Mildred  Lane  Kemper  Art  Museum   Washington  University  in  St.  Louis   Sam  Fox  School  of  Design  &  Visual  Arts   Spotlight Essay: Eugene  Berman,  The  Good  Samaritan  (Le  bon  Samaritain),   1930   March  2013     Keith  Holz   Associate  Professor  of  Art  History,  Western  Illinois  University     A  tall  man  delivers  a  figure  piggyback  onto   a  well-­‐lit  stoop  where  a  third  man  greets   the  pair.    In  the  foreground  and  middle   ground  horses  stir,  while  a  heap  of  equine   flesh  and  bones  writhes  on  the  ground   stage  left.  These  figures  rehearse  the   parable  of  the  Good  Samaritan  within  the   darkened  architectural  setting  of  Eugene   Berman’s  canvas  of  that  title  from  1930   Paris.    A  student  of  both  painting  and   architecture,  Russian-­‐born  Berman  then  

Eugene  Berman,  The  Good  Samaritan  (Le  bon   Samaritain),  1930.  Oil  on  canvas,  39  1/4  x  31  7/8".   Mildred  Lane  Kemper  Art  Museum,  Washington   University  in  St.  Louis.  University  purchase,  Kende   Sale  Fund,  1946.  

lived  and  painted  in  the  Left  Bank’s  15th   arrondissement,  where  he  was   captivated  by  the  neighborhood’s  

  suburban  architecture  of  stables  and  courtyards,  one  of  which  he  depicts  here.1  In   this  and  related  paintings  and  drawings  sharing  this  title,  Berman  departs  from  his   typically  deep  illusionistic  spatial  settings  to  stage  the  biblical  parable  on  a  shallow   foreground  boxed  in  by  flat  walls.  2    Redolent  of  the  pared-­‐down  urban  architectural   settings  and  mood  of  the  canvases  of  Giorgio  de  Chirico,  whom  he  had  encountered   during  his  numerous  trips  to  Italy  during  the  twenties,  the  geometry  of  color  planes                                                                                                                   1  See  Julian  Levy,  Eugene  Berman  (New  York:  Viking  Press,  1947),  v–viii;  and  James  Thrall  Soby,  After   Picasso  (New  York:  Dodd,  Mead  &  Company,  1935),  36.   2  For  other  artworks  by  Berman  with  this  title  see  Levy,  Berman,  plates  III,  VI,  and  17.  

   

 

1    

identical  with  the  picture  plane  are  as  close  as  Berman  would  ever  come  to  Cubist   picture  construction.      

 

This  paper  asks  what  clues  the  canvas  betrays  of  Berman’s  engagement  with  the   history  of  art  as  well  as  with  his  timely  concerns  as  a  stateless  Russian  Jew  living  in   a  neighborhood  of  fellow  immigrants  and  refugees  who  were  subjected  to  the  Third   Republic’s  then  tightening  refugee  and  residency  regulations.  It  also  seeks  to   illuminate  the  pictorial  language  of  this  painting  in  relation  to  Berman’s  aspirations   as  a  gallery  artist  and  in  relation  to  critical  efforts  to  categorize  the  diverse  styles   and  practices  of  emerging  painters  at  the  time.     Modernism’s  futurity  makes  it  easy  to  forget  that  modern  painters  on  occasion  did   look  back  to  Old  Masters  to  rejuvenate  their  pictorial  practices.  Such  is  the  case  here.   The  Good  Samaritan,  a  canvas  in  the   Louvre  from  c.  1650,  then  believed   to  be  painted  by  Rembrandt  but  now   attributed  to  Constantijn-­‐Daniel  van   Renesse,  appears  to  have  informed   Berman’s  adoption  of  this  theme.   For  Berman,  his  look  back  was  also  a   gaze  averse  to  any  future  associated   with  the  Bolshevik  Revolution  and   Constantijn-­‐Daniel  van  Renesse,  The  Good  Samaritan,   c.  1650.  Oil  on  canvas,  44  7/8  x  53  1/8".  Musée  du   Louvre,  Paris.  Photo  ©  RMN-­‐Grand  Palais;  licensed   by  Art  Resource,  New  York;  photo  by  Jean-­‐Gilles   Berizzi.  

