlass and Michoel Muchnik, was among the show’s participating artists. “Our spiritual leader, Rebbe Schneerson, even gave a warm blessing to this project.”

Wondering what the parameters of Chassidic art were, the Voice asked whether the artists’ pictures must have direct Jewish themes. “It’s not a question of that,” Eisenberg replied. “[E]ven though the subject matter might be a still-life or a landscape, we are constantly expressing our belief and joy in G‑d through whatever emerges on canvas.”

The Brooklyn Museum exhibition drew more than 10,000 visitors, its success leading to Gross’s decision to open a permanent gallery to display and market the work of the often-overlooked Chassidic artists. CHAI opened its doors with the Rebbe’s explicit blessing, and Markowitz has devoted himself to this mission ever since.

Similar to what Eisenberg intimated in the Voice, Markowitz stresses that it is the true devotion of the Chassidic artist that allows the art to communicate with its viewer. The artist cannot merely depict the scene in front of them, but must reveal its essence, showing it to be more than just a sum of its parts. To do this, one must strive to faithfully lead such a life.

“As an artist, it was Lieberman who defined it,” Markowitz explains, referring to the late Russian-born Lubavitcher painter, widely recognized as the dean of Chassidic artists. “Number one, each artist must have the ability to see the world in his own way. Number two, he needs to have a feeling for it. Last, he must have an understanding of what he is doing. Many people try to make a copy of a Jewish ceremony or holiday or whatever, but if you yourself don’t have these things, I don’t think you can really connect people to your art.”

“Feeling is more profound and austere in Chenoch Lieberman’s gouaches and drawings of Hebraic lore … ,” a 1952 review of Lieberman’s work in The New York Times noted. “Some of the earlier sketches show a thorough understanding of cubism, while others reflect the sophistication of Bakst.”

Markowitz arrived in Crown Heights not long after Lieberman’s passing, forming a relationship with the artist through his work. Zalman Kleinman, on the other hand, he came to know very well, working closely with him until the artist’s untimely passing in 1995 at the age of 62. “You couldn’t bother Kleinman until noon,” Markowitz recalls. “He would daven shachris [recite the morning prayers] and then learn Torah until 12, and you couldn’t bother him before that.”

At noon, Kleinman would turn to his work, breaking to pray the mincha and maariv services with a minyan. “I watched Kleinman painting each of his pieces for hours and hours,” Markowitz recalls. “You see, what makes an artist? You have to be unique, you have to do something that not everybody else does. Kleinman captured a time and place and characters who are gone. He was capturing something real to him and pouring his whole soul into it.”

This was not just about painting what he saw, but portraying the higher reality animating the scene, the true beauty that is the essence of G‑d’s world. Kleinman saw this as a fundamental of Chabad Chassidism.

“My greatest dream is to paint a certain scene,” he told the Uforatzto Journal in 1977. “The room outside the Rebbe’s office is called The Lower Garden of Eden.” When Chassidim enter this hallway after experiencing a private audience with the Rebbe, they are grasped by their fellow Chassidim and thrust into a deep, joyous dance. “I would like to paint this, the way it is—an ecstasy in Gan Eden,” he said. “But how? After all, walls are just walls, benches are benches—where is the Gan Eden? How can it be portrayed?” It would take Kleinman another three years before he attempted his 1980 painting, Yechidut.

Perhaps one of his most famous paintings is the 1983 “From Chaslavitch to Lubavitch,” a large-scale painting depicting a group of Chassidim on the way to their Rebbe in a flying horse and carriage. Leaving behind the rundown, perpetually muddy shtetl of their material reality, the travelers take flight the moment they step foot on the wagon. Once at the Rebbe’s court, they will spend a month studying and praying in his proximity, but the journey, as important as the destination, has already begun.

While the Rebbe encouraged the artists, he also constantly urged for their work to be shared with ever-widening circles of people. For decades, Markowitz would travel the country putting on exhibitions of the works of Lieberman and Kleinman, but also such Jewish painters as Samuel Rothbort, Meer Akselrod, and Michael Gleizer, among others. At one point, he was organizing seven serious shows a year.

