Leonid Pasternak

Naim Attallah acquired the present works by the Russian painter Leonid Pasternak from the artist’s family in 1981. In this endeavour, he enlisted the help of Jennie Erdal, the translator of Pasternak’s memoirs published by Attallah’s Quartet Books a year later. Through her work, Erdal befriended Pasternak’s daughters, who, after their father’s death in Oxford in 1945, dedicated their efforts to preserving his legacy.

In her memoirs, Erdal recalled that the minute Attallah saw the transparencies of the works from the series, he wept and exclaimed: ‘I have to have them. It’s imperative. They remind me of my childhood, my homeland. It’s all gone now, all destroyed. I have to have those pictures’ (Jennie Erdal, Ghosting: A Memoir, Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2004, p.8). These drawings, as such, formed a deeply personal part of the publisher’s collection. Their acquisition is, equally, a testament to Attallah’s charm and power of persuasion, since at the time, as Erdal writes, the Pasternak sisters were determined not to part with any of their father’s works (ibid, p.7).

The drawings were executed in spring 1924 when Pasternak, by then living in Germany, travelled to Palestine as part of an artistic expedition organised by the Russian émigré publisher Alexander Kogan. Kogan’s goal was to collect material for a two-volume publication on life in modern-day Palestine, which partially saw light in Paris in 1925.

When speaking to local journalists in Jerusalem, the sixty-two-year-old artist confessed: ‘My impressions surpass all my expectations […] I cannot even remember without deep emotion all I have seen […] I made sketches all the time without stopping, and, as in a kaleidoscope, the scenes followed, one more interesting than the other […]’ (Gil Weissblei, ‘In Search of a New Jewish Art: Leonid Pasternak in Jerusalem’, Ars Judaica, Vol.13, 2017, p.108). The two charcoal drawings highlight Pasternak’s draughtsmanship, skilfully capturing the majestic atmosphere of Jerusalem and its local types.