The Newspaper Vendor

The blue and white abstract shapes in The Mud Bath evoke human figures in motion against a field of red. Are they meant to be people at a public bathhouse? Or are they interpreted that way because the…

Ira Jan created this hagiographical depiction of her lover Chaim Nahman Bialik being anointed by angels as a child shortly before she was deported by Ottoman authorities to Egypt. Her romantic…

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…