Moses Jacob Ezekiel was a long-forgotten 19th century artist until the culture wars of the 21st century caught up with him.
As a Jew who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War before creating Jim Crow monuments that are now controversial, he possessed an unlikely mix of identities and accomplishments.
Today, he’s a hot topic more for his loyalty to the Southern “Lost Cause’’ than for his artistic merits.
That’s one reason Cleveland State University art historian Samantha Baskind wrote a new book about him. She wants Ezekiel (1844-1917) seen in his entirety, not merely “whipsawed,’’ as she put it, between antagonists on both sides of the political spectrum.
“He was controversial in the liberal cancel culture of the first half of this decade,’’ Baskind said in a recent interview about her book. “Now the environment has flipped over 180 degrees in the other direction.”
Baskind’s new volume, “Moses Jacob Ezekiel: Jewish, Confederate, Expatriate Sculptor,’’ published by Penn State University Press on Sept. 9, raises a timely question over who gets to control narratives around art that becomes politically explosive.
Several of Ezekiel’s monuments were removed or relocated in the early 2020’s amid the Black Lives Matter movement and the racial reckoning that followed the police murder of George Floyd.
In 2022, for example, the federal government removed Ezekiel’s towering, so-called “Reconciliation Monument,’’ originally installed at Arlington National Cemetery in 1914. It was stored in a secure facility in Virginia pending a relocation, according to news reports.
But just last month, Department of Defense (now Department of War) Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the monument, which Ezekiel titled “New South,’’ reinstalled at Arlington.
“It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings,’’ Hegseth posted on X in August. “Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it.’’
His remarks made the sculpture part of the Trump administration’s efforts to restore Confederate monuments and names to military sites. The Associated Press later reported that the monument will go back to Arlington in 2027 after a $10 million refurbishment.
Baskind doesn’t condone Ezekiel’s Confederate work. But she likened him to artists whose personal life and political views are repugnant by today’s standards, but whose work is nonetheless admired.
“Gauguin was a pedophile,’’ she said. “Degas was an anti-Semite. Picasso was a misogynist. When we talk about art, we can separate the man from the art, if it's worth separating. And if you can do that with all these canonical artists, why can’t we do that with Ezekiel?”
The latest word
A specialist in Jewish American art history, Baskind is the author of numerous articles, six books and the editor of a seventh in her field.
She based her new book on sources including Ezekiel’s 638-page memoir, private correspondence, and records at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, where Ezekiel was a cadet during the Civil War. She also appears in a 2024 documentary on the artist’s work.
Ezekiel’s works are visible in several American cities, although they often go unrecognized as his. For example, marchers in the “Unite the Right’’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 tramped by Ezekiel’s monument to Thomas Jefferson on the University of Virginia campus while ironically chanting “Jews will not replace us.’’
The episode underscored for Baskind the importance of drawing fresh attention to Ezekiel’s work. It hasn’t been easy.
Attacked on the left
In 2021, she welcomed an invitation from Princeton University to organize an exhibition of roughly 50 works by late 19th-century Jewish American artists that would have included four non-Confederate sculptures by Ezekiel.
But later that year, the university asked her to remove from the show’s checklist the works by Ezekiel and another artist because of their Confederate sympathies. Baskind felt she had to drop the project, effectively canceling it, because she said it would have made no sense without Ezekiel, whom she called the most important artist in the show. In her book, she accuses the university of censorship.
A university spokesman told Religion News Service in early 2022 that the university’s library, which would have hosted the show, “has the right to decide how to exhibit its work.” Ideastream reached out to Princeton for a fresh response, but did not receive a reply.
Adopted by the right
The removal of the “New South’’ monument from Arlington in 2022 followed a ruling by an independent commission that it was “problematic from top to bottom.’’
As has been widely reported, the work idealizes slavery with imagery such as that of a Black “mammy’’ holding a white infant for a last kiss by a Confederate soldier departing for battle.
Other works by Ezekiel have been relocated. A version of his Stonewall Jackson monument, long displayed on the parade ground at Virginia Military Institute, was taken down in 2020 and moved to New Market Battlefield State Historical Park, on the site of a battle where Ezekiel saw action in 1864. Baskind said the monument is properly contextualized there.
