“Dorothy Adlow—Art Critic as Prophet and Pastor of the Boston Expressionists”

Paper Proposal – Arts, Literature, and Religion Unit, American Academy of Religion

Theme: “Arts, Literature, and Religion at the Centennial of 1925”

“In the summer of 1925 an extremely vivacious 24-year-old American visited Europe. Her name was Dorothy Adlow and she had graduated some two years earlier from one of the most prestigious Ivy League universities, Radcliffe College. She possessed a sharp mind, as she would make evident during the 41 years that she would spend as an art critic for the Christian Science Monitor newspaper in Boston, Massachusetts, for which activity she would receive the American Art Critics Award in 1954” (Apollo Magazine, 171, Issue 574). These words from the English art historian and artist, Eric Shanes, introduced an essay on the modernist sculptor, Constantin Brâncuși. Shanes went on to describe how Brâncuși was uncharacteristically open and communicative with Adlow.  In my paper, I focus on Adlow’s relationship with and interpretation of the Boston Expressionists, an American arts movement composed largely of first or second-generation Jewish immigrants who built upon the psychological and spiritual vision of the German Expressionists. Adlow was likewise a child of Jewish immigrants to the United States. “The only critic we paid attention to, Dorothy Adlow,” noted Boston Expressionist painter Bernard Chaet, in an interview for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. 

I address three principal themes: 

1. Metaphysics in Adlow’s engagement with the Boston Expressionists, exploring their use of biblical references, both Christian and Jewish, in modernist and often macabre, haunting contexts. In so doing, the Boston Expressionists reflected broader spiritual trends in modern art as seen in the Theosophical inspiration of Abstract Expressionists like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky; pioneer of abstraction, Hilma af Klint; and with American artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Raymond Jonson.  
2. Irony, as Boston Expressionists’ incorporation of the occult, mystical, and sometimes grossly material would have been anathema to Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science faith and albeit secular Christian Science Monitor newspaper. Of Theosophy, Eddy wrote, “[It] is a corruption of Judaism. This corruption had a renewal in the Neoplatonic philosophy; but it sprang from the Oriental philosophy of Brahmanism, and blends with its magic and enchantments. Theosophy is no more allied to Christian Science than the odor of the upas-tree is to the sweet breath of springtide” (No and Yes, 14). Still, Adlow’s writings on artwork rooted in modernist mysticism were valued for readers’ intellectual development. 
3. Jewish/Christian dynamics in which Boston Brahmin liberal Protestantism and Jewish culture interconnected.

While the Boston Expressionists emerged after 1925, beginning in the 1930s, their foundations drew from German Expressionism in the early decades of the twentieth century, notably with Die Blau Fier (The Blue Four), consisting of Lyonel Feininger, Alexei Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. Karl Zerbe, a leading member of the Boston Expressionists, fled Germany with the rise of Nazism, bringing his background in German Expressionism to the city.  Later dubbed “degenerate art” by the Nazi regime, Expressionism found in the Boston painter, Hyman Bloom, a literal evocation of this critique with paintings depicting decomposition of the human body. 

Adlow’s engagement with Hyman Bloom’s work is especially intriguing. Both shared similar backgrounds in rising out of Jewish ghettos in Boston to prominence in their respective fields. Neither of Adlow’s Eastern European-born parents had received any formal education beyond a middle school level, yet she and all her siblings attended Harvard or Radcliffe. Bloom grew up amidst the settlement houses of Boston’s West End. For a generally well-educated but not necessarily avant-garde readership, Adlow’s Monitor reviews navigated Bloom’s portrayal of the spiritual within the mortal. She wrote, “The artist is transforming the earthly into the supramundane, chronicle and fact, into symbol. It is an old tradition, as old as art. ‘Older Jew with Torah’ and ‘Younger Jew with Torah’ are penetrating works of insight and compassion. They will undoubtedly outlive a vogue, not peculiar to Mr. Bloom, for themes with a clinical and mortuary basis” (Christian Science Monitor, 15. Nov. 1945, 4.).

While not all the Boston Expressionists were Jewish, the majority were. As Jonathan Sarna has written, “what is distinctive about Jewish Boston: its enchantment with the life of the mind.”  Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock considered Hyman Bloom to be America’s first Abstract Expressionist, although Bloom would later move away from abstraction.  Adlow’s background in the Jewish immigrant experience leading to immersion in Harvard/Radcliffe culture informed her work and her ability to traverse high and experimental arts in the city. She was on close terms with Paul Sachs, director of Harvard’s Fogg Museum and MFA director, Perry Rathbone, while also a regular at the Boris Mirski Gallery, known for exhibiting Boston’s young avant-garde.

Noone knew the Boston Expressionists better than Dorothy Adlow.  Moreover, her criticism continues to attract attention with current major retrospectives: for example, in connection with recent exhibits at MOMA of the aforementioned Constantin Brâncuși and the German Expressionist, Käthe Kollwitz. Adlow’s reviews bring us back to the cultural dynamism of the Jazz Age and the ongoing impact of modern art on the American mind and its spiritual quests. 

Primary resources for my paper come principally from the Dorothy Adlow Papers at Schlesinger Library, Harvard/Radcliffe Institute; the archives of The Mary Baker Eddy Library, which also oversees the historical records of The Christian Science Monitor; archives at Boston museums, including the MFA, Fogg, and Institute of Contemporary Art; published oral history interviews, and ones I will conduct with descendants of the Boston Expressionists. Secondary resources include Adlow’s published writings; materials by Erwin Canham, editor of the Monitor during Adlow’s tenure; books and articles by Jonathan Sarna, the leading scholar on Boston Jewish history; as well as materials on Boston Expressionism.