Tully Filmus immigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of 10 from Ataki, Bessarabia. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Barnes Foundation, and spent 2 years in Europe on a scholarship. Settling in New York, he shared a studio with Willem de Kooning. He taught at the Cooper Union from 1938–50. He was known for his portraits of notable people, like Eleanor Roosevelt and Jonas Salk, as well as many works on Jewish themes.
In the words of Isaac Bashevis Singer:
Tully Filmus is an artist who refuses to be hypnotized by fashion. He is not afraid of “telling a story” even though this is considered a terrible sin among the art critics of today. He is not against experiment but will not take part in a “revolution” which has already all the signs of a cliché. Tully Filmus is still observing nature and drawing from its treasures. His courage in being true to himself and his concept of art evokes admiration for him and his work.1Filmus, Tully. Tully Filmus: Selected Drawings. With an essay by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1971, inside front cover.
Ismar David designed the book, jacket and chapter titles for Tully Filmus: Selected Drawing in 1971. The publication won a Certificate of Award at the Twenty-seventh Annual Philadelphia Book Show in 1972.
Emmanuel Grau, graphic designer, type designer, painter, illustrator, teacher and head of the Department of Applied Graphics at Bezalel.
A 1940 graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design himself, Emmanuel Grau became a teacher there in the 1950s and went on to head the Department of Applied Graphics. He is credited for designing the lettering and signage for the Hebrew University in Givat Ram campus 1958, the logo of Moshe Spitzer’s publishing house, Tarshish, book illustration and posters. He was a member of the Jerusalem Group of Commercial Artists. When Ismar David’s designs for the 23rd Zionist Congress were re-used for the following Congress, Grau made the necessary adjustments.
Palestine before the Worlds Forum by Ismar Freund, cover design by Emmanuel Grau. Rubin Mass, Publisher, Jerusalem, 1946.
A typewritten review by Ismar David for Reform Judaism, October 1972.
Ben Shahn
Edited by John D. Morse
Praeger Publishers
$13.50
This book will tell the reader a great deal about Ben Shahn whose work, perhaps more than that of any other painter, mirrors the period that began with FDR’s presidency and lasted for almost four decades. But most important it lets the artist speak for himself. Essays, articles, lectures and letters all written by Ben Shahn, as well as in interviews and discussion, form the core of this book.
Throughout this book Ben Shahn conveys his deep involvement in the social and political life of his era. From it, his paintings and drawings have derived their strength and power and their relevance. As an artist committed to the present, he had to come to grips with all the different currents and trends of the twentieth century; he had to understand his contemporaries and their work. In this search he was guided by a keen sense for the genuine. But in his own work, abstract composition problems or formalistic approaches to color or texture have remained secondary. His work has been dominated by the manifestation of his strong urge to communicate his social concerns, his compassion for man, to his audience, the very society of which he felt he was an integral part.
Ben Shahn found himself, he found his way, his very personal approach to art, after some soul searching relatively early in his career. His images, his color schemes were the reflection of his emotional life, into which gradually his Jewish awareness penetrated. So it is not just for some of the Jewish themes or characters from the Hebrew alphabet that appear from time to time in his work, but for the almost metaphysical quality reflecting his Jewish feelings and sentiment that he deserves to be considered one of the great Jewish artists.
Ben Shahn lectured a great deal. He was one of those straightforward men who preach what they practice. Reading this book should be stimulating to anyone interested in art. But it will be of special value to the young aspiring artist. It should help him to find his way by finding and understanding himself.
One should not forget that Ben Shahn was first and foremost a painter, print maker and graphic artist, and so while reading this book one naturally has the desire to see his work. Neither the selection of illustrations nor their reproduction does justice to his achievements. But this will always be a problem concerning any book of this kind that deals with an artist whose main accomplishments are in the visual rather than the literary field.
An undated typescript for Ismar David’s evening class at Cooper Union, almost certainly from the 1950s.
