Carriage Driver (Self-Portrait), Drohobycz

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.