the  upending  of  Russian  society  and   artistic  practice  that  also  brought  the   downfall  and  flight  of  Berman’s   affluent  banking  family  and  his  

relocation,  together  with  his  painter  brother,  Leonid,  through  Finland  and  London  to   Paris  by  the  end  of  1918.  Compared  to  the  decidedly  nostalgic  and  romantic   canvases  and  stage  designs  Berman  produced  over  his  long  career  and  for  which  he   has  remained  best  known—compositions  often  dominated  by  classicizing   architectural  ruins  set  within  perspectival  spaces—Berman’s  Good  Samaritan    

 

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compositions,  which  combine  literary  sources  within  rigorous  architecturally   determined  designs,  were  less  estranged  from  the  absolute  propositions  and  radical   practices  of  the  Constructivists  and  their  Cubist  contemporaries  in  the  West  than   any  other  pictures  in  his  oeuvre.  Writing  in  1947  about  this  series  and  its  difference   from  the  rest  of  Berman’s  oeuvre,  his  dealer  Julian  Levy—who  had  met  Berman   before  1930  in  Paris,  exhibited  his  art  at  his  New  York  gallery,  and  facilitated  his   emigration  to  the  United  States  in  1935—noted:  “This  kind  of  organization  had  been   a  solution  when  Berman  was  trying  to  combine  representational  images  with  the   architectonics  of  Picasso’s  cubism.…[The]  pictures  would  have  looked  almost  as  if   they  were  abstractions  had  they  not  been  so  evidently  arrangements  of  recognizable   courts,  walls  and  windows.”3     In  the  Kemper  Art  Museum’s  canvas,  the  courtyard  walls  establish  an  enclosure  of   architectonically  organized,  overlapping,  rectilinear,  colored  planes  across  a  picture   plane  further  structured  by  five  rectilinear  doors,  windows,  and  their  openings.   Together  with  the  nearly  cloudless  sky  and  dirt  of  the  foreground  yard,  they  blanket   the  surface  of  the  canvas.  The  edges  of  walls,  rooflines,  and  vertical  smokestacks   also  impose  geometry  upon  the  natural  blue  sky.  Symmetry  is  enhanced  through  the   pair  of  piers  flanking  the  central,  black,  rectangular  stable-­‐door  opening.  Each  pier  is   crowned  with  a  vase,  although  pentimenti  suggest  that  Berman  reworked  this   aspect  of  the  composition,  as  only  the  vase  on  the  right  remains  fully  visible.    

 

What  precisely  captivated  Berman  in  the  Louvre’s  canvas  remains  unknown,  but  a   few  general  commonalities  should  be  noted.    Like  the  author  of  the  Dutch  canvas,   the  thirty-­‐year-­‐old  Jewish  painter  from  Russia  cast  the  New  Testament  theme  in  a   dim  nocturnal  light  with  characters  on  a  proscenium-­‐like  platform,  surrounded  by   the  unadorned,  flat  planes  of  the  courtyard’s  inner  walls.  Although  the  painting’s   darkness  renders  it  nearly  illegible,  one  is  still  able  to  discern  the  drift  from  left  to   right  of  human  protagonists  passing  horses  as  they  approach  the  illuminated  porch                                                                                                                   3  Ibid.,  viii.    

 

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at  the  right—a  procession  shared  with  the  older  painting.  Furthermore,  adoption  of   the  Good  Samaritan  theme  in  both  paintings  carries  an  additional  dimension  to  the   meaning  of  neighborliness  among  different  ethnic  groups.  Such  a  reading  in   Berman’s  painting  was  suggested  early  on  by  Levy,  whose  1947  recollection  of  his   first  encounter  with  Berman’s  work  is  telling:   The  first  pictures  of  his  which  I  saw  were  of  the  stables  and  courtyards  of   Paris,  a  period  which  we  might  call  the  period  of  the  “Good  Samaritan”  as   that  title  was  given  to  several  variations  of  the  courtyard  theme.  The  old  tale   of  the  biblical  Samaritan  provides  a  good  indication  to  the  mood  of  those   paintings:  the  neighborhood  neighborliness  lifted  parabolically  by  Berman’s   interpretation  to  the  level  of  some  contemporary  myth.4      

 

Identification  with  Rembrandt’s  residence  in  a  Jewish  neighborhood  beginning  in   1639,  where  neighborhood  Jews  modeled  for  his  religious  figures,  including  Jesus,   may  well  have  weighed  on  Berman’s  mind.  He  lived  in  the  multi-­‐ethnic  15th   arrondissement,  a  nearly  suburban  neighborhood  with  one  key  similarity  to   Rembrandt’s  quarter  in  Amsterdam:  both  served  as  urban  havens  for  refugees  from   many  lands.      

