"Untitled (jew)" appears to be a simple picture. It is composed of four equal-size canvases, each covered with deftly applied, impeccably controlled white paint. The snowy canvases butt closely together leaving a cruciform shape at their juncture. The word "jew," spelled lowercase, is emblazoned across the top two canvases. Its off-center position gives the whole a Zen-like, Japonist sensibility. However, the provocative text on the surface of this spare, elegant painting denies the sensuality of the brushwork beneath.


Initially, Anastasi was drawn to the word "jew" because it could act as noun, verb, or adjective. But "jew"-given its associations with antisemitism-was simultaneously fraught with philosophic and social currency close to Anastasi's heart. For Anastasi, who is not Jewish, the term "jew" is the most charged word in the English language, having both positive and negative association. On the one hand, it conjures great modern intellectuals-Freud, Schoenberg, Einstein, Kafka, and Marx-formative players of twentieth-century culture. On the other hand, the term reeks of ideas that are accusatory and denigrating, even violent.


With "Untitled (Jew)", William Anastasi reconciles two seemingly contradictory artistic practices: painting and conceptual art. For Anastasi, painting remains both an instinctive activity and an intellectual construct. He thinks warily about what it means to make a painting. Yet he handles paint fluidly, intuitively deploying form, color, and facture in an autonomous manner that echoes his admiration of gestural abstraction and his obsession with James Joyce's stream of consciousness.


Anastasi began his career during the formative period for Conceptual Art, and many of his early works have become classics of this genre. These works play at the junctures of the real and the represented, the visual and the verbal. A breakthrough work-and one of Anastasi's most frequently discussed-remains his painting "untitled (wall on a wall)." Slightly smaller than the gallery wall itself, the painting depicts a simulation of the wall upon which it was hung, including air ducts and electrical outlets placed on the canvas in exactly the same proportion and position as on the wall itself. Installed at the Dwan gallery in New York in 1967, it has become one of the icons of art that challenged the classic, supposedly neutral, "white cube" gallery spaces. Like "Untitled (Jew)," the 1966 "Untitled (wall on a wall)," is a heady conceit. A deceptively simple work, the earlier canvas stimulates aesthetic discourse about the definition and potential limits of a work of art. Such issues were crucial to the questioning about and reinvigoration of art during the sixties.


Following a quiet period in his career in the 1970s, Anastasi returned in the 1980s to an art world dramatically changed. He must have felt like a wanderer in uncharted terrain. Art's focus had moved away from the phenomenological and epistemological concerns so prevalent during the 1960s and 1970s preoccupations of Minimal, Conceptual, and Process Art and turned instead to an abiding focus on expressionist, narrative painting. Anastasi's picture of the word "jew" might be seen as a negotiation between painting, the medium of choice during the 1980s, and art relating to language, an important aspect of art in the 1960s and 1970s. "Untitled (Jew)" dismissed the representational, often agitated subject matter and paint handling typical of the early 1980s. Instead, it substituted a canvas freighted with linguistic, moral, and political meaning. Using the highly loaded word "jew" as a sole basis for creating a monumental picture, Anastasi enters the twentieth century's continuing struggle to deny assumptions about preconceived limits of painting.