Gershom Scholem

The historian who made Kabbalah a field. Every artist in this wing after 1941 who read anything read him — Kiefer by name, Kitaj by name, and most of the rest at one remove.

⭐⭐ THE SUPPLY LINE. It is not an accident that Kabbalah enters modern art in force after Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) made it legible in English and German. ⚠ Scholem himself was unimpressed by most of what artists did with it, which is worth knowing before quoting him in support of any of it.