Caroline Goldberg Igra

Framing the Shtetl: The Manifestation of a Cubist Style in the Work of Early Modernist Central-East European Jewish artists

This article explores the specific manner in which Cubism, encountered not only in Paris but in artistic centres in Central-Eastern Europe, affected the work of Jewish artists seeking to develop their art in the early 20th century. Emerging from persecuted corners of Eastern Europe, this artistic population could not help be entranced by all that Western avant-garde artistic circles had to offer. Their specific interest in Cubism and the opportunity it gave them to abandon the iron hold of traditional perspective was completely expected. Yet the reception and understanding of this style as it was developed in Paris, its place of origin, was quite different from that in Eastern Europe. This study focuses on a pair of ink works produced by Polish artist Jechezkiel David Kirszenbaum in the early 1920s that perfectly encapsulate the knowledge of, attraction to, and manifestation of, the Cubist style within Eastern metropolises such as Warsaw, Lviv, and Berlin by the young Jewish artistic population. It assesses how Cubism was explored by the Polish Bunt group in Poznań, and the Yung Yiddish circle in Łódź, as well as some other artists in Poland and Germany in the second decade of the 20th century, most especially by those artists who continued on to Berlin in the early 20s; how it was propagated by masters such as Lyonel Feininger at the Bauhaus School of Art in Weimar; and how it was promoted throughout Europe by dealers such as Herwarth Walden, organizer of a series of exhibitions featuring Cubist works in Central-Eastern Europe, not only in Berlin but also, a very early and pivotal one, in 1913 in Lviv. Walden’s influence as both dealer and curator was compounded by the publication of a journal, Der Sturm, distributed throughout both Western and Eastern Europe. Artwork exhibiting the application of the Cubist idiom by early Eastern proponents to subjects of Jewish traditional homes and mysticism, was pivotal to Kirszenbaum’s own exploration. Notable comparison is offered to the work of Jakob Steinhardt (establisher with Ludwig Meidner of the Die Pathetiker group just a decade earlier in 1912), Issachar ber Ryback, Lyonel Feininger and the cubist, who became constructivist — Henryk Berlewi.

Author's email:

caroline.igra@gmail.com

DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.54759/ART-2024-0307

Full-text in the Digital Library of the Czech Academy of Sciences:
https://kramerius.lib.cas.cz/uuid/uuid:f1b61259-adb7-440c-891d-3c17ed6b7311

< back