By David Isaacson, son of Joel Isaacson
Joel Isaacson, artist and Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of Michigan, died at age 95 in Berkeley, California. He is survived by his wife, Helen, his children David (Ann Manikas) and Elisa (Michael Butler), and his grandchildren Chaityn, Jack, and Jacob.
Joel, responding to a challenge from NPR, once wrote a six-word autobiography: “Born during Depression. Learned a lot.” Rooted in a decade characterized by privation and frugality, Joel also saw his life as shaped by the social reforms and postwar opportunities available to the many (though, as he was very much aware, not to all) who were able to take advantage of social benefits like public education and the GI Bill. He was born in 1930 in Brooklyn, New York, to William and Ann (Schwartz) Isaacson. Bill had emigrated from Bacau, Romania, and Ann’s parents from Ungvar, Hungary (now Uzhorod, Ukraine), part of the great late-19th/early-20th century Jewish migration from hostile conditions in Europe. Joel grew up in Borough Park and Flatbush and attended PS 103, PS 134, and Montauk Jr. High School before following his brother Morty to Brooklyn Tech High School.
From there, he went to Brooklyn College where, at a meeting of the college newspaper—the Brooklyn Vanguard—he was struck by the bright red lipstick worn by a fellow student journalist, Helen Goldberg. The two of them would share a formative experience at the Vanguard when the college’s president, Harry Gideonse, banned the paper from campus. (It was the height of the Red Scare on American campuses, and the Vanguard had published an editorial critical of Gideonse for revoking a professor’s appointment as department chair.) Joel, Helen, and the rest of the staff continued publishing the paper off-campus, under the name Draugnav (Vanguard spelled backwards); as a result, they were placed on academic probation.
At Brooklyn, a chance suggestion by a fellow student who was admiring his desktop doodles led Joel to the Design Department. That department was at a historic juncture, with older Bauhaus-influenced faculty who stressed a “form follows function” approach joined by a new breed, the Abstract Expressionists, who were shifting the eyes of the Western art world to New York. Joel’s studies with Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt, Jimmy Ernst, Burgoyne Diller, Stanley William Hayter, Robert J. Wolff, and Alfred Russell would forever influence his art and art history careers.
After Brooklyn College, Joel—following a harrowing time in basic training that he said affected his sleep patterns ever after—served for two years in the Army’s Exhibit Unit at Fort Myer in Virginia. It was during this time that he and Helen married; they jokingly said it was so Joel could get out of the barracks and into married servicemen’s housing. Their marriage lasted 72 years.
Joel and Helen then spent a year in London, where Joel studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, with faculty including Anthony Gross and Martin Froy—the first of many extended trips abroad for research and art. After returning to the States, the Isaacsons headed to Oberlin, Ohio, where Joel received his master’s degree in painting, learning from a faculty that included Paul Arnold, Irving Marcus, and Forbes Whiteside. It was an extraordinary time at the small midwestern college: Joel and Helen saw Pete Seeger when he sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” for the first time in public, and attended a campus speech by Martin Luther King Jr.
Their next move was inspired by a letter from old classmate Marvin Friedman, informing them that he and fellow Brooklyn alumnae Philip and Gladys Leider had “discovered the Garden of Eden” in San Francisco. Joel and Helen got into their Buick and, at the height of the Beat era, moved to North Beach in San Francisco. When Joel became frustrated with his painting, he enrolled in the University of California Berkeley Art History Department, where he got his PhD, writing his dissertation on the early work of Claude Monet. Joel always considered his free college education—first in the free New York City college system, then with the GI Bill that funded his years at Oberlin, and finally in the (then) free University of California system—as a magnificent ideal that has since been lost in this country.
During their California years, Joel and Helen’s children Elisa and David were born, and in 1964 they all moved to Ann Arbor, where Joel had been hired by then-chair Marvin Eisenberg to join the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan. Joel would go on to a distinguished career as an expert in late-19th century French painting. The scholar Kathy Adler, in a 2016 issue of Burlington Magazine, wrote of the 1980s and 1990s: “It was then that such scholars as Joel Isaacson, Robert Herbert, T.J. Clark and John House rewrote the history of Impressionism.” Joel published two books on Claude Monet, exhibition catalogues on Édouard Manet and on “The Crisis of Impressionism,” and numerous articles and book chapters. He served, during his tenure, as chair of his department and as a board member of the College Art Association, and, among other things, was known for the artist’s eye that he brought to the study of art history.
Joel had been at the University of Michigan for just one year when, inspired by the writings of I.F. Stone, he determined to take action against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He and ten other faculty and graduate students (including William Gamson, Frithjof Bergmann, Richard Mann, and Julien Gendell) met to plan a one-day strike on campus, and Joel—a lecturer at the time, with no job security—went to the department chair to tell him his plan. Eisenberg consented, a hallmark of the supportive relationship that lasted until Eisenberg died. Other faculty, including Marshall Sahlins, got involved and—as Joel put it—suggested “that instead of walking out, we should teach in.” Thus, the concept of the Vietnam Teach-In was born. Joel participated in that first event, which went all night on March 24, 1965; it was soon followed by teach-ins at Columbia, Wisconsin, Penn, and more, spurring a wave of campus activism and creating awareness of the situation in Vietnam, the Tonkin Bay Resolution, and bombings, all of which were not well understood at that time by the public.
After 31 years in Ann Arbor, Joel and Helen retired back to California. Joel returned to his former avocation as a full-time artist. He had two solo shows in Berkeley. The first of these was entitled “Walls” and featured paintings of contested walls and fences: at Guantanamo, at the U.S. border, and in Israel and Palestine. The second exhibition was “Bark,” made up of large-scale, detailed drawings of tree trunks. His artworks can be found at isaacsonpaintings.com.
At the age of 90, in 2021, Joel made a final return to art history, publishing an article on Monet’s “Le Boulevard des Capucines en Carnival” in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. Coincidentally, the same issue had an article by another nonagenarian graduate of Brooklyn Tech High School: Theodore Reff.
In Joel’s final years, he found sustenance in living with Helen, talking to his children, reading the many periodicals he subscribed to (he and Helen were among the original subscribers to The New York Review of Books), watching the Warriors and the 49ers, keeping up with friends and former students, and supporting his favorite organizations and politicians (including fellow Brooklyn College attendee Bernie Sanders)—reflecting his lifelong sense of justice and determination not to look away. He got great pleasure from seeing his beloved grandchildren spread their wings as adults.
In lieu of flowers, you may make a donation to the Middle East Children's Alliance at mecaforpeace.org.
