Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century

In 1979, Warhol began working on the series which was suggested to him by art dealer Ronald Feldman. The subjects of the portraits were subsequently chosen by Feldman after consultation with the director of the art school of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington, Ruth Levine, and with the Center's gallery director, Susan Morgenstein. Feldman had originally been asked by an Israeli art dealer for a series of portraits of Golda Meir. Warhol nicknamed the series "Jewish geniuses". ==Subjects==

• Actress Sarah Bernhardt • United States Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis • Philosopher Martin Buber • Physicist Albert Einstein • Psychologist and writer Sigmund Freud • Stage and screen comedians the Marx Brothers • Prime Minister of Israel Golda Meir • Composer and songwriter George Gershwin • Novelist Franz Kafka • Novelist and critic Gertrude Stein == Exhibitions ==

Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century was first shown at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington in Rockville, Maryland in March 1980. In September 1980, a set was displayed at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. That month, another set was mounted at the Linda Farris Gallery in Seattle, Washington. From September to November 1980, the series was included in a Warhol exhibit at the Portland Center for Visual Arts in Portland, Oregon. The series was also exhibited at the Jewish Museum of New York from September 1980 to January 1981. In November 1980, the series was included in a celebration of Jews titled "Variations on a Jewish Themes" at the Hartford Jewish Community Center in Harford, Connecticut. The series was displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in London between January and June 2006, and returned to New York's Jewish Museum in 2008 in an exhibition called "Warhol's Jews: 10 Portraits Reconsidered". A set of screenprints of the series was donated to New York's Jewish Museum by Lorraine and Martin Beitler in 2006. Two sets live in Des Moines, Iowa. One is on display at the Des Moines Art Center and the other is on display at Tifereth Israel Synagogue. ==Critical reception==

The exhibition had a distinctly varied and even quite harsh critical reception. The Philadelphia Inquirer called the series "Jewploitation" and a critic for The Village Voice wrote that the show was "hypocritical, cynical and exploitative." Roger Hurlburt of the Fort Lauderdale News praised Warhol's approach: "Warhol's highly graphic technique masterfully singles out those traits that emphasize a universal aspect for each personality. … The image may be immediately recognizable, but Warhol forces us to evaluate the work while he remains distant." Subsequent assessments In 2006, the National Portrait Gallery wrote that "Warhol's insistence that the subjects be deceased invests the series with an inescapable character of mortality. The faces of the dead appear as if behind a veneer of modernity. The tension sustained between photograph and abstraction focuses the issue of their celebrity. Probing the faultlines between the person and their manufactured, surface image, Warhol presents these individuals' fame as a complex metamorphosis". In 2008, Ken Johnson of The New York Times wrote that "What is remarkable about the paintings now, however, is how uninteresting they are. What once made them controversial – the hint of a jokey, unconscious anti-Semitism – has evaporated, leaving little more than bland, posterlike representations. The paintings do have a certain visual panache; you could even call some of them jazzy. … The issue for Warhol is not what his subjects did and not Jewishness in general. His real subject was fame. He was interested in famous people simply because they were famous". ==References==