Women in general and Jewish women in particular participated in the artistic life of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union for over a hundred years. Chronologically, this period can be defined by the years 1890 to 1990, that is, from the end of the nineteenth century, when the first women painters appeared on the Russian artistic scene until the USSR ceased to exist as a unified state. Throughout this period, Jewish women occupied a significant place in Russian and Soviet artistic life; indeed, they were among those who led the way in establishing women’s presence there. Jewish women artists worked in all styles, from the routine academic to the extreme avant-garde. There were also well-known art patrons and gallery owners, art historians, and art critics.

Even though Jewish women actively and successfully participated in Russian cultural life, their contribution still lies beyond the interest of art historians and exhibition curators, who have been entirely focused on Jewish male artists, as is evident from two examples of Russian Jewish art exhibitions: Tradition and Revolution. The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art 1912–1928 (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1987) and Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change 1890–1990 (The Jewish Museum, New York, September 1995–January 1996). It is noteworthy that in both cases the exhibitions were overseen by women curators: Ruth Apter-Gabriel and Susan Tumarkin Goodman respectively. Neither of them, however, displayed any works by Jewish women painters or graphic artists, who were only briefly mentioned by Alexandra Shatskikh in her article “Jewish Artists in the Russian Avant-Garde,” published in the catalog of the New York exhibition.

As a result, the oeuvre of Jewish women artists in Russia and the Soviet Union has basically not been explored in either its Jewish or its gender aspects. In part, this may be due to objective factors that rendered difficult the revelation and interpretation of ethnic and gender components in the art of Jewish women. One of these factors is the unique evolution of the feminist movement in Russia. The “women’s question” there had no significance of its own, almost always being only a part of nationwide socio-political or ethnic programs and declarations. Russian feminism, therefore, never attained the same degree of social importance as in Western Europe and the United States. The weakness and vagueness of the feminist movement in Russia found expression in the artistic sphere as well: women painters were an integral part of the general artistic environment; they never acted as a separate group with unique objectives. In contrast to American women artists, for example, Jewish women painters never united themselves into separate organizations or unions, instead of becoming members of Jewish or Russian artistic associations headed by men. In the Soviet period, the Communist party saw the “women’s question” as an element of state politics to be resolved by the ideological re-education of women and their involvement in the socialist industry and social life. The totalitarian state promoted full emancipation of women and shaped the new forms of their social behavior, at the same time endorsing puristic and even ascetic forms of relationships between the sexes and often persecuting the violators of these norms. These concepts left their mark on Soviet art, where class or propaganda rhetoric typically replaced gender issues. In addition, works of art addressing any ethnic topics, especially Jewish ones, were not approved of and sometimes even condemned, the scope of artistic topics being limited to the internationalist Soviet ideology. As a result, both gender and ethnic problems were pushed to the background of artistic consciousness. Nevertheless, these topics were sometimes represented in the works of some Jewish women painters, though only minimally and in a veiled manner.

The present chronological discussion reviews the work of these artists, as well as of other Jewish women who took an active part in Russian and Soviet artistic life.

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After Stalin’s death in 1953 and during Nikita Khrushchev’s “thaw period,” the ideological pressure lessened and many restrictions on free self-expression in art were removed. For Jewish artists, in particular, there was now an opportunity to communicate their Jewish identification. This evolving opportunity was especially topical in connection with the experience and understanding of the Holocaust and Stalin’s crushing of Jewish cultural life in the USSR, which were part of the personal experience of many Jewish artists. One example of this is the destiny and work of the painter and sculptor Eva Levina-Rosenholz (1892–1975) between 1950 and 1960. She began her artistic studies at Pen’s school in Vitebsk. From 1918 to 1920, she studied at the Sculpture Studios of Stepan Erzya (1876–1959) and Golubkina’s; from 1921 to 1925, she attended Falk’s painting class in VKHUTEMAS. From 1926 to 1930, she lived in London, studying Turner’s art. Back in the USSR, she actively participated in exhibitions. During this period, she painted only landscapes and still-life compositions, in which she solved only formal problems—inter-relationships of color and form, creation of composition, etc. In 1949, during an antisemitic campaign against “cosmopolitanism,” Levina-Rosenholz was arrested and spent seven years in the gulag. When she was freed, she returned to Moscow, where she worked on a large series of graphic works on subjects from the Books of Ruth and Esther. These stories of female destinies were not chosen by chance by the artist, who focused on their most dramatic moments, emphasizing the element of tragedy and the loneliness of the characters. The artist’s own life was interpreted in the universal content of these Biblical stories. The images of Ruth and Esther, which are of paramount importance for the Jewish psyche, filled the Jewish painter’s life with a national meaning, thus transforming it into a symbolic reflection of the tragic history of all Jewish people.

