- Artist/Maker:
- Ken Aptekar
- Bio:
- American, b. 1950
- Title:
- I Hate the Name Kenneth
- Date:
- 1996
- Medium:
- Oil on wood with sandblasted glass and bolts
- Dimensions:
- 69 × 120 7/8 × 3 in. (175.3 × 307.1 × 7.6 cm)
- Credit Line:
- Purchase: Barbara S. Horowitz, Howard E. Rachofsky, Ruth M. and Stephen Durschlag, Marcia May, J.W. Heller Foundation, Michael L. Rosenberg, Helga and Samuel Feldman, Caroline B. Michahelles and Robert G. Pollock gifts, and Fine Arts Acquisitions Committee Fund
- Accession Number:
- 1997-26a-h
Not On View
When I was growing up, people often assumed I wasn't Jewish because I have red hair. Sometimes, if I found myself in a situation where I preferred not to identify myself as a Jew, I just packed away my Yiddish expressions, tried not to gesture with my hands too wildly, and kept my usual skepticism under wraps. And besides the red hair, the name "Aptekar' could go either way; nobody was ever too sure what it meant about my heritage.
Jewish names, as a result, interest me. Perhaps because of pangs of guilt at my own willingness to pass as Not Jewish, I have little tolerance for Jews who change their names to sound less Jewish...
Though in recent years I've been using mostly Rembrandt's paintings as sources for my own, last year I decided to leave him for a while. If my work is to be understood in part as a critique of the authority of Old Master paintings, then my preoccupation with the King of the Old masters was bound to give way to many uncrowned. Enter Isidor Kaufmann, largely forgotten painter of the 19th century. Born in 1853 in Arad, today situated in Romania, he lived most of his life in Vienna, traveling to Galicia to paint Jews in the shtetles...
Is my work Jewish because I insist on combining text--the Word--with images? Is it Jewish because in my heart I think images can mislead, words you can trust more? Is it the importance I attach to interpretation, or my sometimes insufferable judgementalism? Is it my mistrust of authority, seen here as Old Master painting, gentile, and male? Or my interest in a physical sense of the body as pleasurable, and as ethnic sign? Or is it simply the question I ask?
-Ken Aptekar, 1996
Jewish names, as a result, interest me. Perhaps because of pangs of guilt at my own willingness to pass as Not Jewish, I have little tolerance for Jews who change their names to sound less Jewish...
Though in recent years I've been using mostly Rembrandt's paintings as sources for my own, last year I decided to leave him for a while. If my work is to be understood in part as a critique of the authority of Old Master paintings, then my preoccupation with the King of the Old masters was bound to give way to many uncrowned. Enter Isidor Kaufmann, largely forgotten painter of the 19th century. Born in 1853 in Arad, today situated in Romania, he lived most of his life in Vienna, traveling to Galicia to paint Jews in the shtetles...
Is my work Jewish because I insist on combining text--the Word--with images? Is it Jewish because in my heart I think images can mislead, words you can trust more? Is it the importance I attach to interpretation, or my sometimes insufferable judgementalism? Is it my mistrust of authority, seen here as Old Master painting, gentile, and male? Or my interest in a physical sense of the body as pleasurable, and as ethnic sign? Or is it simply the question I ask?
-Ken Aptekar, 1996
Information may change as a result of ongoing research.