The painter Morris Louis was born in Baltimore, where he attended the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts from 1929 to 1933. After four years living and working in New York, Louis returned to Baltimore to work as a private art instructor before making his final move to Washington, D.C., in 1952. The 1950s were pivotal for Louis’s career; he produced his most mature and celebrated works of art during this decade. While teaching at the Washington Workshop Center of the Arts, Louis met fellow abstract painter Kenneth Noland, with whom he visited the studio of Helen Frankenthaler. Louis was profoundly inspired by Frankenthaler’s work and incorporated her method of staining canvases into his own process, producing the color-field paintings for which he is known today.
Even in the narrative prose written by native Hebrew speakers towards the end of the 1940s, writers who hardly knew any foreign language and who were assuming positions at the center of the literary…
Issachar Ber Ryback’s drawings of the painted ceiling of what was known as the Cold Synagogue in Mogilev (today in Belarus) are among the few visual records of the work of the painter Chaim ben…
These small Torah finials, decorated with silver repoussé and dark- and light-blue enamel, originated in Persia. They are further adorned with slender flowers and graceful geometric patterns.