On the wood-framed doorway of the gallery Untitled, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, hangs a mezuza. It’s small, unassuming, something you wouldn’t necessarily notice if not for the title of the exhibition inside: “Jew York.” But it turns out that the mezuza wasn’t installed for the show; it’s been there for years, since…
‘Though raised in a religious family, I threw off the old faith when I started to live my own life, as did so many men of my age,” the 21-year-old Sergei Diaghilev wrote to Leo Tolstoy in 1893. “I had to convince myself that many things I had previously accepted were merely fairy tales, which…
A Marc Chagall painting stolen more than 10 years ago was discovered in the home of former Italian soccer star Roberto Bottega. Italy’s art-theft police said Monday that “Le Nu au Bouquet,” painted in 1920 by the renowned Jewish artist and reportedly worth $1.3 million, was found in the Turin home of Bottega, formerly of…
Gallery 395A is tucked away in a corner on the third floor of the Art Institute of Chicago’s modern wing. After passing works by Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti and Salvador Dalí, viewers enter Gallery 395, which features a glass wall overlooking Lake Michigan and is packed with Constantin Brâncusi, Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore sculptures….
A woman swathed in scarlet tulle dangles upside down, like an exhausted circus acrobat, gripping the bars of a swaying steel prism. Alongside her floats a bride — a trapeze artist in flowing white silk. A cow-headed man in a gray suit hangs on as if for dear life. The images recall the work of…
The German Jewish graphic artist Hermann Struck (1876-1944), who emigrated to the Holy Land in 1922, was famed for the multiple portraits which he created of Theodor Herzl. But he was more than just a pioneering artist before Israel’s statehood was declared. A small, well-chosen exhibit, Hermann Struck in Galilee, was on view at the…
Last month, on December 14, three carefully detailed renderings of synagogue interiors, the handiwork of Marc Chagall, fetched $2.3 million at Sotheby’s. In the days preceding the auction, much was made of the rarity of these works and of how they stood apart from the artist’s oeuvre, which tilted toward the fantastical. A great deal…
The Polish Jewish painter Josef Herman, who settled in the UK as a refugee, is best known for his monumentally blocky paintings of Welsh miners whom he depicted empathetically while living for over a decade in a Welsh mining town, starting in 1944. Now a centenary exhibit, “Josef Herman: Warsaw, Brussels, Glasgow, London, 1938-1944” traces…
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