Boris Schatz, the Bulgarian sculptor who believed that Jews could invent a Jewish art in Palestine and founded the Bezalel School in Jerusalem in 1906 to prove it, died in Denver, Colorado, in 1932. He was on yet another of his fund-raising drives, traveling around the United States with a trailerload of Bezalel arts and crafts, hoping to raise enough money to reopen the school, which had closed its doors in 1929 after twenty-three very checkered years. (The Bezalel Academy of today is the third institution to bear that name.) Reading about Schatz in the impressive catalogue that the Jewish Museum published in 1983 to accompany an exhibition devoted to the history of the Bezalel School, one does not exactly grow fond of the man. His own work is not lovable or even likable. There are a few images of pious Jews done in low relief that could perhaps be called tolerable, but for the most part his sculpture and painting is intolerable—comatose histrionics. His personality is not particularly lovable, either. He was a bombastic egotist (it shows in the work), careless of people in the way that people who get the job done often are. But, having said that, I hasten to add that without his iron egotist’s will, Schatz would never have become involved in the mission impossible of bringing Jewish art culture to a Palestine where Jews wondered where their next meal was coming from—a local newspaper dismissed the school as “a pathetic factory of