“I always sent the Rebbe an invitation to whatever exhibit we were putting on,” Markowitz says. “Then every time I passed by the Rebbe [when he distributed Sunday] dollars, he would ask me about them. The Rebbe was pushing me all the time, saying I need to go make exhibits around the world. What he was most interested in was new projects.”

CHAI has also published a number of glossy coffee-table volumes of Chassidic artists’ work, the one featuring Kleinman’s work including an introductory essay by the late Jewish art historian and noted curator Cissy Grossman. Markowitz continues to hold the exclusive rights to reproduce Kleinman’s works, which are available, among others, at the gallery as high-quality giclees and prints.

Light and Shadow

Markowitz has long been fascinated with photography, and among the collections exclusively available at CHAI are the works of the Jewish photographers Jerry Dantzic and Shlomo (Fridrich) Vishinsky. The American-born Dantzic was a photojournalist who appeared regularly in publications such as Life, Look and The New York Times, and whose work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art.

One summer evening in 1973, Dantzic came to 770 Eastern Parkway to document former President Zalman Shazar of Israel’s visit to the Rebbe. That night, the Rebbe led a Chassidic gathering in honor of 12-13 Tammuz, the anniversary of liberation from Soviet imprisonment of the Sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory. Shazar’s second term as president had just concluded a few months earlier, and in many circles where he’d formerly been feted he was already being forgotten. Shazar appears to have been greatly bothered by this development, making his summer visit to 770 a particularly poignant one.

“In Chabad nothing changed,” Shazar told a reporter shortly thereafter. “They greeted me with the same parade and the same love as when I was president … . The true friends still come to speak and confer with me.”

Among the many striking photos taken by Dantzic that night is one snapped in the Rebbe’s study following the conclusion of the farbrengen gathering. It shows the Rebbe and Shazar seated at the desk, both smiling. The Rebbe is looking at Shazar, while the president stares straight at the camera. The time was 3 a.m., and everyone else had left the room to allow the Rebbe and Shazar to converse alone. Only Dantzic remained. Taking the hint, he took one final photo and scurried out.

“The Rebbe received me courteously, and gave me useful advice on how to adjust to my new status as an ordinary citizen,” Shazar said after that meeting. “The transition is very difficult and the Rebbe’s advice is truly helpful.”

Markowitz connected with Dantzic in the early 2000s, visiting him in a nursing home towards the end of his life. After sifting through the great photographer’s negatives, Markowitz mounted an exhibit of Dantzic’s Chassidic-themed photos at CHAI.

Shlomo Vishinsky’s story is a very different one. A multi-talented, Leningrad-born photographer, he first came to Crown Heights in the early 1980s. “I see a guy walking with a Leica camera down the street, it was not something I was used to, so I stopped him,” Markowitz recalls. Vishinsky, it turned out, had studied art and photography at a high level in the Soviet Union. He was also a musician, and at the time made his living playing saxophone aboard a Carnival cruise ship, returning to Crown Heights every six months to visit his elderly mother. Seeing the quality of Vishinsky’s portfolio, Markowitz began convincing the enigmatic photographer to settle in Crown Heights and focus his lens on the Rebbe and his court. Eventually he agreed, and between 1982-1994 Vishinsky took thousands of iconic photos of the Rebbe. “The Rebbe liked Vishinsky very much,” Markowitz says. “He was able to move freely and get the pictures he wanted.”

Today, Markowitz is the copyright holder for this unique collection. What makes photography an art form, he explains, is revealed in Vishinsky’s methods.

“Ten photographers can take pictures of one scene, and only one captures it,” Markowitz says. “Vishinsky did that.” There were times when Vishinsky would spend days just trying to capture one scene. “He could use three rolls of film to snap the one picture that he was happy with,” he says. Even then, Vishinsky was never totally satisfied. “He would say, ‘I think I could do better.’ He was always competing with himself. That’s an artist.”

