A book called “My Name is Asher Lev” by Chaim Potok published by Penguin Books Copyright 1972

This was a very interesting book about a Jewish artist from Brooklyn, New York

It contained some interesting thoughts on Art.

For example on Page 197

The sculptor Jacob Kahn is talking to Asher Lev:

“… Asher Lev, there are two ways of painting the world. In the whole history of art, there are only these two ways. One is the way of Greece and Africa, which sees the world as a geometric design. The other is the way of Persia and India and China, which sees the world as a flower. Ingres, Cézanne, Picasso paint the world as geometry. Van Gogh, Renoir, Kandinsky, Chagall paint the world as a flower. I am a geometrician. I sculpt cylinders, cubes, triangles, and cones. The world is structure, and structure to me is geometry. I sculpt geometry. I see the world as hard-edged, filled with lines and angles. And I see it as wild and raging and hideous, and only occasionally beautiful. The world fills me with disgust more often than it fills me with joy. Are you listening to me, Asher Lev? The world is a terrible place. I do not sculpt and paint to make the world sacred. I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible this world truly is. Nothing is real to me except my own feelings; nothing is true except my own feelings as I see them all around me in my sculptures and paintings. I know these feelings are true, because if they were not true they would make art that is as terrible as the world….”

Page 220

Again here Jacob Kahn is teaching Asher Lev about art:

“… After breakfast, Jacob Kahn and I would set up our easels at the edge of the dunes and paint. He thought me how the Impressionists had painted light and what Cézanne had done with color and form. Once a sailboat came close to the shore and was circled by the gulls. Using washes of oils, he showed me how John Marin might have painted that. I had seen Marin’s watercolors in museums. Now I begun to understand their lines of tension, their fluidity and power.

I began to understand, too, though only with difficulty, why and how he painted as he did. The canvas was a two-dimensional field, he said. Any attempt to convert it to an object of three dimensions was an illusion and a falsehood. The only honest way to paint today was either to represent objects that were recognizable, and at the same time integral to the two-dimensional nature of the canvas, or to do away with objects entirely and create paintings of color and texture and form, paint the volumes and voids in nature into fields of color, paintings in which the solids were flattened and the voids were filled and the planes were organized into what Hans Hofmann called ‘complexes’. I watched him paint and began to understand what he meant. But I could not paint that way myself. I needed hands and faces and eyes, though for a while now I had not needed them to be three-dimensional.

‘You are too religious to be an Abstract Expressionist,’ he said to me one morning. ‘We are ill at ease in the universe. We are rebellious and individualistic. We welcome accidents in painting. You are emotional and sensual but you are also rational. That is your Ladover background. It is not in my nature to urge a person to give up his background and culture in order to become a painter. That is because it is not in my nature to be a fool. A man’s painting either reflects his culture or is a comment upon it, or it is merely decoration or photography. You do not have to be an Abstract Expressionist in order to be a great painter. In any event, by the time you reach your twenties Abstract Expressionism may be gone as a n important movement in American painting. Thought I do not think so. I think people will paint this way for a thousand years.’…”

On page 164 he gives some insight into the Jewish religion:

“… We studied about three kinds of Jews in the world: the rosho, the one who sins and has evil thoughts, whose efforts to live a good life are an endless struggle – most of us are in that category, the mashpia said sadly; the benoni, the one whose acts are without fault but who cannot control his thinking – very few achieve that high level, the mashpia said; and the tzaddik – a tzaddik can only be born, the mashpia said. It is the greatest gift of the Ribbono Shel Olom; yes, a tzaddik can only be born. Only tzaddikim have control over their hearts; the mashpia said, quoting the Midrash.

We studied the meaning of the verse in Deuteronomy, ‘But the thing is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it.’ What does the word very come to teach us? That the person whose understanding in the knowledge of the Master of the Universe is limited, who cannot comprehend the greatness of the blessed Being Without End, who cannot produce awe and love of God in his mind and understanding – such a person can nevertheless come to fear and love God through the observance of all the commandments of the Torah, for the commandments are very near to all Jews.

We studied the meaning of the verse of Proverbs ‘The candle of God is the soul of man.’ The souls of Jews are like the flame of a candle, the masphia said. The flame burns upwards; it seeks to be parted from the wick in order to unit with its source above, in the universal element of fire. Similarly, the soul of the Jew yearns to separate itself and depart from the body in order to unite with the Master of the Universe, even though this means that nothing will remain of its former nature as a distinct and separate entity. It is in the nature of the Jewish soul to desire this union with the Being Without End, unlike the souls of the Gentles, which are derived from the Other Side and which strive to remain independent beings and entities.

We studied about the sitar achra, the Other Side, the realm of darkness and evil given life by God not out of His true desire but in the manner of one who reluctantly throws something over his shoulder to an enemy, thereby making it possible for God to punish the wicked who help the sitra achra, and rewards the righteous who subjugate it….”