USA: Louise Nevelson's The White Flame of the Six Million at Temple Beth El, Great Neck

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. Sanctuary, Armand Bartos & Associates, architects, 1970. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

USA: Louise Nevelson's The White Flame of the Six Million at Temple Beth El, Great Neck
by Samuel D. Gruber

Last October I gave a lecture at Temple Isaiah in Great Neck, New York, and  used the occasion to revisit Great Neck's Temple Beth El, which I had not seen since publishing my American Synagogues book in 2003. At that time I was more interested in the architecture of the 1970 building designed by Armand Bartos & Associates, than the rich collection of Jewish art and memorials which adorn the many spaces of the synagogue, including the 1930s Tudor-style prayer hall with an ark with artwork by Ilya Schor, a small gallery space, hallways, vestibules, and the very large 2-story 1970 sanctuary.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. Sanctuary 1930s, now chapel. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. Sanctuary 1930s, now chapel. Ark doors by Ilya Schor. Photo:

Kampf, Contemporary Synagogue Art: Developments in the United States, 1945-1965.  (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966), 205.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. Armand Bartos & Associates, architects, 1970. Photo: Architectural Record Religious Buildings (1979).

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. Sanctuary, Armand Bartos & Associates, architects, 1970. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

On this visit, guided by Temple Executive Director Stuart Botwinick and congregant and good friend Rebecca Anderson Wotman, we looked at the art more closely, and especially the great wood work by the late Louise Nevelson titled The White Flame of the Six Million which spreads across the back of the sanctuary bimah. The work turns 50 this year. It was commissioned as a Holocaust Memorial and as the Torah Ark of the synagogue, a rare combination, and should be better known as an early example of synagogal Holocaust commemorative art.

Naming a work gives it meaning. Without its title and the ceremonies which consequently acknowledge the name, this work might "just" be considered an abstract artwork, or a decorative screen creating focus in the otherwise austere sanctuary space. But by naming the "White Flame," the work now hovers on the boundary of abstraction (familiar from many Holocaust memorials) and symbolic form.

While Nevelson, through the 1950s and 1960s, had been creating larger and larger sculptural works and especially developing her signature approach to constructing wooden walls, such works were made as purely expressive exercises. Some had fanciful titles, but she never attempted to load them with overt meaning. Only a few other works, including two referencing the Holocaust, carried any level of specificity. 

The first, titled Homage to Six Million I, was made in 1964, and consists of two attached curved walls, each comprised of a grid of boxes in which no two boxes and their contents are alike. Though all painted black, they are seen to represent that the "6,000,000" are a collective - but a collective of individuals. A second version, Homage to 6,000,000 II, was also made in 1964. Also of black-painted wood boxes, this is arranged more like a stepped pyramid, and all the box compartments are of different sizes.

Louise Nevelson. Homage to 6,000,000 (1964). Formerly Collection Brown University, Providence Rhode Island, now Osaka City Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Nevelson Wood Sculptures (1973).

Louise Nevelson. Homage to 6,000,000 (1964). Formerly Collection Brown University, Providence Rhode Island, now Osaka City Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Nevelson Wood Sculptures (1973).

Louise Nevelson, homage to 6,000,000 II, 1964. The Israel Musuem. Photo: The Israel Museum in Rapaport, ed. The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend (Jewish Museum, 2007), 23.

Martin Friedman, writing in Nevelson Wood Sculptures, a catalog of a Nevelson sculpture exhibit in 1973 organized by the Walker:

Nevelson's sculpture is about the revelation of daily existence. She is not a literary or historically minded person, nor is she interested in creating descriptive or symbolic forms. Her work is a distillation of impressions and experiences of life and embodies the forms and energies that surround us. In her art, these qualities are translated to an abstract level, with occasional clues in the form of recognizable objects, to a reality we all share.

Friedman's words "with occasional clues in the form of recognizable objects, to a reality we all share" might apply to The White Flame of the Six Million, because in the work the cut wood pieces are assembled in patterns that do recall flames. This work is something of a transition for Nevelson in that it does not use found pieces of wood but instead is entirely constructed of newly shaped and sawn pieces (much like Matisse’s paper cut collages). But the wall is not solid, it is pierced to give alternating strips of solid and void; of white paint and dark shadow. It can look like flickering flames, and both the white silhouettes and shapes of the shadowy voids can appear wraith-like, as if wispy ghosts of the crematoria-burned dead are still present as wisps of spirit in supplication; shadow figures seeking prayers and remembrance, demonstrating their past European lives to the still-present and prosperous American congregation.