In 2020, the City of Chicago put an Ezekiel statue of Columbus into storage amid controversy over whether the explorer was a violent colonizer. Italian-American groups reject that characterization.
“No doubt, Ezekiel would have been bewildered by the controversies around his art, let alone its relocation and removal,’’ Baskind says in her book.
A new look
Reappraising Ezekiel is tough because exhibitions of his work are rare, and his monuments are scattered.
Prominent examples include his 1876 “Religious Liberty’’ monument, displayed outside the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, steps from Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell.
In addition to the Jefferson monument, the UVA campus has Ezekiel’s “Blind Homer with His Student Guide,’’ a tribute to the ancient Greek poet.
In Ohio, the Cincinnati Art Museum has several works, including “Eve Hearing the Voice,’’ 1876. On Johnson’s Island in Sandusky Bay, a 1910 statue of a lone Confederate soldier commemorates the site of a prison that once housed more than 12,000 captured rebels. Baskind said the solder is an idealized self-portrait of the young Ezekiel.
Loyal to lost causes
Ezekiel’s contemporaries included painters John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer and the sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens, famous for his memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the unit that inspired the 1989 film, “Glory.’’
Ezekiel’s reputation faded quickly after his death for reasons including the rise of modern art in which his peers played a role, but which he abhorred.
Ezekiel insisted on sculpting idealized figures in the neoclassical style among obscure allegorical symbols that even his clients had trouble deciphering.
In art, as in war, he chose the losing side, but he was loyal to his causes, especially the South.
He was born in Richmond in 1844 into a Dutch Sephardic Jewish immigrant family that settled in Virginia.
Jews celebrate freedom from ancient enslavement in Egypt every year during the Passover holiday. Contradictions between the religion and support for the Confederacy are difficult to explain. Baskind writes that Southern Jews who fought for secession from the Union sought to combat anti-Semitic stereotypes and prove their allegiance to the country in which many had recently arrived as immigrants.
Ezekiel, for his part, endorsed the “Lost Cause’’ myth that the South fought for state’s rights, not the preservation of slavery.
At the Battle of New Market on May 15, 1864, VMI cadets famously lost their shoes in boot-sucking mud, earning it the nickname “Field of Lost Shoes,’’ also the title of a 2014 feature film about the battle. More than 4,000 rebels repulsed a larger and better equipped Yankee force. Ezekiel suffered flesh woods but saw friends ripped apart by cannons, gunfire and bayonets.
‘Going rogue’
After the war, Ezekiel heeded advice from no less an eminence than Robert E. Lee to become an artist, instead of pursuing a career in medicine or the military. He enrolled at the Royal Academy of Art in Berlin, won a scholarship to study in Rome and stayed the rest of his life. Ensconced in a vast studio he fashioned in the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian, he became a global celebrity who received gushing coverage by the New York Times and other publications.
Visitors to his studio included Franz Liszt, Queen Margherita of Italy and other notables. Baskind likened his studio to Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1960s New York.
Her book explores Ezekiel’s sculptural treatments of religious freedom, Judaism, Zionism, Christianity, ideas from antiquity and the Renaissance, portraits of U.S. presidents, and lastly, the Confederate monuments.
She rigorously examines Ezekiel’s cumbersome symbolism, criticizing his tendency to “go rogue’’ by including coded meanings in his works that subverted the intentions of his clients.
That’s what happened with the “New South’’ monument. Ezekiel “went overboard’’ with it, Baskind said in the interview. “He turned it into ‘Lost Cause’ propaganda” of a kind that, she said, continues to fuel white supremacy.
The Associated Press reported that the reinstalled monument will be accompanied by “context about its history’’ at Arlington Cemetery.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s attacks on the independence of the Smithsonian Institution and other efforts to see American history rewritten, Baskind doubts whether the current government will tell the whole truth about the monument. She intends for her book to provide a more complete picture about all of Ezekiel’s work, including “New South.”
“We live in a very complex country with a very complex history,’’ Baskind said, “and we should know about it.”
