Page 295 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Introduction to the sculpture

or “genre” were fashioned with a specific person consciously or
unconsciously in the artist’s mind.

The justification for trying to guess the subject of certain pieces is
based on the assumption that no creative act is dissociated totally
from the psyche of the actor. If doodling, a seemingly random and
disinterested process, can yield insights to psychoanalytical scrutiny,
then it is not unreasonable to venture into the somewhat murky
waters of speculation concerning AR’s subject matter. First, it is of
note that fewer than one quarter of the human representations are
identifiable as portraits; that is, as known persons, either by
inscriptions on the pieces themselves, by attestation of the sculptor,
or by unmistakable visual clues. The four “family” members in that
number are the least positively named, confirmation of his
unwillingness explicitly to associate anyone close with the images of
his handiwork—and the scarcity of pieces in the category itself may
signify the same thing.
The other portraits (of real or fictional public characters) would
not have given him any of those anxieties. In recreating figures of
literary or historical significance, he may have felt either that he was
paying homage to them or adding his own interpretation to an
already existing representational canon— both activities to which he
was clearly given license by convention and by his own intellectual
involvement in forming an opinion of those individuals. Each of
these pieces has a story behind it: at least the popular version, and
sometimes AR’s personal commentary upon it (made consciously or
not). They form a sort of library, therefore, of his interests.
Biblical figures constitute the largest subgroup of portraits, and in
general these carvings are powerful statements reaching beyond the
text into realms of political and emotional complexity. An aspect of
shtetl education of importance here is the reality and historical
proximity of events in the Bible for students who never saw any
other source of information concerning the past. AR !may well have
shed that untutored attitude along with his boots when he left the old
country, but the moral lessons associated with biblical figures
undoubtedly lingered on well past belief in the miracles with which
they were associated. In particular, the Zionist drama, as played out in
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