Michael Chabon. Photo courtesy of HarperCollins.

A writer walks into a room full of rabbis. This sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it’s not. In the words of Woody Allen’s “Broadway Danny Rose,” “It’s the emes.” The Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) held the Reform movement’s annual rabbinical convention March 3-6 in Long Beach, and novelist and essayist Michael Chabon was this year’s Jacob Rader Marcus lecturer. He spoke on the topic “Shaping Jewish Narrative” with Rabbi Yoel Kahn who, not coincidentally, was the rabbi who married Chabon and his wife, author Ayelet Waldman. All of which raises the question: How is a novelist like a Reform rabbi?

Before the crowded room of gregarious, well-read rabbis from around the country, Kahn asked Chabon to narrate his own Jewish coming-of-age. When Chabon was 8, his family moved to Columbia, Md., a new planned community developed by James Rouse that sought to be a model for the city and the community of the future — fully integrated and harmonious in all aspects. It even included an interfaith spiritual center shared by several religious denominations, including Chabon’s own congregation, which practiced what he called a “guitar-strumming” Reform Judaism called “Innovative Judaism.”

Chabon’s loss of innocence occurred at age 11, when his parents announced their separation and eventual divorce, a completely unexpected event that caused, he said, “the scales to fall from my eyes.”

Growing up, the sound of Yiddish was familiar. His grandparents belonged to a Conservative synagogue in Silver Springs, Md., which he attended on several occasions, and where they prayed, he recalled, in a “pickled-herring type of Hebrew — lots of bones in it” in a service that was heavy — not only because of its five-hour, endless-seeming plodding pace, but also because he knew there was meaning there that he couldn’t yet grasp. Nevertheless after his bar mitzvah, Chabon drifted away from Judaism.

In his 20s, he said, he found himself adrift. A first marriage to a non-Jewish woman had ended. Although they’d had no children, they had fought constantly about how they would raise them. She challenged him about why he felt so strongly about his Jewish identity when he had little to no Jewish content in his life. Forced to give what Chabon called, “The Tevye answer” of “tradition,” he found himself wondering what did matter to him about Judaism. And so, he said, “I began to reconnect.”

Then Chabon met Waldman, and, yes, she was Jewish, but her father was a secular Trotskyist Zionist who worked on a kibbutz and had contempt for any religious practice. So, together the pair searched for what was meaningful for them, which led them, as San Francisco residents, to Rabbi Kahn’s congregation.

At the same time, Chabon explained, he was also feeling equally adrift as a writer. He was publishing New Yorker-acceptable short stories, but he felt that form limited his expression of all that he enjoyed as a reader — which was all sorts of genre fiction. Chabon decided that his writing should better reflect his passions and who he was.

“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is about two comic book creators, one of them a Holocaust survivor; it tells the story of their lives, loves, success and tragedies, and it became, for Chabon, a vehicle for embracing his interests and expressing parts of who he was. He followed up with three more novels, “The Final Solution,” “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” and “Gentlemen of the Road,” all of them mixing genre elements with Jewish characters and themes in new ways.

Nonetheless, Chabon said the “unapologetic Jewish stance” in his writing is only possible because he is what he called a “post-Rothian” writer, not breaking ground the way Roth or others Jewish writers of prior generations had to do.

“I benefit from the struggles of my parents and grandparents. They did all the hard work,” Chabon said.

Asked how he expects his own children will connect to Judaism, Chabon said he is curious to see what they will adopt and make their own. Asked what he struggles most with as a Jew, Chabon answered that it is “the incredible black eye that fundamentalists are giving every religion,” and that fundamentalists will make all religions seem tainted to his children and their generation.

In discussing how he shapes his narratives, Chabon explained that often one must decide whether to supply a lot of explanation and set things in context, or to plunge the reader right into a world and explain by means of the main character’s point of view — to reveal information to the reader only as the character learns about the world.

As it turns out, the challenge for the Reform rabbi is similar, Kahn remarked, in deciding how best to explain the context of Judaism and Jewish history while attempting to address a congregant’s own point of view on the world, and in so doing, shaping the narrative of Judaism for the future.

Chabon has found a way to meld his writing self with his Jewish self to forge a new narrative. And for as long as there have been American Reform rabbis, they have tried to shape the story of contemporary Judaism. As was clear from Chabon and Kahn’s conversation, both the Reform rabbi and the Jewish American novelist are engaged in the search for authentic expression of self as well as a continuity of Jewish identity.

There is, however, one important distinction: Only the novelist gets to play at being God.

Here’s a challenge: Let’s say you had $1.1 million to give away on a program to inspire people working in Jewish organizations as well as the people who find themselves in their public spaces.

What would you do? Hand out baseball cards with the pictures of famous rabbis and leaders? Produce mix tapes of Israeli rap music?

Philanthropist Harold Grinspoon had a different idea, and the result can be seen in an exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center of 18 posters commissioned to marry the work of great Jewish graphic designers and artists with inspirational Jewish quotes. Called “Voices & Visions,” the display is on view through March 17.

The featured quotes range from Martin Buber (“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware”) to the Baal Shem Tov (“From every human being there rises a light”). There are rabbis galore: Hillel, Tarfon, Akiva, Heschel as well as authors such as Blu Greenberg and Susan Sontag.

My personal favorite is designed by Paula Scher. All it shows is a person purposefully walking, wearing a suit, depicted in profile from the waist down, with a quote from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “When I marched in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.”

There is also a series of accompanying texts — viewable online at skirball.org — that are produced by writers as diverse as Erica Brown, Rabbi Daniel Gordis, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin and Rabbi Irving Greenberg.

Grinspoon’s eponymous foundation, located in western Massachusetts, recently distributed 6,000 complete sets of the posters to Jewish institutions, PJ Library partners and cultural organizations. They are available for free through the program (voices-visions.org), at least for the first set, and there is a limited, signed edition that either will be given, offered for sale or offered at auction.

The concept behind the project is the famous ad campaign by the Container Corp. of America, called “Great Ideas of Western Man,” which ran between 1950 and 1975. Its posters by accomplished artists and designers such as Fernand Léger, Milton Glaser and Saul Bass, featured quotes from such inspirational thinkers as John Stuart Mill, Woodrow Wilson and Abraham Lincoln.

Grinspoon wondered if the same could be done pairing great Jewish quotes with Jewish graphic designers and artists. He discussed the idea with his friend Nancy Berman, a former curator of the Jewish Museum in New York and the founding director emerita of the Skirball. Berman knew Louis Danziger, who had worked on the original Container Corp. campaign. He, in turn, suggested Arnold Schwartzman as artistic director, at which point the project began to take shape.

Schwartzman was born in London, and, as a child during World War II, his home was destroyed on the first day of the Blitz — his family had to be dug out of the rubble. Later, his family ran a kosher hotel in the seaside resort of Margate. He attended art school and then went into military service and was posted to the Korean DMZ, where his chaplain was Chaim Potok, the author and rabbi. Upon his return, he began a career as a graphic designer, first in television and then in advertising.

