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 Traveler was painted soon after the Russian Revolution, around the time that Marc Chagall was appointed commissar of the arts for Vitebsk, the site of Yehudah Pen’s academy, where Chagall had…
While ketubot (marriage contracts) are usually written in Aramaic, Karaite ketubot are written in Hebrew. They are often pentagonal in shape, most often with a pointed bottom. This example has a…
Late in his career, Guston turned from abstract expressionism to figurative art, creating iconoclastic, allegorical paintings. Moon is a combination of still-life, self-portrait, and landscape. In the…