A Lion in Zion

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2024

A lion in Zion

On “All About Herzl: The Exhibition” at the Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica, New York.

The raid on the town can only be described as an atrocity. Terrorists from across the border descended on the remote village and quickly overran its defenses. Trained and supported by a hostile state, which had planned the attack as part of a larger proxy war, tribal mercenaries went door to door “with horrid shouting and yelling,” according to one eyewitness account, “like a flood upon us.”

Over the course of the day, the attackers brutalized and murdered as many residents as they could find. They bludgeoned and burned the townspeople in their homes. People of all races and backgrounds fell victim to the assault. Anyone the terrorists could not round up to take back across the border as either a hostage or domestic slave was slaughtered. Women and infants, along with the infirm, were specifically targeted.

By the next day, ten men, nine women, and twenty-five children lay dead out of a population of 291, with more than a hundred people taken hostage. Nearly half the town was reduced to ashes as the attackers looted what remained. Even if they survived the initial onslaught, husbands and fathers had to watch as their wives and children were slain for not keeping pace on the forced march back to enemy territory.

Meanwhile, those who survived back home attempted to raise the funds to pay the kidnappers for the return of their kin—often in vain. Negotiations dragged on for years while the participants in the raiding party fought over the booty. Hostages had to renounce their faith as they were forced to live with their attackers. Half the captives never made it home. Eventually, one survivor gave witness to the massacre in a book that galvanized public opinion. Its title was The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion.

The Deerfield Massacre of February 29, 1704, described above, is a reminder of the brutalities Americans endured in the creation of what became the United States. The attack on a remote village in the Connecticut River Valley by Mohawk Indians and their allies, crossing the border from Canada along with their French enablers, was just one episode in what historians know as Queen Anne’s War (1702–13), part of the greater War of the Spanish Succession.

Nation-building is a difficult business. Often the outsize burden of cultivating a wilderness and taming a border can only be endured through faith. America’s early settlers, persecuted across the Atlantic, found power in their belief in the City upon a Hill, in creating the New Jerusalem that would become their Manifest Destiny. Some three centuries on, a similar faith in a Promised Land, a Zion, inspired Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) to envision what became, just a few decades after his death at age forty-four, the modern State of Israel.

A small but potent exhibition now on view at New York’s Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica called “All About Herzl” delivers on its promise to reveal this latter-day nation-builder through primary documents and the iconography that came to surround him.1 Drawing on the Central Zionist Archives of the World Zionist Organization (here mostly in facsimile) and the David Matlow Collection of (original) Herzl memorabilia, the fascinating exhibition curated by Warren Klein presents the Zionist behind Zion and the cultural artifacts he and others deployed to inspire Israel’s creation.

A delegate card from the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

The exhibition begins on East Sixty-fifth Street, where a banner for the show depicts Herzl in profile, hands clasped together beneath his Assyrian beard, leaning over a railing and gazing out at the Fifth Avenue façade of Temple Emanu-El and the Brooklyn Bridge. As with much Herzl iconography, this image represents a wishful concatenation. Herzl never visited the United States. The picture is rather a combination of Ephraim Moses Lilien’s 1901 photograph of Herzl overlooking the Rhine from his hotel balcony in Basel, Switzerland, taken as he attended the fifth Zionist Congress, with modern images of New York. For the exhibition-goer, a further opportunity to be seen in Herzl’s shadow continues just inside the lobby. Here visitors can stand beside a life-size statue of Herzl, arms folded, positioned in front of a backdrop of a Zionist Congress.

Trigger warning! These early chances to see yourself beside the founding father of the State of Israel, even the option to take a selfie with him, reveal a show that is unabashedly pro-Herzl, pro-Zionist, and upbeat about his nationalist vision. Like the energized state he inspired, Herzl understood the joys that could be released from Jewish sorrow, a fact reflected in the show’s sometimes lighthearted application of Herzl-iana. The mascot for David Matlow’s own “Herzl Project,” for example, based in Toronto, Canada, and established “to inspire people to be a little like Herzl and pursue their dreams,” is a Herzl-faced hockey player. At a moment when Israel’s frontiers are under vicious assault and cosplaying Mohawks are attacking America through its ally, the absence of doubt here for Herzl’s vision is refreshing. For those looking for a counterpoint, there is always Columbia University.

