Yehuda Pen, The Sholem Aleichem of Painting

Abstract

This article is about Marc Chagall’s teacher in Vitebsk, Yehuda Pen (1854-1937), and the school for painters that he established at the turn of the twentieth century. From it, in addition to Chagall, came the likes of El Lissitzky (1890-1941) and Osip Zadkine (1888-1967). It is proposed that in addition to training and enabling these better-known artists to “paint in Yiddish,” Pen, who is hardly known in the West (and who was mysteriously murdered in 1937, at the peak of Stalin’s purges), was himself (while academically trained) a truly and remarkably groundbreaking Jewish, Yiddish painter.