 

After  the  stock  market  crash  amid  mounting  economic  depression,  an  influx  of   refugees  joined  the  highly  concentrated  immigrant  populations  already  living  in   Parisian  districts  such  as  the  15th.  Migrants  and  especially  refugees  were  subjected   to  federal  laws  imposed  to  regulate  foreigners.  Already  in  1922,  the  Soviet   government  had  stripped  Russian  emigrants  like  Berman  of  their  nationality,   leaving  them  stateless.  Russian  refugees  in  Paris  were  also  often  subject  to   refoulement,  or  forced  repatriation  to  their  homeland,  a  fate  Berman  would  surely   have  done  anything  to  avoid.5  With  the  onset  of  the  depression,  public  outcry   against  immigrants  taking  French  jobs  and  other  forms  of  xenophobia  and  anti-­‐                                                                                                                 4  Ibid.,  v-­‐vi.   5  Mary  Dewhurst  Lewis,  The  Boundaries  of  the  Republic  Migrant  Rights  and  the  Limits  of  Universalism   in  France,  1918–1940  (Stanford,  CA:  Stanford  University  Press,  2007),  158,  159.    

 

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Semitism  were  on  the  rise.6  Russians  in  France  suffered  higher  unemployment  rates   and  for  longer  periods  than  previously,  and  they  were  also  arrested  for  vagrancy   more  often  than  other  foreigners.7  In  this  environment,  Berman’s  experience  as  a   Russian  Jew  in  Paris  would  have  triggered  instincts  of  self-­‐preservation  but  also   heightened  concern  for  the  destabilized  status  of  his  fellow  countrymen  and  other   uprooted  refugees.  Viewed  in  this  context,  Berman’s  choice  to  restage  the  story  of   Jesus’  account  of  the  injured,  possibly  Jewish,  traveler  aided  by  a  Samaritan   (Samaritans  and  Jews  typically  scorned  one  another)  was  no  simple  engagement   with  an  Old  Master  canvas  from  the  French  state’s  premier  art  museum.  Rather,  it   amounts  to  a  timely  recognition  of  the  potential  for  humane  neighborly  relations   across  painful  ethnic  and  religious  divisions  under  state-­‐sanctioned  duress  that  the   émigré  painter  was  beginning  to  witness  in  1930.8  The  dynamics  of  this  tension  may   well  be  staged  in  this  canvas,  particularly  in  the  disjunction  between  the  setting  and   its  occupants.  In  contrast  to  the  reassuring  stability  of  the  simple,  even  protective,   architectural  surround,  the  tranquility  of  the  scene  has  been  disrupted  by  the   mysteriously  threatening  aura  suggested  by  the  afflicted  fallen  horse  and  perhaps   the  injured  man  delivered  by  the  Samaritan  as  well.  For  a  stateless  Russian  Jewish   migrant  during  this  insecure  period  of  rapidly  shifting  attitudes  toward  foreigners   and  a  tightening  dragnet  of  legislation  toward  refugees  and  migrants,  even  toward   Russian  Jews  who  had  enjoyed  a  decade  of  relatively  little  turbulence,  the  stakes  of   demonstrating  assimilation  to  French  society  and  professional  belonging  had  never   been  higher.       Over  the  course  of  the  1920s,  Berman,  despite  his  status  as  a  foreigner,  had   exhibited  regularly  at  Paris  galleries  and  had  enjoyed  moderate  success  as  a  painter.     The  Parisian  art  market  and  the  discourse  attending  it  had  been  quick  to  categorize                                                                                                                   6  Ibid.,  173.   7  Ibid.,  171–72.   8  Another  Jewish  painter  in  Paris,  the  Belorussian  Chaim  Soutine  painted  his  Carcass  paintings  from   1924  to  1929,  a  theme  previously  pioneered  by  Rembrandt.  Like  Berman’s  Good  Samaritan  works   that  triangulated  with  an  outlying  Parisian  neighborhood  and  a  canvas  attributed  to  Rembrandt,   Soutine’s  paintings  triangulated  with  Parisian  slaughterhouses  of  similar  outlying,  déclassé  Parisian   neighborhoods  and  Rembrandt’s  paintings  of  bovine  carcasses.    