Louise Nevelson, The White Flame of the Six Million. Model, 22.5 x 74 inches, 1970. Private Collection. Photo: Ellen Page Wilson, in Rapaport, ed. The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend (Jewish Museum, 2007), 152.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Rome, Italy. Villa Torlonia Catacomb. Wall painting in cubiculum. The flames here might refer to eternal life after death. Photo: ISJM.

Yehuda Bacon. In Memory of the Czech Transport to the Gas Chambers. 1945. Charcoal on paper. Yad Vashem Art Museum Collection, Jerusalem.Photo: Samuel Gruber 2016.

David Olere, Extermination of the Jewish People, 1946. Ghetto Fighters House, Israel. Photo: http://fcit.usf.edu/Holocaust/gallery2/D96.htm.

The reality of flames is part of the horror of the Holocaust, as we know that so many people, and so many synagogues and holy objects were burned to nothing. The immediacy of fire has appealed to artists grappling with how to represent Holocaust suffering and destruction. And artists have also looked to fire's smoke. The extinguished flame is a sign of final death, but also one might find something of the face and spirit of the dead in the smoke, as did the very young Yehuda Bacon, in his portrait remembrance of his father, whose face he drew rising above the crematorium.

Showing the flame, too, can represent hope. In Jewish tradition from the funerary art of the Roman catacombs to graphic art of the pogrom-plagued Pale of Settlement, the light of the Temple menorah and sabbath candles has been used to suggest the constancy of the Jewish people, their resilience and revival, and God's covenant.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson, Torah mantles designed by Ina Golub. Photo:Paul Rocheleau, 2002.

Architecturally, Nevelson's memorial works as a bimah backdrop and wide screen that enlivens the wide otherwise blank wall. The middle section, not quite centered, bulges out with accent, and this is the functional Holy Ark, the repository of the Torah scrolls. The brightly colored mantles designed by Ina Golub are the only accent of color in the otherwise understated sanctuary. I don't know if Golub's colors were anticipated by either architect Bartos or sculptor Nevelson, or whether they were added to the sanctuary as an antidote of color.

There are many examples of such screens in mid-century modern synagogues, such as in the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation (1948), designed by Percival Goodman; the Park Synagogue in Cleveland (1953) designed by Erich Mendelsohn; Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel in Port Chester, New York (1956), designed by Philip Johnson, where sculptor Ibram Lassaw created a wire sculpture screen that is now owned by the Jewish Museum in New York;  Temple De Hirsch Sinai in Seattle (1960), designed by Detlie and Peck with B. Marcus Pritica; Temple Oheb shalom in Baltimore, Maryland (1960), designed by Walter Gropius and Sheldon Leavitt; and the chapel at Temple B'rith Kodesh in Rochester, New York (1962), designed by Pietro Belluschi with a bimah/ark by Richard Filipowski.

Port Chester, NY, Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel, Philip Johnson, architect, 1956. Photo:

Kampf, Contemporary Synagogue Art: Developments in the United States, 1945-1965.  (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966),195.

Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore Hebrew Congregation (1948-1953).

Cleveland, Ohio. Park Synagogue. Eric Mendelsohn, arch., 1948-1953. Photo: Paul Rocheleau, 2002.

Seattle, Washington. Temple De Hirsch Sinai, 16th Avenue and Pike Street. Detlie and Peck, architects; B. Marcus Pritica, consulting architect, 1960. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2016.

Baltimore, Maryland. Temple Oheb Shalom. Walter Gropius and Sheldon Leavitt, architects, 1960. Photo: Paul Rocheleau, 2002.

Rochester, New York. Temple Brith Kodesh, chapel. Pietro Belluschi, architect with a bimah/ark by Richard Filipowski, 1962.

In 1970 Louise Nevelson was recognized as one of the greatest living American artists, and her work in wood and metal influenced and dominated contemporary trends in sculpture. Her work developed out of surrealism and abstraction in the 1930s and 1940s, but was able to respond and adapt to - as well as push and shape - developments in 1950s and 1960s including pattern and abstract design and the rise of minimalism and installation art.

Nevelson was born in Ukraine and came to America as a small child, settling with her family in Rockland, Maine. Throughout her life she constructed her autobiography in similar ways to her sculpture, by compartmentalizing, rearranging and obscuring the main narrative, and building structure from scavenged and modeled pieces arranged, attached, and repeated in accordance to her particular aesthetic. All these details were first painted black, and then sometime beginning in the early 1960s she also made works in white - white-washed if you will. For Nevelson, truth was found not in precise facts, but in the real or fictive arrangement of fragments to create an experience or tell a story.

