Good on Paper

THE NEW CRITERION, March 2025

Good on paper

On “Paper, Color, Line,” at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

“Paper, Color, Line: European Master Drawings from the Wadsworth Atheneum,” the exhibition now on view in Hartford, Connecticut, goes against every diminished expectation of what a major museum show today ought to be.1 Just consider the words in its subtitle. European? Master? Drawings? All from the museum’s permanent collection? Swish that vocabulary around your palate like you’ve just supped some pre-phylloxera wine—you probably assumed such old-vine vintages had been long since emptied from the cellars of contemporary politicized discourse. Then book yourself a train to Hartford, as I did, or drive, fly, or walk, and rejoice in the opportunity to see an exhibition whose sole purpose is to rekindle the art of close looking. Such connoisseurship informed the creation of this drawings collection a century ago. It still does today. While you are at it, stay on for the other highlights from the Wadsworth’s permanent collection, on view here in one of the country’s oldest museums, with both Old Master and modern treasures and a grand salon-style paintings hall. The leaders of this museum once envisioned the Wadsworth as a pilgrimage site for important art. It might just be that way again.

“Paper, Color, Line” is the initiative of Oliver Tostmann, the Wadsworth’s Susan Morse Hilles Curator of European Art. His exhibition of over sixty works on paper from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries, selected from the museum’s holdings of 1,250 drawings, watercolors, pastels, and collages, serves not only to put these rare sheets back on display. It also presents the opportunity for a wholesale reassessment of this overlooked aspect of the Wadsworth’s permanent collection, along with advancing the essential restoration, reconditioning, and remounting of these fragile objects. Just as important for the endurance of this project, even after this exhibition comes down, has been the production of a sizable catalogue, the Wadsworth’s first publication dedicated to its European drawings collection. The scholarly entries here are all written by Tostmann himself, unencumbered by the synthetic stuffing we might find from guest contributors. Supplementing the exhibition’s informative wall labels, his catalogue delves deep into each drawing on view as well as the history of how they all happened to end up in Hartford.

In terms of the narrative arc it traces of American museum-making, the Hartford chapter of this story can be surprisingly compelling. Founded in 1842 by Daniel Wadsworth (1771–1848) on the grounds of his family home at the center of Hartford, open to the public since 1844, the Wadsworth predates the establishment of other major East Coast art institutions by more than a generation. The Atheneum bills itself as the oldest continuously operating museum in the United States. Enlarged through the philanthropy of local Gilded Age grandees, including the Colt family and none other than John Pierpont Morgan, himself Hartford-born, this institution grew expeditiously during the early decades of the twentieth century but has struggled since. The museum’s current concatenation of architectural styles, from neo-Gothic to Beaux-Arts to International Style to bunker Brutalism, speaks to the highs and lows of its civic fortunes.

Giuseppe Cesari, called Cavaliere d’Arpino, The Discovery of Romulus and Remus, 1596, Red chalk, Charles H. Schwartz Fund, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.

Drawings began entering this collection with one of Daniel Wadsworth’s earliest bequests. Tostmann introduces his survey with a pair of pastels by the British artist James Sharples of George and Martha Washington, each created circa 1798 and accessioned by the institution in 1848. (A tool of the trade, especially relevant here but useful whenever reading a wall label, is to note a work’s accession number. More often than not, the number begins with the year the work entered a collection, followed by a period and a second number indicating the order of its accession in that given year. Sharples’s George Washington and Martha Washington carry accession numbers 1848.18 and 1848.19, respectively.)

The Sharples pastels were first owned by Daniel Wadsworth’s father, Jeremiah, a sea captain and statesman who represented Connecticut in the Continental Congress and the House of Representatives. He was also a friend and confidant to George Washington. A plaque erected at the corner of the museum notes that Colonel Wadsworth entertained Washington on that spot in 1775. In 1780, Washington returned to the Wadsworth home with Lafayette, General Knox, and Governor Trumbull for their first meeting with Count Rochambeau and Admiral Verney in order to “concert joint military and naval plans.” The rest, as they say, is history. Tostmann surmises that young Daniel must have met the Father of our Country during one of Washington’s many return visits to Hartford, a fact that gives these portraits and their bequest to the new museum, founded on the very spot where Washington turned the spindle of the world, extra significance. It is interesting to note that Governor Trumbull’s son, the painter John Trumbull, became Daniel Wadsworth’s closest mentor and joined Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church as his artistic advisor.