Schwartzman, who moved to Los Angeles in 1978, has brought his talent to everything from the London Times to Coca-Cola commercials to the 1984 Olympic Games, where he was design director. He won an Oscar for best documentary feature for 1981’s “Genocide,” has consulted on design to the Academy Awards since 1996 and has produced some 10 books, numerous films and too many ads to tally. In 2002, Queen Elizabeth appointed him Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Schwartzman has been a longtime member of the prestigious Alliance Graphique Internationale, an organization of the world’s greatest graphic designers, and the friendships he developed there informed the all-star list of graphic designers and artists he assembled for “Voices & Visions”: Glaser and George Tscherny (both of whom worked on the original Container Corp. campaign), Art Paul (Playboy’s founding art director, who came up with the bunny logo), Hungarian-born Israeli design icon Dan Reisinger, R. O. Blechman (known widely for his New Yorker cartoons), Israeli master designer Yarom Vardimon and many others, including Schwartzman himself.

All are Jewish, for which Schwartzman has no explanation other than the pattern of Jews entering professions for which there was no bar to entry; those raised in religious homes who rebelled by finding a vocation making graven images; and a realization that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of peddlers, once ensconced in advertising and “brand identity,” remained good salesmen. The styles are eclectic, from typography-dominated to visual symbols, from the fine art to the abstractly commercial, some in which Jewish references exist subtly and others more obviously.

“Voices & Visions” was supposed to take four months to put together; instead, it took 18 months. Madeline Calabrese, the program director, explained that a “quote team” was created that not only researched and found potential quotes to be used, but also cleared them, when necessary, for copyright purposes. This took some time.

The purpose of the posters, Calabrese said, is to beautify space in Jewish public institutions as well as render old quotes anew, to “let the artist develop a first take” and trust that conversations will ensue.

The notion that a poster can change a mind, brighten a day or start a conversation seems at first far-fetched. But as people read less, the way they connect to thoughts and information is increasingly graphic and design-driven. (There’s a reason Apple Inc. is worth as much as it is.)

At the Skirball, there is a companion exhibit, “Decades of Dissent,” which features posters that effectively politicized the world. Meanwhile, at the Hammer Museum, there is an exhibit, “Graphic Design: Now in Production,” on logo and brand identity design as well as book design and infographics.

(In a separate contest, the “Voices & Visions” program, in conjunction with PJ Library, invited children ages 7-12 to create their own posters expressing their ideas about tikkkun olam. One of the 12 winners was Stella Feldman-Abe, 7, of Westchester.)

All of which reminds us that although a picture may be worth a thousand words, great design helps us see those words in new ways and find new meaning in sayings that have themselves stood the test of time.

SIDEBAR: ARNOLD SCHWARTZMAN master designer

Arnold Schwartzman, the artistic director of the “Voices & Visions” program and one of the most accomplished designers and documentary directors of our times, is a story unto himself. Recently, I spent a few very companionable hours at Schwartzman’s L.A. home as he shared some of the details of his personal journey and professional career.

As Schwartzman related, he was born in modest circumstances in London’s East End. His mother was born in England, and his father had arrived as a young child from Lodz, Poland. His father worked as head waiter at London’s Savoy Hotel. However, during World War II on the first day of the Blitz, their home was bombed. “We actually had to be dug out of the rubble,” Schwartzman recalled. His parents survived, but he was evacuated to the countryside for the duration of the war.

After the war, his parents moved to Margate, a seaside resort that had been evacuated during the war. Seizing the opportunity, they started a rooming house, which in turn they traded up to purchase and run a small kosher hotel. (Coincidentally, it had been used at one point during the war to house the children of the Kindertransport.) Schwartzman is currently at work on a documentary about Margate.

Recalling his war-interrupted childhood, Schwartzman said, “I had an almost nonexistent formal education. I taught myself to read and write. What I liked was to draw. My parents didn’t know what to do with me. They wanted me to go into the hotel business. I wanted to draw. So I went to art school.”

Military service followed. Schwartzman was posted to the DMZ in Korea, where his chaplain was Rabbi (and later author) Chaim Potok. Many years later, Schwartzman asked Potok to write the introduction to his book, “Graven Images.”

After military service, Schwartzman found work as a graphic designer, first in television, then in advertising as a creative director. “My major account was Coca-Cola,” Schwartzman said, recalling that, “I got the Who to perform for our commercials.” From advertising he became design director for Terence Conran’s company, but managing people didn’t appeal to him so he went off on his own.

A friendship with famed Hollywood graphic designer Saul Bass, who was in London at the time working on his own feature film, “Phase IV,” led to Bass calling him to say: “How about you come to L.A. to be my design director.” Schwartzman demurred but Bass was so enthusiastic and insistent that Schwartzman finally agreed. Within three months, he and Isolde, his second wife (who is also his production partner and manages all the logistics of his projects), had moved to Los Angeles – this was 1978 — and they’ve been here ever since.

Schwartzman liked Los Angeles, but working for Bass? Not so much. “Once again, it was a mistake. I was running a studio, managing lots of people but not doing as much design.” After six months he resigned. Bass took him out for a drink, and asked: “What are you going to do now?” Bass told him that just that morning he’d got a call from this new organization, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, to do a 15-minute film for them. Bass had imagined they might do it together but as Schwartzman had quit, he’d turned them down. A few minutes later, Bass said, “You’re not doing anything now, why don’t you do it?” That was the start of “Genocide.”

What began as a short 15-minute film for the nascent museum took more than two years and involved research in archives in West Germany, France and at Yad Vashem in Israel. While in Jerusalem, Schwartzman was able to contact British historian Martin Gilbert, who also happened to be there. “Within months he wrote a fantastic script.” The Wiesenthal Center was able to get Elizabeth Taylor and Orson Welles to narrate. Schwartzman was able to get Elmer Bernstein to do the score.

They originally conceived of having multi-projectors telling the story – eventually 21 in all, coordinated by computers. When they finally screened the film, the response was so favorable that one of the viewers, Barry Manilow, suggested that if they put it together as being disseminated from one projector, then it could be submitted for the Oscars, which they did just in time – and won the best documentary feature Oscar for 1982.

Schwartzman also regaled me with an anecdote about Simon Wiesenthal, whom he got to know during the making of “Genocide.” Once when visiting Wiesenthal’s overstuffed office in Vienna, Schwartzman spied a card file bursting out of cabinet, marked “M.” Is that for Mengele? Schwartzman asked. “No,” Wiesenthal explained, “It’s for ‘Meshugges.’ You wouldn’t believe some of the letters I get!”

Schwartzman consulted on several more films for the Wiesenthal Center over the years, including “Echoes That Remain” (1991) and “Liberation”(1994).