Whatever else you think of him, Theodor Herzl must be the most consequential theater critic in modern history. The Austrian-born playwright went from working as a cultural correspondent in Paris to inspiring what has become a nuclear-armed state. In the final eight years of his life, Herzl foresaw the descent of liberal Western Europe into barbarism as well as his own reburial in his future nation (by design, he was initially interred in Vienna in a transportable metal casket).

Herzl identified the mechanisms to turn his vision into a groundswell and to set its gears in motion. He mapped out a state that would serve as a beacon and bulwark for the region. In his utopian novel of 1902, Altneuland (The Old New Land), he envisioned a desert transformed into a Jewish metropolis. One translation of this book’s title provided the name for the city of Tel Aviv.

Herzl was not your obvious nation-builder. Born into an affluent, assimilated Jewish family in what is now Budapest, he attended a Protestant high school, where he studied German literature and poetry and at first looked down on “shameful Jewish characteristics.” The exhibition includes such artifacts as Herzl’s second-grade report card (in facsimile, ca. 1867) from the Israelitische Hauptschule Pest along with a rare photograph of him clean-shaven (ca. 1880).

When his family relocated to Vienna, Herzl joined a German nationalist fraternity and remained a member despite its growing anti-Semitism. In 1891, he moved to Paris as a correspondent for Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse at a moment of populist turmoil in the French Third Republic. Three years later, anti-Jewish sentiment came to a head in the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer falsely accused of spying for the German Empire. The exhibition contains several illustrations from this trial and the subsequent degradation ceremony that divided French opinion. If liberal Western Europe could turn so fiercely against its Jews, Herzl reasoned, no amount of assimilation would solve what he called the “Jewish problem.” The only solution, he argued, could be found in the title of his 1896 manifesto, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). Several editions, including English, Spanish, Hungarian, Yiddish, Polish, and Arabic translations, are here on display.

A bust of Theodor Herzl, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

Calling in his preface for the “restoration of the Jewish State,” Herzl maintains that the “world resounds with outcries against the Jews, and these outcries have awakened the slumbering idea.” The “misery of the Jews,” he continues, can be turned into a new nation’s “propelling force.” History has shown that “the absorption of Jews by means of their prosperity is unlikely to occur,” since the hatred directed at them by their host nations—of “vulgar sport, of common trade jealousy, of inherited prejudice, of religious intolerance, and also of pretended self-defense”—is a “remnant of the Middle Ages, which civilized nations do not even yet seem able to shake off, try as they will.” In fact, the “longer Anti-Semitism lies in abeyance the more fiercely will it break out,” Herzl continues, since the “world is provoked somehow by our prosperity, because it has for many centuries been accustomed to consider us as the most contemptible among the poverty-stricken.” On the question of where this new Jewish state should be established, in one famous passage, Herzl weighs the two areas of recent settlement—“Palestine and Argentine:”

Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency. If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.

Driven by necessity, Herzl concludes that the “Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question, which can only be solved by making it a political world-question.”

By expanding Judaism from a shared ancestry and religion into a “political world-question,” Herzl found his earliest critics in assimilated Jews. They saw his Zionist call (a term he did not invent but deployed in a new way) as unnecessarily tendentious. At the same time, many orthodox observers believed that only Hashem, and not man, should aspire to return the Jews to Jerusalem (a handful of their descendants can today be seen joining the campus Hamas-niks). It was in the unreformed East, where Jews lived with no pretense of assimilation, that Herzl found his most fervent believers and the misery to shape his nation’s “propelling force.”

A bas-relief portrait of Theodor Herzl, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

As Herzl devotes much of his book to the mechanics of nation-building—the handling and reselling of assets, the corporate and social entities that must be created, the use of negotiorum gestio, that “noble masterpiece . . . the Romans, with their marvelous sense of justice, produced”—The Jewish State can be a dry read. Yet the manifesto’s arid structure proved to be the kindling that ignited the movement.

