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Creative Power: Viktor Lowenfeld as a Jewish Refugee in the Jim Crow South
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Creative Power: Viktor Lowenfeld as a Jewish Refugee in the Jim Crow South
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Dissertation
Creative Power: Viktor Lowenfeld as a Jewish Refugee in the Jim Crow South
2019
Overview
This thesis explores the historical alliance between Jewish refugees, fleeing from Nazioccupied Europe, and African American art students in the Jim Crow South. Told largely from the perspective of an Austrian-Jewish art educator, Viktor Lowenfeld, and his two most celebrated students, John T. Biggers and Samella Lewis, this thesis examines how a complex culture of shared empathy emerged in the most unlikely of places in order to create politically radical works of art which challenged antisemitism and racism. Lowenfeld’s qualities as an artist were anathema to fascist ideologies which vilified Jewish intellectualism and modernist art expression, and his experiences in Vienna teaching art to the blind, considered “degenerates” by promoters of Nazism, marked the beginning of his politically subversive career. Fleeing in 1938 and finding employment at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, Lowenfeld continued to encourage political resistance through the production of art, this time within the spaces of a historically Black institution. The artistry that developed at the Hampton Institute allowed processes of identity affirmation and reclamation to occur. As Lowenfeld relied on his experiences of persecution to relate to students, he effectively strengthened and weaponized his Jewish identity, while his students used creative expression to redefine their own aesthetic and cultural heritages. This thesis reimagines the dynamic between Jewish and African American activists to include artistic, pedagogical and transnational frameworks. It challenges scholarship that colors this historical alliance with excessive pessimism, while still recognizing the strains of tension within as exemplified by Lowenfeld’s relationship with Biggers and Lewis. Furthermore, it works in opposition to myths that Jews’ participation in rising Civil Rights rhetoric and interests were motivated by desires to shed their Jewish identities and become mainstream members of white society, as the narrative instead demonstrates a reinforcement of Jewishness in Lowenfeld.
