The Meeting: A Jewish Youth and Two Women in an Urban Alley

Bruno Schulz

1920

Painting of two young women next to low wall and a hunched-over man in sidelocks and hat looking at them.

The Meeting, Schulz’s only surviving oil painting, obliquely explores a theme he returned to many times in his writing and art, namely, sadomasochism, this time in the context of an encounter between different worlds: Jewish and non-Jewish, male and female. A young Hasidic man bows obsequiously as two well-dressed women pass by. Many of Schulz’s drawings depict women dominating men who are content with their subordinate roles. Around the time that he made this expressionist-style painting, he published a portfolio of drawings dedicated to the topic of sadomasochism.

Credits

Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw.

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

Engage with this Source

Creator Bio

Bruno Schulz

1892–1942

Born in Poland, Bruno Schulz was best known as a short-story writer and regarded as one of the great Polish-language writers of the twentieth century. He was also a gifted painter and graphic artist. While little of his artwork survived World War II, a number of remarkable pen-and-ink drawings did, including erotically charged illustrations for Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novella Venus in Furs (1870). Only one of his oil paintings survived the war. In 2001, wall paintings, created by Schulz while he was a prisoner of a Gestapo sergeant, were discovered in Drohobych, Ukraine. Schulz was shot to death in 1942 by another Gestapo officer who was engaged in a dispute with the sergeant.

You may also like

Watercolor pen and ink drawing of angular figure holding Torah scroll.
Tooltip info icon

Man with Torah

Frenkel, whose work was shaped by the School of Paris (École de Paris), played a key role in bringing modernism to Israeli art. Among his students were prominent members of what is known as the Land…
View Source