 

 

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Berman’s  paintings  of  the  twenties  and  early  thirties.  As  early  as  1924,  at  an   exhibition  at  the  Galerie  Drouet,  Berman  and  his  fellow  students  from  the  Academie   Ranson  had  labeled  their  own  pictures  in  this  post-­‐Cubist  period  “Neo-­‐Romantic.”   An  additional,  not  exclusively  pictorial  term,  “Neo-­‐humanism,”  was  coined  by  critic   Waldemar  George  in  1930  and  favorably  applied  to  Berman’s  new  painting.   Christopher  Green  has  summarized  well  the  complicated  yet  influential  critical   significance  of  George  in  Paris  at  this  time.  Discussing  George’s  notion  of  Neo-­‐ humanism  that  he  developed  when  he  founded  his  art  journal  Formes,  Green  notes   that  George  argued  for  new  art  to  turn  away  from  outright  progress  and  modernism   and  return  to  the  past,  a  maneuver  he  found  exemplified  in  Berman’s  art.  Among  the   other  artists  the  assimilated  senior  critic  named  as  Neo-­‐humanists  in  the  first  issue   of  Formes  were  Giorgio  de  Chirico  and  Alberto  Savinio  (de  Chirico’s  brother),   together  with  “our  young  school”  (the  Neo-­‐Romantics  foremost)  that  included,  along   with  Berman,  Christian  Bérard  and  Paul  (Pavel)  Tschelitchew.9    

 

To  pinpoint  more  precisely  Berman’s  location  in  the  networks  and  discourses  of  the   rapidly  internationalizing  Paris  art  world,  it  is  illuminating  to  compare  the  persons   and  territorial  trajectories  of  Berman  and  George.  Like  Berman,  George  was  a  Jew   who  had  fled  to  France  as  a  political  refugee—Berman  from  Russia  in  1918  and   George  from  Poland  in  1911.  By  the  late  1920s,  both  men  regarded  themselves  as   well  along  the  path  of  assimilation  to  French  society  and  culture,  a  process  they   embraced.  While  little  is  known  about  Berman’s  perspective  on  his  own  Jewish   identity,  George  identified  with  the  French  Jews  whose  families  had  been  in  France   for  generations—the  so-­‐called  Israelites.  But  by  1930,  even  established  Jews  had   come  to  fear  that  the  new  waves  of  Jewish  refugees  would  fan  the  flames  of  anti-­‐                                                                                                                 9  See  Christopher  Green,  Art  in  France  1900–1940.  Pelican  History  of  Art  (New  Haven:  Yale  University  

Press,  2000),  esp.  222–23.  In  this  work  Green  synthesizes  pioneering  work  on  Waldemar  George   conducted  by  Romy  Golan  and  Matthew  Affron,  especially  Golan’s    Modernity  and  Nostalgia:  Art  and   Politics  in  France  between  the  Wars  (New  Haven,  CT:  Yale  University  Press,  1995);  and  Affron’s   “Waldemar  George:  A  Parisian  Art  Critic  on  Modernism  and  Fascism,”  in  Fascist  Visions:  Art  and   Ideology  in  France  and  Italy,  ed.  Matthew  Affron  and  Mark  Antliff  (Princeton,  NJ:  Princeton  University   Press,  1997),  184–204.  

   

 

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Semitism.  Berman’s  frequent  turn  to  the  Italian  classical  tradition  (in  the  majority  of   his  other  paintings)  and  to  Rembrandt  (in  the  Good  Samaritan  paintings  and   drawings),  made  him  an  exemplar  of  George’s  Neo-­‐humanist  agenda  that  celebrated   artists  engaged  with  a  recovery  of  European  cultural  traditions.  Berman’s  privileged   Russian  past  and  antipathy  toward  the  Soviet  regime  that  had  ruined  his  family’s   station  in  St.  Petersburg  and  imprisoned  him  for  two  months  in  1918,  paired  with   his  artistic  pursuits  in  Paris  and  the  acculturation  that  entailed,  set  him  on  a  course   of  synthesizing  disparate  present-­‐day  traditions  as  well  as  reconciling  art  of  the  past   with  what  was  new  in  Paris.      

 

