Nicole Eisenman’s Chicago Retrospective Centers Her Jewish Identity

This piece originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

Nicole Eisenman’s painting Seder (2010) features objects familiar to anyone has celebrated Passover: a shank bone, lettuce leaf, and boiled egg, all assembled on a Seder plate; an open horseradish container, its contents expectantly awaiting consumption on Hillel sandwiches; and open Haggadahs, their pages wilted from years of use. In the foreground, bulbous pink hands break a piece of matzah in two, a reference to the moment when one half is set aside for the afikoman. We are invited to view this Seder through the matzah breaker’s eyes, with Eisenman channeling a specifically Jewish perspective on the scene. 

What would it mean to see not just this one painting but Eisenman’s entire oeuvre through the lens of her Jewishness? That’s a rich question posed by curator Mark Godfrey in the catalog for Eisenman’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which has arrived stateside after a run in Europe. 

Prior surveys similar to this one have shown that Eisenman’s queerness and gender are inseparable from her art—something that can be seen in Seder, where, on the Seder plate, one can spot an orange, an untraditional symbol for women and members of the queer community who have historically been sidelined within the Jewish community. But her Judaism has largely been unconsidered, and that makes this show important. I came out of it thinking that Eisenman is one of the great Jewish artists working today. 

Eisenman’s Jewish perspective is most obvious in her work of the ’90s, which approaches religious material in a way that can only be called sacrilegious. Take her 1999 drawing Jesus Will You Shut Up, which depicts a guy at the wheel of a car being hounded by another driver trying to speed by. The titular phrase, commonly uttered in the face of a person who won’t stop honking, is here made literal, with a mopey-looking, crucified Jesus nearby. “OH SORRY,” Christ says in the drawing, to which the driver responds, “NOT YOU, YA IDIOT”—a dismissive remark that barely acknowledges Jesus’s presence. (Sadly not included in the MCA exhibition is Eisenman’s 1996 drawing Jesus Fucking Christ, which depicts exactly what its title implies.) 

Paintings of Jesus Christ over the centuries are generally meant to inspire deference and piousness, whereas Eisenman sees the subject in decidedly profane ways. In Lemonade Stand(1994), clusters of figures come together to piss into jugs and sell their urine to unsuspecting passersby. Mannerist painters like Tintoretto painted similar masses assembled to witness crucifixions and baptisms. Were he alive to stand before Eisenman’s Lemonade Stand, Tintoretto would probably be scandalized. 

In subverting the Christian-centric Western canon, Eisenman offers a Jewish point of view that would never have made it into the artistic record of, say, Tintoretto’s 16th-century Italy. And though the canon has been opened to people who may have once been seen as outsiders, Eisenman remains closely attuned to art history as an exclusionary force. 

The Chicago show marks the debut of The Visitors (2024), a painting in which a group of gallery-goers admires art that vaguely recalls Eisenman’s, including a canvas showing a woman masturbating. Everyone seems oblivious to the trench-coated men at the gallery’s door, who were lifted by Eisenman from a photograph of “Degenerate Art,” the Nazi-organized 1937 exhibition that sought to strike down modernist art that evinced a “perverse Jewish spirit.” Eisenman’s ancestors departed Vienna during the ’30s as the Nazis rose to power, and the artist has said, in an interview quoted in the catalog, that she considers it her “job” to “process the sadness of my family.” 

In The Visitors Eisenman shows that oppression still exists and that there are people out there who seek to deny queer and Jewish perspectives like her own. But the painting is hardly intended to inspire terror. At the bottom of the canvas, a figure in a maroon sweater—someone who looks like Eisenman herself—reaches a hand into the pocket of a man who appears to be a patron and pulls out his wallet, getting ready to take the money and run. As usual, she gets the last laugh.