As Herzl traveled to Constantinople to negotiate (unsuccessfully) for a parcel from the Ottoman sultan, his followers flocked to see him at the rail stops. Zionist chapters formed in cities across Europe and (to a lesser extent, at first) America. With the paintings, posters, photographs, pamphlets, books, medals, and statues that came to represent him, “All About Herzl” picks up with the abundant memorabilia produced around the early meetings of the Zionist Congress, the annual black-tie affairs that Herzl produced with enough pomp and circumstance to make his vision a reality. “If you will it, it is no dream,” he proselytized. The second Zionist Congress created the Jewish Colonial Trust and its Anglo-Palestine Bank, which went on to become Israel’s Bank Leumi. The fifth Zionist Congress created the Jewish National Fund for the purchase of land, with the suggestion (made by a Galician bank clerk) that a collection box be placed in every Jewish home.

Herzl gave his life for his cause, dying from the fevered urgency of his dream. In death he became a political martyr, his image an icon, as represented in the exhibition’s final, salon-style hanging of twentieth-century depictions of him, which are inventively varied. In a Rudi Weissenstein photograph from Tel Aviv in 1949, a year after Israel’s founding, we see Herzl’s casket lying in state before its reinterment in Jerusalem—another redeemed captive returning to Zion.

1. “All About Herzl: The Exhibition” opened at the Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica, New York, on September 17, 2024, and remains on view through January 23, 2025. ↩

The Boston Perry

THE NEW CRITERION, October 2024

The Boston Perry

On In the Company of Art: A Museum Director’s Private Journals by Perry T. Rathbone, edited by Belinda Rathbone.

Back before “connoisseurship” became a dirty word, a generation of museum directors learned to “know by the senses” through a Harvard course prosaically titled “Museum Work and Museum Problems.” Created and taught by Paul Sachs (1878–1965), a scion of both Goldman and Sachs and a former Wall Street investor himself, the postgraduate course educated its “scholar-connoisseurs” on matters of quality through visits with art dealers in New York and object lessons and dinners at Sachs’s Cambridge home Shady Hill. The instruction was hands-on, from the study of Greek coinage, to the maintenance of an institution’s physical plant, to the cultivation of museum benefactors. In every case, students honed their powers of discernment while learning how to flip the coin, turn the switch, and seal the deal.

Perry T. Rathbone (1911–2000) was a Sachs graduate who applied these lessons con brio. In the Company of Art presents this museum director’s newly published “private journals” as selected and introduced by his daughter Belinda Rathbone. Beginning in the early 1950s, when he was the director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, but focused on his subsequent and transformative seventeen-year tenure at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the journals and letters collected here find Rathbone “writing in earnest” as he took the helm of a large and luffing institution on the flood tide of postwar expansion. “What dreary galleries, what gloom! And what a behemoth it is!” he wrote to his wife, Euretta de Cosson Rathbone, a highborn British ski racer whom he variously addresses as Rettles, Ret, and Rett, upon arrival in Boston in May 1955.

The journals of many a not-for-profit manager might have limited appeal, even ones documenting important moments, but Rathbone’s were never weighed down with meetings and memos. “My father’s journals are filled with his feelings,” notes Belinda, a New Criterion contributor who has written about Sachs for these pages (“Museum work & museum problems,” December 2018). In the Company of Art locates her father “at the peak of his powers, at the crest of his career, old enough to look back as far as he could look forward.”

The journals convey the observations of a seasoned connoisseur—not just of art, but also of the many famous figures he encountered and occasionally even of himself. Attached to the “educated eye” Rathbone developed through Sachs was an aptitude for concision. Intended for his readership alone, these discerning journals impart their own literary lessons in the elegant powers of description.

Elegance is the stock-in-trade of museum directorship, of course, especially as it comes to the dark arts of benefaction, but Rathbone cut his high polish with just enough world-weariness to make his personality revealing. He drove a 1936 Ford Phaeton, a memento from his sandbox days as a curator in Detroit, well into the 1960s. “Trained in the courtship of the rich,” writes Belinda, “he also learned to see through them.”