Thus, knowing her early life, and discerning any role of Judaism and impact of being Jewish on her art is hard to discern. But biographers Michael Stanislawski, Laurie Wilson, and others make it clear that the impact of her outsider immigrant-foreigner status in Rockland status and the widespread and persistent antisemitism in early-20th century Maine was strong. In 1925, just four years after Louis Berliawsky, soon-to-be Nevelson left, the Ku Klux Klan had over 150,000 members in Maine. That was, according to Laurie Wilson, more than in any other state at the time. The KKK in Maine was there to protect the white Protestant make-up of the state against foreigners - especially Catholics and Jews. The rise of the KKK in the Jim Crow South was paralleled by its rise in the anti-immigrant Northeast and Midwest. Publicly, Nevelson spoke of the more positive influences of Rockland and Maine - timber, ship building and ornate wooden houses with stick style porches and rooftop captain's walk.

Throughout Nevelson's long career her work was uniquely recognizable as hers, and hers alone. Yet decade by decade Nevelson kept pushing boundaries and creating new types, forms, and audience relations for her work. In the 1960s her work became increasingly monumental, first as fragments, then as walls, and then entire environments. She began to be commissioned to create pubic art. Her large wall sculpture for Temple Beth El is a good and early example, but there were others that were made with Jewish content or for Jewish context.

Louise Nevelson. New Continent, 1962. St. Louis Art Museum.
Photo: Nevelson Wood Sculptures (1973).

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Three years after her work in Great Neck, Nevelson created a twenty-foot-high and-wide Cor-ten steel sculpture installed in 1973 outside Boston's Temple Israel, which was expanded by The Architects Collaborative, with which the idea of the Nevelson installation apparently originated. The AC thought the Nevelson piece would "establish an appropri­ate frame for the formal approach to the Temple and a counterbalance to the strength of the existing portico.”

The work, titled Sky Covenant, with its grid of twenty-five boxes more closely resembles some of Nevelson's black-painted wooden walls of the 1960s than the Temple Beth El memorial. It is very much part of a metal sculpture series Atmosphere and Environment which she was making in the early 1970s. But like the painted wood Beth El memorial wall, these work are transparent; there are spaces that allow the eye and hand to penetrate the grid. In this, Sky Covenant is as much a screen as a wall. It was described by Temple Israel's Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn as symbolic of the universe - perhaps a bit of rabbinic hyperbole - and there is no indication one way or the other that this interpretation or intent was Nevelson's.

Louise Nevelson. Big Black, 1963. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2017.

Boston, Massachusetts. Temple Israel. Sky Covenent by Louis Nevelson, 1973. Photo: Temple Israel in Rapaport, ed. The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend (Jewish Museum, 2007), p. 61.

Today, the sanctuary of Beth El in Great Neck is not used every week - the congregation prefers the smaller 1932 chapel, with its wood ceiling and stained glass windows. But the 1970 sanctuary is used on major holidays, for important life cycle events, and for concerts and memorial services. The Nevelson sculpture is still an important part of this space but it may be that after fifty years it is often taken for granted. Now, as it celebrates its Golden Anniversary, it seems worth taking another look. How does abstraction lead to reaction? Can form lead to contemplation or serve as mediation to meditation? Or are sensibilities in the 21st century too demanding, requiring action over abstraction; distraction over contemplation?

In Paris (and elsewhere in France) Look Out for Statues of Notable Jews

Paris, France. Hommage au Capitaine Dreyfus by Louis "TIM" Mitelberg (1986). Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2020.

Paris, France. Leon Blum by Philippe Garel. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Paris, France. Elie Wiesel by Denis Chetboune. Photo: Cynthia Mitchell 2019.

In Paris (and elsewhere in France) Look Out for Statues of Notable Jews
by Samuel D. Gruber

After past visits to Paris I've written about on this blog and on Public Art and Memory several noteworthy monuments and memorials. These accounts hardly scratch the surface in a city which may boast more public sculpture than any other city in Europe. The more one visits a place and keeps eyes open, the more one understands the networks of places and spaces. Even when a building or statue or light-post or bench is put in as an individual act it immediately becomes part of a greater whole. In the past this was well understood. The six "talking statues" of pre-modern Rome, for example, carried on public discussions across the city. In this post I try to draw some connections between monuments and memorials I have seen - some by intent and others just by happenstance.

