VENICE.- Venice is hosting the first-ever retrospective exhibition of Norman Raeben (1901-1978), a Ukrainian-American Jewish artist best known as the influential teacher of music legend Bob Dylan. The exhibition, titled "Norman Raeben. The Wandering Painting," runs from November 24, 2024, to January 14, 2025, at the Ikona Gallery in Campo di Ghetto Novo.

Born Numa Rabinovitz, Raeben was the son of Sholem Aleichem, the celebrated Yiddish author considered the "father of modern Yiddish literature." The exhibition features forty of Raeben's works, displayed across the gallery to create a journey through the places that shaped his artistic life and travels: Paris, New York, Venice, and Provincetown.

The exhibition reconstructs Raeben's artistic evolution and explores his influence on American artists and Jewish immigrant intellectuals of Yiddish culture. Among the portraits on display are depictions of prominent figures like Sholem Aleichem himself, Mary Adler, Pearl Pearson Adler, Luba Harrington, Miriam Kressyn, Bob Haggart, Paul Musikonsky, and notably, Bob Dylan, as well as Stella Adler, whose Group Theater revolutionized American cinema and theater.

A key focus of the exhibition is Raeben's time teaching at Carnegie Hall from 1946. Visitors will experience his artistic theories through archival materials and videos of his lessons, including works by both Raeben and his students, with a highlight being a painting attributed to Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan's own recollections have been instrumental in reconstructing Raeben’s artistic path, including his time in Paris where he interacted with giants of modern art like Chagall, Soutine, Matisse, and Bissière.

Curator Fabio Fantuzzi, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, explains that Raeben became a central figure for New York's Jewish circles due to his work's aim to "redefine Yiddish culture and identity and to merge it in a secular and artistic way with American and European traditions," seeking a creative path towards what art historian Nico Stringa termed "a compatible modernity."

The exhibition highlights two pastel cycles of urban landscapes where Raeben’s search for a universal visual language culminated in a synthesis of Post-Impressionism, the School of Paris, and American Realism. The quickly sketched human figures within these landscapes, portrayed as ephemeral silhouettes in an indefinable urban space, embody the theme of contemporary wandering.

Other sections of the exhibition showcase Raeben’s oil paintings, still lifes, Venetian and Provincetown landscapes, along with pastel and charcoal portraits and caricatures.

The exhibition also presents previously unseen materials, including photographs of Raeben's studio, high-resolution digital images of his work, and the documentary Painting: a Laboratory of Aesthetics, featuring four of Raeben’s performative lessons, filmed by Bill and Harvey Fertik.

The exhibition is connected to the Marie Skłodowska-Curie POYESIS research project (“Perspectives on Yiddish Cultural Evolution and Its Legacy: Visual Arts, Theatre, and Songwriting Between Assimilation and Identity. A Case Study”), funded by the European Union. An international conference, “On the Norman Raeben exhibition. Paths in Yiddish art and culture from Sholem Aleichem to Bob Dylan,” organized by the Department of Humanities of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, will accompany the exhibition.

The exhibition is curated by Fabio Fantuzzi in collaboration with Stefania Portinari and Nico Stringa and is promoted, organized, and sponsored by the Jewish Community of Venice, the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and Opera Laboratori. It is also supported by a contribution from the Veneto Region.