He Cast a Look and Went Mad

Born in Warsaw into a wealthy Jewish family, Maurycy Minkowski suffered an illness at age five that left him permanently deaf. In 1888 he attended the Institute for the Deaf and Mute, where his artistic talents were recognized, ultimately leading him to study at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts from 1901 to 1905. Amid Russia’s 1905 revolution and the devastating counterrevolutionary pogrom wave of 1905–1906, Minkowski toured Jewish communities and documented the Russo-Polish Jewish plight in a series of paintings—including After the Pogrom (1905)—that rendered Jewish dislocation and misery intimate and immediate. He also produced paintings seemingly concerned with East European Jewish folklife but at least in some cases attentive to the cultural and psychological conflicts of Jewish modernity; He Cast a Look and Went Mad depicts traditional East European Jews in some sort of religious setting but invokes in its title the classic talmudic legend of the sage who “looked and was injured” when he gazed upon the orchard of forbidden knowledge (b. Ḥagigah 14b; classically, this was a trope for mystical knowledge, but in the nineteenth century also became a trope for Jewish encounters with Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment knowledge and doubt). Minkowski lived in Paris for many years, returning to Eastern Europe for exhibitions. While touring Argentina in 1930, he was killed in in a traffic accident; the exhibition he intended to display there became the property of IWO (Argentina’s branch of the YIVO Institute).