Another incipient organization, the Skirball, asked Schwartzman to consult on the graphic design of their initial installation, which included Jewish timeline panels as well as a kaleidoscope room of Jewish images.”That was fun putting that together.” Since then, Schwartzman has also consulted on other exhibits for the Museum of Tolerance.

Since 1996, he has designed many key elements of the Academy Awards, including posters, trailers and programs both for the award ceremony as well as the Governor’s Ball. In 2010, the Cunard Line commissioned Schwartzman to paint two murals for their new “Queen Elizabeth” ocean liner.

Which brings us back to “Voices & Visions” exhibit. What was supposed to take four months, took 18. A lucky number in Jewish lore. Lucky, I would say, for “Voices & Visions” — for Schwartzman proved to be not just a master designer for the poster initiative but also a master among designers.

Daniel Day-Lewis stars as President Abraham Lincoln in “Lincoln.” Photo by David James, DreamWorks

Abraham Lincoln has been dead for almost 150 years, yet suddenly he’s everywhere. At the Skirball Cultural Center, you can see an original copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by Lincoln, amid an impressive array of founding American documents. The Huntington Library is host to two stunning and deeply engrossing Civil War exhibitions, “A Just Cause: Voices of the Civil War” and “A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the American Civil War.” And on screens everywhere, there’s Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln.”

After visiting the exhibitions, watching “Lincoln” was almost surreal – photographs I had just seen and documents I had just read came to life. Daniel Day-Lewis, for his part, seemed to embody Lincoln so completely at certain moments, it was as if he, too, were convinced he actually was Lincoln. At the same time, Spielberg’s Lincoln is portrayed in more personal and intimate terms than ever before on film: shown speaking to soldiers, to the war wounded, to family members and advisers; shown being both compassionate and passionate in his advocacy; and seeming something of a sly fox – always with a story, anecdote or joke at the ready to liven a room, make a point or close a deal.

After seeing the movie, I got to thinking about whether this Hollywood studio film, which was written and directed by Jewish-Americans (Tony Kushner and Spielberg, respectively), and which depicts the quintessential American as portrayed by Day-Lewis (whose mother is Jewish), is, in fact, a Jewish version of history in and of itself, a throwback to the days when Hollywood’s moguls, themselves Jewish-Americans, made movies about a seemingly non-Jewish America through the filter of their own very Jewish perspective.

Which raises the question: Has Spielberg given us a Jewish Lincoln? Or is it that Lincoln was “Jewish” in his temperament, values and actions: consumed by social justice in his fighting a war to abolish slavery; Moses-like in leading a people to freedom; talmudic in his use of disputation among a “team of rivals” to lead the nation; alternately morose and jovial (who doesn’t know that type?)? Add to all this that he died during Passover.

Set during the first four months of 1865, and centered on January, the month during which Lincoln lobbied the House of Representatives to pass the 13th Amendment, the film depicts a Lincoln more human, more flawed than we have ever seen on screen. Spielberg and Kushner contrive to show where Lincoln may have overstepped his authority, suspending habeas corpus and acting by executive fiat, yet the president is allowed to argue in his own defense the legality of his actions. This Lincoln is driven to incorporate the prohibition of slavery into the Constitution because he knows the legal importance of that document and because he fears what will follow if he doesn’t accomplish this before the war ends. We also see Lincoln’s failings – as a father, husband and friend, as well as in his anger when it flares.

Compassion, charity and the pursuit of  justice – these values, which we identify as Jewish values – are what inform the Spielberg-Kushner Lincoln: This is a president who seeks freedom for the slaves, who wants to heal the nation, is devoted to his young son, who visits the sick and mourns the dead. Sound familiar? While they might also be described as American values, even Christian values, it is understood that Spielberg and Kushner know them as the Jewish values of tikkun olam (repairing the world), tzedakah (charitable giving), bikur holim (visiting the sick) and gemilut hasadim (acts of lovingkindness).

“Joint Resolution Submitting 13th Amendment to the States, signed by Abraham Lincoln and Congress.” Abraham Lincoln Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

There is one more way that this “Lincoln” conforms to an “Old Hollywood” tradition of Jews using the movies to redefine American history: The film contains no mention of Jews or Judaism.

It is historical fact, however, that Lincoln was very much a friend of the Jews, and he was much loved by the Jewish community, both in his day and after his death. There is even some reason to believe that Lincoln himself had Jewish forebears.

In Illinois, Abraham Jonas, the first Jewish settler west of the Allegheny Mountains, served in the Illinois legislature with Lincoln and was, in Lincoln’s words, his “most valued friend.” Louis Dembitz Brandeis, a Jew from Kentucky, was a Lincoln delegate to the 1860 Republican Convention and was reportedly the first to vote to nominate Lincoln for president. As president, Lincoln appointed the first Jew to serve as a foreign consul. More important, Lincoln was the first and only president to revoke an official U.S. act of anti-Semitism, canceling Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s order barring Jewish peddlers from selling to Union troops. In Washington, one of Lincoln’s best friends was Isachar Zacharie, a Jewish doctor from England who treated him and became his friend. His photographer, Samuel Alschuler, was Jewish. And, according to the Rosewater Family papers donated to the American Jewish Archives, Edward Rosewater, while serving as a telegrapher in the War Department in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War, came to know Lincoln, who would often come to Rosewater to dictate and receive communications. It was Rosewater who dispatched the Emancipation Proclamation to the world.

Even more intriguing was the claim that Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, author of the Union Prayer Book and founder of Hebrew Union College, delivered in his funeral address for Lincoln in Cincinnati in 1865: “Brethren, the lamented Abraham Lincoln believed himself to be bone from our bone and flesh from our flesh. He supposed himself to be a descendant of Hebrew parentage. He said so in my presence. And, indeed, he preserved numerous features of the Hebrew race, both in countenance and character.”

Lincoln, really Jewish? There are some tantalizing clues. He was named Abraham, for his grandfather, Abraham, who died when Lincoln’s own father was quite young; his paternal great-great-grandfather was named Mordecai, as was his uncle. Their last name derives from the city from which they emigrated, Lincoln in England (many Jews adopted as family names the city they hailed from). The city of Lincoln, it is interesting to note, is famous for being home to one of England’s oldest and most important Jewish communities, as well as for saving its Jews during the 12th century Crusader riots. However, Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert denied that his family was of Jewish ancestry, saying that his father was merely jesting when he spoke with Rabbi Wise.

Still, it is not so hard to believe that Lincoln, who never professed a faith other than citing the Ten Commandments in Exodus, saw himself as a descendant of Jewish tradition, for where did his sense of justice and fairness come from if not from Mosaic law, or his belief that a mere amendment to the Constitution would do more than an army to win a war?

Although some historians have suggested that Lincoln suffered from depression, in Spielberg’s rendering he is not so much depressed as hobbled by the weight of the war, the war dead and the wounded veterans he has met; his wife (in a powerful performance by Sally Field), besotted by grief for a dead son and fearful of losing another to the war, both prods him and adds to his burden. All these factors contribute to Lincoln’s urgency to end slavery by passing the 13th Amendment before the war ends with the South. To do so, Lincoln uses every arrow in his quiver – cajoling, strong arming and making personal appeals to get the votes he needs. We see politics in action and understand that great change comes from great will – knowing when not to compromise – and always at some cost.

