Ukrainian-born painter Michael Gleizer’s journey from the Soviet Union to America tells a new story about art, freedom, and faith
As you are surely aware, the primary talent of an artist is his ability to step away from the externalities of the thing and, disregarding its outer form, gaze into its innerness and perceive its essence, and to be able to convey this in his painting. Thus the object is revealed as it has never before been seen, since its inner content was obscured by secondary things. The artist exposes the essence of the thing he portrays, causing the one who looks at the painting to perceive it in another, truer light, and to realize that his prior perception was deficient.
And this is one of the foundations of man’s service of his Creator.
As we know from the Torah—and particularly from the teaching of Chassidism—the entirety of creation stems from the word of G-d,[2] and the word of G-d is what brings it into existence and sustains it in every moment of time. It is only that the divine power of tzimtzum (constriction) holds the divine life-force in a state of concealment and obscurity, and we perceive only its outer form (i.e., the physical reality).
Our mission in life—based on the simple faith that “there is none else beside Him”[3]—is that we should approach everything in life from this perspective. That we should each strive to reveal, as much as possible, the divine essence in every thing, and minimize, to the extent that we are able, its concealment by the externalities of creation...
So one must take great care that secondary and external matters should not obscure the essentials of life and its ultimate purpose.
A person might experience difficulties, trials and challenges in separating the good from the bad. But these are but the means by which to achieve the purpose of life—that his soul should elevate itself through its positive deeds in this world...
So one must never allow the difficulties in overcoming one’s trials, or even the fact that one might occasionally fail and stumble, to overwhelm the joy that one must feel as a child of G-d...
MENACHEM MENDEL IN THE SHTETL
Born into an observant Jewish family in Kyiv in 1946, Gleizer grew up without synagogues, Jewish schools, or kosher food. Nevertheless he maintained a strong Jewish identity, speaking—and reading—Yiddish at home.
Stories of Tevye, a traditional dairy farmer burdened by poverty and a bevy of independent-minded daughters (later adapted in America by Joseph Stein as Fiddler on the Roof), were among the few sanctioned expressions of Judaism in the Soviet Union. For Gleizer, Sholem Aleichem’s wry, humorous stories bore the full weight of his Jewish identity, an identity bound up with a sense of loss.
Still, Gleizer managed to convey some of the humor, and the subversive undertones in these stories. His painting “Menachem-Mendel in Shtetl” depicts the classic archetype of the unlucky shlemiel. Here he is seen teetering on a diagonal dressed in a fancy cream-colored overcoat and shoes adorned with spats. He carries a little satchel, no doubt filled with false promises that will fuel the misadventures of the naive Tevye.
Gleizer’s budding career was quickly cut short when, after Israel’s Six-Day War in 1967, the Soviet government launched an anti-Israel media campaign. In 1973 all Jewish art was banned.
Reflecting on that time, the artist recollected: “All hopes and dreams are in vain. The gates will always remain shut for you if you are a Jew.”
NEW SPACE FOR GRIEF
Beneath Tevye’s dry humor, of course, is a current of anguish, and as the Soviet Union tumbled toward dissolution in 1991, Gleizer was finally able to reckon with the darker realities of Jewish life in Ukraine and Europe.
His nine-panel “Babi Yar” commemorates the largest mass murder of Jews by the Nazis during the war against the Soviet Union. Among the 33,771 Jews murdered in this ravine near Kyiv on September 29–30, 1941, were some of Gleizer’s relatives. Yet memorials erected on the site by the Soviets commemorated only “peaceful victims of fascism,” without mentioning Jews. Gleizer’s massive painting breaks new artistic ground, presenting hundreds of indistinct figures struggling to free themselves in the mire of a fog-filled landscape under three horizontal registers of cold, relentless sky.
But even as he grieved the past, Gleizer was confronting the future. Perhaps unwilling to uproot his family, he had remained in Russia as many of his fellow Jewish artists fled.
In the winter of 1985, Michael Gleizer was working as a librarian. At nights and in spare moments stolen from his young family, he painted the images that had made him a pariah in the Soviet art world—a bride and groom standing beneath a wedding canopy, a woman circling the flames of the Shabbat candles with her hands. They were never exhibited.
A painter and illustrator whose work the art historian Mikhail German once compared “emotionally and plastically to the bitter poetry of Marc Chagall, Sholem Aleichem, and Anatoly Kaplan,” Gleizer’s art is inextricably bound up with his strong Jewish identity—a bond would lead him on an unusual artistic journey.
In 1993, at the age of forty-seven, Gleizer immigrated to America with his family. Having lived the first half of his life without the freedom to practice his faith, “America gave me an opportunity to freely plunge into religious life,” he says. “I felt how Jewish spirituality is close to me, to my soul.” The artist settled in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, and began attending synagogue regularly.
In the decades that followed, he produced a large and diverse oeuvre that spanned graphic arts, costume design, and an endless array of neo-impressionistic oil paintings.
BREAKDANCING REBBES
Familiar with Gleizer’s work from his Soviet years, Zev Markowitz, director of the Chassidic Art Institute formally invited Gleizer to exhibit in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn, gallery in 1991. Gleizer moved to New York that year. His work has been exhibited multiple times at the gallery since.
In an absolute expression of joy and freedom, Gleizer’s images in New York blossom with men in prayer shawls. A series of four paintings, “Synagogue” (1993), finds eighteen Jews adorned in tallit and tefillin, milling around a shul, a scene unheard of in Gleizer’s former life.
Perhaps the most notable assertion of Jewish practice is “770” (1994), depicting over sixty men in an odd moment after the morning services at the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters, caught in a moment of random community that expresses a deeply felt freedom to be individuals, unified by Jewish faith and practice. The choice of subject was not accidental. Gleizer had rented a studio in Crown Heights, opposite the Chai Gallery, where he worked every day for twenty-five years.
But what is truly unique in Gleizer’s later works is a delicacy of touch and sense of humor rare in Jewish art. His ability to see beyond clichés and find the vibrant soul of Jewish practice informs a pair of Chasidim in “Dancing” (2003). While their oversize black hats and suits are straight out of central casting, it is the totally unique crouching steps and twisting gait that transform them into breakdancing rebbes.
Gleizer’s Jewish art is one strand of many in a lifetime of artistic output. Yet his Jewish sensibility can be seen in almost everything he produced, he says: “I always present in [my paintings] Jewish elements, whether in the Soviet Union or the USA.” Gleizer’s early experience with Soviet religious and artistic oppression—and subsequent liberation—presents an alternative to widely held beliefs about the incompatibility of faith and art. At the same time the struggle to develop and preserve his Jewish identity under duress has led to a deeper awareness of what he shares with all people.
“Even when painting Jews, I strive to express qualities and problems common to all human beings,” he says. “The deeply national develops into something universal.”
Excerpts from an article by Richard McBee. This article appears in the Fall/Winter 2024 issue of Lubavitch International, to subscribe to the magazine, please visit www.Lubavitch.com.
