BAIGELL, Matthew 1933-

PERSONAL: Surname is pronounced Bay-gel; born April 27, 1933, in New York, NY; married Renee Moses, February 1, 1959; children: Leah, Naomi. Education: University of Vermont, B.A., 1954; Columbia University, M.A., 1955; University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D., 1965.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of Art History, Voorhees Hall, 71 Hamilton St., Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Professor of art history. Ohio State University, Columbus, instructor, 1961-65, assistant professor, 1965-67, associate professor of art, 1967-68; Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, associate professor, 1968-72, professor, 1972-78, distinguished professor of art, 1978-2002, professor emeritus, 2002—. Military service: U.S. Air Force, 1955-57; became second lieutenant.

MEMBER: College Art Association.

WRITINGS:

A History of American Painting, Praeger (New York, NY), 1971.

(Editor) A Thomas Hart Benton Miscellany, State University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, KS), 1971.

The American Scene: American Painting in the 1930s, Praeger (New York, NY), 1974.

Thomas Hart Benton, Abrams (New York, NY), 1974.

Charles Burchfield, Watson-Guptill (New York, NY), 1976.

The Western Art of Frederic Remington, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1976.

Dictionary of American Art, Harper (New York, NY), 1979.

Albert Bierstadt, Watson-Guptill (New York, NY), 1981.

Thomas Cole, Watson-Guptill (New York, NY), 1981.

A Concise History of American Painting and Sculpture, Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1984.

(With others) Arte Americana, 1930-1970, Fabbri (Milan, Italy), 1992.

(Editor, with wife, Renee Baigell) Soviet Dissident Artists: Interviews after Perestroika, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1995.

A Concise History of American Painting and Sculpture, IconEditions (New York, NY), 1996.

Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1997.

Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

(With wife, Renee Baigell) Peeling Potatoes, Painting Pictures: Women Artists in Post-Soviet Russia, Estonia, and Latvia. The First Decade, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 2001.

Jewish Artists in New York during the Holocaust Years, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (Washington, DC), 2001.

(Editor, with Milly Heyd) Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 2001.

Contributor to Nineteenth-Century Painters of the Delaware Valley, New Jersey State Museum (Trenton, NJ), 1983; (with Julia Williams) Artists against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists' Congress, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1986; and Three Hundred Years of American Painting: The Montclair Art Museum Collection, Hudson Hills Press, 1989.

SIDELIGHTS: Matthew Baigell has introduced generations of students to the amazing world of art through his more than dozen surveys and studies. In addition to writing noteworthy surveys of American art, Baigell, a long-time professor of art and now professor emeritus at Rutgers University, has studied, written, and edited works dealing with the identity of artists and the social, cultural, and personal contexts in which they work. While Baigell has specialized in American art, in several works he has examined works of a subgroup of American artists—Jewish artists. Among his works are titles about Jewish artists during and after the Holocaust, works by women in countries of the former Soviet Union, and works by modern Jewish artists. When asked why he specialized in American art, Baigell told Aliza Edelman in an interview published at the Art History Web site: "The most interesting environment is the one I grew up in, that is, America. I wanted to explore what America was like on a certain cultural level. I was always interested in connecting to an environment that was familiar to me. I do not believe that art comes necessarily just from art but also from some kind of environmental concerns. In order to understand art, you need to understand the environment."

Among Baigell's books are two historical surveys of the American art world, A History of American Painting and The American Scene: American Paintings of the 1930s. In the first of these works, Baigell chronicles American painting from the 1600s to the late-twentieth century. He characterizes each period by studying prominent American artists whose works represent features of a historical style. Hilton Kramer of the New York Times Book Review contended that Baigell's book adheres to "the line of well-established opinion," but a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement observed: "Baigell manages to say something quite individual about most of the major nineteenth-century painters. One feels that the paintings under discussion have been freshly studied before being locked into the inevitable categories." And although some critics found the book too short for a work of scholarship, others recommended it as an introductory reader. David Gebhard wrote in the Library Journal, "For the general reader this book is excellent: [Baigell's] characterizations of the period are well made."

In The American Scene: American Paintings of the 1930s, Baigell examines the group of artists that came to be called the American Scene painters. These were a disparate collection of painters who rejected modern European painting styles and developed an indigenous, realistic American art that found expression in scenes of the American landscape and the working class. Except for their mutual interest in painting scenes of American life, this group of artists had little in common. According to James R. Mellow in the New York Times Book Review, they manifested no shared style of aesthetics, formed no cohesive program of art, and held no collective motives or ambitions. In the reviewer's opinion, Baigell inherits the inconsistencies of the period in trying to build a clear construct in which to examine the painters; he excludes certain major artists, like Charles Demuth and Edward Hopper, because they do not adhere to his theories on the movement. Mellow commented, "One has the feeling that Professor Baigell wanted to wrap up his subject in a clear and precise pedagogical fashion, but history, with its usual perversity, has presented him with too many loose ends. [He] does little to explain or explore the contradictions of the movement." Still "Baigell makes a useful distinction between the generally apolitical regionalist painters like [Thomas Hart] Benton and [Grant] Wood and the Social Realists, figures like Joe Jones, Philip Evergood, Ben Shahn, whose subject matter tended to suggest political action." On the other hand, Ruth Berenson maintained in the National Review that Baigell's "well-illustrated and thoughtfully researched book fills a real need, for the period has been unaccountably neglected by art historians. As the book shows, our view of America has been profoundly affected by images created by American Scene painters."

