Unknown

Vintage Vibrant Mod Divine Comedy Dante Inferno Virgil Woodblock Woodcut Print

c.1960-1970s

This came out of a Chicago collection. It appears to be signed Betsey Nelson. It depicts canto from Greek Mythology. Virgil and Dante mythological figures. it is done on a fine tiss...

Arthur Kolnik, Jewish painter and printmaker Ivano-Frankivsk (Ukraine) 1890 - Paris (France) 1972 Arthur Kolnik was born in Stanislavov, a small town in Galicia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, who was originally from Lithuania, worked as an accountant and his mother, who was originally from Vienna, ran a shop. In 1905, he discovered Yiddish literature in Czernowitz, on the occasion of the first conference on Yiddish language, which was organized by several writers including I. L. Peretz, Cholem Aleichem, Shalom Asch, and Nomberg. In 1909, Kolnik joined the School of Fine Arts in Krakow and took classes taught by Jacek Malezcewski and Joseph Mehoffer, a portrait painter and an artist who produced stained-glass windows in Fribourg (Switzerland). He was mobilized in the Austrian army in 1914. He was wounded in 1916 and repatriated to Vienna, where he met the Judaic painter Isidor Kaufmann. In 1919, Kolnik settled in Czernowitz, which was then annexed by Romania. There, he met writer and poet Itzik Manger and storyteller Eliezer Steinberg for whom he produced several illustrations. In 1920, Kolnik left for the United States, bringing fifty paintings...