In press notes for the film, Kushner describes Spielberg and his decision to narrow the focus of the film to the passage of the 13th  Amendment: “We both felt it was incredibly timely, because in this day and age when so many people have lost faith in the idea of governance it’s a story that shows you can achieve miraculous, beautiful things through the democratic system. That month was also a lens though which you could see Lincoln with real clarity. It had all the ingredients that characterize him – his family life, his emotional life and his political genius.” Spielberg, who very much wanted to show both the leader and the man, describes Lincoln as someone “who was continually looking inside himself.”

The Lincoln of Spielberg’s film is very much in evidence in both the Skirball and Huntington exhibitions – which together include more important U.S. historical artifacts and documents on display than anywhere in the world outside Washington, D.C., and more than have ever been seen here before. The exhibitions include rough drafts and original copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment (ending slavery), as well as one of the largest displays of Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner’s haunting photos of the Civil War dead, and original materials relating to the end of the Civil War, the assassination of Lincoln and his funeral procession.

“Creating the United States,” at the Skirball through Feb. 17, illustrates the process by which the U.S. became a functioning democracy. We are treated to original publications by Benjamin Franklin from as early as 1750, suggesting a confederation of states; engravings by Paul Revere (yes, the silversmith midnight rider); and original correspondence by John Hancock, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (along with a facsimile of Jefferson’s signing desk). There before your eyes are the Stamp Tax, a tea box, an engraving depicting the Boston Tea Party and Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence.

A second section documents how the Constitution came into being, even how its iconic preamble, “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union,” was composed; a third section is devoted to the Bill of Rights; and a final fourth section highlights how the political conversation begun in these documents continues throughout the history of this country. It is humbling to stand before an original copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by Lincoln, as well as a copy of the 13th Amendment and the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote.

Reading these documents, it becomes “self-evident” that the argument over slavery began before there even was a United States (Franklin urged that the Republic not countenance the practice). And yet, slavery remained unresolved until Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, followed by the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865. Lincoln is shown as just part of a long line of leaders who fostered, interpreted and extended the meaning of that singular phrase, “all men are created equal.”

At the Huntington, the focus is more specifically on the Civil War, with two exhibits  featuring rare documents and photographs from the library’s collection: “A Just Cause: Voices of the Civil War,” which runs through Jan. 7, and “A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the American Civil War,” which will close Jan. 14.

“A Just Cause,” whose title is drawn from a letter Lincoln wrote to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, includes letters, diaries and other writings by Lincoln, Jefferson Davis and Frederick Douglass, as well as from Union and Confederate soldiers and their families. The Civil War was, one veteran said, “a battle of ideas punctuated by artillery.” The exhibition demonstrates the complexity of a conflict in which each side felt it was fighting with God on its side. The South felt that States should have the right to secede; to them the issue was not slavery but abolition. The North tried just as hard to say that slavery was not the issue, it was the South attempting to secede and their rebellion that they were fighting. Yet it was slavery that stood at the center of the rift, not just its morality, legality or its role in the economy of the South, but also whether a nation could be half-free and half-not. The Civil War was so devastating that after the first years, many people were no longer sure what they were fighting for – their states, their livelihoods, their way of life or the abolition of slavery. Passage of the 13th Amendment by Congress on Jan. 31, 1865, heralded the surrender of the Confederate troops a few months after.

“A Strange and Fearful Interest” includes rare photographs of the Civil War and, most hauntingly, of Civil War dead. Image after image shows slain soldiers abandoned like deadwood on the battleground. When these images were first shown in New York during the war, they drew huge crowds – and provoked editorials about how distanced the general population was becoming from the war.

Although Lincoln is not present in most of the images, his presence remains at the center of it all. To some, in both the North and South, he was seen as a tyrant, abusing executive privilege, bypassing Congress by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, violating the law, obsessed with ending slavery at any cost, including the deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers; in the South, the problem was not slavery, but abolition. To others, however, Lincoln was a great man, the moral force, the father of the nation.

Also among the Huntington’s artifacts are engravings that speak to the assassination of Lincoln, including a rare handbill offering a reward for information leading to the capture of the conspirators in his assassination, as well as photos of their hanging and pictures of the grieving crowds watching Lincoln’s funeral procession, from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Ill. These images offer a deep sense of Lincoln’s canonization and show how a figure so controversial in life became revered in death.

Taken together, the Lincoln that emerges from the film and these exhibitions is well read, deeply versed in the Old Testament, self-taught, someone who has both a deep belief in the legal system and the rule of law, so much so that he understands that a nation is made more robust by challenges and emendations to those laws. Lincoln tended to be a loner, prone to solitary contemplation, who nevertheless maintained deep friendships, was curious about people from all walks of life as well as all political bents and all races, and could be as gregarious as he was at times taciturn. He loved jokes and off-color stories and told them with great relish. He was, in all respects, a mensch.

No one should miss the chance of seeing, in tandem, these rare documents and photos telling our history, and the film, depicting a Lincoln who, if not our co-religionist, was most certainly a man with whom we share a common heritage.

For evidence, you need look no further than the prayerful words with which Lincoln concluded his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, just weeks after the passage of the 13th Amendment, days before the end of the Civil War and a mere few weeks before his own death:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is on screens everywhere. For more information on the Huntington and Skirball exhibitions, visit www.huntington.org and www.skirball.org.

On Nov. 1, Israel’s most popular and enduring pop icon, Rita Yahan-Farouz, known the world over simply as Rita, will appear at UCLA’s Royce Hall, along with a special band assembled for this tour. She will perform songs from throughout her career, in Hebrew, as well as songs from “My Joys” (HaSmachot Shelanu), her most recent hit album, which includes lyrics in Farsi. Middle Eastern flavor and gypsy rhythms have become surprise dance hits in Israel, as well as in Iran, where, although not permitted, her songs have found underground success  — achieving a musical bridge between two peoples that is a peaceful counterpoint to their countries’ respective leaders beating drums of war. In advance of her Los Angeles date, Rita spoke by phone from Israel about her life, career and the concert she will perform in L.A. The following is an edited version of that conversation.

Tom Teicholz: What brought your parents to Israel in 1970, at a time when life for Iranian Jews under the shah was relatively good?

Rita Yahan-Farouz: Actually, at that time we lived in Tehran in the same neighborhood as many of the Iranian army’s generals. Our parents told us not to tell anyone there that we were Jews.

TT: So you experienced discrimination then?

