As well as reflecting Metzger’s increasingly anti-nuclear sentiment, he also suggested that the Table series represented ‘a connection to the tablet of Moses’. He recalled, ‘I was raised in a Jewish Orthodox environment, so there was a fascinating clash in my youth between art and the Jewish insistence on the prohibition on images. This is at the centre of my work: on the one hand, opening up to the world and, on the other, closing off from it. I arrived in Britain as a refugee when I was 12 years old, so it never came to the point of choosing between art and tradition because, by the time I would have been faced with such choices, I had already left my hometown and gone in a completely new direction.’ Metzger, also spoke of ‘grappling for years with the central question: how might a Jewish person make art?
Table may also have been included in Metzger’s 1960 Temple Gallery retrospective.
