By Susan Isaacs, PhD, MFA
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In January 2025, I was contacted by Director Sol Davis and Exhibits Manager Katie Andril of the Jewish Museum of Maryland (JMM) in Baltimore to create an exhibition in some way inspired by or connected to a 1998 essay that Baltimore artist Jacob Glushakow (1914–2000) wrote for the Jewish Museum’s institutional publication, Generations, titled “Brief Burst of Glory: The founding and flourishing of the first and last school of Jewish artists in Baltimore.”
Gushakow claimed, that for a period, Baltimore nurtured a core group of Jewish artists who mostly knew each other and often showed together. Many of them later taught at area institutions such as the Maryland Institute College of Art, the Jewish Community Center, and various colleges and universities, influencing the next generations of Baltimore artists and art lovers.
He included himself and 10 more artists as representative of this era, which spanned the Great Depression of the 1930s through the Civil Rights decade of the 1960s. Readers may have heard of some of these artists. You might even own a work by one or more of them: Florence Austrian, Mervin Jules, Reuben Kramer, Herman Maril, Karl Metzler, Selma Oppenheimer, Helen Ries, Edward Rosenfeld, Amalie Rothschild, and Aaron Sopher. As the project evolved, we added four contemporaneous artists not discussed in Glushakow’s article: Gladys Goldstein, Perna Krick, Bennard Perlman, and Peter Scholleck. Most of these artists have work in the JMM collection, which is not specifically an art museum but, instead, an institution that seeks to illuminate Jewish history and culture.
Several of this final group of 15 artists are known beyond Baltimore and quite a few are included in museum collections across the United States. In fact, I had already worked on a very large project for one of them, Amalie Rothschild, which included a retrospective at Towson University and a companion in-depth book. (www.goyacontemporary.com/publications/amalie-rothschild#tab:slideshow) Sadly, we could not track down a Helen Ries painting until after the exhibition opened. It became clear over the expanse of the project that the preservation of an artist’s career following their death often depends upon family members championing and preserving their loved ones’ works and reputations. We collaborated with five different artists’ family members and several collectors, as well as another Maryland institution, the Maryland Center for History and Culture. (https://www.mdhistory.org/)
In the end, we created an installation of 77 objects (paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture) by 14 artists. Of these, 45 are owned by the JMM and 32 are borrowed from private and public collections. In addition to designing an exhibition to show off these works, the museum also needed to frame over 30 of them and build sculpture stands and Plexi© cases for eight and a light box for yet another.
As is typical of large exhibitions, some works required conservation treatment. We also wrote and published an illustrated catalog of 60 pages, now included in the collection of the Library of Congress and available for purchase from the Jewish Museum of Maryland. In general, such a project would normally take place over a several-year period. With the outstanding staff of the JMM and the amazing specialists engaged by the museum, we accomplished this in a bit over six months.
What specifically did we learn about these artists? We discovered that they were individual practitioners who responded to modernist ideas with a broad range of methods, materials, and styles. Their views were largely shaped by prevailing theories that emerged from Europe: Post Impressionism, Fauvism, German Expressionism, Cubism, Art Deco, Surrealism, and Bauhaus. Some of them were also influenced by a 20th century American approach to Realism and others to the Abstract Expressionism that emerged in the U.S. after the Second World War. Of the final 14 artists in the show, 12 of them studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)—some for a brief period and others graduating with honors. Quite a few studied in or travelled to New York City and to Europe and beyond; others stayed closer to home, with each finding a unique voice that expressed a contemporary vision.
Glushakow, himself, arrived as an infant in Baltimore having been born at sea while his parents were emigrating from Ukraine to the United States. He not only studied at MICA, but also at the Art Students League in New York City (1933–36). He, like many of the artists in Modernisms, worked for the WPA (Works Profess Administration) during the Depression and served in the Armed Forces in WWII. He was an excellent draftsman who focused on modern life, especially depicting the people and streets of Jewish Baltimore. Two works by Glushakow included in the exhibition are exquisite drawings of the historic synagogues (Lloyd Street and B’nai Israel) that today flank the central structure of the JMM.
Many of the artists were close friends, among them Herman Maril (1908–1986), Reuben Kramer (1909–1999), and Amalie Rothschild (1916–2001).
Maril was a Baltimore native who graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art, participated in the WPA, and served in the military during WWII. He developed a modernist painting style that employed flat planes of color. Believing in creating an overall harmony where all the forms “locked” together, Maril produced images where no elements could be taken away or added without disturbing his elegant, reductive compositions. He is represented in the Modernisms exhibition by seven works that span a period of close to 40 years, from circa 1941–1980. Five of them are owned by the JMM and demonstrate the development of his style from an American type of bold figuration to a stylized abstraction of landscape and interiors. Maril’s work is in museum collections across the United States.