Let me introduce myself—I am your instructor, Ismar David. I am going to do my best in the weeks to come to acquaint you with a subject which I hope you will become as enthusiastic about as I am. I look forward to many pleasant hours with you as we explore this subject together and I trust you will find them so. I would like you to feel free to talk to me about anything that is not clear as I describe it—we will reserve a period in each session when you may ask questions that pertain to the evening’s work.
And now let us begin.
I want to discuss with you this course called LETTERING and to outline our program. We will concern ourselves mainly with what is known as the ROMAN alphabet or rather the Roman letter family and it’s derivation.
You all know Roman letter forms, of course, and you are able to read and write them without being conscious of doing just that. When you were children, you learned reading and writing in school and you were probably more conscious of the appearance of these forms a that time. Later this reading and writing becomes almost mechanical and more automatic and you are not aware of the individuality of each letter.
Now it is my job again to make you more conscious of these forms. We will notice nuances of measurements and proportions of letter forms, by seeing and producing them and you will train your eye and your hand—but most important, your mind. You will develop your judgment and your taste which you will need whenever you are confronted with problems of lettering. And like all knowledge, you will find that this will help you in other problems of aesthetics.
For the purpose of this discussion, we divide letter-forms into two major groups:
One: the type which is available for use in any form of printing and comes to the typographer or printer in a “ready-made” form.
Two: the letters made by hand, individually (and this is the group with which we will principally concern ourselves in this course.)
Without going into detail about the first group, I might say that printing from movable type (more or less as we know it and use it) dates from the middle of the fifteenth century. The inventor probably was Johann Gutenberg, and while it is not clear to us when he cast his first type, the year 1440 is the accepted date for printing coming to life. He conceived the idea of making metal molds from individually cut letters and cast in those molds single letters which were later assembled. After they were used for printing, they were distributed and were available for re-use.
Prior to Gutenberg, printing on a small scale was done, but such printing was produced by woodcuts. Full pages were cut into the wood, in reverse, and books printed from them were called “block books.”
So much, at present, for the first group.
Now, for the letters made by hand. Let us first acquaint ourselves with a brief history to which we will come back with amplification from time to time during this course.
All of us take for granted, once we become literate, that what we have to say we are also able to write down. We do so by using graphic symbols—our alphabet—which represent sounds. We call this the phonetic system. This very phonetic system is one of the most exciting inventions and one of the greatest cultural contributions to civilization. It enables us to record and communicate with precision the equivalent of the spoken word.
Western culture has its roots in the Near, Middle East and North Africa, and it is in this area that we discover our pre-alphabet writing.
Before any actual system of writing existed, so far as the records that have come down to us indicate, the oldest documents of communication we have, are cave painting. These paintings, for the most part, depicted animals, and since these animals were probably sacred, we can determine from this and other evidence that has been found that these paintings were made to indicate a place of worship.
Later we find simplified and stylized drawings of objects which we call pictographs, because they, in a sense, are writing in pictures. For example, the drawing of the sun meant not only the Sun, but also “shining.” Of course, the messages written in this way had to be limited due to the number of symbols available and to the fact that no syntax would be expressed by them. The most developed writing in pictorial symbols we find in the Egyptian inscriptions which are called hieroglyphs. They are the highest form and last of this kind of writing.
There have been many theories advanced as to the culture to which we can attribute the first alphabet. The most accepted is that the Phoenicians developed it. (As you know the Phoenicians were a nation settled in cities and on islands along the Mediterranean coast.) The Phoenician alphabet was in its own way a perfect system wherein a small number of symbols representing the different sounds of speech, could be set down in an order and combination to record it. Here was a way, through the alphabet of some twenty or more symbols, to express what hundreds of pictographs could not convey and the way was then open for all of the developments of other alphabets and letter forms which succeeding centuries brought.