Despite  the  gentle  syncretic  character  of  his  art  at  this  time,  Berman’s  Good   Samaritan  canvas  is  notably  void  of  Jewish  or  “primitivist”  motifs  or  style  (East   European,  Russian,  or  otherwise),  either  of  which  might  have  pulled  him  into  the   crosshairs  of  xenophobic  and  anti-­‐Semitic  sightings  within  the  right-­‐leaning  French   public  sphere.  Instead,  The  Good  Samaritan,  with  its  balance  approaching  symmetry   and  its  reconciliation  of  dramatic  figures  within  a  geometrically  stable  and   sheltering  surround,  betrays  its  proximity  to  the  French  classical  tradition—Poussin,   Puvis,  or  even  Cézanne  and  Derain—just  as  it  marks  out  its  distance  from  the  radical   Russian  or  Western  avant-­‐gardes  of  the  day.  In  this  respect,  American  collector  and   Wadsworth  Athenaeum  curator  James  Thrall  Soby’s  comment  that  Neo-­‐Romantic   paintings  are  “free  at  last  from  the  burden  of  revolutionary  ideas”10  rings  true.  By   staging  the  injured  transient  and  agitated  horses  within  a  protective  architectonic   surround,  this  canvas  seems  in  tune  with  Baudelaire’s  1863  challenge  that  modern   life  painters  come  to  terms  with  the  Old  Masters,  and  his  definition  of  modernity  as   “the  ephemeral,  the  fugitive,  the  contingent,  the  half  of  art  whose  other  half  is  the   eternal  and  the  immutable.“11    Berman  gives  us  both  halves  in  this  version  of  The   Good  Samaritan.        

 

                                                                                                                10  Soby,  After  Picasso,  8.   11  Charles  Baudelaire,  “The  Painter  of  Modern  Life,”  in  his  The  Painter  of  Modern  Life  and  other  essays,   ed.  and  trans.  Jonathan  Mayne  (London:  Phaidon  Press,  1964),  13.    

 

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It  is  important  to  acknowledge  that  the  Neo-­‐Romantic  painters’  work  was  not   always  met  with  enthusiasm.  Those  committed  to  the  rigorous  development  of   Cubism  and  its  legacy  were  often  harshly  critical.  Consider  the  view  of  German   expatriate  art  historian  and  critic  Carl  Einstein.  Around  1930,  Einstein  could  offer   only  scorn  for  what  he  took  to  be  the  facile  pictures  of  the  Neo-­‐Romantics  and   others.  Although  it  was  the  paintings  of  Christian  Bérard,  Berman’s  fellow  student   from  the  Academie  Ranson  whose  art  had  come  to  embrace  fashion  illustration,  that   triggered  Einstein’s  ire,  it  is  not  difficult  to  imagine  Berman’s  work  as  well  targeted   by  his  acerbic  critique  of  contemporary  painting.  In  an  often-­‐overlooked  essay,  “The   Little  Picture  Factory”  of  1931,  Einstein  delivered  an  institutional  critique  of  the   Paris  art  trade.  Particularly  offensive  to  Einstein  was  the  robust  market  for   fashionable  paintings,  which,  according  to  him,  Neo-­‐Romantics  like  Berman   epitomized.  Einstein  wrote:     The  fabrication  of  pictures  without  worldview  or  risk  is  lower  than  the  traffic   in  young  women,  for  the  facile  dauber  is  menaced  by  no  punishment,  only   comfortable  income.…Many  people  believe  in  their  talent,  mostly  because   they  sit  in  Paris,  where  the  legacy  of  painting  flies  around  in  tatters  like   nowhere  else.  One  even  belongs  to  the  School  of  Paris  and  addresses  cousin   Cézanne  in  the  familiar.  One  finally  destroys  the  sham  of  a  dubious   commodity  market.  The  abused  Seine  is  dammed  up  with  oil  paint,  the  docks   sink  before  the  shame,  Notre  Dame  is  violated,  and  nudes,  painted  right   down  to  the  enameled  skin,  swing  over  moth-­‐eaten  sofas  that  give  off   outdated  anecdotes  and  insect-­‐spray.12    

 

                                                                                                                12  “Bilderfabrikation  ohne  Anschauung  und  Wagnis  ist  niederer  als  Mädchenhandel,  da  dem  

beflissenen  Pinsler  keine  Strafe  droht,  sondern  bequeme  Rente.    .  .  .  Viele  Leute  glauben  an  ihr  Talent,   ungefähr  weil  sie  in  Paris  sitzen,  wo  die  Fetzen  malerischer  Erbschaft  nur  so  umherfliegen.  Man   gehört  eben  der  Pariser  Schule  an  und  duzt  den  Vetter  Cézanne.  Man  zerstöre  endlich  den  Bluff  einer   fragwürdige  Warenmarke.  Die  missbrauchte  Seine  ist  von  Ölfarbe  gestaut,  die  Quais  versinken  vor   Scham,  Notre  Dame  wird  genotzüchtigt,  und  Akte,  heruntergemalt  bis  unter  die  emaillierte  Haut,   überschaukeln  vermottete  Kanapees,  die  überalterte  Anekdoten  und  Flytox  ausdünsten.”  Carl   Einstein,  “Kleine  Bilderfabrik,”  Weltkunst  5  (April  1931),  2–3,  reprinted  in  Carl  Einstein  (1885–1940)   Kleine  Bilderfabrik  Eine  Auswahl  unbekannter  Aufsätze  (Siegen:  Universität-­‐Gesamthochschule  Siegen,   1988),  24–26  (translation  mine).  

