Iconoclasm uninterred. The Jewish roots of American abstract expressionism

What does it mean to say that a work of art is “Jewish”? And what role did Judaism play in the linguistic innovations brought by Jewish authors to the XX Century art system? Starting from these and other questions, I will develop an exegetic path to show how Judaism in the arts has been declined in many different ways throughout the past century. One crucial step of my analysis of these issues is the focus on the relationship between the traditional Jewish aniconism and the abstract tendencies of Post-War American paintings. After discussing the peculiarities of Jewish abstraction, I will thus focus on how they’re declined – in an antithetic yet complementary way – in the artistic production of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.