The Russian Jewish and Soviet painter, theatrical designer, and sculptor Natan Altman was born in Vinnitsa (today, Vinnytsya, Ukraine). He studied in Odessa from 1903 to 1907 and moved to Paris in 1910, before returning to Russia. Like his contemporaries Marc Chagall and El Lissitzky, the young Altman was influenced by cubism and other emerging postrealist and postimpressionist approaches and generally saw himself as part of the general Russian-European art scene. Yet during World War I and the early years of the Russian Revolution, Altman also briefly grew interested in traditional East European Jewish folk art and in the possibility of a modernist Jewish national art. In those years, he produced his most famous sculpture, entitled Head of a Young Jew (Self-Portrait); an emblem in the Jewish folk style for the Hebraist youth publishing house Ahinoar; and abstract constructivist set designs for the burgeoning modernist Yiddish theater. Altman lived abroad from 1928 to 1935, and when he returned to the Soviet Union, he agreed to work in the then-required style of socialist realism.
The young couple depicted here are in the act of embracing one another, their cheeks touching. They are one of the best-known examples of Georg Ehrlich’s representational bronze sculptures, which…
The hotels designed by Morris Lapidus in the 1950s and 1960s, including the Fontainebleau, were pioneers of what came to be known as “Miami Modern” (MiMo), the signature style of resort hotels in…
Grids and parallel lines are dominant features in Kupferman’s paintings and drawings. They provided a structure to which he added layers of paint or graphite and then repeatedly removed and reapplied…