‘You Are Who You Are’

Chassidic art, wrote the Rebbe, is about inspiring the viewer “with higher emotions and concepts of Yiddishkeit imbued with the spirit of Chassidut … .” In his nearly-half century of promoting Chassidic art, Markowitz often saw how honestly executed art could, in fact, change its viewer. “You could introduce someone who is not observant at all, sell them a Jewish subject and one day something will click in their head,” he says. “A Jewish painting, it could change them. It might take time but one day they become different people.”

In Markowitz’s own case, this could take place even before the artwork was complete. “When I first began spending time with Kleinman, I did not have enough knowledge of different Jewish things,” he says. “I wasn’t brought up in a yeshivah; we were observant, but we did not have books beyond a siddur and a chumash.” And so a big portion of his Jewish education came via the hours spent in conversion with Kleinman as the latter painted. They would discuss Chassidic ideas, stories from Tanach, or whatever Kleinman was working on at the moment. “I learned many things from him.”

In fact, it was this lack of Judaic background that got Markowitz started on his daily Psalm-saying regimen. During his early years in America, Markowitz felt he needed to do something concrete to strengthen his Jewish identity, yet he lacked the skills for in-depth Torah study. “After I came to Crown Heights, I heard the Rebbe speaking about the importance of Tehillim and I decided I would do something about it,” he says. In 1979, he began reciting the entire book every day. When the Rebbe became ill in 1992, Markowitz started reading it twice each day. He’s never stopped.

From the beginning, CHAI wasn’t meant only to display the artistic works of Chassidim, but also to connect less-observant Jewish artists with their own Jewish self. Many of the artists Markowitz worked with in the early years were, like him, born in the Soviet Union, and Markowitz invested time introducing them to Jewish life and their own Jewish heritage. Though they might have had superior technical skills, they needed to engage with their own Jewish soul to gain a true feeling for the subject matter.

About 15 years ago, Markowitz was at his printer’s in Manhattan when he noticed the work of an artist named Harry McCormick. The themes weren’t Jewish, and neither did the artist’s name give any reason to suspect he was anything but an Irishman. But Markowitz was impressed by the artist’s skills, and arranged to meet him for lunch.

“Do you only work with Jewish art and artists?” McCormick asked him towards the end of their conversation.

“Yes,” Markowitz replied. “That’s the gallery’s purpose.”

McCormick sat quietly, hesitating.

“Harry, you wanted to say something?” Markowitz asked after a few moments.

“Yes,” McCormick responded. “I wanted to tell you that my mother was Jewish.”

Until that point McCormick, who’d been raised Irish-Catholic, had not realized that his mother’s being Jewish meant he was as Jewish as Moses. Soon thereafter, McCormick began attending his local Chabad center in Florida. “I struggled with painting Jewish scenes,” McCormick wrote, “until I met Rabbi Ruvi New from Chabad of East Boca Raton. He took me under his wing and agreed to teach me about Judaism with the stipulation that I learn not as an outside observer, but as a participant on the inside.”

McCormick later traveled to Israel together with Markowitz, spending time in the Old City of Jerusalem, the Kabbalistic town of Tzfat and other holy sites. When he returned home he began painting, and in 2013 the first exhibit of his Jewish work—which he began signing with his Jewish name, Zvi Hersh—was held at CHAI.

McCormick died earlier this year, a Jew who’d reconnected to his true identity through art. In a 2013 interview with this writer, McCormick acknowledged that his change in signature had caused some complications.

“People have been buying my art, and when they see my name signed as Zvi Hersh, they call me up and ask me to sign it ‘McCormick,’ which is how I’ve always signed my paintings,” McCormick said.

“I asked Zev what I should do, and Zev answered me, very wisely, and typical of him:

“‘You are what you are.’”

Click here to learn more about the CHAI Art Gallery