The painter, graphic designer, and typographer Henryk Berlewi was born into an acculturated Warsaw family. He trained in Warsaw, Antwerp, and Paris and became known for his theater posters, book jackets, and page designs in Hebrew and Yiddish. In the 1920s, he took up constructivist abstraction, creating paintings that employed simple geometric forms. In 1928, after moving from Warsaw to Paris, he abandoned the avant-garde and began painting portraits and nudes in a figurative style. He survived the war in Nice, serving in the Resistance, and in 1957, he returned to painting abstract works. He is often considered a progenitor of optical art.
Chair with Red Matter was painted at a time when Henryk Berlewi was producing figurative art: portraits and still lives inspired by the work of seventeenth-century French artists. By 1957, he had…
In The Costume Party, George Segal switched from making all white sculptures to using colors. The six figures—Anthony and Cleopatra, Superman, Pussy Galore, Catwoman, and Bottom from Shakespeare’s…
This panel, from a relief in Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh, complements Sennacherib’s statement, in the account of his campaign to Judah, that Hezekiah sent him “his elite troops (and) his best…