During his lengthy career, Baigell has been fascinated with issues of artistic identity. After three decades of intermittent work, in 2001 he published the solo essay collection Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America, which contains seventeen "thought-provoking essays," to quote Choice reviewer I. Spalatin. In these essays about the works of such artists as Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Philip Pearlstein, Robert Morris, Richard Estes, Ben Shahn, and Barnett Newmann, Baigell relates their works of art to their social, cultural, and personal contexts, pointing out recurring themes. As Baigell explained, "I grew up hearing about the social view of art, the responsibilities of art and artist to society, and the ways artists reflect various economic and political tendencies in society." Thus in Baigell's analysis of art, the doctrine of social responsibility takes precedence over the form or the view of art for art's sake. Although in essays dating from an earlier period in his life, Baigell used standards of beauty defined by nineteenth-century American writers, in much later essays he employs the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Frederic Jameson in determining aesthetic value. Yet Baigell's emphasis on the environment of the artist as the prime factor in his creativity remains a constant. Citing Baigell's "admirable consistency of principle along with an equally admirable flexibility and responsiveness to change," Art Bulletin reviewer Sarah Burns praised Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America. "Baigell never hesitates to criticize moral vacuity or to condemn pretension," she added. "In the end, he rethinks the history of American art."

Several of Baigell's books deal with art in eastern Europe, including the 1995 title Soviet Dissident Artists: Interviews after Perestroika and the 2001 work Peeling Potatoes, Painting Pictures: Women Artists in Post-Soviet Russia, Estonia, and Latvia. The First Decade. The former came about as a result of the donation of a private collection of paintings by dissident Soviet artists to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. With his wife, Renee, a student of Russian literature, Baigell conducted interviews with the forty-seven artists who had created the newly acquired artworks featured in the book. Free at last to express themselves, these artists discuss not only their styles—which bucked Soviet socialist realism—but their harassment by the Soviet establishment.

After examining the ways by which artists try to define themselves as American, Baigell looked at another subset: Jewish artists. In Jewish Artists in New York during the Holocaust Years, published by Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in 2001, he proposes ways in which such artists as Mane-Katz, Jacques Lipchitz, Marc Chagall, Jack Levine, and Mark Rothko dealt visually with the Holocaust, classifying these representations into four main categories. Baigell grew up in New York during the 1940s and thus had memories that he brought to bear on the study, a fact that Daniel Morris of American Jewish History likened to using Rorschach tests, which "tell us more about Baigell's pysche, and especially his need to believe that important Jewish American modernists did represent the Holocaust, than about the artist under discussion." Morris concluded, "Intriguing as a kind of art historian's psychobiography, the book is not convincing as a work of art history." A book with a much wider focus on Jewish identity is Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, coedited with Milly Heyd. In this collection of fifteen essays, the various authors, as the editors explain, deal with "art created by Jewish artists in which one can find some aspect of the Jewish experience, whether religious, cultural, social, or personal." Baigell himself contributed the essay "Jewish American Artists: Identity and Messianism" to this collection, which, in the words of a Parachute reviewer, "powerfully demonstrates how the variety of Jewish thought and experience adds beauty and strength to the intrinsic ties between individuals, their history and heritage."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Baigell, Matthew, and Milly Heyd, editors, Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 2001.

PERIODICALS

American Jewish History, September, 2002, Daniel Morris, review of Jewish Artists in New York: The Holocaust Years, pp. 329-333.

Art Bulletin, December, 2002, Sarah Burns, review of Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America, pp. 694-696.

ARTnews, November, 1997, Rex Weil, review of Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust, p. 152.

Burlington Magazine, January, 1987, review of A Concise History of American Painting and Sculpture, p. 40.

Choice, March, 1996, review of Soviet Dissident Artists: Interviews after Perestroika, p. 1118; February, 1998, review of Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust, p. 980; July-August, 2001, I. Spalatin, review of Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America, p. 1944.

Christian Century, January 16, 1985, review of A Concise History of American Painting and Sculpture, p. 58.

Journal of American History, September, 1987, Joseph Boskin, review of Artists against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists' Congress, pp. 550-551.

Library Journal, August, 1971; October 15, 1995, Eric Bryant, review of Soviet Dissident Artists, p. 58.

London Review of Books, March 21, 1985, review of A Concise History of American Painting and Sculpture, p. 14.

Los Angeles Times, October 7, 1984, Robert L. Pincus, review of A Concise History of American Painting and Sculpture, p. 8.

National Review, February 14, 1974.

New York Times Book Review, December 5, 1971; December 1, 1974; April 27, 1986, Hilton Kramer, review of Artists against War and Fascism, p. 19.

Parachute, January-March, 2002, review of Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, p. 116.

Publishers Weekly, November 13, 1995, review of Soviet Dissident Artists, p. 56.

Russian Review, October, 1996, Dmitri Shalin, review of Soviet Dissident Artists, pp. 709-710.

Shofar, winter, 2003, Carl Belz, review of Complex Identities, pp. 187-189.

Slavic and East European Journal, fall, 1997, Tamara Machmut-Jhasi, review of Soviet Dissident Artists, pp. 511-513.

Times Literary Supplement, November 9, 1973; March 21, 1980; January 11, 2002, Martha Kapos, review of Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America, p. 26.

ONLINE

Art History, http://www.arthistory.rutgers.edu/newsletter/ (May 14, 2002), Aliza Edelman, "Refocusing and Retirement: An Interview with Professor Matthew Baigell.*"