Norman Raeben (1901-1978): The Wandering Painting, edited by Fabio Fantuzzi. Livorno, Italy: Sillabe, 2025, pp. 250.
Reviewed by Alessandro Carrera, University of Houston
This luscious book is the catalog of Norman Raeben’s exhibition hosted in Venice, Italy by the Venice Jewish Museum and other artistic associations (Ikona, Lab Space, Azzime) from November 24, 2024, to January 14, 2025. The project was conceived and directed by Fabio Fantuzzi, with the supervision of Stefania Portinari (associate professor of Art History at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice) and funded by the European Union under a Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant. It contains a preface by Dario Calimani (President of the Jewish Community in Venice), introduction by Fabio Fantuzzi, six essays by various authors (one was a Norman Raeben student), and, possibly, the most complete selection of paintings, drawings, and studio works from Norman Raeben, the painter-teacher who perhaps never knew the impact he had on that scruffy guy who in the early months of 1974 took painting classes in his studio on the eleventh floor of the Carnegie Hall building in New York. Raeben would certainly have been surprised to know that his teaching helped Dylan conceive a new approach to the narrative ballad genre, one in which the song must be contemplated like a painting where different events seem to happen at the same time, or in no time at all.
“I had the good fortune to meet a man in New York City who taught me how to see. He put my mind and my hand and my eye together in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt.”[1] This is Dylan’s first oblique reference to Norman Raeben, given in a 1978 interview (all other references are oblique as well). As we know, the immediate result of this re-learning was the manipulation of time in the lyrics of Blood on the Tracks, where it is often impossible to place the events described in a linear chronology. Dylan’s newly found ability to suspend or twist narrative time shows up in other songs of the 1970s, such as “Isis,” “Señor,” and “No Time to Think” (a title, as Chistopher Ricks observed, that must be read both ways, “there’s no time to think” and there’s “no-time” to think about).[2] In fact, Dylan’s new style extends all over the 1980s, leaving traces in “Jokerman,” “Blind Willie McTell,” “Foot of Pride,” and “Brownsville Girl” (and, years later, “Highlands” and “Tempest”). The process that Dylan learned was his personal adaptation of Horace’s well-known saying, namely, that painting and poetry have a lot in common (ut pictura poesis, or “as is painting, so is poetry,” Ars poetica, 361). The seven stanzas of “Tangled Up in Blue” are either the story in chronological order of a man desperately in love with the same woman or the same story with scrambled chronology. The song could also be the story of one man chasing seven different women, or seven men chasing the same woman. The listener is supposed to “stop time” and contemplate the song as one synchronic event.
Dylan, who attended Raeben’s classes five days a week (something that he had never done, that is, sit down in a classroom and pay attention, since his high school years) never revealed the name of his teacher, probably to protect him from unwanted exposure. The first Dylan sleuth to name him was Bert Cartwright in the early 1990s.[3] Clinton Heylin, Howard Sounes, and Sean Wilentz picked up from Cartwright. When I was working on the first edition of my Dylan book, I did some research at the Bobst Library of NYU, and I found more biographical details in the Who’s Who in American Art.[4] Ten years later, my few pages on Raeben spurred Fabio Fantuzzi, then an undergraduate student at the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, to investigate further. He wrote to me, asking if I thought that he could submit a Norman Raeben research project for a Ph.D. in American Studies. I remember that I was skeptical. I was afraid that no American Studies professor in any Italian university might find the Raeben project worthy of a doctoral fellowship. How wrong I was! He was accepted at Università Roma Tre under the guidance of Professor Maria Anita Stefanelli and immediately started hunting the legacy of Norman Raeben. He went to New York, found Raeben’s old students, interviewed them, found the location of his remaining paintings, motivated art historians to delve into the life and works of a quasi-forgotten heir to the Ashcan School of realist painting, wrote his dissertation, and published his first findings in a 2020 book on Dylan as an artist.[5] Fantuzzi has now crowned his research with this gorgeous catalog, which will be the mandatory reference for anyone who wants to know about this Norman Raeben, Dylan or not. Raeben was born Numa Rabinovitz in Ukraine and was the youngest son of Shalom Rabinovitz, better known as Shalom Aleichem, one of the major figures of modern Yiddish literature, and whose stories inspired the musical The Fiddler on the Roof.