Rathbone’s observations could be frank, but they were rarely biting, at least as selected here in these breezy two hundred pages. The appreciation he showed for his own life’s good fortunes conveys an honest ease that grounded his judgment. “I know my life is rich,” he wrote on October 1, 1962, reflecting on “how omnivorous time swallows up the detail of our lives,” but, as he continues, “to read about it makes it seem richer than I could ever remember it to have been.”

Latter-day readers of these journals will be drawn to Rathbone’s character sketches, especially as they concern the notable and quotable. (As the editor, Belinda provides footnotes to better our understanding of person and place.) “After giving him the benefit of the doubt for two days, decided he was a man of limited intelligence,” he writes of Willem de Kooning, after serving on an awards jury with the painter at the Chicago Art Institute. “Quite expressionless. And a staccato monotony of speech I found rather tiring” (October 1, 1953).

“His quite unassuming behavior won me at once, never permitting me to feel odd or even self-conscious,” he notes of a visit to the museum by Aldous Huxley. “He walks with a curious bending gait, a sort of lope, and he looks at the world through the palest of blue eyes, almost as if veiled with mist” (October 14, 1960).

“He’s a sharp observer and a quick, rather tart, talker,” he says of his time with Kenneth Clark, the wartime director of London’s National Gallery and soon to become the television host of Civilisation. “He does look extraordinarily like a turtle . . . not only round the nose and mouth, but even in the eye. And he’s a bit snappy too; even knows and admits he’s been rude” (April 4, 1962).

“Picasso’s eyes are unforgettable and also his delicate tapered fingers,” he writes to Ret from Peggy Guggenheim’s Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, after a visit to Cannes. “He was like a child in the studio, following all our interests and enthusiasms and bringing out his special treasures for us to enjoy—Degas pastels and the two tiny portraits by Douanier Rousseau” (July 6, 1964).

“Of all the sculptors I have known—Moore, Marini, Calder, Milles, Lipchitz, Marcks,” he notes on a visit to Japan, “Noguchi is the only one who lacks basic kindliness” (March 26–April 14, 1974).

Along the way, we learn about the sticky business of museum acquisition (“a repellant creature,” he writes of one dealer who tried to cut him in on a sale, which he declines, “but he cannot be ignored”; October 18, 1953). There are the expected grievances around the museum board (“an admirable man of the law but possessing not a fiber of aesthetic sensibility,” he says of one trustee; October 13, 1960). Difficult donors conspire to take up his time (“She has a way of detaining her guests—more like a jailer than a hostess”; letter to Ret, June 20, 1964). Museum renovations keep him awake at night (“I can see these galleries as if I were in them, every detail. It is inimical to sleep”; October 26, 1961). Loans are to be pursued even if beyond reach (“Seems to be no hope of bringing the Gioconda to Boston, but at least the effort has been made. . . . Now we can relax”; December 19, 1962). At the same time, the prerogatives of modern art confound him (“I am more at sea than ever over how to formulate a policy of acquisition in the field of modern art for a great museum of historical art like the MFA”; January 31, 1964).

Readers might appreciate Rathbone’s astringent comments on modern architects and urban planners, especially as compared to the lust for anti-contextual additions at today’s institutions. “Americans in the middle of the twentieth century live at the mercy of highway engineers and ‘traffic experts,’” he laments (January 31, 1964). Meanwhile, “Harvard only builds ‘centers’ today,” he writes of the university’s brutalist new home for contemporary art, which features a highway-like ramp. “Nor has this tortured pile of concrete designed by Corbusier any apparent logic within or without” (December 18, 1962).

At the crux of this volume are Rathbone’s interactions with the Kennedy administration and in particular his time with the First Lady. For this head of Massachusetts’s flagship museum, Camelot came calling in a way that might otherwise have been reserved for Washington’s National Gallery. At first, Rathbone begs off his invitation to the inauguration. “Who wants to be swallowed up amidst thousands”? (January 16, 1961). In the end, a blizzard and a railroad strike conspire to keep him away. Nevertheless, three weeks later, “Mrs. Kennedy telephoned me this morning from the White House! I couldn’t have been more surprised and thought for an instant that someone was pulling my leg” (February 4, 1961).

