Ellen Holtzblatt
- Matthew Baigell, Professor Emeritus of Art History at Rutgers University, from his
forthcoming book
In contrast, Chicago-based Ellen Holtzblatt, conjoining the biblical with the personal, found
in the story of Noah a way to visualize her meditations on physical and metaphysical
aspects of birth and rebirth. Briefly, in the biblical account, God, fed up with human
wickedness, instructs Noah to build an ark and take on board his family and pairs of every
living creature that flies, walks, or crawls in order to repopulate the earth after He destroys
everything in the Flood. (Genesis 6-8). Although the story is riveting, Holtzblatt found the
biblical text to be, in her words, “spare and emotionless,” and in need of considerable
elaboration. The same might be said about the traditional Jewish view—that it is a tale
about human corruption in which a wrathful God intent on punishing sin will nevertheless
allow mercy to triumph ultimately over His harsh judgment. As she has stated, “the story
clearly depicts the scope of the devastation, but blanks on details that my imagination has
since filled in.” It begged for greater development and serious reflection because, in a
manner of speaking, God was starting the world over again with Noah becoming a new
Adam. Holtzblatt, decided to look “beneath the outer coats of the stories into a deeper and
more mystical realm,” and found “layers of personal, emotional, and spiritual meaning,”
implied but not spelled out in the text.
Like other artists considered here, she thought of her series “as visual midrash. The images
are my means for exploring and developing personal insights and connections to the texts.
They become a vehicle for learning about myself and the world.” Her version of the story of
Noah resulted in a narrative series of fourteen woodcuts entitled Hamabul (The Deluge)
(2005) (figs. 69-72). In it, she viewed the story less through a moral lens—as issues of bad
versus good or retribution versus forgiveness—than as a person sensitive to “the interrelatedness of creation and destruction, birth and death occurring both simultaneously and
separately.” In symbolic terms, the ark became for her a womb. Noah and the other living
creatures were fetuses reborn after the rains stopped and the water receded. The final
image in her series shows the earth as a nursing woman. In correspondence, she has
indicated that “very personally, I connected to the story as a woman who has experienced
cycles of fertility and sexuality. Birth, death, and what happens in between have been
central interests. I have been examining my own place in this cycle—past, present, and
future—sometimes feeling as though I am in all tenses at the same time.”
Like David Wander’s interpretation of Jonah’s experiences, water is, of course, an
important element in Holtzblatt’s retelling of the story. And like Wander, Holtzblatt relates
elements in her personal life to her narrative. But the feminist movement obviously
provided a climate of opinion in which she—and other women—began to find ways to
express quite openly and personally their most intimate thoughts about water and
immersion in water. These reach beyond but are clearly related to the importance now
given to Miriam’s Well during the Israelites’ wanderings in the desert as symbolized by the
recently developed tradition of adding a Miriam’s Cup to the Passover seder. For example,
in 1973, Ruth Weisberg, whose works were previously discussed, created a lithograph,
Waterbourne, showing a woman floating underwater in a fetal position. The next year, in
an intaglio entitled Sea Change, she tripled the number of women underwater to suggest
the stages of the birth of a fetus. And in 1996, she created a set of six monotypes of a
woman in various fetal positions underwater. When creating the earlier works, Weisberg,
pregnant at the time, wanted “to explore, she said, “the situation of a fetus [and] my
empathy with this soul inside me… The theme of women in the water, the sensuality of it,
was later joined to more explicit ideas about ritual and creation in the biblical sense which I
began to connect with Genesis 1:6: ‘Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water, that it
may separate water from water.’ Weisberg also associated water with the ritual bath, the
mikvah, observant women attend just before marriage and at a certain time in their
monthly cycle as a purification ceremony, a subject that would not have been so openly
discussed, photographed, or painted before the 1970s.
The mikvah has additional resonances for Holtzblatt. She accepts the notion that “the act of
submerging in the mikvah is meant to result in the cessation of individual ego and
reunification with God. Through immersion, we merge our dust-life, or clay-self, with the
source of life and symbolically disintegrate in the water and then emerge spiritually
renewed.” But what about the origin of water? In a careful reading of Genesis 1:2, “the
earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from
God sweeping over the water…,” she holds that water is primordial and represents the
chaos before Creation. If the Flood was meant to result in chaos and another Creation, as it
were, then the Flood could be viewed, according to Holtzblatt “as the ultimate mikvah,
returning the earth’s residents to the water that pre-existed descriptive life.” It then follows
that the Flood story is also about “the possibility of rebirth and immersion with and in
God.”
So, Holtzblatt’s images are about death and destruction and, finally, renewal and rebirth, or,
to use the Hebrew word, teshuvah, return and repentance. The first image, entitled
Corruption, illustrates Genesis 6:11: “The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was
filled with lawlessness.” The pile of the bodies seen here presages Holtzblatt’s vision of the
experience of drowning about which she has said that she visualized “the figures of the
Flood story with their gaping orifices freely admitting the seas into their bodies, boundaryless with the waters” (fig. 69). But before that happens, God makes a covenant with Noah in
verse 18: “But I will establish My covenant with you, and you shall enter the ark with your
sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives.” Holtzblatt interprets this passage in a woodcut
entitled Covenant to mean that life will be renewed for the succeeding generations,
symbolized here by Noah as a six-month old fetus surrounded by the amniotic sac. The
horizontal lines designate womb water in contrast to the destructive rainwater behind (fig.
70). Finally, Noah’s family and the various animals and birds safely boarded the ark. At the
time, according to Genesis 7:6, “Noah was six hundred years old when the Flood came,
waters upon the earth”. In the woodcut, Water on Earth, Noah, after having the boat built
and bringing aboard all the animals, seems frail and tired, a perfectly normal human
response to the ordeal that he had been instructed to perform (fig. 71).
His fatigue and age are contrasted to Holtzblatt’s interpretation of Genesis 8:22 entitled All
the Days of the Earth, which marks the subsidence of the Flood and God’s promise not to
destroy everything living thing again: “So long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease” (fig. 72). Life will return
to normal and the generations will follow in their turn. The idealized but flawed world of
Adam and Eve is now replaced by our entirely imperfect world. As Holtzblatt has stated, “I
am compelled by this devastation and by the implications of spiritual renewal. The Bible
begins with divine creation yet only divine retreat allows space for mortal creativity. Water
signifies purity and rebirth in the archetypes of literature and visual art. To journey
through water takes one from the mundane to the holy and from the weakness of mortality
to potency.” The ultimate meaning of The Deluge, especially if one is, like Holtzblatt, serious
about one’s religious beliefs, is to take advantage of the second chance given to human kind
to make the world a better place.