Archie Rand, the Jewish Michelangelo?

I often joke that I wish I could become Catholic just for the art. When visiting the Florence Baptistry or St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, I want to feel that the art is mine—that Michelangelo, Fra Angelico, and I are landslayt. But I have never experienced a Jewish space as majestic as those.

Does anything come close? Perhaps the Brooklyn Sephardi synagogue B’nai Yosef, where the American Jewish artist Archie Rand, now seventy-three, covered some 13,000 (or 18,000, depending on who’s counting) square feet of walls with murals. Indeed, having followed Rand’s work closely for twenty years, I believe his serial paintings represent one of Jewish art history’s most unique and ambitious bodies of work, and that synagogue is the nearest thing I know to a Jewish Sistine Chapel. OK, maybe the murals there are not quite so marvelous as the Sistine frescoes, but they’re also more than double the scale, and Rand was eight years younger than Michelangelo was, twenty-five rather than thirty-three. Plus he got it done faster, taking three years starting in 1974, instead of Michelangelo’s four.

Why so many numbers? For one thing, it seems that Rand himself hardly meets a Jewish number over which he does not obsess. One series offers one picture per commandment in the Torah—613 in all. Another series of eighteen responds to the number of blessings in the Shemoneh Esrei, or amidah, prayer. The 39 forbidden Sabbath labors? Rand has done that too. The same goes for a series on sixty paintings from the Bible, the seven days of creation, and more.