The Wandering Painting is a tribute to Norman Raeben with and without Dylan, as it should be, because there’s a lot to say about Raeben himself: “a sophisticated artist,” Fantuzzi writes in his introduction, and:
an erudite, influential teacher whose long career spanned across some of the most influential 20th-century American and European artistic movements and cultural milieus […] The project analyzed Raeben’s career and his artistic collaborations as a case study to deepen the knowledge of the evolution of Ukrainian Yiddish-derived culture and art in New York in the 20th century. […] The most substantial part of the research, however, consisted in examining private collections belonging to the artist’s students, collaborators, and relatives. The study of these archives uncovered a wide range of information […]; it also unearthed a corpus of unpublished materials, including letters and documents, videos and audios of his lessons, various lectures, excerpts of an unfinished book on art history, and an extensive collection of his paintings. (pp. 11-12)
During the 1920s and 1930s, Raeben’s works were displayed in several collective exhibitions. In 1946, he opened his school in the heart of New York, and it is amazing that the Venice retrospective of his work has been the first. Raeben, who was good at many things, was not good at publicizing himself. It is also true that many of his works, located in a studio in Connecticut, were lost in a fire.
Why “The Wandering Painting”? Because, as Fantuzzi explains, “most of his works were made ‘on the road’.” Moreover, and starting from the mid-1930s, “Raeben stopped giving titles to cityscapes and intentionally did not provide indications, dates, or progressive numbering, forcing the viewer into a journey, both real and ideal, among and within the works in a circular path with no beginning and no end.” Just like in “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Where Are You Tonight,” and possibly “Changing of the Guards,” “the journey thus becomes the very substance of the artistic process as both subject and method. Such transposition of a wandering approach, rooted within traditional Jewish and American culture, into painting foreshadowed the incoming cultural zeitgeist that shortly thereafter would mark the essence of 1950s and 1960s Americanism” (p. 12). That may very well be, but it must be remembered that the zeitgeist that put people on the move, albeit anticipated by the Beatniks, only began in the second half of the 1960s.
Clearly a post-impressionist modernist, leaning sometimes toward expressionism (no mere “copy from life” was allowed in his school), Raeben was neither avant-garde nor retro-garde. Raeben could do good, traditional portraits, and he did them on commission. In his personal work, however, as Fantuzzi says, he was “mid-garde,” between the realism of the Ashcan school and a more stylized approach to the American genre of cityscape. In fact, the similarities between Raeben’s cityscapes and the 1990s Dylan paintings cannot be missed. In more recent years, however, Dylan’s large paintings have moved toward a stricter realism that probably would not have impressed his old teacher that much, but that’s a different story.[6]
The volume includes six essays: “Locating Norman Raeben in American Art,” by Andrea Pappas; “‘Way of Seeing and Being Seen’: Norman Raeben in Paris,” by Stefania Portinari; “Norman Raeben, American in Paris, European in New York,” by Nico Stringa; “Portraits of Wandering: An Artistic Journey from Sholem Aleichem to Bob Dylan,” by Fabio Fantuzzi; “Norman Raeben: Art Telescopes Time,” by Roz Jacobs (one of Raeben’s students), plus the technical approach of Antonella Martinato in “Maintenance and Conservative Restoration Process Diagnostics and Study of Materials.” Except Fantuzzi, the authors are not Dylan scholars, yet they share the temptation to understand what made Raeben so important to Dylan. Because, as it seems, Raeben showed Dylan the way to consciously regain access to his unconscious, Portinari comments:
When Dylan attended that school for two months in the spring of 1974, he was encouraged not to focus on details and was taught ‘to see,’ to become aware of what he already felt ‘in an unconscious way.’ He benefited from a welcoming philosophical counseling environment that fit within a culture of synesthesia, very Yiddish yet also idealistic, existing in America within the intellectual climate of neo-avant-gardes, stemming from the European theosophies that passed to the Bauhaus masters exiled in America, to the 1970s climate of minimalist artist-thinkers like Sol LeWitt and Smithson. (p. 37)
Certainly, any investigation on “theosophies” that were passed on to Dylan, no matter how second-hand they were, would be fascinating. I have doubts, however, that it will ever be undertaken, except maybe for the Tarot symbolism in Desire.