 

 

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What  Einstein  found  so  reprehensible  in  the  work  of  George’s  beloved  Neo-­‐ Romantics,  however,  came  to  be  embraced  with  warmth  and  discernment  across  the   Atlantic  in  the  writings  of  James  Soby.  In  his  1935  book,  After  Picasso,  Soby   characterized  well  the  canvases  Berman  commenced  upon  returning  from  Italy  to   Paris  in  1930:   From  his  drawings,  he  painted  a  series  of  pictures  of  courtyards  which  have   centers  of  dramatic  excitement  in  contrast  to  the  calm  of  the  buildings   beyond.  Compared  to  the  uncommunicative  silence  of  his  interiors,  these   paintings  are  the  nearest  Berman  has  come  to  commentary.  In  pictures  like   The  Wounded  and  Le  Bon  Samaritain,  figures  bend  over  a  wounded  man  and   horses  stand  ready  to  be  ridden  away.  The  light  on  these  activities  is  derived   from  Rembrandt,  and  falls  from  a  doorway  on  the  right;  there  is  no  other   light  except  the  moonlight  on  the  roofs  and  the  dull  glow  from  windows   beyond.  The  painter’s  melancholy  is  more  active  here,  and  no  longer  suggests   a  calm  malaise  but  a  quiet  concern.…    

Using  broad  and  fairly  pure  passages  of  color,  he  began  to  lighten  his  

palette  and  to  smooth  out  the  texture  of  the  pigment.…The  rich  greens,   browns  and  grays  of  the  buildings  and  the  figures  are  framed  against  an   atmospheric  background  of  dark  blue.13     This  description  is  directed  at  another  painting  of  the  same  title,  formerly  in  the   collection  of  Soby’s  friend  and  early  Museum  of  Modern  Art  board  member  Edward   M.  M.  Warburg,  but  it  also  rings  true  for  the  canvas  in  the  collection  of  the  Kemper   Art  Museum.      

 

Stationing  Berman’s  canvas  amid  key  social  and  discursive  contexts  of  the  early   1930s,  it  is  possible  to  regard  this  painting  as  a  hybrid  creation  of  the  migrant   imaginary  seeking  assimilation  and  acculturation.  Firstly,  the  Good  Samaritan  theme   adapted  from  Rembrandt  appears  to  fuse  Berman’s  hope  for  better  ethnic  relations   in  his  neighborhood  as  well  as  improved  relations  with  French  immigration                                                                                                                   13  Soby,  After  Picasso,  35–36.      

 

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authorities.  Secondly,  the  modernist  assertion  of  flat,  architectonic  planes  to  frame  a   stage  set  amounts  to  a  weak  nod  toward  Cubist  picture  construction  while  retaining   the  architectonic  framing  of  a  rather  conventional  proscenium  stage  to  host  the   biblical  narrative  that  Berman  found  so  timely.  Thirdly,  the  general  maneuver  of   taking  art  backwards—to  an  Old  Master  canvas  depicting  a  biblical  parable—to   reinvent  painting  anew  nudges  Berman’s  painting  into  a  modernist  tradition   attuned  to  Baudelaire.  In  following  each  of  these  dualities  negotiated  in  paint  by   Berman,  we  are  able  to  discern  how  Berman’s  painting  also  staked  out  a  middle   ground  for  itself  between  opposing  critical  factions  concerned  with  contemporary   Parisian  pictorial  aesthetics.  With  Berman’s  residency  and  welcome  in  France  never   so  uncertain,  and  critical  views  of  his  art  so  polarized,  The  Good  Samaritan  brokers   these  differences  without  effacing  them,  perhaps  with  the  hope  to  ameliorate   current  and  future  discord.           To  cite  this  essay,  please  use  the  following:       Keith  Holz,  “Spotlight  Essay:  Eugene  Berman,  The  Good  Samaritan  (Le  bon  Samaritain)  (1930),”  Mildred  Lane  Kemper  Art   Museum,  Spotlight  Series,  March  2013,  http://kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/files/spotlightMAR13.pdf  (accessed  on  [insert   date]).  

 

 

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