After lending a suite of American watercolors, the Rathbones travel to the White House to see these works by Sargent, Homer, Prendergast, and Hopper hanging in the West Sitting Room. “The charming Mrs. Kennedy soon appeared. Her ultra simple attire made me feel that I belonged to a different generation. In a way it stated the triumph of the proletariat” (April 18, 1961). Later that year, Rathbone returns for a concert in the East Room by Pablo Casals: “a glittering company all around absorbing great sonorous music from a great artist, I was conscious of my privilege every moment” (November 17, 1961).

Museum directors must be acquisitive by nature, especially those leading American institutions in times of growth. Rathbone was a treasure hunter out of necessity, a swashbuckler who enjoyed collecting personalities and far-flung experiences perhaps even more than the art itself, at least judging by the attention paid to each in these journals. “I am always surprised at my success” (October 1, 1960).

The happy disposition revealed here conveys an innocence on the subject of Rathbone’s ultimate denouement and serves in part to exonerate his fateful lapse in judgment. The matter concerned “The Boston Raphael,” the title of Belinda’s previous book on her father and the cause of his resignation from the MFA. Charged with landing the big one in honor of his museum’s centenary year, Rathbone acquired a Raphael portrait from Italy that proved to be anything but—“maybe Lorenzo Costa on a good day,” said one expert. After much fanfare, the means of its acquisition were challenged and the painting restituted to Italy, where it now resides off-view.

Of this “greatest of all adventures,” he writes to Rett in the days after negotiating its purchase on the Italian Riviera, “I spent the afternoon sunbathing and I swam and swam again from the rocks.” Although he lived for another thirty years after this letter from the Hotel Porta Rossa, Firenze, of July 15, 1969, Rathbone’s charmed journals, at least as collected here, had just about reached their end.

The map & the territory

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2024

The map & the territory

On the life & work of Joe Zucker.

The art world never knew what to make of Joe Zucker, a painter who died in May at the age of eighty-two. Just as pirates became a recurring theme in his work, Zucker took a piratical stance on art history. He refashioned the flotsam and jetsam of pictorial space to raise his own Jolly Roger over the scurvy dogs of modernism in a way that fit nobody’s story of art but his own.

Like Augie March, Zucker was “an American, Chicago born.” Growing up Jewish on the city’s South Side, he spent his childhood at the museum of the Art Institute. His father was a scrap-metal dealer. His mother, a nurse, deposited him at the museum starting at an early age to avoid the ethnic warfare of the streets. Here he absorbed an aesthetic education that was democratic and particularly American, one that flattened chronology and place—a “Veronese one day, a de Kooning the next, Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles,” he said. Back home, through an affinity for literature and narrative, he further mixed high and low—Willa Cather with Studs Terkel, Herman Melville with N. C. Wyeth’s illustrations for Treasure Island.

Chuck Close, Joe Zucker, 1969, Gelatin silver print, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.

After a stint at Miami University of Ohio, where he played basketball, Zucker returned to Chicago. He enrolled at the School of the Art Institute, earning his undergraduate and graduate degrees. He joked that here he learned to draw a skeleton riding a bicycle from memory. As with much of Zucker’s artistic identity, this was fact and fiction mixed in a medium of dry wit. The tall tale reflects the degree of technical training he received without any particular sense for what to do with it, especially since he said he never wanted to be the next jock from the School of Paris flexing a Picasso brush. “My real love is being an artist and making art,” he once said. “Not advancing the myth of modernism.”

As he stared at his canvas, an early moment of doubt became Zucker’s first artistic breakthrough. Uncertain what to paint, he set about depicting the painting itself—in particular, the warp and weft of the canvas’s weave. His subsequent abstractions of interwoven rectangles brought to mind the rigors of Piet Mondrian but also the basket weaves of brightly colored plastic lawn chairs, which were then a ubiquitous feature of demotic Americana. Zucker’s interest in vernacular, in the elevation of craft and domesticity against the backdrop of high art, in grids and recursive rules, and in the conflation of process and product, were already apparent and continued throughout his career. His circular logic could be confounding, but Zucker flavored such Möbius strips like salt-water taffy—palatable, mysterious, and (as his last name might suggest) sweet.