Kramer, the son of Russian immigrants, was born and raised in East Baltimore. He too attended MICA, graduating from its Rinehart School of Sculpture in 1934. Through two travel scholarships, he went to Europe to study sculpture, first at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière in Paris and then to The American Academy in Rome in 1936. Following this, he went to London for another year to continue his sculpture studies with a Jewish expatriate sculptor, Jacob Epstein. Kramer, too, served in the military during the Second World War. Over his long career, he created an enormous body of work which includes both cast bronze sculptures and contour line drawings. Six of his table-top bronzes and eight of his drawings, all from the JMM collection, are on view in the exhibition. He was influenced by both the expressionism of Epstein and the modernism of Matisse.
Amalie (Getta Rosenfeld) Rothschild was born in Baltimore. At the age of 18, she earned a diploma in fashion illustration from MICA. For five months, she also attended what is now the Parson School of Design in New York City. Rothschild later undertook painting lessons with Richard Dicus, Herman Meril, and Max Schallinger. After a successful career as a painter, she turned her attention to sculpture, studying with Frieda Sohn. Rothschild was a prolific and highly respected artist who created a body of 1400 completed works in many different media, with approximately 380 of them now in private and public collections. In addition to creating paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings, she also designed sets and costumes and undertook important commissions such as the Ark curtain for Baltimore Hebrew Congregation. Of the 10 works by her in the exhibition, spanning 1948–1982, five belong to the Jewish Museum of Maryland. They represent her various periods from Cubism to Constructivism and include both painting and sculpture.
Two quite different artists, each known for their abstract works are Gladys Goldstein (1917–2010) and Peter Scholleck (1923–1969).
While Goldstein was born in Ohio, her parents were native Baltimoreans who moved the family back to the city when the artist was just three years old. Goldstein began studying art as a child in a special program for gifted students at the Maryland Institute, and when she graduated high school, she enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art, but left because she felt it was too conservative. She later took classes at Johns Hopkins and Columbia universities, the Art Students League of New York, and the Pennsylvania State University, studying with Hobson Pittman, who encouraged her to pursue a career as a fine artist. The seven works Goldstein in the exhibition demonstrate her range from Abstract Expressionist paintings to an exploration of memories and feelings. She was often inspired by nature but never worked representationally. She enjoyed experimenting with differing materials and forms which are evident in the works in Modernisms.
Peter Leo Max Scholleck was born in Munich, Germany to Jewish parents. He was named for his father, Leo Max Czollek, who predeceased Peter’s birth by just three months. In 1933, after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, the laws in Germany transformed and in 1938, when a young teenager, Scholleck was forced to leave school. That same year, he experienced Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), the state sanctioned rioting that resulted in the destruction of synagogues and the looting of Jewish owned businesses, and in Scholleck’s case, his beloved stepfather being taken to Dachau Concentration Camp for six weeks. The family realized they must depart Germany. They managed to get out and arrived in Baltimore in May 1939 with his stepfather dying just 20 months later from the injuries incurred at Dachau.
Scholleck never went back to school as he needed to support his family. He enlisted in the U.S. Army where he served in the Pacific during World War II (1943–1946). He was extremely useful as an intelligence interpreter as he spoke five languages. Beginning in the early 1940s, he began to make art in his spare time. He was a self-taught modernist who produced about 250 works, including paintings and drawings, during his artistic practice of about 20 years. He seemed to have learned painting largely by looking at images in art publications and through constant practice.
He was not part of an artistic group, did not attend art school, did not travel, and only showed his work in a few regional art fairs during his lifetime. Yet, by the mid-1950s through the 1960s, he had developed a sophisticated, largely expressionist style, often abstracting the figure, which places him within a national conversation on the contemporary art of his time. He is represented in the Modernisms exhibition with eight works that span from 1954 to1967. It is only the second showing of any of his work in public since the few art fairs he participated in during his lifetime.
To learn more about the exhibition and the other artists in the show, consider visiting the JMM before Modernisms closes on March 15, 2026. Make a day of it. Visit the galleries and take a docent-led tour of the historic synagogues.
About The Author:
SUSAN ISAACS (AKA J. Susan Isaacs) is retired from teaching art history and museum studies at Towson University. She has curated many exhibitions for the Department of Art + Design, Art History, and Art Education Galleries as well as numerous institutions across the United States and abroad. She writes and publishes on contemporary art. Isaacs holds a four-year certificate of Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in painting, B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in art history from the University of Delaware, and an M.F.A., in studio art from Towson University. You can see her work at susanisaacs.art.