Fantuzzi’s essay opens with Raeben’s alleged portrait of Bob Dylan, showing a bespectacled young man in a light-brown jacket, just a hint of a beard, and sleeves that end without hands coming out of them. The Poet with No Hands (A Portrait of Bob Dylan) is now at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma (reproduced in the book at page 46, 54, and 79). Before we delve into the psychoanalytic interpretation game of the poet with no hands, however, Fantuzzi informs us that Raeben did that painting as an exercise a few days before Dylan showed up at his school. So, was the title already there or did Raeben add it later? Did he retouch the painting to make it more a portrait of Dylan? We don’t know, and Fantuzzi doesn’t say. A better question would be, did Dylan have heart and mind but no “hand” at painting (or writing) when he enrolled in Raeben’s class? And did he regain his “hand” afterward”? There is no doubt about that. We leave the rest to the goddess of synchronicity.
The second part of the volume is dedicated to the retrospective. As Fantuzzi explains, placing Raeben’s paintings in any order is a difficult task. Fantuzzi has done all he could to reverse the artist’s decision, date, and locate the paintings, as it was his duty to do so (artists and scholars rarely see eye to eye on these matters), and the result is impressive in terms of scope and precision. Thanks to The Wandering Painting, we can see now in sequence the portraits of Raeben’s father and mother dating back to the 1920s, many cityscapes and landscapes from places known and unknown (Venice included), charming drawings, nudes and dancers reminding us of Degas, figure studies oscillating between cubism and realism, many instances where the brush strokes break free from realism to create a structure of pure signs, and studio works that do not seem to need further completion.
In the end, was Norman Raeben a “great painter”? Maybe not, but that’s not the point (Dylan isn’t a “great painter” either). Because of his European upbringing and the time he spent in Paris, where he was familiar with Chagall, Matisse, and Soutine, Raeben never really broke with post-impressionism. He did not become a fully “American artist” like the new masters of abstract expressionism – who were not “great painters” either, yet were able to conjure up great paintings from pure concepts. Still, Raeben was a painter, to the extent that he had a vision of the America he wanted to portray. The world is full of “great painters,” just as it is full of “great poets.” What we miss, most of the time, are just painters, like Raeben, and just poets, like Dylan.
[1] Interview with Jonathan Cott, “Rolling Stone,” November 16, 1978, in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, ed. By Jonathan Cott (New York: Wenner Books, 2006), 260.
[2] “In terms of the transitory language, it is not that there is no time to think, but rather that one of the things that must be promptly thought about is that there’s no time.” Christopher Ricks, “American English and the Inherently Transitory,” in C. Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 427.
[3] Bert Cartwright, “The Mysterious Norman Raeben,” in Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan, ed. by John Bauldie (New York: Citadel Press, 1991), 85-90.
[4] Alessandro Carrera, La voce di Bob Dylan. Una spiegazione dell’America (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2001, 2011), 296-310. The title of the third, expanded edition is slightly different: La voce di Bob Dylan. Un racconto dell’America (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2021). In his bibliographical references, Fabio Fantuzzi has conflated the two titles.
[5] Fabio Fantuzzi, “Painting Songs, Composing Paintings: Norman Raeben and Bob Dylan,” in Bob Dylan and the Arts: Songs, Film, Painting, and Sculpture in Dylan’s Universe, ed. by Maria Anita Stefanelli, Fabio Fantuzzi, and Alessandro Carrera (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2020), 209-232.
[6] For an assessment of Dylan as a painter, see Bob Dylan: Retrospectrum, ed. by Shai Baitel (Milan: Skira -MAXXI Museum, 2022), and Alessandro Carrera, “Bob Dylan: pittore realista americano (minore),” in Changes. Riscritture, sconfinamenti, talenti plurimi, ed. by Angela Albanese (Sesto San Giovanni: Mimesis, 2024), 71-88.
