5 February 2004

I am Jewish Art in my pictures.

My Commentaries - often very short - have been hated by critics who say that painters have no business writing about their own pictures because those pictures must stand on their own so that pious critics may write about them and violate them if they like.

No painter, except maybe Van Gogh, has been foolish enough, except me, fool that I am, to write these commentaries.

As a youthful painter, I sometimes put commentaries right on the pictures themselves. I believe I was the first painter to do that. 3 inspirations excited me in those early sixties: Eliot's notes to his Waste Land; The Warburg tradition of iconographic commentary to pictures; some Surrealist practice, such as: This is not a pipe.

In the seventies, as my Jewish obsession began to unfold, the vast literature of Jewish commentary, exegesis and Midrash encouraged me to write about some of my pictures in a new spirit, a twist in my modernist tail and tale. Of course, many Orthodox critics and philistines loathed and scorned me (including Jews). But audiences loved my commentaries which helped them see some pictures in new ways. Then, in 1994, came my Tate War, when the shit hit the fan.

In 2003, I began to study Sigmund Freud and a new Jewish jolt came to me as I realized that my strange commentaries could be likened to a kind of Psychoanalysis, or even self-analysis. My painting becomes the Analysand and my commentary becomes a Case-History! Because I am Jewish Art, IT keeps coming to me through the ether.