The expressionist painter Chaim Soutine was born in Smilovits (now Smilavičy, Belarus), into an impoverished and traditional religious family. He fled his family and hometown in 1909 and studied painting, first in Minsk and later in Vilna. In 1913, he left for Paris, where he lived the remainder of his life, except for the years 1940 to 1943, which he spent in the French countryside, hiding from the Nazis. Although his work was never explicitly Jewish in terms of its subject matter, critics always viewed him as a representative Jewish artist, in part because of the emotional intensity of his style and in part because he associated with other East European Jewish artists who settled in Paris.
Chaim Soutine’s self-portrait is both an homage to art history and a critique of it. There was a long tradition of artists painting themselves facing an easel, holding a palette and paint brushes. But…
This Torah ark curtain from Venice was made by Simḥah, the wife of Menachem Levi Meshuallami, a member of a prominent family in the Venice Ghetto. It is embroidered in silk and silk-metallic thread…
This photograph is one of a series of street photographs that Paul Strand took in 1916, using a camera outfitted with a false lens pointed away from what was being photographed. This enabled him to…