Nine cylinders made for Arnold's first one-person show, "B'reshit: Jewish Traditions of Creation," at Bennett Galleries in 1989. The potter Peter Rose threw them; at the leather-hard stage Arnold carved a shallow grid into each and incised a different traditional text into the squares. The form came from a cuneiform cylinder he had seen at the Jewish Museum in New York, and from Pirke Avot: "Turn it, and turn it, for everything is in it."
"The Awesome Name," carved with a kabbalistic meditation that pairs the letter aleph with each letter of the Name of God in every combination of vowels, was acquired by the Knoxville Museum of Art in 2016, on a base by Ernie Gross. A fragment of the eighth cylinder, which broke in the kiln, was given to Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz in Jerusalem, whose writing was a major influence on Arnold. The cylinder broke because its text had been placed wrongly; the incorrect part broke away in the firing.
The text
אי או אה
The letter aleph joined to each letter of the four-letter Name, each pair pronounced with every combination of vowels; the first portion of a meditation that would take about seven hours to complete.
Incised in the grid of "The Awesome Name"
Studio of Arnold Schwarzbart
Arnold Schwarzbart ז״ל · 1942 – 2015 · Knoxville, Tennessee