Page 301 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Introduction to the sculpture

was already a skilled artist, having spent years in apprenticeship. He
spent his later years in Los Angeles, where his carvings were
frequently on display. They were published in 1947 in the book I
chanced upon; that volume is still available from used booksellers
online.
The carvings, all in wood, are sophisticated renderings of
characters from Satt’s memories of his childhood, both in the round
and in relief. It seems very likely that AR saw this body of work in
the years before he began his own. Whether or not he ever met Berel
Satt is unknown and unknowable. It is not difficult to draw parallels
between Satt’s carvings and AR’s; if anyone else were producing work
in this medium with this subject in those years, it, too, might be
pointed to as influences. Absent such examples, it can only be stated
that AR had a good chance of having seen Satt’s work, based on the
latter’s public exposure.
Consideration of A Jewish Town makes one aware of both AR’s
faults and virtues; they ultimately are linked to his lack of training in
art as a youth. Satt was professional and polished in ways AR could
never master. Yet that mastery served to suck the life out of Satt’s
shtetl folk: despite their authenticity in portrayal as folk characters,
they are frozen in conventional poses and facial expressions.
Ironically, AR at times strove to achieve accepted artistic standards in
sculptural representation—to the detriment of the expressiveness of
his pieces. The “real” untutored folk art he repeatedly produced,
regardless of subject—with eccentricities of relative scale,
indifference to anatomical accuracy, excessively hieratic orientation
and crude humor mixed with suppressed pathos—commands our
attention and appreciation long after Satt’s stereotypes have ceased to
be of interest. Yet the two men’s carvings were created for much the
same, almost compulsive reason: to memorialize a lost world.

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