For the next eighty years, drawings entered the Wadsworth in fits and starts, including via a gift of sixty European prints and drawings in 1914 by the descendants of Cassius Welles. That all changed in 1927 with two auspicious arrivals. One was a $1.1 million bequest from the estate of Frank Sumner, a donor whose family had deep roots in Hartford, which established a significant acquisitions fund for paintings. The second was the appointment of A. Everett Austin Jr. (1900–57), the brilliant young director known as “Chick” Austin, just twenty-six years old at the time, who knew how to leverage this gift for the museum’s great benefit—and interpreted the Sumner bequest to include the acquisition of drawings as well as paintings.

Léon Bakst, Costume Design for Vaslav Nijinsky as the Faun, from “L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune,” 1912, Graphite, tempera, watercolor & gold paint on illustration board, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.

Austin arrived as the Atheneum’s first academically trained director, having graduated from the fabled museum course offered by Edward Waldo Forbes and Paul J. Sachs at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum. (For more on Sachs and the story of another one of his graduates, Perry Rathbone of the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Boston mfa, see “The Boston Perry,” my review in the October 2024 issue of The New Criterion.) Tostmann credits Sachs with instilling in Austin a special appreciation for drawings, which he pursued energetically during his tenure at the Wadsworth. Such acquisitions continued after his retirement in 1944 under his immediate successor, Charles C. Cunningham, who served as director until 1966. In part, these purchases were strategic. Even with the Sumner fund, Austin could be easily outspent for top-flight oils by larger institutions. When it came to works on paper, not always by name-brand artists, he stood a fighting chance. His acquisition budget simply went further with drawings than paintings.

Beyond mere finances, however, Austin put in practice the lessons he had learned from Sachs in valuing drawings qua drawings. Sachs lectured often about the importance of drawings. He collected his thoughts in a 1951 publication called The Pocket Book of Great Drawings—tracing a line from the disegno of Giorgio Vasari to an appreciation of drawings as the locus of artistic understanding:

Drawing is, indeed, the fundamental element in all great picture making, just as grammar is at the root of all good writing. . . . A great drawing . . . instantly brings to us the thought, the emotion of the artist at the time of creation. . . . It is in his drawings that the artist makes his most spontaneous statements, and enables us to follow his thought in the very act of creation.

We can just about hear Sachs’s words in Austin’s and Cunningham’s ears as we survey the Wadsworth’s highlights, mostly presented by Tostmann chronologically by their year of creation. As quoted by Sachs, Vasari himself called drawing “the necessary beginning of everything [in art], and not having it, one has nothing.” One of the first sheets up is Vasari’s own Jupiter Sacrificing on the Island of Naxos (1557, acquired by the Wadsworth in 1948). This ethereal drawing of pen, ink, and brown-ink wash, with lead white over graphite underdrawing, “demonstrates not only Vasari’s economical and pragmatic work habits,” writes Tostmann, “but also his erudition, succinct storytelling, and technical skill.”

Giorgio Vasari, Descent from the Cross, ca. 1550, Pen, ink wash & chalk on paper, Purchase through the gift of James Junius Goodwin, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.

In acquiring both drawings and paintings, Austin largely looked beyond the household names of the High Renaissance to the art of the Baroque, which he championed much as Sachs had done. The Holy Family (ca. 1760, acquired 1930) by Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Tiepolo, depicts a tender embrace in a liquid sheet of rippling line. “In all of his prolific work,” Sachs said of Tiepolo, “we delight in the illusion of Italian sunlight which suffused his rapid sketches as it does his vast compositions. . . . The light beloved of all Venetians shines on his pages with a brilliant whiteness.” In this deft work of pen and brown ink with gray wash, the untouched areas of cream paper are allowed to shine with their own light of the world.

Another highlight of highlights here is Honoré Daumier’s The Departure of the Clowns (Le déplacement des saltimbanques) (ca. 1866–67, acquired 1928). Austin spent far more on this drawing, $16,000, than he would even on drawings by Cézanne or Renoir—no doubt again encouraged by Sachs. “No man who ever lived was more of a translator of life into contemporary, everyday terms by means of masterly drawing,” Sachs wrote of the illustrative Daumier:

His ability to depict through facial expression—punctuated by the emphasis of gesture—fleeting and conflicting human emotions is unequalled. In the whole field of art there are no finer examples than those by Daumier of drawing from memory.