The Holocaust theme emerges in the works of a number of young Jewish women artists between 1960 and 1970. This choice of subject was, on the one hand, a result of the awakening of Jewish national self-consciousness in the USSR following the Israeli victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, and on the other hand, a reaction to the growing state antisemitism. While the Jewish themes could not be directly expressed, they were usually alluded to by hints as well as in symbolic and allegorical images. For example, in some of the sculptural compositions, Julia Segal (b. 1938) depicted everyday life scenes in pre-war Kiev. The characters could easily be identified as Jews, thus transforming the compositions into nostalgic memories of a world that no longer existed. Segal emigrated to Israel in 1991.

During these years, many Jewish women played a prominent rôle in Soviet art criticism and art historical studies. The most distinguished among them are: Ella Gankina (b. 1924), an expert in Russian and Soviet illustration who emigrated to Israel in 1992; Olga Roitenberg (1923–2000), an art historian specializing in the 1920–1930 period; Vigdarya Khazanova (b. 1925), an expert on Soviet avant-garde architecture; art critic Muda Yablonskaya, (1926–1990); and Dora Kogan (1923–1995), the author of definitive monographs of Russian painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kogan emigrated to Israel in 1999. Entire strata of Russian artistic culture were discovered due to their research. Among the younger generation that emerged around 1975, Galina Elshevsky (b. 1953) deserves mention. Her research focuses on Russian art of the beginning of the twentieth century and she is also a leading and authoritative art critic.

Jewish women artists also left their mark on the Soviet “non-official” or “non-conformist” art of the 1970s. Irina Yudina (b. 1943), a veteran of this movement, participated in underground “apartment” exhibitions as early as the end of the 1960s. Rimma Zanevskaya (born Sapgir, 1930) was a member of the “Movement” group, which developed principles of abstraction and kinetic art. In Leningrad in 1975, a group of Jewish non-conformist painters founded the Jewish artistic group “Aleph.” These artists, who differed from each other in style and artistic inclinations, were united not by a mutually accepted program, but rather by their common origin and their feelings of protest against official art. Tatyana Kornfeld (b. 1950), who emigrated to Israel in 1976, and Olga Schmuilovich (b. 1948) were active in this group. A Jewish artist, Natalya Abalakova (b. 1941), was one of the most radical creators of conceptual art in Moscow. She organized happenings and installations together with her husband, Anatoly Zhigalov (b. 1941). They initiated a special stream in conceptual art called “TOT-ART,” the goal of which was a total conceptual re-comprehension and artistic transformation of everyday life. In their joint projects, there was a conscious division of gender roles, with Abalakova taking on provocative and creative functions, according to her understanding of her female rôle, which also, most recently assumes a certain Jewish quality.

The plastic experiments with gender implications by Nina Kotel (b. 1949) are of considerable interest. With color pencils, she draws large-sized fragments of the nude female body (usually, these are self-portrait fragments), obtaining a visual effect that is based on the paradoxical but deliberate contradiction between the fine technique of the pencil strokes and the huge size of the image itself. In these works, the overt, almost provocative, self-eroticism is a convincing aesthetic feature.