NEUTRAL PEOPLE

Dear Jerry,

I’ve been thinking about writing you a letter for a long time. I tuned in. Wrote. Sent.

My name is Tatyana Fedorovskaya. I am an artist, director, and screenwriter from Moscow, and have recently become a neutral person without cultural identification. I won’t take too long; I’ll try to be brief.

I have reviewed almost all of your lectures on YouTube, I read you on social networks, and I wanted to share with you a small incident that had a tremendous impact on me.

It happened a couple of weeks ago. Like all artists, I was looking for a gallery for cooperation for half a year, probably. I wrote letters and sent my portfolio to curators. In 99.9% of cases, refusals came or I was simply ignored. But I did not give up – I wrote and sent the portfolio further. And then suddenly, fortunately for me, someone answered me from the Los Angeles gallery, and it wasn’t just the curator or administrator, but the owner of the gallery herself! My happiness knew no bounds! Images of a personal exhibition immediately flashed through my head, incredible sales of my art to the best houses in Paris and London, publications in magazines, etc. In general, this is the artist’s happiness and you don’t have to be dead for this. After we both exchanged detailed courtesies, we came to the stage of selecting paintings to be sent to the land of opportunity.

I was surprised to discover a strange feeling of embarrassment at the fact that I was Jewish.

I’ll explain now.

It was exactly this. The picture that she liked on Instagram was captured in the process of creation and, apparently, some features of this canvas were not quite readable. The gallery owner asked me to change the name of the painting first; which had been called “Shabbat March 3.” Then the woman asked me to change the figures of the people depicted on the canvas to make them more neutral. After I clarified what exactly was meant, she carefully explained, referring to the special public and clientele of her gallery, that they were unlikely to accept and understand the specific subject. “I am not sure how well it will get received here.” And the most beautiful thing was at the end of our correspondence, the art-lady asked me to depict a group of neutral people, without cultural identification, without precise signs that indicate that this group is Jewish. “I do like the composition of all these people gathering but can we do it in a way that does not have any recognizable culture or people? Just neutral people.”

For the first few days, I began to frantically pace before the picture, thinking about where to start neutralizing the cultural characteristics of my characters. I couldn’t lose the opportunity to get into the real world of art. So, I could remove the sidelocks, I thought…yeah, well, then I could paint over the kippahs with hair, but what to do with the lapserdaks? What to do with those damn long coats? No, it’s no good, I’d rather paint new, beautiful, simply neutral people for the art-lady. Can they wear glasses? Oh no, don’t give them glasses, they’ll look like Jews again. So, maybe make them black? No, it’s not even neutral. Then what about the Asians? No, they have no neutrality at all; their eyes are narrow, their hair is black, the gallery owner’s clients will immediately understand that something suspicious is depicted here.

And then I began to ask myself questions and reflect on the subject … Wait, what is wrong with them? No, not with my Jews, but with the public of that very gallery that is located in the heart of the free world in LA itself? A world free from prejudices, and, moreover, from signs of Nazism? What’s wrong with them? What can happen to them and how can they react to a picture depicting the Jews? Who are they, those people from the city of angels? People of a special kind? We’ve been through this before…

Dear Jerry, to be honest, I was rushing to write her a letter with explanations and some apologies for the fact that I depict Jews on many of my canvases. I even felt a little ashamed that I myself was Jewish. And I felt a little ashamed of my non-neutral figures on the canvas. Ashamed, too, that this is my identity…that I also write scripts and even made a short film about Jews, and specifically about my family, which fell under the Holocaust in 1941…and received a Bafta Award for it. I felt ashamed of all this…

And I also felt embarrassed for Chagall …

I wanted to write all this somehow easily and cheerfully, but I feel that I have slipped into reflection. Forgive me for this, dear Jerry!

And you, Jerry, how would you neutralize the Jewishness in yourself?

I hug you tightly,

T.