Austin and Cunningham are not the only ones to thank for establishing this farsighted drawings collection—which includes outstanding works by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Gustave Courbet, Gustave Doré, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Egon Schiele, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, and the Leipzig School’s Werner Tübke, as well as an essential suite of designs for the Ballets Russes by Léon Bakst, Natalia Goncharova, and Mikhail Larionov. A stunning Ingres, the Portrait of the Architect Louis-Pierre Haudebourt (ca. 1814–18), is not an Austin acquisition at all but a 2023 bequest by Susannah Shickman that would have no doubt pleased both Austin and Sachs. In this dashing portrait—“animated by the contrast between Haudebourt’s highly finished face and the loosely sketched body,” says Tostmann—we readily appreciate what Sachs called Ingres’ “accounts of the outer rather than the inner man.” Ingres, Sachs continued, displays a

rare combination of subtle intuition, skillfully minute delineation, and fidelity to appearance which gives his drawings their special character and charm—a charm not unlike that of the characters in the novels of Jane Austen.

The Ingres acquisition reminds us that drawings continue to be an active interest at the Wadsworth. A Helmeted Warrior with Two Separate Studies of His Head, and Two Other Studies (ca. 1645, acquired 2024), a sketch by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino, appeared just a year ago on the Upper East Side wall of Nicholas Hall and W. M. Brady & Co during Master Drawings New York, a part of the city’s essential week for Old Master dealers (see my “Brown in town” in the March 2024 issue of The New Criterion). Such ongoing Old Master acquisitions speak to the continued foresight of the Wadsworth in not simply going in for the latest contemporary bauble, as well as the cultural value of a healthy marketplace for art.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Portrait of Louis-Pierre Haudebourt, Pencil on paper, Bequest of Susannah Shickman, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.

Just a final note for when you arrive in Hartford: the display of these drawings could look better. Spanning the walls of a bright-yellow room, with landlord paint covering the electrical outlets, the linear arrangement does not reward visitors as much as it should or help them slow down for the careful viewing these works deserve. Drawings are best presented in domestic scale, with alcoves and seats to aid in their unfolding discovery. When Austin inaugurated his Avery Memorial wing at the Wadsworth in 1934, he installed a drawings center right on the ground floor, with desk and chairs available for close study. These rooms were torn out in the 1970s at a time when the Wadsworth had tossed aside its entire interest in collecting European works on paper. With that interest rekindled today, why not bring these rooms back? This is the ultimate hope for “Paper, Color, Line”—that an essential line of inquiry has now been drawn from the connoisseurship of Sachs and Austin to the museum world of today and beyond.

1. “Paper, Color, Line: European Master Drawings from the Wadsworth Atheneum” opened at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, on January 16 and remains on view through April 27, 2025. 

When Art Goes to War

THE NEW CRITERION, February 2025

When Art Goes to War

Sabin Howard has been at the center of a battle over sculpture for over three decades. I first wrote about him in this space nearly twenty years ago, when I paid a visit to his studio in the South Bronx and found him surrounded by a pantheon in plaster and bronze (see “Gallery chronicle,” May 2007). At the time, Howard was completing a statue of Apollo. As with all of his work, this multiyear labor, built up through tens of thousands of hand-applied dots of plasteline, was destined to be cast in an alloy, one might say, of his own autobiography. Howard sculpts in epic and myth, including his war against our cultural status quo. He has long approached the plastic arts as if he were a Prometheus, a fallen god out to redeliver that creative fire from Mount Olympus.

I doubt I was the only observer who felt a mixture of elation and apprehension when, in 2016, the U.S. World War One Centennial Commission selected Howard out of some 350 submissions to design the centerpiece for its new war memorial on the Washington Mall. Here was a creative battle to end all art wars. I feared one unelected agency after another would wear down this aesthetic belligerent to a stalemate, if not gassing him into unconditional surrender.