Rita: It was not so bad, but that was something they told us when we were little. We went to a Muslim school, and every morning they would say the Muslim prayers in class. One day, the teacher asked my sister, who was 14, to do the Muslim prayers, and she said she can’t do that. She was so embarrassed. When she came back home, she said that all the other girls in the class had looked at her like she fell out of the sky, because she didn’t know the prayers. She was crying. When my father came home after work at night, he asked what happened, and she told him. And he said, “Well, I think this is a good time to leave to Israel.”

TT: Growing up in Israel, did your family cling to Iranian traditions or culture? Were you raised speaking Farsi?

Rita: We didn’t do anything really.  Not on purpose. My mother had a great voice, and she used to sing Persian songs all the time at home when she was cooking, when she was working or when we had dinners with guests; after dinner she would sing for us. We didn’t study Persian. Exactly as much Persian as I knew when I left Iran when I was 8 years old is all the Persian I know. Maybe after working on this record, my Persian is better than it was before, but I can’t really speak or understand Persian as well as my father or mother.

TT: What were the circumstances that brought about the album “My Joys”?

Rita: I was in the middle of recording another album [in Hebrew]. Then I started to work with a band that is Moroccan and rock ’n’ roll, and I had a show with them [The Mind Church/Knesiyat Hasekhel]. … And I suddenly felt something — I don’t know how to explain it — but I knew that I had to stop the record I was making, and I had no doubt that I must do something completely different. I thought that I was going to do a world music record — something like taking songs from around the Middle East. But every time I went to look for something, I went to the box of records, the singles that my mother brought from Iran. Each one of those singles, I would say, “This is a great song.” Suddenly, after two, three months of working, I understood that all the songs that I chose are Persian, and each song means something to me; that I grew up on those songs. This is the soundtrack of my life, of my childhood, of my family.

TT: Even if these are the songs of your childhood, the way you sing them, and the music that surrounds the lyrics, is a wholly contemporary world-music interpretation.

Rita: I’m not a classic Persian singer. I studied classical music, but I sing pop and rock, and I’ve been out of Iran for so many years [that] this is a fusion of all that I am. I was lucky; all the musicians that I played with [on “My Joys”] are really artists who are geniuses with their instruments and often are touring abroad. My dream was to take this [sound] to the stage. Sometimes you can’t really translate it to the stage, but everyone who I dreamt of is with me. What is happening with all these musicians in the show is that we are like a gypsy band that is going from country to country, state to state. This experience  is like a world of different colors — or like the aroma or scent of something completely different — what people say is that the show lifts them up to a place of happiness; that you go back home much happier. I am very, very lucky to be there [with the audience] for this moment of celebration, of life.

TT: This album has become a success in Israel and also an underground success Iran. That must be very gratifying.

Rita: It’s amazing, you know. I get so many amazing e-mails from all over the world, from Iranians in Iran who say, “Thank you for showing our real culture to the world,” because nowadays we are only talking about bombs and dark, dark, things.

TT: It’s somewhat ironic that your musical career began in the Israeli army and now you are waging heavy peace.

Rita: (laughs) But even in my army [service] I was singing. This is the only weapon I know and the only real working weapon in the world. Music is responsible for so many changes and revolutions in the world.

TT: You have performed several times for Prime Minister Netanyahu. Has he spoken to you about your new songs?

Rita: No. We have not spoken of that.

TT: And would you perform in Iran if invited?

Rita: Of course! I would be so glad to do that! I will be thrilled to do that. And that time will arrive soon, I believe.

TT: Tell me about what we can expect of your L.A. concert.

Rita: Most of the concerts were for Israelis. This time the songs are from my entire repertoire in Hebrew, and those Persian songs fit in amazingly well together. I think it will be something really new for me and for my audience.

TT: L.A. has a large Iranian community and a very prominent Iranian-Jewish community. What are you hoping to share with them?

Rita: Happiness, joy and amazing, amazing music and celebration.

Portrait of Arthur Schnitzler, Atelier Madame d’Ora, 1915. Image courtesy of ONB/Vienna, 203.759-D

One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons features two men in conversation walking down a city street. Surrounding them are dollar signs — in every window, on every car, on everything. The caption reads: “Remember when everything was sex, sex, sex?”

This image came to mind the other afternoon at a dramatic reading by Annabelle Gurwitch and Sam Tsoutsouvas of “Arthur Schnitzler — Being Jewish,” a work based on Schnitzler’s own writings as culled by Lorenzo Bellettini, an Austrian scholar. The performance at USC was followed by a panel discussion about Schnitzler and his work, with the speakers including Bellettini, Peter Schnitzler — the documentarian and Schnitzler’s grandson — the Austrian journalist Philipp Blom and historian Sharon Gillerman from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. The event was moderated by USC historian Paul Lerner (a similar reading and panel had been held earlier in the week at the Getty) and was sponsored by the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies and the Jerome H. Loucheim School of Judaic Studies at USC.

Schnitzler, who lived from 1862 to 1931, was a playwright, novelist, essayist and diarist who spent most of his life in Vienna. His father, Johann Schnitzler, was a prominent Hungarian-Jewish throat doctor who treated some of Vienna’s best-known singers and actors; his mother was the daughter of a physician. Schnitzler also became a throat doctor and continued to practice, even after his writing career took center stage. When he was in his 40s, he married Olga Gussmann, a 21-year-old singer and actress. They had two children, but later separated, in part, according to scholars, because Schnitzler’s fame eclipsed hers. They remained friendly for the rest of his life, but separation agreed with Schnitzler; it allowed him to pursue his libertine lifestyle.

Schnitzler is most famous for his play “Reigen” (“Merry-Go-Round”), a series of vignettes of characters amorously linked to one another shown before and after sex, and more popularly known as “La Ronde,” for the film adaptation by Max Ophuls. It is a work that continues to inspire to this day — the most recent version being Fernando Meirelles 2011 film, “360.” Schnitzler’s works also inspired Tom Stoppard’s “Dalliance,” David Hare’s “The Blue Room” and Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.”

Perhaps no writer since Casanova has paid as much attention to, or has gotten as much literary mileage out of, his numerous sexual encounters. From the age of 17 up until two days before his death, Schnitzler kept a diary — some 8,000 pages, now collected in 10 volumes — that is notable for the casualness with which he describes his sexual encounters, as well as for his obsessiveness; for several years he kept an inventory of each of his orgasms, notated day by day.

In his day, Schnitzler was branded a pornographer and his works were banned, although he was later acclaimed and embraced as one of the most important writers of his era. He was part of a small circle of intellectual lights of fin-de-siècle Vienna that also included his friend Theodor Herzl (although Herzl’s Zionism seemed to get on Schnitzler’s nerves), and Sigmund Freud, who called Schnitzler his “doppelganger,” and who, Freud said, seemed to intuit in his characters the psychological truths Freud had worked so hard to discern. The group also included the essayist Karl Kraus, who was Schnitzler’s literary enemy, taking him to task for work Kraus adjudged decadent.

