Thought I'd pass this along for anyone interested. The show seems to include
medieval examples, though unfortunately the reviewer is only talking about
items from later periods.
pat
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Subj: WOID #V-28. Review: Jews of Morocco
Date: 12/20/00 1:06:57 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: [log in to unmask] (Paul T Werner)
To: [log in to unmask] (Paul T Werner)
"Morocco: Jews and Art in a Muslim Land"
The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street
(212) 423.3200
http://www.jewishmuseum.org
September 24 through February 11
This is a tight little show that speaks for itself. At least the objects
that deal with writing do: they have the fine visual sensitivity of
Moroccan popular culture, starting with a Roman-era fragment of a
tombstone from Volubilis inscribed in a thin, gracefully balanced script.
There is a Sefer Torah printed in Fez in 1516, which preserves an
epigraphic simplicity in the cutting of the type. There are a number of
Kettuboth with interesting, dense decorations, and some fine stucco
fragments from a nineteenth-century synagogue. And written amulets and
charms, more interesting I suspect for the text than the visual aspect.
Boxes, also, for colored inks, along with another box that held ashes for
drying penpoints.
The later, nineteenth-century examples of writing are the least
interesting: Torah covers that borrow their lettering from Ashkenazi type,
for instance, and a reconstitution of a classroom set up by the Alliance
Israelite Universelle, a self-improvement society in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. The show closes with a few examples of post-modern
micrography. They're not very interesting, and not the best of their type.
Go, mostly, for an extraordinary six-minute film, projected on two screens
set at angles. The shots are sometimes panoramic, sometimes out of synch,
they follow inscriptions, tombstones, boys teasing girls in winding
streets. You'll feel that you're there. You'll wish you were.
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Paul Werner, New York City
http://www.theorangepress.com
WOID: a journal of visual language in New York, including reviews,
listings and resources.