These networks with their invisible lines and (almost) inaudible conversations are what keeps a city thrumming behind the noise of cars and trucks and the indifference of temporary visitors. We discover these connections - we don't imagine or invent them. They rise up in high relief at different times that can depend on a route walked, the way the sun shines, or a particular mood. Some people stop for every red light. I stop for every monument, plaque, and statue (much to the chagrin of my walking companions).

Paris is a very walkable city and now with the ongoing metro strike it is more so than ever. Many, if not most of the figurative and representation sculptural works are allegorical and there are also hundreds of historical events presented in heroic and mythologized forms. In Paris, the allegorical and historical often intermingle, and different timelines can also easily become entangled. Never is this more so than in the historically confused, ambivalent, and defensive French attitude to Jews, and the long Jewish presence in France.

The tendency to generalize and obscure is found in all sort of monuments, and until quite recently this has been especially true of monuments to the victims of World War II concentration camps, and even more so on memorials to Jewish victims of the French and German deportations to Death Camps. I've written about the memorials in the Pere Lechaise Cemetery to French victims of various camps here, and about victims of the Velodrome d'HIV deportations here. To these, can be added the series of bronze reliefs by Arbit Blatas that are installed on the walls of the entry court of the Mémorial de la Shoah (currently covered during renovation work).

Paris, France. Mémorial de la Shoah. Arbit Blatas bronze reliefs. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2012.

Paris, France. Mémorial de la Shoah. Arbit Blatas bronze reliefs, detail. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2012.

Paris, France. Mémorial de la Shoah. Arbit Blatas bronze reliefs under wraps. Photo: Samuel Gruber December 2019.

There is another class of monuments to Jews in Paris also worth considering. These recognize individual Jews important in French history. While they are only a few in number, these represent a growing trend in France (and elsewhere) to diversify the historic figures in stone and bronze that reside in so many Parisian parks and squares.

Statues to at least three notable Jews - Alfred Dreyfus, Leon Blum, and most recently, Elie Wiesel, have been created and installed since the 1980s.

Paris, France. Elie Wiesel by Denis Chetboune. Photo: Cynthia Mitchell 2019.

Paris, France. Elie Wiesel by Denis Chetboune. Photo: Cynthia Mitchell 2019.

On July 2, 2019 a new statue of writer, human rights activist, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel was unveiled in the small Parisian park with a double name: Square du Temple - Elie Wiesel. Wiesel's name was attached to the square in 2017. The Wiesel statue, by sculptor Denis Chetboune, was donated to the city by the "Association des fils et filles des déportés juifs de France."

It's notable that the sculpture mixes materials - bronze and wood. The wood may be a railroad tie, a reference to the Holocaust deportation trains. The bronze bust of Wiesel is respectfully representational, showing the human rights advocate with a serious gaze. Wrapped around him like a necktie, is a group of unidentified human figures, Holocaust victims from whom Wiesel's visage emerged as spokesman, advocate and storyteller. Embedded in the wooden tie is a Jewish Star, an overt reference to Wiesel's Judaism; not surprising since his entire literary and public career drew on this identity and history. Though Wiesel spent many years in Paris, he was never French.

Paris, France. Elie Wiesel by Denis Chetboune. Photo: Cynthia Mitchell 2019.

Already in October 2007, a separate memorial plaque was inaugurated in the center of the Square du Temple (before Wiesel's name was added). This plaque has the names of 85 Jewish children under the age of 6 who lived in the 3rd Parisian district and were deported to Auschwitz between 1942 and 1944. It is one of many plaques installed around the city about a decade ago as part of more public recognition of the French role in the deportation of Jews - especially children - and commemorating the victims.

Paris, France. Square du Temple - Elie Wiesel. Memorial to Jewish children under the age of 6 who lived in the 3rd Parisian district and were deported in Auschwitz between 1942 and 1944. Photo: Cynthia Mitchell, 2020.

This statue honors Wiesel, but by extension commemorates the Holocaust because Holocaust memory was the cause of Wiesel's life. Coincidentally, the bronze box set within the railroad tie, empty except a Star of David, reminds me of the buried cache of synagogue Judaica discovered just a few days ago in Wieliczka, Poland. There, the box has rotted away, leaving only the jumble of weathered metal ritual ornaments.

Paris, France. Elie Wiesel by Denis Chetboune. Photo: Cynthia Mitchell 2019.