However, after World War I, some dismissed Schnitzler as passé. As the USC panelists made clear, the reasons for his rise and fall were several: He was praised as one of the first writers to use interior monologue and stream of consciousness to define character and attack the established order: In “Anatol,” he described an immature playboy; in “Lieutenant Gustl,” the rigid military code; in “Fräulein Elise,” a young aristocratic Jewish woman’s moral dilemma. He was an early master of the short story, and he captured the anomie of a middle and upper class with too much time on its hands. He was critiqued for his amoral characters, for the lack of political engagement in his work, for returning to the same themes over and over again — and he was attacked for being Jewish. Which brings us back to “Schnitzler — Being Jewish.”

The late 19th century in Austria brought forth not only the emancipation of the Jews, but also their rise to the highest levels of Austrian society and culture. It was Jewish families who built the Ringstrasse, filled the opera houses, and in many cases it was Jews who wrote the music, the plays, owned and wrote for the newspapers, magazines and literary journals, crowded the cafes, and who posed for and were patrons of the great artists. Vienna arguably had become the greatest city in the world for the highly successful Jewish population, the majority of whom felt themselves to be completely assimilated and could not imagine a turning back on their bright future ahead.

However, in 1897, Karl Lueger became mayor of Vienna. His Christian Social Party would employ no Jews, and he became among the first in the 20th century to exploit anti-Semitism as a political philosophy. Schnitzler could not have been more surprised. It was Lueger, Schnitzler is supposed to have said, who made Schnitzler realize he was a Jew. It was also Lueger who made the Viennese concerned about politics, a subject the Jewish middle and upper class had become comfortable enough to become disinterested in.

Schnitzler, who was in no way observant, therefore embraced his Jewish identity — he was critical of those, like the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who wanted to deny it, or those like Herzl who felt that fleeing to Palestine was a solution. Jewishness was, for Schnitzler, a consciousness, a racial identity divorced from its spiritual dimension, a quality that he sought to reveal in his characters. Yet, as being Jewish had increasing political consequences, Schnitzler’s attitude, like his work, came to appear old-fashioned. Sex had become a luxury. In Vienna, the topic was no longer sex, sex, sex, but politics, politics, politics.

Now, at the 150th anniversary of his birth, Schnitzler seems to be very much in the air — mentioned in the Getty’s Klimt exhibition and also making an appearance in LACMA’s Kubrick exhibition. When I asked the panel at USC why this was, their answers varied. Peter Schnitzler observed that his grandfather’s work comes in and out of style as society itself goes through periods that are more conservative or liberal.

“Art and death, betrayal and [sexual] liaisons are eternal themes,” said the journalist Blom, and all of them remain relevant to this day. Yet Schnitzler’s work, in which so many characters reach an unhappy end, also contains a warning that regardless of the material comforts and seeming social mobility of the Jews, anti-Semitism never fully goes out of fashion. And that a life without meaning is as eternally alluring, and inevitably unfulfilling, as a merry-go-round of sex, sex, sex.

On Nov. 1, the Los Angeles County of Museum of Art, (LACMA) in partnership with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (those wonderful folks who bring us the Oscars), will present the first U.S. retrospective of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, a project developed in partnership with the Kubrick estate, a show that originated at the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany, but will be seen here in a more expanded form.

Kubrick, who died in 1999 at 70, was — for those short of memory or Netflix membership — the Bronx-born filmmaker of such idiosyncratic and varied works as “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “Barry Lyndon,” “The Shining,” “Full Metal Jacket” and “Eyes Wide Shut.”

“By featuring this legendary filmmaker and his oeuvre in his first retrospective within the context of an art museum,” LACMA director and CEO Michael Govan says in the press materials, “Stanley Kubrick will reevaluate how we define the artist in the 21st century and simultaneously expand LACMA’s commitment to exploring the intersection of art and film.”

Well: Bravo! Rarely have I read a quote so loaded and so revealing. All you need to know is right there, and all I need do is unpack Govan’s quote — which I will do, in reverse order.

To wit: 1. “… expand LACMA’s commitment to exploring the intersection of art and film.” I take this as a phrase serving two masters: First, it acknowledges that the May Co. building at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, which has housed only a smattering of exhibitions and a bunch of LACMA offices, is about to become the home of the new Academy Museum, (although this show will be presented in LACMA’s Art of the Americas Building). So museum-wise, it is LACMA that will stand at the intersection of art and film. On a deeper level, as the encyclopedic art museum continues to search for its distinctive place in the local and national museum landscape, it is a canny move to tap into the region’s most famous industry, the movie biz. This is hardly the museum’s first move in that direction; LACMA exhibitions, such as the recent “Dalí : Painting & Film” and the “Tim Burton” show were also ventures into the intersections of high and popular art.

Which brings us to…

2. “Stanley Kubrick will reevaluate how we define the artist in the 21st century.” Museums, although most often slower moving than the rest of society, are being forced to rethink what they do, how they do it and who they do it for. So, for example, the Annenberg Space for Photography exhibits at its centerpiece digitally projected images — it is a gallery that is not really about what is on the walls, so much as what can capture the attention and imaginations, camera-roll style, of an Instagram-saturated generation. The Annenberg Space, like the downtown-L.A. Grammy Museum, which juxtaposes cultural artifacts and audiovisuals in curated shows, have been successful at breaking ground with regard to what a museum can do.

Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.” Photos © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

By contrast, Los Angeles’ veteran Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), under the directorship of Jeffrey Deitch, has, in its attempt to redefine art as fashion and to outsource its curatorial function, been roundly criticized (and deservedly so) for abandoning its mission and its legacy as the place for visionary, large-scale art historical shows that force us to think — and rethink —  the work of contemporary artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Arshile Gorky, among others.

Finally, 3. “By featuring this legendary filmmaker and his oeuvre…” You know any time the word French word “oeuvre” (body of work) is used, that the other French term “auteur” (literally, author) is not far behind. And if Kubrick is a “legendary filmmaker,” what exactly is his legend?

Glad you asked: Legend has it that Kubrick, a poor student, became absorbed by photography as a teenager, selling his first photo to Look magazine at the age of 16 and  eventually becoming a staff photographer there. One of his friends from high school, Alex Singer, was working in the offices of the newsreel “March of Time,” and he helped Kubrick get his first directing assignment, “Day of the Fight,” about a boxer. Kubrick shot, edited and did almost all the work on the film, thereby garnering firsthand a wide education on every facet of filmmaking.

Kubrick’s Hollywood career took off with a pair of Kirk Douglas dramas, “Paths of Glory” and “Spartacus,” which he followed with two satirical works starring Peter Sellers, “Lolita” and “Dr. Strangelove.” In those early four films, the actors were the stars. By contrast, though his “A Clockwork Orange” made Malcolm McDowell a star, it was Kubrick who got top billing for the film.

Lee Ermey in “Full Metal Jacket.”

With the release of “2001: A Space Odyssey” in 1968, Kubrick’s use of music, his attention to technical details, and the ambition and talent of what went on the screen made the announcement loud and clear (and at great length) that Kubrick had become his films’ star. From then on, (with the possible exception of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” in 1980), audiences went to see a Kubrick film, not to see who was in it.

