Maurycy Gottlieb was born in 1856 in the small city known in Polish as Drohobycz, then attached to the province of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the course of his very short life (he died at age twenty-three), Gottlieb painted dozens of extraordinary works that have since found homes in museums in eastern Europe and in Israel, where, following a major exhibition in 1991 in Tel-Aviv, he achieved the status of a founding father of Jewish art. The subjects of his paintings range from self-portraits and portraits of family and friends to orientalist themes, historical topics, and biblical scenes, including two important representations of Jesus. Ezra Mendelsohn sets this impressive body of work in the context of contemporary European painting, and uses Gottlieb's work to illuminate the cultural complexity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire prior to World War I. Interpreting the paintings, and their reception in Gottlieb's day and beyond, Mendelsohn touches on a number of key issues in modern Jewish history, among them identity, assimilation, acculturation, nationalism, the relationship between Jewry and European culture, and relations between Jews and non-Jews, particularly between Poles and Jews. Mendelsohn notes that Gottlieb is an ideal subject for a historian of modern Jewish Eastern Europe with an interest in the visual dimension of Jewish culture. Since the artist's death in 1879, Polish nationalists, Jewish integrationists, Jewish nationalists, and finally the Israeli Jewish establishment, have laid claims to his art. Yet as Mendelsohn shows the subjects Gottlieb chose to paint -- particularly the historical subjects -- demonstrate that Gottlieb was first andforemost an artist of Jewish universalism.
- ISBN10 1584651806
- ISBN13 9781584651802
- Publish Date 15 December 2004 (first published 1 October 2002)
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Out of Print 1 September 2008
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University Press of New England
- Format Paperback
- Pages 279
- Language English