It did not help matters that the designated site of Pershing Park, just around the corner from the White House, already contained a design from 1981 that had been the result of an earlier competition involving no less than Robert Venturi, Richard Serra, and M. Paul Friedberg—establishment grandees all. True, their site had been in decline for decades. First it was shoehorned into a sunken ice rink, then a swamp designed by the firm of Oehme, van Sweden, and finally a brownfield site of broken water features, abandoned postmodern pavilions, and a derelict garage for the Zamboni. Despite the sorry state, preservationists were quick to panic in this needle park as they dug up Kodachromes from opening day, 1981. Any commission would need to accommodate Pershing Park’s bones—including its existing monumental plaza dedicated to General John J. Pershing, which had been designed by Wallace K. Harrison with a statue by Robert White from 1983—even as it looked to create something revivified and new.

The location of the memorial site was just one of Howard’s many troubles. Our nation’s art-and-architecture insiders were sure to see the selection of Howard and his competition partner, Joseph Weishaar—a twenty-five-year-old graduate of the University of Arkansas, an architect who did not yet have his license at the time of the announcement—as interlopers in what was supposed to be an exclusive lawn party for pedigreed insiders. After all, the last starchitect to dip his beak in the National Mall was none other than Frank Gehry. In 2020, he left it with an anti-monument made of chicken wire, purportedly dedicated to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Of course, the war over the National Mall goes back much further. In 1982, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, submitted when she was an undergraduate at Yale (whew!), was a minimalist broadside against the capital’s classical aspirations. The assault was only somewhat countered two years later by the addition to the site of Three Soldiers, Frederick Hart’s realistic bronze sculpture of multiracial brothers-in-arms.

Sure enough, as I tuned in to view the endless agency meetings in the years following the commission announcement, it seemed as though Howard and Weishaar’s concept, called “The Weight of Sacrifice,” would be bled through a thousand bureaucrats. What initially called for three walls of engravings, all designed to surround a freestanding battle sculpture and an elevated lawn, was eventually reduced through eighteen different iterations to a single wall of sculptural relief less than sixty feet in length. Weishaar’s elevated lawn, meanwhile, returned back to Friedberg’s sunken plaza, now merely modified and tidied up, with Howard’s sculptural frieze essentially replacing the old Zamboni dock. (gwwo Architects, meanwhile, stepped in as managing architects, with David Rubin Land Collective serving as the landscape designer.)

The pressures might have been enough to shell-shock any creative soul. For Howard, it appears to have fired up some essential distillation, encouraged by his commissioners, including Edwin Fountain, as well as by Justin Shubow of the National Civic Art Society. Relief sculpture going back to antiquity has a special ability to convey the cycles of war. Unlike freestanding statuary, its program can be episodic. Rather than a single moment, relief can contain many moments across a single frame progressing from left to right, as for example up the spiral of Trajan’s Column in Rome.

Howard appears to have drawn from numerous sources as he recast his sculpture into what he titled A Soldier’s Journey—a long frame of a single figure in multiple scenes as he turns from his daughter and wife, marches off to war, faces the ferocity and terrors of the trenches, and returns home to his family. Howard’s wife, the novelist Traci L. Slatton, as project manager recorded the evolution online in preparation for a documentary about the commission called Heroic, to be released this summer. She also served as a model for a nurse in the composition; their teenage daughter provided the model for the girl at the start and end of the frieze.

For inspiration Howard looked to Ghiberti’s baptistry doors in Florence and John Singer Sargent’s Gassed, that epic processional painting of blinded soldiers from 1919 based on Sargent’s own frontline observations, now in London’s Imperial War Museum. The minimalism of Lin and the realism of Hart both seemed to become reflected in the synthesis of the evolving relief. So too the turmoil of Henry Merwin Shrady’s sculptural battle groups for his tripartite Ulysses S. Grant Memorial, which leads up to the United States Capitol from the west. That work took Shrady twenty years to complete and accelerated his untimely death in 1922 at just age fifty, a fact that did not bode well for Howard. The Grant Memorial was only completed by Shrady’s studio assistants Edmond Amateis and Sherry Fry. (Shrady’s pendant equestrian statue in Charlottesville of Robert E. Lee, completed by Leo Lentelli in 1924 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997, was removed and melted down in 2023 as a consequence of the moral panics of 2017. This is just one of the many recent crimes against our sculptural patrimony that has yet to be redressed.)