The exhibition at LACMA promises to reveal the influences and references Kubrick found as inspiration, as well as what archival material, photographs, props, costumes and annotated scripts he used for his technical and artistic innovations.

In his later years, Kubrick became obsessed with controlling every aspect of production, and his research leading up to a project — his perfectionism and his inventive use of special effects, lighting and camera movement — would impact the work of a generation of filmmakers to follow and would add to the cult-like reverence for his work. It would also contribute to the eventual stagnation of his career — he rarely left England and almost as rarely left his home. He spent years on projects that he later abandoned. The result was his work suffered, as evidenced by the fiasco that was his final film, the Arthur Schnitzler-inspired, Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman vehicle, “Eyes Wide Shut.”

Malcolm McDowell in “A Clockwork Orange.”

Film aficionados see Kubrick as a genius. But he was also a Jewish boy from the Bronx who became sealed away from the world by a lens, controlling his narratives on an editing table. Neither he nor his parents were in any way Jewishly observant, but Kubrick, in England, loved to surround himself with Jewish friends, screenwriters and colleagues. His acknowledged great influence as a director was Max Ophuls, whose camera movements he adopted (Ophuls, in turn, gave credit for his use of reverse-dolly shots to director Anatole Litvak — all Jewish directors).

Late in life, Kubrick spent years on a Holocaust-inspired project called “Aryan Papers” (which I had heard was based, in part, on Louis Begley’s “Wartime Lies”), immersing himself in research on the Shoah. There are many apocryphal accounts of why he abandoned this undertaking, but perhaps it was just that the film would have required Kubrick to go to a place that he could not, or would not.

The Kubrick retrospective at LACMA will, no doubt, give each of us much to consider, not only in terms of a career and legacy, but also in helping us to examine whether the ephemera of Kubrick’s life’s work can tell us what’s truly great about Stanley Kubrick.

A version of this article appeared in print.

Sonakinatography Compositition 16, 1987. Plaka on Mylar. Image courtesy the artist. Photograph by Joshua White.

Part of the pleasure of seeing a survey show of contemporary art, such as the summer show “Made in L.A. 2012,” currently at the Hammer Museum, lies in the joy of discovery. There may be artists whose works you recognize, but the WOW! of finding an artist you never knew existed but whose work is fully realized, of-the-moment yet timeless and blows you away, well that is worth the price of admission. And that is what I experienced upon seeing the work of Channa Horwitz.

Imagine my further surprise to discover that Horwitz is, at 80, the oldest artist in the show and that her studio is nearby, in West L.A.

At first blush, Horwitz’s work featured in “Made in L.A. 2012” appears to be an intense, even compulsive exploration of a grid taken to the nth degree, forming large-scale patterns that appear both naturalistic (like a diagram of DNA) or man-made (computer switches or circuits) and suggest a mathematical algorithm. The images are both minimalist and conceptual, yet clearly the product of intense craft and artistry.  Horwitz, as I learned during a recent visit to her studio, sees her works as exercises in logic, explorations of questions that have arisen out of her past work, as well as her artistic history, and out of the graph paper that she uses.

Horwitz was born in Los Angeles. Her grandfather was Orthodox, although her grandmother did not keep a kosher home. Her parents rebelled against their parents’ strictures, embracing the Jazz Age and dancing the Charleston. However by the time they were raising Horwitz, their lives had become conventional: Her father was an appliance repairman, and her mother sold bread.

From an early age, Horwitz wanted to be an artist, something so foreign to her parents, that she said, “they didn’t know where I came from. No idea.” Life drawing was her passion, and, in 1950, she enrolled in the Art Center, a commercial-art school, that was then located on Third Street (today it is the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena). Horwitz recalled her greatest academic training as being a class on “the structure of a shadow.”

“How many people have had a class like that?” she said.  However, Horwitz got married and left the school.  As she put it, “I left art.” For the rest of the decade, she stayed home and raised her three children, until she could afford to purchase oil paint and start painting again.

In 1960, she enrolled in Cal State Northridge’s art program, which she described as “a phenomenal experience,” largely due to one teacher, artist Connor Everts. Everts was “an exciting man,” Horwitz said, not so much as an art teacher, but because he taught her “to climb mountains. Literally.” By 1963, she discovered that she “no longer wanted to answer the teacher’s problems. I wanted to create my own.” When told she could not use two motifs in a single painting, she said, “Why not?” and went on to create a painting with motifs of deep space and flatness. “I became very excited about pursuing the questions in painting flat.” She left the Northridge program.

In 1968, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art invited submissions for a prestigious “Experiments in Art and Technology” program pairing artists with scientists and engineers. Horwitz’s application included notations for a proposed sculpture called “Suspension of Vertical Beams.” As Horwitz recalled, “I was suggesting that eight beams be controlled by magnetism; that they would be lightweight beams with a top and cap made of metal, and that they would start out at a base and move to the mid position between the top and the bottom and then each one move according to a plan. But not all at the same time. Each of the eight beams were programmed individually.” Her submission was initially accepted for the exhibition, but it was the only piece in the show that was never built. To this day, Horwitz sees it as a lost opportunity for the world of art and for science and technology, as her project prefigured mag-lev trains. “Actually, if they had followed me then and taken me dead seriously, we would have had a bullet train,” she said.

Channa Horwitz. Photo by Stephanie Keenan

That all the other artists in the show were men, caused an outrage. A feminist movement sprouted up around Horwitz; she joined it. This act changed how she felt about other female artists and about being an artist herself. Beforehand, Horwitz freely admitted, “I disliked all women artists.” However, getting to know some of her contemporaries, including June Wayne, was, Horwitz said, “so influential in my life. She taught me how to be an artist, a woman artist that’s equal to a man. We both have brains. The only thing that the women didn’t have was confidence and belief in ourselves.”

In 1969, Horwitz divorced her first husband, remarried and moved to a house in Hidden Hills. For much of the next four decades, Horwitz remained hidden there, pursuing her art.

“I retreated,” she said. “I had so many questions to ask. And such an incredibly beautiful place to live. What an incredible studio!”

Horwitz said that part of the reason she cut herself off was a “lack of trust in myself.” Calling herself a “thief,” she said that seeing others’ work would be too strong an influence. “I just had to have blinders.” The downside was the loneliness.

“With the great freedom to sit on the top of my hill and watch the birds in the thermals it was also lonely. I would create something in the studio and jump for joy, literally jump in the studio and go YIPE! YIPE!” She once got so excited about a finished work that she dragged the female letter carrier in to see it. They became friends.

Not that the art world was totally ignorant of Horwitz; her conceptual pieces were highly regarded, and intermittently her work was included in exhibitions. A little more than five years ago, a gallery owner in Berlin fell in love with Horwitz’s work, and he organized exhibitions, visits, talks, leading the art world to reacquaint itself with Horwitz. Michael Solway, who had a gallery in Chinatown, exhibited her here (Solway has since closed his gallery).