From the Phoenician we have the Hebrew and Aramaic alphabets and probably other alphabets for Oriental languages. But for our purposes the fact that the Greek and then the Roman stemmed from the Phoenician is of major interest. The various stages of the evolution of the Roman alphabet through to its perfected form will bear study at another time.
We will start now with the proportions of the Roman capital letters as they are exemplified at the highest point of their development—on the Trajan column in Rome in an inscription celebrating of victory of Marcus Aurelius Trajanus. Despite later deviation to which we have accustomed ourselves in the course of time, the beautiful proportion of the letter forms on this column, their clarity, grace and simplicity are still our ideal and for most of us have never been surpassed.1Ismar David papers, box 8, folder 182, RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection.
A collection of upper case Roman Rs. Ismar David would demostrate a free hand R at the beginning of the semester.
Peter Cooper founded the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art on his fundamental belief that an education should be accessible to those who qualify, independent of their race, religion, sex, wealth or social status. Tuition-free, the school originally offered night classes in applied sciences and architectural drawing and day classes in what was called the Female School of Design. A four-year undergraduate program was established in 1902. Eventually Cooper Union evolved into three schools, of art, architecture and engineering.
In the fall of 1954, Ismar David started as an Instructor in the Art School teaching lettering for 6 hours a week in the evening session. George Salter had recommended him for the post. His other colleagues, at various times, included: Phil Grushkin, Larry Hoffman, George Kratina, Jim McCrea, Charles E. Skaggs and Paul Standard. From David’s perspective, Cooper Union operated as the kind of arts and crafts school he had attended in Berlin and Breslau: professionals taught their respective crafts, giving students the education and experience they would need to function successfully in their chosen fields.
David said that he was the only instructor, who, in his first year of teaching, threw a student out of class. He also recalled advocating unsuccessfully to retain a student who had made a 180 degree turn-around during the semester. He enjoyed the exchange with students and the opportunity to help them prepare for their professional lives. He formulated his thoughts about his calligraphy class in this way:
The teaching of lettering should, I believe, develop the feeling for proportion, design, rhythm and harmony. It should be a training for the eye to discover and distinguish the differences and fine nuances of graphic forms. With this, it should develop the manual discipline and skill required. The student should acquire the feeling of the link to the culture of the past and learn to integrate his own creative conception with tradition, which I believe is necessary for good contemporary design.” 1 Undated “Statement 1” Ismar David papers, box 8, folder 182, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, RIT.
David said of the evening class in 1965, which included Anita Karl and Mary Ahern:
This year’s Tuesday class specifically has been for me a very rewarding experience. We had a remarkably high proportion of very interested students, very eager to learn who deserved our efforts to give them the opportunity to study. The samples of their work which I will submit at a later date for the annual exhibition will illustrate that vividly. 2 April 6, 1965 letter to Professor Wysocky, Ismar David papers, box 8, folder 182, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, RIT.
Jean David, 1908–1993, designer, painter and illustrator, multi-media artist.
A 1973 greeting card from Jean David.
Born in Bucharest to a wealthy family, Jean David studies at the Académie Julian and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He had several exhibitions in his home city and was a member of the surrealist group, Unu, although he never quite felt at home with any particular artistic philosophy. He fled Romania for Palestine in 1942. After the British seized the boat carrying him and 12 other refugees, he spent two years at an internment camp in Cyprus. He joined the British Navy immediately on his release.
David lived in Jerusalem for a while, was one of the pioneers of the Ein Hod artist’s colony, and finally settled in an apartment, overlooking the sea, in Tel Aviv. His immensely popular posters for tourism, interiors for El Al aircraft and terminals, large scale works for hotels and cruise ships made him an almost ubiquitous part of Israel’s graphic landscape, both domestically and internationally, in the 1950s and ’60s.
The Israel Exposition listed him as one of its exhibitors (courtesy of the Ford Motor Company).
Moshe Spitzer, 1900–1982, Israeli publisher and typographer.
