Abraham Rattner: how art can bring light into the world

Lately I have been thinking of the power of art to comfort and inspire in dark and troubled times. One work that I find to be a source of tremendous solace and inspiration is the American artist Abraham Rattner’s stained glass window, Let There Be Light, on the interior east wall of the Chicago Loop Synagogue. Rattner based his design for this masterpiece on the opening passage of Genesis, focusing on the many meanings of God’s light.

One enters the sanctuary, walks a few feet, past the overhang of the balcony, and is then struck by the absolute beauty of the stained glass. Its size is immense, 31 x 40 feet, making up the entire East wall of the sanctuary. I have never seen such a large stained glass window. Its scale is many times greater than Chagall’s American Windows nearby at the Art Institute. What strikes one is not just its massive size, but the beauty of the colors, the several different shades of blue in the background, the bright yellow of the circle of light above the synagogue’s ark and the giant lulav, the etrog, the symbols of the twelve tribes of Israel which surround the light, which on closer look has a star of David in blue within it, the red of burning flames above the ark, proclaiming the presence of God as in the Burning Bush. But the many details and symbols embedded within the window don’t hit you right away; instead, one is embraced by the bold colors and stirred by the images of light, absorbed and awakened by the beauty of the window.

This stained glass was commissioned by the synagogue’s architects in 1958; Rattner spent two years working on the conceptual and design themes, making sketches and watercolors, and then a year fabricating it. It was fabricated by Ateilier Barrillet, the leading stained glass studio in Paris, and installed before the High Holidays in 1960.

I had not seen Rattner’s paintings in person, so last summer when I was in the area, I visited the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in Tampa. The Leepa-Rattner museum has a wonderful permanent exhibit on Rattner. Rattner was one of only a few Jewish artists who grappled with the Holocaust, as it was occurring,

in his paintings. Rattner had been living in Paris with his wife, but left in 1939 for New York because of the impending threat of Nazi invasion. Many of his paintings were left behind, their whereabouts still unknown. As he said then, and this quote is on the wall of the exhibit, “I lost interest in Cubist (and Surrealist) expression when the ghastly presence of Hitler and his bloodletting hideousness shadowed the human horizon. . .The trust I once had was outraged.” He turned to figurative expressionism, instead.

In the exhibit, several paintings struck me. I will talk about only one here: Clowns and Kings (1944). The painting is crowded with figures, including the titular king in the background wearing a silly crown and a jester playing a guitar in the foreground.

Rattner wrote that this painting “grew out of a ‘world at war’ atmosphere. Stupidity, bestiality, grotesqueries, of men befogged and drunk with materialistic power or the greed for it prevailed over the desperate efforts of the few of higher understanding.” This suggests that the other figures in the painting are drunk with power and greed, seeking their own pleasures, whether power (the king), or frivolous music (the minstrel) or an easy laugh (the jester).

In the upper left is the artist, who stands apart from these other figures, the clowns and kings. This is a self-portrait of Rattner himself, paintbrush in his hand, painting a sun on his canvas; he is the only figure looking directly at the viewer, in a beseeching way. The painting, then, is about art-making.

The sun looked familiar to me – and then I realized it resembles the image of light on the stained glass at Chicago Loop Synagogue, right above the ark, the ways its rays create a surrounding halo, light emanating in a circle, and has concentric circles in the center.

In the stained glass, this light is not actually the sun; it is an image of the Tree of the Life, the seven-branched candelabrum, the Menorah; it’s a primal light, God’s light: “From the center of the Garden of Eden, this Tree of Life, and of light, spreads its mystic branches embracing the universe with the glory of God’s light.”

So, I think this not a sun in the painting, as is commonly thought. Instead, it’s a representation of God’s light. This makes sense in light of another quote of Rattner’s about the painting: “the greatest evil of our time is its materialism. . .The spiritual values of life we ignore. . .That is what Clowns and Kings is all about.” The artist/Rattner in the painting is quietly protesting against the materialism all around him, painting not a sun, but the light of God, trying to remind viewers of the “spiritual values of life.” This mirrors the act of Rattner himself creating this painting itself as a protest against not just materialism, but the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews.

Given that this is painted in 1944, and Rattner was well-aware of how the Nazis had murdered millions of Jews, perhaps Rattner is condemning men drunk with power and greed who follow false idols, the orders of dictators (kings) who are actually clowns. Perhaps the painting is a critique of SS officers who could run concentration camps during the day, then enjoy their leisure time with their fellow officers, as seen in a series of photos released by the U.S. Holocaust museum in 2007. These photos, taken in 1944, show SS officers, who worked at Auschwitz during the day, laughing with their fellow Germans, enjoying their leisure time, their time off from exterminating Jews at the nearby death camp. In one, they enjoy eating blueberries together. (The photos were from an album found in a Frankfurt apartment which had belonged to the adjutant to the final camp commandant at Auschwitz.) Of course, Rattner never saw these exact photos, but he must have been struggling with the idea that ordinary men, who lead ordinary joy-seeking lives, could be responsible for the execution of millions of their fellow men.

In this painting, then, Rattner is proclaiming the quiet power of the artist to bring not just light, but God’s light, into our awful, grotesque world in which people are capable of tremendous evil and inhumanity. His stained glass window proclaims the divine energy of God’s light and the potential this light has to illuminate the world. His painting shows an artist concerned with how the artist can re-create God’s light as a source of solace and inspiration in a dark world. Even a small light created by an artist can light up the darkness.

Let there be light, indeed.