For her part, Horwitz said she is less wary of the art world now. “I’m not interested in anything that’s happening out there.”

When “Pacific Standard Time” was being organized, she was asked to revisit some of her earlier pieces, which she did gladly, feeling that in her old work there was plenty of inspiration for the new. At 80, she said she finds the trip from bed to studio somewhat more treacherous, but once there, her passion for making art is undiminished.

“I’m interested in still pursuing my questions,” she said.

Anne Ellegood, Hammer senior curator, first saw Horwitz’s work at Solway several years ago. “I was very struck by the work for its incredible detail and beauty coupled with conceptual rigor,” Ellegood explained recently. “Channa happened to be there, so we spoke about her work, and I learned that she lives very close to the Hammer. She gave me her number, and soon thereafter I called her and we scheduled a studio visit. I have since been to her studio several times. I encouraged the other curators of ‘Made in L.A.’ to also visit Channa in her studio, and some of us went together. We then decided unanimously to invite her to be in the biennial.”

Horwitz said she was happy to be included in the show, but she is still skeptical about her reception. “No one is going to give me a retrospective,” she said. Perhaps the response should be the same as what Horwitz once said to her art professor so many years ago: “Why not?”

Gustav Klimt is best known for his famous golden paintings, portraits of society women adorned in jewels and cloaked in gold, and for the flat two-dimensionality of his work that led many to declare it superficial and merely decorative. The Getty exhibition “Gustav Klimt: The Magic of Line” puts a lie to that characterization, demonstrating how Klimt’s work conveys complex emotions and even allegorical ideals.

The Getty’s show features more than 100 drawings from throughout the Austrian painter’s career — a few from the Getty’s own collection, but the majority on loan from the Albertina Museum in Vienna in conjunction with the celebration of the 150th anniversary of Klimt’s birth. The exhibition runs until Sept. 23.

“I thought I knew Klimt, but I didn’t,” said Marian Bisanz-Prakken, curator at the Albertina and the reigning expert on Klimt drawings, discussing what surprised her most about the exhibition. “He was an artist who goes into the elemental situations of life. The cycle of life is presented in a modern approach, a new approach. He brings his subjects to life, and it touches the viewer with immediacy.”

The exhibition is chronological and reveals Klimt’s early talent at rendering scenes and people with a facility many artists never achieve. As an adult, Klimt drew from live models almost daily. It is amazing to see how he used his natural gifts, at first academically and then with precision, and as he matured, how his drawings became the laboratory where he studied human perspective and tested different approaches for his large-scale portraits. It was also where he expressed the inner yearnings of his subjects.

Klimt had a budding career of large public commissions, such as the frieze to honor Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (a facsimile of which has been installed at the Getty for this exhibition), and as president of the Vienna Secession arts movement he had a great say in the décor of its building headquarters. However, when commissioned to create paintings for the University of Vienna’s Great Hall — the university was hoping for historic, allegorical or heroic depictions of law and medicine, for example — Klimt, who had come to believe that true progress for mankind was a chimera and that man was destined to an endless cycle of suffering, war and death, painted works of such nihilism that the university rejected them. In response, Klimt withdrew from public engagement and turned his focus increasingly to portraits.

The Getty exhibition is called “the magic of line” because of Klimt’s uncanny ability to render his models as living, breathing creatures while conveying emotion and, in his later work, to explore the vanishing point where desire, eroticism and dreams meet.

Picasso’s late work is well known for its erotic content, but it appears in his signature style — it is more about content than form. In Klimt’s case, his late drawings, intensely intimate and erotic, represent a new mode of interpretation — his lines change, they become choppy, frenzied almost — as if Klimt is trying to capture a chrysalis in the process of transformation.

Bisanz-Prakken spoke of Klimt’s “respect for Eros,” while Klimt, who rarely commented on his work, did favor the epigram “Nudas Veritas” — in nakedness is found truth. This begs the question: What truth was Klimt actually looking to find in his drawings of women floating, in a dream state, or lost in the throes of autoeroticism? Though there is no sure answer, there are clues to be found in the particular milieu of the society that surrounded Klimt, his subjects and patrons in Vienna at the start of the 20th century.

In the mid-19th century, Vienna had torn down its medieval city walls and built the Ringstrasse, a circular road that centralized the city’s governmental structures along with its cultural institutions and the homes of its wealthiest citizens. Largely financed by Jewish families, the Ringstrasse also became a symbol of the Jewish middle and upper-middle classes’ arrival in Austrian society. By the turn of the century, Vienna was in many respects a city dominated by highly cultured, highly assimilated Jews in most walks of life. This was the Vienna of Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Arthur Schnitzler, of Karl Kraus and Theodor Herzl.

Klimt was not Jewish, but many of his patrons were (among them Wittgenstein’s sister), as were his portrait subjects and models, some of who were believed to also be his lovers. As Klimt drew his highly intimate works of women in an erotic dream state, Freud was treating women from the same social milieu for hysteria and developing psychoanalysis from the interpretation of their dreams; while Schnitzler, with whom Freud corresponded, was writing his stories of sexual dalliances known as “Reigen,” or more popularly as the basis for the Max Ophuls film “La Ronde.” Schnitzler’s novella about an erotic dream state, “Traumnovelle,” would be the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.”

Perhaps the newly wealthy Viennese Jewish upper-middle class experienced too much freedom in which to explore sex, drugs (Freud was a cocaine evangelist) and Wagnerian music. Regardless, Klimt’s drawings are themselves indications and portents of the ferment Vienna would yield.

In Klimt’s drawing, these dark-haired Jewesses are the objects of desire, the temptresses, but they are also “the other.” They are desired and often beyond reach. The sexual desires, actual and fantasized, among Vienna’s Jews, whom Schnitzler chronicled and Freud made a science of, would also be cause for critics such as Karl Kraus to call the age corrupt and without morals. Wittgenstein would champion a movement of “pure” philosophy. This backlash against the rising Jewish middle class in Vienna would also find expression in virulent anti-Semitism.

Freud would forever recall his father being called “Dirty Jew” and having his hat knocked off his head, and Herzl, for his part, would conclude that anti-Semitism was so entrenched, so impossible to combat, that the only solution was to found a Jewish state.

At the same time, the desire for truth and beauty found in nature and the healthy expression of sex, as idealized in Klimt’s work, would also find its most perverted expression in the tenets of Nazi ideology as promulgated by that Austrian would-be painter, Adolf Hitler. Moreover, the same pseudoscience underlying Hitler’s veneration of nature would be used to condemn Jews as “unclean” and characterize the Jewish people as demonic.

Freud is often cited as saying, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” but for Klimt, a drawing was more than a collection of lines — it was the portrait of his age’s unconscious yearnings and of a Jewish society that the 20th century would mark as indelibly as the magic of a line on a paper.