Moshe (Moritz) Spitzer was 16 years old when he wrote to Martin Buber for advice about organizing Zionist school groups in Austria. Sixteen years later, Spitzer became Buber’s scientific secretary, responsible for checking texts and assisting in various projects. In between, he served in the armed forces in World War I, studied at the University of Vienna, earned a Ph.D. in Indian Studies from Kiel University and worked as an assistant at the Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, where he became the first to work on the oldest surviving philosophical manuscript in Sanskrit, which now bears his name. (Comprised of 1000 fragments of varying sizes, the “the Spitzer manuscript” was lost during the Second World War and only survives through copies made by Spitzer in 1927–28.) As chief editor of Schocken Verlag from 1934–1938, Spitzer learned much about composition and production at the very highest standard and even designed books. He encouraged Schocken to publish Franz Kafka’s works. At the same time he planned his own timely exit from Germany, Spitzer devised a plan to rescue “the vast majority” of Schocken’s publications and ship them to Palestine.1Karpel, Dalia, The Enigmatic Life of a Hebrew Graphic Design Pioneer.Haaretz, October 29, 2016. The books and he arrived in Jerusalem in the autumn of 1939.
In 1940, Spitzer founded Tarshish Books, which for the next forty years would produce many of the finest and most beautiful books in the country, and designed many of the books himself. He discovered and promoted countless authors and artists. Beginning in 1942, Tarshish had its own typesetting shop and with partner Heinz van Cleef, Spitzer established the Jerusalem Type Foundry, the first type foundry in Israel. The foundry cast revivals and new modern faces, including Romema, Rahat and Hatzvi. After Intertype issued David Hebrew for line casting in 1954, Jerusalem Type Foundry cast it as a larger size foundry type, which Ismar David considered “unfortunately a misinterpretation of my design. The serif-like beginning of letters are too pointed.”2David, Ismar, letter to Yehudah Miklaf, January 10, 1991.
Spitzer had been more than aware of David and his work. As early as 1938, David had made a presentation folder of his concept for multi-font Hebrew typeface family and given it to Spitzer. Spitzer described the final design of David Hebrew as a “radical departure from the later traditional shapes of Ashkenazic as well as Sephardic letters, and a return to the genuine basic letter forms that anteceded excessive analogization. … The modeling of the strokes and their relations to the counters are of great beauty, and the appearance of a page set in this letter (I refer to the light face, of course) is at agreeable variance with that of the usual Hebrew book page, yet not at all strange. My share in the creation of this letter was confined to advice on desirable basic letter shapes and some details. It had its first test as a book face in my edition of S. Y. Agnon’s story “The Stray Dog,” illustrated by Avigdor Arikha (1960), and passed it very well.3Spitzer, Moshe, The Development of Hebrew Lettering. Off print from ARIEL, a Review of Arts and Letters in Israel, no. 37, 1974. Jerusalem: Cultural Scientific Relations Division, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, p. 27.
A double spread from A Stray Dog by S. Y. Agnon.
Tarshish edition of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, set in David Hebrew and David Hebrew Italic 1976.
Ismar David designed a cover for Palestine Stories, for Tarshish in 1942.
Franziska Baruch studied design, illustration and calligraphy in Hamburg, where she was born, and Berlin. At the beginning of her career, she was mainly engaged in industrial design and worked with porcelain for the Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Berlin. She began her journey into Hebrew design with no knowledge of the language, when Yaakov Steinhardt approached her for designing the Passover Haggadah in a bibliophile edition in Hebrew and German. Stam, the typeface she designed for the Haggadah was first produced by the Berthold Type Foundry in Berlin and later by Moshe Spitzer’s foundry Jerusalem Letters under the name “Meir-Baruch”. She designed books and book covers, coins, children’s toys and more until Hitler came to power. In 1933, Baruch immigrated to Jerusalem and worked as a graphic designer. Her design work included the Israeli passport cover, banknotes, stamps and symbols for the Israeli government, and Ha’aretz newspaper logo.
