The Russian Jewish and Soviet painter, theatrical designer, and sculptor Natan Altman was born in Vinnitsa (today, Vinnytsya, Ukraine). He studied in Odessa from 1903 to 1907 and moved to Paris in 1910, before returning to Russia. Like his contemporaries Marc Chagall and El Lissitzky, the young Altman was influenced by cubism and other emerging postrealist and postimpressionist approaches and generally saw himself as part of the general Russian-European art scene. Yet during World War I and the early years of the Russian Revolution, Altman also briefly grew interested in traditional East European Jewish folk art and in the possibility of a modernist Jewish national art. In those years, he produced his most famous sculpture, entitled Head of a Young Jew (Self-Portrait); an emblem in the Jewish folk style for the Hebraist youth publishing house Ahinoar; and abstract constructivist set designs for the burgeoning modernist Yiddish theater. Altman lived abroad from 1928 to 1935, and when he returned to the Soviet Union, he agreed to work in the then-required style of socialist realism.
If Not, Not is one of Kitaj’s best-known works. Inspired by T. S. Eliot’s poem, "The Waste Land" (the poet is depicted at bottom left), it portrays a chaotic landscape, storm-swept and strewn with…
This limestone model of a shrine, around 8 inches wide, 10 inches long, and 14 inches high (20 cm × 25 cm × 35 cm), was painted red. The façade features a triple-recessed door frame, above which is a…
Aleksander Lesser’s most famous painting is The Funeral of the Five Victims, which depicts the public funeral of five men shot by the Russian military on March 2, 1861 during a rally calling for…