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Maurycy Trebacz
Old Jewish Shtetl Rabbi Charcoal Judaica Drawing World War II Era

C.1940

About the Item

Maurycy Trębacz (1861 – 1941) was one of the most popular Jewish painters in Poland in the late 19th and early 20th century. Many of his paintings were lost in the Holocaust, but a representative selection of his artwork survived.Trębacz died of starvation in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto during the Nazi German occupation of Poland. Maurycy Trębacz, along with Samuel Hirszenberg, Jakub Weinles, and Leopold Pilichowski, belonged to the first generation of Jewish artists in Poland who broke away from the religious prohibition on portraying a human figure (see below). The studies show his mastery of painting, his own unique style and great imagination. Trębacz was noted within the European art-world as a master portrait and landscape painter,[1] but above all he was also a rare chronicler of the contemporary Jewish life, depicting a world that is now lost. His popular subjects included praying Rabbis, old men, street and Jewish domestic scenes, and genre painting depicting the everyday side of life. His psychological portraits of Jews earned him the greatest popularity and critical acclaim, and influenced the work of other Jewish painters in Poland. Notably, Trębacz's oil painting "The Good Samaritan", reportedly stolen in 1904 at the World's Fair, was recently sold at auction at Sotheby's. Born in 1861 in Warsaw, the son of David Trębacz, a house painter, Maurycy (Mojżesz) at the age of 16 years was admitted to the school of drawing by professor Wojciech Gerson and Aleksander Kamiński. Three years later, with the support of Leopold Horowitz, he received a scholarship sponsored by lawyer Stanisław Rotwand, and moved to Kraków where he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in the studios of Jan Matejko, Leopold Loeffler and Władysław Łuszczkiewicz. From 1882, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Sandor Wagner (until 1884) and received the grand silver medal there at the completion of his studies for the work "Martyrdom". Between 1889 and 1890, he studied in Paris at the Académie Colarossi. He lived and worked in Munich for 4 years before returning to Warsaw. Over time, Trębacz worked in Lviv and Drohobych, and eventually moved permanently to Łódź, where he founded and ran a private art school until September 1939. He is often criticized for giving in to popular demand later on in his career. Pressured by financial sponsors, he began to produce sentimental theme portraits pertaining to the bucolic life of country folk. Trębacz made his successful artistic début twice, first at the Munich Kunstverein, and then at the Krywult Salon in Warsaw as a 23-year-old painter. His another big success was the participation of painting "Good Samaritan" (1886, pictured) in a Kunstverein exhibition in Munich as well as at the I National Art Exhibition in Kraków and in Warsaw at the Zachęta Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts. The painting was also awarded a gold medal at the Universal World Exposition in Chicago. Subsequently, Trębacz also received a bronze medal at the Paris Universal World Exposition of 1889. "Good Samaritan" (1886), book engraving from painting by Maurycy Trębacz, Warsaw Maurycy Trębacz died of hunger in the Łódź Ghetto during the Holocaust in occupied Poland, and is buried at the Bracka Street Cemetery in Łódź, grave #490. His wife Pola (Perla) also died in the ghetto in 1941, at the age of 54. They had three children, Edward, Zofia and Bronisław. In the ghetto he lived in Limanowskiego 19 street. Soon after the war ended, some 70 paintings of Maurycy Trębacz (along with works of Izrael Lejzorowicz, Amos Szwarc, Mendel Grosman and others, wrote Dr. Cieślińska-Lobkowicz)[note 1] were located in Poland by Nachman Zonabend on behalf of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (JCR) and the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO) from the United States. Most, were taken out of the country by Zonabend in 1947 against the official policy on protecting the national heritage, and then split between the YIVO Institute of New York and Yad Vashem. The illegal removal of the collection was criticized by Jewish press not only in the communist Poland, but also in Canada and France.
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His work was selected for both the 1948 and 1950 Venice Biennale exhibitions and his 1954 retrospective traveled from Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art to the Albright Gallery and the de Young Museum before closing out at The Whitney Museum of American Art in 1955. In a 1954 interview with Yale art professor Bernard Chaet, Willem de Kooning indicated that he and Jackson Pollock both considered Bloom to be “America’s first abstract expressionist”, a label that Bloom would disavow. Starting in the mid 1950s his work began to shift more towards works on paper and he exclusively focused on drawing throughout the 1960s, returning to painting in 1971. He continued both drawing and painting until his death in 2009 at the age of 9 Hyman Bloom (né Melamed) was born into an orthodox Jewish family in the tiny Jewish village of Brunavišķi in what is now Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire At a young age Bloom planned to become a rabbi, but his family could not find a suitable teacher. 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    John Heliker Self Portrait, 1991 Charcoal Pencil on Paper (with original Kraushaar Galleries label verso) Signed on the front bears the original KRAUSHAAR GALLERIES label on the verso on the frame Vintage metal frame included Self portrait done in charcoal pencil by distinguished American artist John Heliker. Hand signed on the front This work is framed - bears the label of the renowned KRAUSHAAR GALLERIES on the verso. Image size: 13 inches by 10 inches; Framed: 18 1/2 inches by 14 1/2 inches About John Heliker from The New York Times Obituary, 2000 (Roberta Smith) John Heliker, a painter and teacher who was a fixture of the New York art world for nearly seven decades, died on Tuesday at the Sonojee Estate, a health center in Bar Harbor, Me. He was 91 and had lived in New York during most of his career, spending summers on Cranberry Island...
    Category

    Late 20th Century Modern Portrait Drawings and Watercolors

    Materials

    Charcoal, Carbon Pencil, Paper

  • Young boy at Loemboeng, 1918
    Located in Amsterdam, NL
    Young boy at Loemboeng, 1918 Signed with initials and dated, bottom right Black chalk on paper, 25.7 x 10 cm Literature: W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp, Zwerftochten door Timor en Onderhoori...
    Category

    1910s Art Nouveau Portrait Drawings and Watercolors

    Materials

    Paper, Graphite

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