NEW YORK.- Gilded Lions and Jeweled Horses: The Synagogue to the Carousel is a groundbreaking exhibition that tells the story of a little-known aspect of American carousel history and its connection to Jewish visual culture. On view at the American Folk Art Museum, New York, from October 2, 2007 through March 23, 2008, the exhibition is organized by Murray Zimiles, guest curator, and coordinated by Stacy C. Hollander, the museum’s senior curator and director of exhibitions. Approximately one hundred splendid and rarely exhibited artworks are on loan from public and private collections from the U.S. and Israel. Gilded Lions and Jeweled Horses will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog co-published by the American Folk Art Museum with Brandeis University Press, an imprint of the University Press of New England. The exhibition will travel to the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York, from May 24 to September 1, 2008.

Gilded Lions and Jeweled Horses is the first major study of an important aspect of the Jewish contribution to American folk art. Many of the artisans who arrived in America carved for their local synagogues; some also found work creating horses and other animals for the flourishing carousel industry. Inspired by the memory of symbolic references carved into majestic Torah arks and gravestones and cut into paper, they translated these motifs into an American idiom, elevating carousel art into a powerful sculptural expression of dynamic and animated forms. Although fanciful carousel animals have long been exhibited in museums, the religious carvings have primarily been known and appreciated only within the setting of the synagogue. Until now, the important historical and aesthetic link between the two has never been documented.

Background - From the shtetls (villages) of Eastern Europe to the boisterous shores of New York’s Coney Island, immigrant Jewish artisans brought with them a vital and meaningful artistic tradition that helped bridge the transition from the Old World to the New. Gilded Lions and Jeweled Horses traces their journey from Eastern and Central Europe to America and the unsung role they played in contributing to a distinct Jewish visual culture in communities throughout the United States. As Jewish immigrants struggled to balance the continuation of an observant life with the realities of adjusting to a new culture, artisans responded to the vigorous pull of the spiritual and the secular through the perpetuation of familiar forms and the new application of traditional artmaking skills. It was within this powerful dynamic that a surprising link was forged between the synagogue and the carousel.

Exhibition overview - The exhibition begins with an exploration of the imagery that infused three important centers of traditional Jewish life in Eastern and Central Europe—the synagogue, the home, and the cemetery. Gilded Lions and Jeweled Horses follows the legacy of these motifs to America, where they were re-created by immigrants in vital Jewish centers in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston as well as newly established communities in the Midwest and further reaches of the country.

A major focus is on New York, where a group of talented carvers were among the throngs of Jewish immigrants who arrived between the 1880s and 1920s. They produced ark carvings for the many synagogues that proliferated on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and in Brooklyn. The association between immigrant Jewish woodcarvers and the American carousel industry is embodied in the colorful figure of Marcus Charles Illions, who came from a family of horse dealers in Vilna, Lithuania. His signature appears on carved Torah ark pediments and also on a number of carousel horses. Historical photographs of Illions’s shop show synagogue carvings side by side with carousel animals.

Marcus Charles Illions, along with Solomon Stein and Harry Goldstein, Charles Carmel, and others, was inspired by his Jewish heritage to create fiery carousel horses and menagerie animals with flamelike manes, flaring nostrils, wild eyes, and elaborate floral and jeweled trappings. Their ferocious red mouths gape like those of the rampant lions who guard the Tablets of the Law atop Torah arks.

CENTRAL AND EASTERN Europe - The tradition of Jewish woodcarving in Central and Eastern Europe was focused in the synagogue, as illustrated in the exhibition through archival photographs and wooden scale models. Wooden synagogues were distinguished by their enormous wood-shingled multitiered roofs and interiors with highly decorated walls, vaults, ceilings, and domes that housed structures such as fantastic, enormous carved and painted Torah arks, the most important object in the synagogue because it contains the sacred Torah scrolls. Central and Eastern European arks were usually elaborately carved structures of three or four distinct levels that might have risen to an astonishing height of thirty feet or more. Densely worked with carved elements, including foliage, animals (mythical and real), fruits, and columns, and sometimes brightly painted and gilded, these superstructures usually also incorporated symbolic motifs such as the Tablets of the Law (Decalogue), the hands of the high priests (kohanim) disposed in a gesture of blessing, and animals that hold deeper meanings in Hebrew texts and lore.

Jewish PAPERCUTS - When such soaring Torah arks were lit from behind, the open areas created a filigree effect with forms that appear to have influenced the art of Jewish papercutting. Made primarily by men and boys, most of the known papercuts are from Poland and date from the second half of the nineteenth century, when paper had become relatively inexpensive.

Papercuts are constructed by folding the paper and then cutting out designs with small scissors or a knife; the uncut areas of the paper might have been painted with watercolors to depict animals, plant motifs, and even the human form. The final image was then placed on a solid-colored sheet, which acted as a contrasting background visible through the open areas. Jewish papercuts were mainly placed in the home for prayer and in celebration of holidays or given as gifts to friends.

The tradition of papercutting flourished in the United States from the late nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth wherever Jewish communities were formed. Family tradition states that the papercut by David Elias Krieger, “Amulet Made for Mother and Newborn Child,” was made on the ocean passage from Europe to America. More likely it was started in Galicia and finished in the U.S. The papercut by Abraham Shulkin, who immigrated to Sioux City, Iowa, seems to have been made as a template for working out the design for the Torah Ark that he carved for the Jewish community

AMERICA GILDED LIONS - In North America, the rich and elaborate symbolic vocabulary of Central and Eastern European carved Torah arks was restrained to a smaller number of key elements: lions, Decalogues, hands of the kohanim, eagles, and crowns. Lions, in particular, are depicted in myriad ways but are, almost without exception, gilded. Many have their mouth open, painted red and revealing sharp teeth. Protruding eyes, sometimes of red glass, or, when carved, often painted blood red, transfix the viewer. Some lions were even embellished with electric light bulbs for eyes, impelling the viewer’s eyes toward the ark and the Tablets of the Law as in the elaborate Decalogue from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Manes, often elaborately carved and heavily textured, cascade down and flare out to surround and frame the head in the formal carving on loan from the Hillel Jewish Student Center in Cincinnati. Usually standing as paired sentinels on either side of the Tablets of the Law, the ensemble are, in turn, supported by elaborate floral scrollwork, which adds rhythm, color, and ornament.