Temple Emanuel Sanctuary Wall (Grand Rapids, Michigan)

Lucienne Bloch

1953

Photograph of interior view of a synagogue with rows of chairs facing a central platform featuring wall mural of painted panels with crowns, suns, Hebrew lettering, and spirals.
Lucienne Bloch’s thousand-square-foot mural covers the entire rear wall of Temple Emanuel, the building of which was designed by Erich Mendelssohn. Painted on lightweight wood panels in a palette favoring golden yellow, orange, and brown, the mural includes both abstract and representational motifs that include traditional biblical imagery such as wheat, grape vines, and crowns. Some of the panels with abstract designs represent the artist’s interpretation of the opening words of Genesis: the creation of light, heaven, and earth.

Credits

Courtesy Temple Emanuel, Grand Rapids, MI. Photo: Dave Kagan, Sensitography.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 9.

Engage with this Source

Creator Bio

Lucienne Bloch

1909–1999

Lucienne Bloch was a Swiss-born artist who spent the majority of her career working in the United States. Bloch is often noted for her relationship with the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, whose work inspired her own diverse creative practices, from murals to photography to sculpture. Bloch was born in Geneva, the daughter of the composer Ernest Bloch. She first studied sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and then spent a year working in glass at the Leerdam Glassworks in Amsterdam. During an exhibition of her work in New York in 1931, Bloch met Rivera, whose controversial Rockefeller mural she photographed, secretly, before it was destroyed. Her friendship with Kahlo and Rivera inspired her foray into mural painting, and Bloch became a talented muralist in her own right. Among her many impressive works is a thousand-square-foot mural at Temple Emanuel in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

You may also like

The Pittsburgh Platform

In view of the wide divergence of opinion and of the conflicting ideas prevailing in Judaism today, we, as representatives of Reform Judaism in America, in continuation of the work begun at…
View Source
Photograph of room with rows of pews, curtains on right-hand wall, and columned archway on back wall.
Tooltip info icon

Scuola Levantina, Venice

The Scuola Levantina (Levantine Synagogue), a Sephardic synagogue built in 1541, was restored in the late seventeenth century. The bimah is thought to have been carved by Andrea Brustolon, famed for…
View Source