Self-Portrait with a Palette

Painter and graphic artist Yehudah Pen is known for his sympathetic paintings of contemporary East European Jews poised between the old and the new and for his influence as a teacher on a generation of Russian Jewish artists including Marc Chagall and El Lissitzky. Born into a traditional Jewish home in the town of Novo-Aleksandrovsk (today, Zarasai, Lithuania), Pen apparently met sharp resistance to his artistic inclinations from his own mother. But while an apprentice house painter in Dvinsk (today in Latvia), he made contact with modernizing Jewish circles who encouraged his art studies. Pen studied at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg from 1880 to 1886. Remaining religiously observant and also drawn to burgeoning ideals of Jewish nationhood and Jewish cultural renascence, Pen focused much of his painting over the next three decades on realistic, detailed, and psychologically resonant depictions of everyday East European Jews facing the complexities of life, from divorce and poverty to the encounter with new forms of culture. From the turn of the century, several of his best-known works (as in The Watchmaker, 1914) feature recognizably traditional Jews reading issues of the nationally- and Zionist-minded Yiddish newspapers that burst onto the East European Jewish cultural scene after 1903 and especially after Russia’s 1905 Revolution. In 1897, Pen opened a school of drawing and painting in Vitebsk. His positive relationship to Judaism and Jewish national identity seems to have shaped the atmosphere of the school and its many students, and thus, perhaps, the engagement with Jewish themes and visual traditions by graduates including Chagall and Lissitzky. In the Soviet period, Pen found a modus vivendi with the new regime, depicting subjects drawn from the new Soviet civic life while also continuing to work in his previous vein.