Samuel Bak On Sale

The Polish-born painter Samuel Bak is well-known for his Surrealist paintings, which frequently derive from his own experience. In Vilna, Bak and his family experienced the Holocaust, but he and his mother survived, thanks to the help of a nun named Maria Mikulska, who hid them in a convent. It was during this time that Bak discovered his talent for painting. At the age of nine, living in the Jewish Ghetto, Bak had his first exhibition. Maria Mikulska encouraged his talent while in hiding, supplying him with paint and paper.

After the war, Bak left for Munich to study painting and became familiar with German Expressionism and Constructivism. In 1948, Bak and his mother immigrated to Israel and Bak studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. He moved to Paris in 1956, studying at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, where he discovered post-neoclassical Cubism, and in 1959, he moved to Rome and held his first exhibition of abstract paintings. Bak later wrote that in Paris and Rome “there was an incredible freedom, you could do practically anything. But not tell stories in paintings, and not do anything which might be considered theatrical.” A product of his varied training, Bak’s work combines elements of Realism, Surrealism and Cubism, as well as reflecting his admiration for the Old Masters, such as Albrecht Dürer and Michelangelo. However, from these he carved out his own style, choosing to go against the current and create narrative paintings drawn from his experience of the war.

Bak’s use of seemingly incoherent symbols and his play with reality and illusion has earned the artist comparisons to the Surrealist painter René Magritte. Like Magritte, Bak’s proportions are deliberately exaggerated and he often displays ordinary objects in unusual settings, giving the objects a new meaning. The unlikely combination of fruit, household objects and collections of three-dimensional shapes that occupy the foreground, set against vast natural landscapes form characteristically Surrealist, dreamlike compositions.

The artist’s personal experience colours the imagery of his paintings, often employing symbols, and artistic devices such as substitution to make his art more palatable to the viewer. He claimed; “my use of symbols, icons and metaphors managed to keep the underlying horror of my world at bay.” Rather than directly painting scenes of death, he depicted crematorium chimneys. Similarly, he painted teddy bears as a testament to the victim children. These recurring symbols are often set against a background of crumbling monuments and buildings, which remind the viewer of a world in disarray. By using the same set of symbols and images, Bak creates his own pictorial language.

Over the course of his career, Bak’s work has featured in numerous exhibitions and collections throughout Europe, Israel and the United States, where he now resides. In 1961, Bak was invited to exhibit at the “Carnegie International” in Pittsburgh. In 1963 he was honoured with retrospectives at the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The following year, he exhibited at the Venice Biennale. Other exhibitions of Bak’s work include the 1975 exhibition at the Jewish Museum of New York and an exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London in 1990. In 2002, he received the German Herkomer Cultural Prize and today, a collection of his works is on permanent display at the Pucker Gallery in Boston.

(Biography provided by Stern Pissarro Gallery)

In the wake of World War I’s ravaging of Europe, artists delved into the unconscious mind to confront and grapple with this reality. Poet and critic André Breton, a leader of the Surrealist movement who authored the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, called this approach “a violent reaction against the impoverishment and sterility of thought processes that resulted from centuries of rationalism.” Surrealist art emerged in the 1920s with dreamlike and uncanny imagery guided by a variety of techniques such as automatic drawing, which can be likened to a stream of consciousness, to channel psychological experiences.

Although Surrealism was a groundbreaking approach for European art, its practitioners were inspired by Indigenous art and ancient mysticism for reenvisioning how sculptures, paintings, prints, performance art and more could respond to the unsettled world around them.

Surrealist artists were also informed by the Dada movement, which originated in 1916 Zurich and embraced absurdity over the logic that had propelled modernity into violence. Some of the Surrealists had witnessed this firsthand, such as Max Ernst, who served in the trenches during World War I, and Salvador Dalí, whose otherworldly paintings and other work responded to the dawning civil war in Spain.

Other key artists associated with the revolutionary art and literary movement included Man Ray, Joan Miró, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Frida Kahlo and Meret Oppenheim, all of whom had a distinct perspective on reimagining reality and freeing the unconscious mind from the conventions and restrictions of rational thought. Pablo Picasso showed some of his works in “La Peinture Surréaliste” — the first collective exhibition of Surrealist painting — which opened at Paris’s Galerie Pierre in November of 1925. (Although Magritte is best known as one of the visual Surrealist movement’s most talented practitioners, his famous 1943 painting, The Fifth Season, can be interpreted as a formal break from Surrealism.)

The outbreak of World War II led many in the movement to flee Europe for the Americas, further spreading Surrealism abroad. Generations of modern and contemporary artists were subsequently influenced by the richly symbolic and unearthly imagery of Surrealism, from Joseph Cornell to Arshile Gorky.

Find a collection of original Surrealist paintings, sculptures, prints and multiples and more art on 1stDibs.

Still-life paintings work as part of the decor in nearly every type of space.

Still-life art, which includes work produced in media such as painting, photography, video and more, is a popular genre in Western art. However, the depiction of still life in color goes back to Ancient Egypt, where paintings on the interior walls of tombs portrayed the objects — such as food — that a person would take into the afterlife. Ancient Greek and Roman mosaics and pottery also often depicted food. Indeed, still-life paintings frequently feature food, flowers or man-made objects. By definition, still-life art represents anything that is considered inanimate.

During the Middle Ages, the still life genre was adapted by artists who illustrated religious manuscripts. A common theme of these paintings is the reminder that life is fleeting. This is especially true of vanitas, a kind of still life with roots in the Netherlands during the 17th century, which was built on themes such as death and decay and featured skulls and objects such as rotten fruit. In northern Europe during the 1600s, painters consulted botanical texts to accurately depict the flowers and plants that were the subject of their work.

Leonardo da Vinci’s penchant for observing phenomena in nature and filling notebooks with drawings and notes helped him improve as an artist of still-life paintings. Vincent van Gogh, an artist who made a couple of the most expensive paintings ever sold, carried out rich experiments with color over the course of painting hundreds of still lifes, and we can argue that Campbell’s Soup Cans (1961–62) by Andy Warhol counts as still-life art.

While early examples were primarily figurative, you can find still lifes that belong to different schools and styles of painting, such as Cubism, Impressionism and contemporary art.

As part of the wall decor in your living room, dining room or elsewhere, a still-life painting can look sophisticated alongside your well-curated decorative objects and can help set the mood in a space.

When shopping for a still-life painting, think about how it makes you feel and how the artist chose to represent its subject. When buying any art for your home, choose pieces that you connect with. If you’re shopping online, read the description of the work to learn about the artist and check the price and shipping information. Make sure that the works you choose complement or relate to your overall theme and furniture style. Artwork can either fit into your room’s color scheme or serve as an accent piece. Introduce new textures to a space by choosing an oil still-life painting.

On 1stDibs, find a collection of still-life paintings in a wide range of styles and subject matter.