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 1670, Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jewish community commissioned a new synagogue, which, when finished, was the largest in the world. The master mason Elias Bouman, a non-Jew who had helped design the…
Impaled corpses at Lachish, detail from Assyrian relief in the Nineveh palace of Sennacherib (reigned 705–681 BCE), depicting the conquest of Lachish in 701 BCE. For the full relief see Conquest of…