Creator Bio

Mordechai Tsvi Mane

1859–1886

Born in Radoshkovitsh, Russian Empire (today Radochkovitchi, Belarus), Mordechai Tsvi Mane received a yeshiva education in Minsk before beginning art school in Vilna in 1876. From 1881 to 1884, he studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, receiving scholarships from several Jewish philanthropists. Mane began writing Hebrew-language poetry during his time in St. Petersburg, and his poems attracted admiration from his contemporaries. But he considered himself primarily a painter, and in addition to his body of artistic work, Mane published essays on the place of the visual arts in incipient Jewish national movements, calling for the careful cultivation of aesthetics as an integral part of Jewish nationalism. He died of tuberculosis in his twenties.

Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator

Primary Source

On the Art of Painting in General and among Jews in Particular

Public Access

Text

In recent years, a time when the branches of science planted in the vineyard of the Enlightenment stretch out to our brethren in our land [i.e., the Russian Empire], and many eat their fruit, and many…