Wieliczka, Poland. Newly discovered Judaica cache beneath synagogue. Photo: Michał Wojenka

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The star in the box is also reminiscent of the large bronze star that caps the deposit of ashes from death camps in the crypt of the Memorial de la Shoah. It is itself a sort of sunken box, lit only by an oculus through the bronze "well-head' in the memorial forecourt. This also recalls the lonely stars in the paintings of Vilna Ghetto survivor Samuel Bak, in whose mournful memories of the Holocaust one hears the empty dry winds of death, longing, and even the loss of hope.

Paris, France. Memorial de la Shoah. "Crypt" with ash from concentration and death camps. Photo: Memorial de la Shoah / Nathalie Darbellay.

Samuel Bak. Ghetto, 1996.

Of course, after the Holocaust, Wiesel's box was not empty. As a writer and advocate he mined it for memory, pain, stories, and strength. Sometimes he found hope; sometimes not.

Paris, France. Hommage au Capitaine Dreyfus by Louis "TIM" Mitelberg (1986). Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2020.

Paris, France. Hommage au Capitaine Dreyfus by Louis "TIM" Mitelberg (1986). Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2020.

Alfred Dreyfus, on the other hand, whose name and fame are now synonymous with late 19th-century French antisemitism, saw himself as entirely French. Still, he was falsely accused and convicted of espionage because his enemies only saw him as Jewish. In 1985 French Minister of Culture Jack Lang (whose father was Jewish), commissioned Polish-born Jewish-French political cartoonist and artist Louis "TIM" Mitelberg to create a statue of Dreyfus (Hommage au Capitaine Dreyfus)  to be installed in the courtyard of the École Militaire, where Dreyfus had been degraded. The country seemed to be on a point of reconciliation, until the over-life size statue was rejected by the conservative military brass. The statue may be a caricature, but it is deadly serious.

At least twice the height of Dreyfus himself,the enormous statue is both cartoonish and monumental. Here Dreyfus is shown as a grand gesture; a symbol more than a man. He is in military dress, at attention, with his raised but broken sword. In the style of Alberto Giacometti, the figure is attenuated, the head too small and the feet too big. Dreyfus was not a great man - at least not initially. He was not more than his uniform and his allegiance to the state and idea of France. It was his ordeal that made him great, and changed his name into an ideal. The statue hints at this. The uniform is greater than the man inside. But the uniform gives the man his posture, his pride, his patriotism and even his heroism.

There are few statues of heroic Jewish military figures with which to compare this work. It is obviously different from those early Zionist works of the Maccabees, such as Alfred Nossig's Judas Maccabaeus, made c. 1901 at the height of the Dreyfus affair, just two years after Dreyfus was pardoned and released from prison in a face-saving move by the French military. Nossig's heroic Jewish fighter is shown with raised sword. The theme is also repeated in Wilhelm Wachtel's near-contemporary illustration of a Jewish Youth Swearing Oath (1902), with raised sword. Sadly, Nossig himself as an old man in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 was found guilty of collaboration with the Nazis and executed by the Jewish Combat Organization. The new generation of "heroes" discarded the old. With all this in mind the notion of Jewish heroism, and image of the raised sword, needs to be viewed with caution.
 

Alfred Nossig. Judas Maccabaeus (ca 1901). From R. Cohen Jewish Icons, fig. 128.

Wilhelm Wachtel. Jewish Youth Swearing Oath. Illustration, Rocznik Zydowski,

1902. JHI, Warsaw. Jewish Art, Vol. 23-25.

Dreyfus's broken sword, the result of the highly stylized ceremony of public humiliation and literal degradation where Dreyfus's uniform was stripped of buttons and insignia and his (previous filed down) sword was broken, reminds me of a very different destruction of swords represented in the dramatic bronze Universal Peace of Jules Butensky (c. 1910) which shows swords beaten into ploughshares.

Alfred Dreyfus' degradation, 5 January 1895. Picture by Henri Meyer on the cover of Le Petit Journal (13 January 1895), captioned "The Traitor". Photo: Wikipedia.

Jules L. Butensky Universal Peace, c. 1910, bronze. Metropolitan Musuem of Art. 4)

The Dreyfus statue also stands distinct from the version of the heroic Jewish fighter created by Polish-Jewish sculptor Nathan Rapoport in his Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument of 1948 and its progeny celebrating Ghetto fighters and the warriors of the Israeli War of Independence.

