The Lad Bialik

Marc Chagall’s newspaper vendor, whose pouch holds both Yiddish and Russian newspapers, looks worried. The sky is an alarming red, and the news is not good. The first world war has begun. Chagall…

Sailor with Guitar is one of Jacques Lipchitz’s early cubist sculptures, an experiment in translating painterly cubist concepts into three dimensions. The figure of the sailor was inspired by sailors…

Yehudah Pen painted this portrait of Marc Chagall soon after Chagall returned to Vitebsk from Paris in order to marry his sweetheart, Bella. While he was there, World War I broke out, and Chagall was…

Like other paintings by Yehudah Pen, The Watchmaker depicts an encounter between a traditional Jew and modernity. Here, a traditionally dressed watchmaker reads the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt…

Ze’ev Raban painted this portrait of his wife, Miriam, in 1914, the same year they got married and he became head of the repoussé department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. His…

When Claude Cahun took this self-portrait photograph, she was still Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob and had not yet adopted her new gender-neutral name. She is wearing a pinafore, sitting quietly at a desk…