Creator Bio
Emmanuel Mané-Katz
1894–1962
The painter Emmanuel Mané-Katz was born Mane Leyzerovich Kats in Kremenchug, Ukraine, and as a child was destined for the rabbinate. At the age of seventeen, however, he left home to study art in Vilna and then Kiev and, in 1913, went to Paris. He was in Russia during World War I but returned in 1921 to Paris, where he befriended Pablo Picasso and other important artists, and was affiliated with the art movement known as the École de Paris. In 1931, his painting The Wailing Wall was awarded a gold medal at the Paris World’s Fair. During World War II, Mané-Katz lived in the United States but made Paris his home. Like Marc Chagall, he favored overtly Jewish themes drawn from his childhood in Eastern Europe.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
Primary Source
Homage to Paris
Mané-Katz was a prominent member of the School of Paris (École de Paris), a group of young artists, many of whom were Jews from Eastern and Central Europe. Mané-Katz painted in a modernist style but…
Primary Source
Orchestra
Mané-Katz may have painted this picture of a traditional Jewish klezmer band from memory, from his childhood in the Russian Empire. By the late 1940s, his previously dark palette had begun to shift to…