c. 1999 Religion News Service

LOS ANGELES _ Bonnie Voland’s daughter, Hayley, seems as curious as other seven-year-olds. And perceptive, too.

While touring the Skirball Cultural Center, Hayley noticed the constant, subtle presence of red in the large, acrylic-on-canvas, three-panel exhibit,”History of Matzah: The Story of the Jews,”by New York artist Larry Rivers.

Unlike many adults, the girl picked up on the red in Jewish faces, backgrounds and clothes.”That’s right,”Hayley’s mother told her,”there’s a lot of blood in our history.” The large, airy Skirball museum does not avoid the Holocaust in its artworks. Instead, it gives a full, pre- and post-Holocaust view of Jews across the centuries. With a museum mantra being that Jews have endured good as well as bad times, artwork using a Jewish staple _ matzah, the flat unleavened bread eaten especially during Passover _ as backdrop to history promises strong images.”Why did I use the matzah?”said artist Larry Rivers as he spoke to Skirball patrons.”I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t want to make up anything that makes it sound important, a metaphor and everything like that. I jump in with some sort of start. It struck me that a giant matzah, to be able to put things on it, to do a Jewish history, seemed to me to be pleasurable. My associations with matzah are pleasurable too; the holidays, my home. Everybody’s enjoying matzah.” A tension between Jewish good times with matzah and horrific times of pogroms and genocide is the meeting point for Rivers, a New York expressionist, and the Skirball, a Los Angeles museum seeking to show all Judaica.”There’s a certain interesting tension between Rivers and the core exhibit of the Skirball which tells the story of the Jews and was created by scholars,”said Skirball President Uri Hersher.”And it turns out when you tell the story in its entirety, every moment of our history is not filled with conflict. Too often it’s only the bad news conveyed in stories, conveyed to children and grandchildren. We also emphasize the joyful. There’s some balance. We’ve had some good days on this earth.” And some randy ones, too. The third matzah panel, for example, shows a Jewish prostitute working New York’s Lower East Side during the city’s turn-of-the-century immigration waves.”If one of the professions that you thought Jews stayed away from was prostitution, you’re wrong,”said Rivers.”… They also stood on the street corner and for a few bucks did this.” The three panels are large _ each 10-by-14 feet. Together they cover one long mural wall. Known first for abstract expressionist art and then for his turn to pop art, Rivers chose a kaleidoscope, scattershot approach to the 4,000 years of Jewish history.

The first panel covers Moses and ancient times. The second one details European Jewry, featuring a 1404 decree from Cologne, Germany regulating what clothes Jews must wear and the Roman Catholic Church’s Fourth Lateran Council ruling in 1215, which made Jews wear distinctive badges on clothing.”I’ve been amazed at looking at the painting at how far back and how insidious anti-Semitism is,”said one woman, studying the badges.

The third panel emphasizes the hope found through immigration to the United States. Despite constant references to anti-Semitism, the panels employ no distinct Nazi imagery, Holocaust references, or symbols of Israel. With its focus on New York immigrant life and successes, the third panel is set clearly in the early 1900s, when New York flourished with Yiddish newspapers, theater and robust socialist politics.

Having opened in February and set to run through May 30, Rivers made the matzah art in the early 1980s. This is only the work’s fourth public showing, with previous exhibits at the Jewish Art Museum in New York in 1984 and, in the early 1990s, in Berlin and Philadelphia.

Rivers has been known for four decades for his abstract and pop art. His earlier large-scale art narratives include the 1953″Washington Crossing the Delaware,”and 1965’s”The History of the Russian Revolution.” Museum officials said the draw has been excellent, though reviews are not unilaterally flattering _ Rivers’ matzah art was panned by at least one literal-minded patron.”It’s messy,”said Jay Seidman, a retired Los Angeles engineer.”It’s not crisp. It’s too much and it doesn’t follow any real good time sequence of an evolutionary process. And there are big gaps in it, historical gaps. You come from the falling of the temple and then you’re in the 1400s and bingo there’s nothing in between for 1500 years.” Seidman also noticed there was nothing about Sephardic or Asian Jews, chuckling,”I imagine you can get matzah in China.” But Chinese Jews were not of concern to Rivers growing up as Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg in Yiddish New York’s nuanced, immigrant culture, where conservative Bronx Jews debated their more liberal Manhattan brethren. Missing some centuries of the Middle Ages is not as important to such immigrant offspring as Rivers as remembering socialist Meyer London, whom Lower East Side Jews sent to Congress in 1914. The artist said he wanted to”make your mind travel there.” He also conceded his art is not by-the-book history.”Sometimes I felt a compulsion to be very, sort of, detailed, and other times I felt it wasn’t that important,”he said.”I had to hold back a lot.” Patrons with deep roots to New York seem to spend much time deciphering the third panel.”I used to speak to somebody at work in Yiddish,”said Louis Cherwin, a retired refrigerator supply executive from Long Island City, N.Y.”My father used to read that newspaper,”said another retiree, about Rivers depicting the famous Yiddish-language newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward.”There is an unfinished quality to this art,”said Cherwin,”like Jewish history itself.” DEA END FINNIGAN