Warsaw, Poland. Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument. Nathan Rapoport, sculptor, 1948. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2008.

As Thomas Bass has written in an informative essay about the Dreyfus statue and the entire Dreyfus Affair, "If it had been installed in its rightful place, Dreyfus would be saluting his fellow officers and the army that tortured him. But the army was on to Mitelberg and his subversive sense of humor. They wanted no cartoons of soldiers holding broken swords."  See Thomas Bass, "Still Wandering," (Tablet, Oct 18, 2011).

The Dreyfus statue eventually found a permanent home in the small Square Pierre Lafue. Since 1998, a full-size copy is now installed in the courtyard of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme where it is seen by a larger public. Appropriately, the museum houses the Fonds Dreyfus, an archive of over 3,000 items donated by the grandchildren of Captain Dreyfus.

Paris, France. Leon Blum by Philippe Garel in front of the Hotel de Ville of the 14th Arrondissement. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Bridging the lives of Dreyfus and Wiesel was Leon Blum (1872-1950), the first Jewish and first socialist prime minister of France, who led the Popular Front coalition government in 1936–37. He was born into a Jewish family in Alsace, educated at the École Normale Supérieure, and studied law at the Sorbonne. The Dreyfus Affair brought him into active politics on the side of the republican Dreyfusards and led to his joining the French Socialist Party in 1904. Read more about Blum here.

A bronze statue of Blum by Philippe Garel was installed in front of the Hotel de Ville of the 14th Arrondissement in 1991. The statue is an  homage, and draws on famous models. Blum's expressive features and his billowing coat recall Rodin's great statue of standing Balzac, seen across town in the Musee Rodin (and also in the sculpture garden of MOMA in New York).

 

Paris, France. Leon Blum by Philippe Garel. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Paris, France. Leon Blum by Philippe Garel. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Paris, France. Leon Blum by Philippe Garel. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Paris, France. Leon Blum by Philippe Garel. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Paris, France. Balzac model by Rodin. Musee Rodin. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2013.

Paris, France. Balzac full statue by Rodin. Musee Rodin. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2013.

Though I wasn't actively looking, I did not see any statues to women or people of color in my recent walks through Paris, though there are bound to be a few. There are no statues (in Paris) to famous Jewish stage celebrities Rachel Felix and Sarah Bernhardt, though Felix has one of the most impressive tombs in the Jewish section of Pere Lechaise cemetery, and an allee named after her.

Paris, France. Pere Lechaise Cemetery. tomb of Rachel Felix. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

A bust of French politician, human rights activist, Auschwitz survivor and EU president Simone Veil, who died in 2017, was however, installed just a month ago in the town La Roche-sur Yon. Sadly, it was promptly vandalized. Whether the vandals despised Veil as a Jew, or the most prominent proponent of women's rights in France in unknown. It was Viel, after all, who was most responsible for legalizing abortion in France, still a hot-button topic for many religious conservatives. The bust itself is not remarkable as sculpture. It is a remarkable matter-of-fact likeness of the French politician whose likeness at the time of her death was probably as well-known in France as the (ever-changing) face of Marianne.

Echoing the dearth of statues of accomplished women across Paris, Veil is only the fifth woman given the honor of burial in France's Pantheon, where she was laid to rest in June 2018. When I visited her grave a few weeks ago, however, I noticed that the curators have not yet gotten around to including her biography along with all the other dignitaries entombed nearby.
 

La Roche-sur Yon, France. Bust of Simone Viel, after vandalism December 2019.

Lastly, on the this topic of the sculptural depictions of real Jews, Ruth Ellen Gruber wrote in 2018 about a double portrait memorial to the poet and painter and critic Max Jacobs, created by sculptors Philippe Meffroy and Veronique Millour and erected in 1995 in the small town of Treboul in Brittany. 

According to Ruth, Jacobs "was born in nearby Quimper in 1876 and vacationed in Treboul from 1929. Born and raised a Jew, Jacob (who was gay) converted to Catholicism in 1909 (apparently after claiming to have had a mystical vision of Christ). Still, he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and sent to the Drancy internment/deportation camp outside Paris, where he died of pneumonia before he would have been deported to Auschwitz. His brother Gaston, sister, and brother-in-law were murdered at Auschwitz." The memorial stands at the top of a path leading from the port near the church of St. Jean.

Treboul, France. Memorial to Max Jacobs by sculptors Philippe Meffroy and Veronique Millour, 1995. Photo: Ruth Ellen Gruber 2018.