After teaching at the Minneapolis School of Art, Zucker moved to New York in 1968. He soon fell in with Klaus Kertess and the iconoclastic artists he was showing at his Bykert Gallery, who included Lynda Benglis, Dorothea Rockburne, Barry Le Va, and Brice Marden. Among them was Chuck Close, who became Zucker’s loft neighbor on Prince Street and drinking buddy as they taught together at the School of Visual Arts. In one of his early portraits, Close depicted Zucker in horn-rimmed glasses and shirt and tie, with his hair slicked back in a way that resembled an overtaxed insurance salesman. A study for this work is now in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Joe Zucker, Amy Hewes, 1976, Acrylic, cotton & rhoplex on canvas, Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

“Joe Zucker has consistently for over four decades been one of America’s most innovative artists,” Close wrote for Bomb magazine in 2007.

His paintings are personal, quirky, idiosyncratic, and often puzzling. His style is rooted in processes, some simple, others remarkably complex. . . . Pouring, squeezing and manipulating paint, he fashions paintings so personal it would be impossible to imagine anyone else having made them. This is the definition of personal invention.

Close went on to say of Zucker that there was “no greater influence on the way I think about painting, and no person who played a more important role in the formative period of my work and changed my mind about how paintings can and should be made.”

A decade later, when I assembled an exhibition of Zucker’s depictions of the sea for the National Arts Club, Close wheeled into the opening. As I plied him with martinis, he explained how he and Zucker together learned to develop processes to complicate and “de-skill” their means of representation. “This is something you and I have spent a lot of time doing, removing the taboo of talent,” Zucker said in response to Close in that 2007 interview. Here was a problem, I concluded, only for those specimens for whom pictorial talent comes too easily.

As might any artist who chooses to start his career by painting the materials of a painting, Zucker next set about working up an index for his oeuvre-to-be. The 100-Foot-Long Piece (1968–69) is the first work he made in New York. In the 2020 monograph on Zucker published by Thames & Hudson, Terry R. Myers wrote how the work was “like a catalogue of available merchandise (as he called it, ‘the Sears catalogue’),” one that “retains many of the material characteristics of life in the suburban Midwest.” Made up of rectangular strips in a range of styles, some abstract, others representational, created through a wide array of processes, the mixed-media work can resemble a row of linoleum patterns or wallpaper swatches. Faux fabrics are intermixed with a depiction of Billy the Kid. An illustration of the Charioteer of Delphi is featured alongside cones of mathematical plotting-paper sticking out from the picture plane. “One area was wood-burned,” Close approvingly remarked. “When was the last time you saw a work of art by a serious artist that was made with a wood-burning kit?” A young secretary at Kertess’s gallery dubbed the work “tossed salad.” That secretary, Mary Boone, went on to become a mega-gallerist of the 1980s and even represented Zucker for a period in the 2000s. “It was as if all my styles I made at once, rather than the more usual linear development of style,” Zucker remarked. “I made enough styles to last a lifetime.”

Joe Zucker, Paying Off Old Debts, 1975, Acrylic, cotton & rhoplex on canvas, Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

Writing an introductory essay for the 2020 monograph, John Elderfield noted that Zucker may have developed up to eighty different series through his career: “Having many sides is integral to his self-presentation as artist.” The 100-Foot-Long Piece featured a preview of the one that became his most consequential: his cotton-ball paintings. Zucker developed these works using Rhoplex, an acrylic binder developed in the 1950s by the Rohm and Haas chemical company for use in cement and spackle with an “exceptional pigment-binding capacity.” By dipping cotton balls in Rhoplex, which he then hand-tinted and adhered to canvas, Zucker devised a method of painting that resembled a pixelated screen, one that could convey a recognizable image.

At first Zucker used this labor-intensive process to draw a connection to Byzantine mosaics. Woman with Halo and Scepter (from Five Mosaics) (1972), which referenced the art of Ravenna, is now in the collection of the Art Institute. Five Amphoras (1972) is at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. From a distance, the works read as recognizable images. Up close, the brightly colored cotton balls resemble piles of tufted carpet. “It took months to roll up the pieces of paint,” Zucker said of his process, “and then all of the paintings were finished in a minute.”

