Leopold Krakauer was born in Vienna, where he trained as an architect. He made aliyah in 1924. While he earned his living as an architect, building several prominent buildings in the internationalist style, he was also a gifted draftsman and produced a body of sober drawings of the Jerusalem landscape, especially thistles and olive trees, with gnarled trunks often suggesting human bodies in torment.
The rough-hewn sculptures that Epstein created early in his career, like that of the painter Jacob Kramer (1892–1962), departed from the conventions of classical Greek sculpture in a radical way that…
This “imaginary wall” in Raphael Soyer’s studio features (clockwise, from top left) a self-portrait; portraits of the artists Nicolai Cikovsky, Moses Soyer, and Chaim Gross. In the center is the…