Howard’s most significant invention in A Soldier’s Journey was surely mothered by the necessities of his impending deadline and what he could fully do with the sculptural space that remained for him. For an artist who could spend years building up a single statue, a multipart relief of more than three dozen figures, all over life size, could quickly add up to a terminal Shrady sum. A manual artist, Howard turned to digital solutions. At first he took some twelve thousand pictures of his models, posed in authentic period uniforms, with his cell phone. The many models—a mix of actors and military veterans along with his family members—recited period poetry during the long posing sessions. “Dulce et Decorum Est,” written by Wilfred Owen in 1917 and published posthumously in 1920, proved to be particularly relevant to the emerging sculptural story:

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

To advance his production schedule further, Howard relocated for nine months to New Zealand, where he worked with Wētā Workshop, the concept-design company behind the Lord of the Rings franchise. Through Wētā’s digital modeling software, he developed and tweaked his sculptural maquettes to secure commission approval. With his models and their wardrobes in tow, Howard then traveled to the Cotswolds in England to work with Steve Russell Studios and the Pangolin Editions foundry. Here he positioned his models one by one in a 360-degree photogrammetry rig—a cage of 156 inward facing cameras feeding three-dimensional scanners—for a final round of imaging. After digital editing, Pangolin milled foam mannequins of these figural forms, which were left coated with a thin layer of clay.

Beyond merely accelerating his development time, this digital process significantly altered Howard’s final results. His use of digital modeling not only helped him to arrange his figures but also allowed him to build his relief more fully in the round, with increasingly true-to-life complexity. With the foam figures back in his studio, now a garage in Englewood, New Jersey, he sliced and diced slivers off of them while slapping on additional layers of plasteline. The action added an expressionistic finish and an urgent manual dash to the underlying digital printouts. The entire assembly was then cast by Pangolin in large bronze sections. In a final step, Howard patinated his bronze in dark gray with a brush and blowtorch.

Technological advancements have always upended creative practice in both destructive and generative ways that can be long debated. A century ago, the sculptor Paul Manship lamented the imposition of the Janvier Reducing Machine even as the mechanical lathe allowed sculptors to rescale their reliefs as never before (see my “Tokens of culture” in The New Criterion of December 2024).

A Soldier’s Journey, by Sabin Howard, The National WWI Memorial, Washington, D.C. Photo: James Panero

For an artist long dedicated to the importance of manual craft, Howard’s digital intervention has created a hybrid sculpture. A Soldier’s Journey is not classical in its own right. It is rather a modern work that speaks to the classical tradition, quite literally, through a contemporary lens. Viewing the completed assembly soon after its unveiling last September—most revealingly in the stark spotlights that illuminate the monumental site at night and shimmer in its reflecting pools—I sensed I was experiencing not traditional sculpture at all but rather actors frozen on a stage. The uncanny-valley hyperrealism of Howard’s digital scans has left us with a cinematic diorama caked in plasteline mud. In memorializing a war that defied all convention and accelerated our modern era, this end result may ultimately be more successful than any purely classical relief. Staring at his figures, which seem to stare right back as they march and spin and cry through the muck, I regarded the work as an unalloyed triumph.

It should come as little surprise that movie-making, an art form coming into its own at the time of the First World War, should have proven so successful at depicting the flashing terrors of that modern slaughter—and in turn influencing more traditional creative forms. King Vidor’s 1925 film The Big Parade remains one of the finest reflections of that conflict and deeply informed the cinematic painting style of Andrew Wyeth. The films All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Paths of Glory (1957), and, more recently, 1917 (2019) have all arguably done more to keep World War I in the popular consciousness than any other form of art.

Howard has taken up this cinematic idiom to give us a sculptural statement on the First World War that manages to make its century-old realities newly real. At the same time, his composition speaks to the history of relief in bold new ways. I was particularly struck by his use of traditional relief framing at the start of the composition that then appears to crumble away in the mire of battle. Further along, an American flag rises above the relief’s upper frame to signal the new standard on the horizon and the turning point in the war. Throughout the deep relief, the helmets and weapons and gas masks that are scattered about appear as though they could almost be kicked off the stone plinth and into the cascading fountain and reflecting pool beneath them.

At the unveiling ceremony, Howard aptly reflected on the message of his figures and what he hoped to achieve with a monument that gives new life to an old conflict:

There are no victims here. They are all heroes. They are all moving forward, calling upon their better selves, and giving unstintingly to their country, to protect what we so often take for granted, our freedom to choose what we will do with the gift of life.

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. ↩