Zucker then looked to the history of cotton and the role of labor in its cultivation and trade. Drawing on photographs of riverboat freight from the American South, Zucker loaded his imagery with historical import at a time when few contemporary artists dared look beyond the clean surfaces of minimalism or the safety of pop aesthetics. Rendered in grisaille, reflecting old photographic source material, subjects such as the riverboat in Amy Hewes (1976), in the collection of the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, and the laborer in Paying Off Old Debts (1975), in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, convey a haunting presence, as if the history of American slavery were reaching out through the very cotton of the works.

By the time I first came across Zucker’s work, some twenty years ago, he had long since moved to East Hampton, Long Island, where he established a home and studio in the 1980s with his wife, Britta Le Va. Here he coached high-school basketball as a volunteer for the championship Bridgehampton team with players far removed from the area’s multimillion-dollar summer residences. (His efforts were featured in the 2017 documentary Killer Bees, produced by Shaquille O’Neal, about the team as it defended its state title.)

Joe Zucker, Russian Empire, 2012, Watercolor & gypsum on plywood, Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

Zucker was ahead of his time in his use of unorthodox materials and techniques, not to mention his resurfacing of fraught historical subject matter. Yet the Neo-Expressionists and the “Pictures Generation” of the 1970s and 1980s had little use for his involved and at times confusing work. Nevertheless he continued to develop new series, drawing on everything from pegboards and squeegees to the history of Joseph Smith, sometimes combining all three.

The work centered on shipping, marine life, and piracy could be his most satisfying. A 2008 exhibition at Nyehaus Gallery called “Plunder,” which featured rolls of canvas cut through with cannonballs, was particularly successful. For Zucker, the map was the territory. Allegory and allusion mixed with the concrete. “The ghostly spectre of the slaver Trinidad rises among the wrecks and reefs of Madagascar on a moonlit night during July of 1834,” he scrawled across a drawing from 1978, which I first saw at
Nolan/Eckman Gallery. On a diagrammatic image called Axe Lake (Legend) (1994), Zucker included a key that listed the fishing spots and mills along with his vodka martinis and gibsons.

Water served as a recurring theme in Zucker’s churned processes. He saw a connection between the surface of the painting and the “machinery depicted in the painting—objects that stir water, such as planes, windmills, ships, wheels.” It helped that Zucker was himself an accomplished fisherman—skills he developed through weeks-long expeditions to Minnesota and as the captain of a fishing boat he docked in Montauk harbor called The Rodfather. Following a few occasions when I paid studio visits to East Hampton, we motored out to the reefs off Montauk. Zucker knew just the right time and place to put down line for striped bass as he named the fish he caught. “Nancy Pelosi” was his keeper. I called mine “Mahmoud A. Bass.”

In East Hampton, Zucker developed several series that hearkened back to the warp-and-weft grids. I am unsure if one series involving mops dipped in paint, arranged on the wall as if woven together, has ever been fully executed. Another series, of gypsum board hand-scored and water-colored into tight grids resembling tesserae, recalled those earlier Rhoplex mosaics. He titled the 2013 exhibition of this series at Mary Boone “Empire Descending a Staircase.”

Joe Zucker, Robocrate Flagship #2 (1955–1960), 2004, Watercolor, ink & graphite on paper, David Nolan Gallery, New York.

Zucker’s final series was inspired by stories of the Pale of Settlement by Sholem Aleichem, which he read during the 2020 covid shutdowns. Made of cast-off studio trash, such as cardboard, towels, and rubber mats, the austere monochrome paintings of shtetl houses and abstracted snowmen, depicted in a chilling, white landscape, felt like a fresh airing of sublimated forces and materials. In the summer of 2022, I paid my final studio visit to see this work. Zucker by then had already suffered a series of health setbacks, including the consequences of a traffic accident and metabolic encephalopathy. As I slept on a cot in his spider-filled studio, I could hear Zucker in the other room narrating his own demise.

“There’s a surprise to his work,” the critic and poet John Yau explained as I sat down for an interview with him and Zucker in 2016. “The humor is very generous. If anything he’s self-mocking. He’s mocking the idea of being an artist, but in a kind of generous way.” In much of Zucker’s work, as in my final moments with him, you never know whether to laugh or cry.