ART REVIEW : CEREMONIAL OBJECTS BY A CRAFTSMAN

Moshe Zabari is an Israeli-born master craftsman whose entire artistic output is devoted to Jewish ceremonial art and design.

His current retrospective at the Hebrew Union College Skirball Museum (through Feb. 23) features work produced over the last 25 years as artist-in-residence at the Jewish Museum, New York. Curated by Nancy Berman, this handsome, insightful exhibit of ritual objects traces Zabari’s aesthetic development from the strict formalist tenets of the Bauhaus to Post-Modernism’s more eclectic, historical pluralism.

This evolution is perfectly illustrated by a contrasting pair of three-tiered seder plates. The first, from 1961, epitomizes the repetitive formalism and simplicity of design of the International Style. Square, plexiglass tiers are arranged in layers to hold the ritual matzo and support the six silver dishes that contain the seder’s symbolic foods.

This hard-edged geometry is counterpointed, in typical Bauhaus style, by a sinuously curved handle, adding elegant rhythm to an otherwise stripped-down, functional aesthetic.

The second seder plate (1984) is typical of Zabari’s more recent output, reflecting both the influence of stylistic innovations wrought by the Pop, Op and Kinetic art movements, and his growing interest in Jewish archeology and symbolism. Thus the later work, with its fabricated silver embellishments and Lucite tiers, takes 19th-Century Viennese decorative arts as its model, injects the mystical and metaphorical resonance of arcane words and images, yet molds these parts into a dynamic whole that combines machine-age purity of form with appropriate reverence for the object’s religious function.

Stylistic pluralism becomes an ideal vehicle for Zabari’s growing spiritual expressionism, where past and present, biblical and aesthetic history, form a provocative and malleable dialectic.