Baruch was a member of the Jerusalem Group of Commercial Artists with Ismar David.
The Bezalel Academy is an academic college of design and art located in Jerusalem, Israel and established by painter and sculptor Boris Schatz in 1906. It is named for the Biblical figure Bezalel, who was appointed by Moses to oversee the design and construction of the Tabernacle. The art created by Bezalel’s students and professors in the early 1900s is considered the springboard for Israeli visual arts in the 20th century. Several of David’s colleagues and friends from the time he lived and worked in Jerusalem taught in Bezalel.
In May, 1985, Bezalel hosted Ismar David for a calligraphy lecture.
While designing the ark and its surroundings for the Brotherhood Synagogue, my thoughts were stimulated by those portions of the Holy Scriptures that deal with religious services in ancient Israel. The objects that were required for these services (the ark, the menorah, the table displaying the breads and other items) are described there in detail, but it is the ethos by which the Israelites lived that becomes apparent and is most important.
Skill as well as striving for perfection, if not perfection itself, was required from the artisans who fashioned these furnishings. Blemishes on the objects or the lack of integrity would have made these objects unfit for use.
The same standard applied to the offerings that were made in the temple. These offerings were an expression of devotion. As long as the ancient temple was the center of religious life, the making of offerings was one of the means that brought man close to God. With the destruction of the temple, the rites of offering ceased. The giving for the benefit of the new communities of the diaspora became the new form of offering.
As the Torah is timeless, so too, are the principles by which we should live today. In our offerings we should give from the best of ourselves and from the best we have in terms of material. In this sanctuary project, this tradition has guided all who have been involved. The congregation provided means and guidance. The craftsmen who built the ark provided the best in workmanship. The rare woods were carefully selected. The inlay work is delicate and crisp.
The furnishings of the ancient temple are gone, but they have taken on a new life as symbols. These symbols bring the past which they represent close to us, and in new forms of rendering they bring together past and present. Decorations at synagogue at Dura Europus and Beth Alpha achieved that fusion of past and present for their times. I have seen my task to find a solution for this sanctuary in that same tradition.
The panel that crowns the ark has the words Holy Holy Holy in Hebrew and in English. These words dedicate the sanctuary and remind the congregation of the divine nearness. The lower part of this panel is filled with the Hebrew letter Shin, the symbol for the name of God. The long frieze below carries the ancient blessing in Hebrew welcoming those who are present.
The panel further down shows a composition of the eternal light succumbed by the symbol for the blessing hands of the Cohanim. The Hebrew blessing of the frieze is repeated in English translation above the ark doors.
The ark, the container and shelter for the Torah scrolls, is the center of the Bimah. Its doors are inscribed with the abbreviated form of the ten commandments, symbol for the extents of the five books of Moses. Flanking these doors are two panels which are filled with the symbols of the twelve tribes of Israel, the descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob.
The source for these symbols is found in two places in the Torah. The first, the main one, is Jacob’s last address to his sons. The second is Moses, farewell blessing of the twelve tribes. The symbols are simple: a tree, a donkey, a ship, a lion, etc.; However, the twelve tribes together are symbolic for the earliest beginning of the Jewish people, long before they became a nation. The design of the rosettes relates to decorative elements that once enhanced ancient Jewish objects.
And some words about the columns. They are elements of support as well as symbols of support. As such they have been used in some early European synagogues.
A rare feature in this sanctuary will be a ramp that will lead to the elevated Bimah. It will allow full participation in the services for all, including those who cannot negotiate steps. But this ramp is also a link to the past. Not steps, but a ramp led to the elevated altar platform of the ancient temple.
The Menorah, fitting into this scheme but still missing, will complete this project.
This synagogue in its rejuvenated state will serve its community in many ways. It will continue to be its religion, its cultural and its social center. But it will also serve as a link to the Jewish past and as a building block for the future of Judaism.”
