The Meeting: A Jewish Youth and Two Women in an Urban Alley

Bruno Schulz

1920

Image
Painting of two young women next to low wall and a hunched-over man in sidelocks and hat looking at them.
The Meeting, Schulz’s only surviving oil painting, obliquely explores a theme he returned to many times in his writing and art, namely, sadomasochism, this time in the context of an encounter between different worlds: Jewish and non-Jewish, male and female. A young Hasidic man bows obsequiously as two well-dressed women pass by. Many of Schulz’s drawings depict women dominating men who are content with their subordinate roles. Around the time that he made this expressionist-style painting, he published a portfolio of drawings dedicated to the topic of sadomasochism.

Credits

Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 8.

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