John the Baptist

Henryk (Hanokh) Barcinski

1919

Linocut of man in profile with short beard, long hair, stern expression and downward gaze angled to his left.
The young Jewish intellectuals of Barcinski’s generation were interested in pushing boundaries, including by employing Christian imagery, as Barcinski did in this portrait of John the Baptist. The American Yiddish poet Moyshe Leyb Halperin (1886–1932), for example, frequently referred to Jesus in his poems, and in the nineteenth century and at the turn of the twentieth, various Jewish artists, such as Mark Antokolsky, Maurycy Gottlieb, Max Liebermann, Samuel Hirszenberg, Moses Ezekiel, and Ephraim Moses Lilien, depicted Jesus in a range of approaches and representations.

Credits

Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 8.

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Creator Bio

Henryk (Hanokh) Barcinski

1896–ca. 1941

Henryk Barcinski was a Polish-born painter and graphic illustrator who worked in the expressionist manner. He studied in Lódz, Warsaw, and Dresden and lived in Berlin from 1927 to 1934, when he returned to Lódz. He was associated with the Yung-yidish group from 1919 to 1921. His linocut of John the Baptist is representative of the group’s rebellion against the conventions of Jewish piety and respectability. He died in the Tomaszów Mazowiecki ghetto during World War II.

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