Maurycy Minkowski

Maurycy Minkowski, a Polish Jewish artist born in Warsaw, was one of the first Polish painters to devote his oeuvre to contemporary Jewish themes. From 1900 to 1904 he trained at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under Jozef Mehoffer and Jan Stanislawski. He initially worked as a landscape and portrait painter, but the Polish Revolution of 1905 and the subsequent pogroms in Poland and Russia left an indelible impression on him. He witnessed firsthand the pogrom of Bialystock and travelled to Odessa to document the events there with a series of drawings. He subsequently left Poland for Paris, and his art became increasingly focused on socially critical realism, depicting Jewish refugees, especially children, dislocated as a result of the political and social upheaval towards the end of the Czarist regime.

The series of paintings of Jewish refugees from Odessa and Bialystock which Minkowski painted, and of which Children of the Shtetl forms part, are haunting and evocative. They document in a naturalistic manner the impact of pogroms, war, and persecution of the Jews of Eastern Europe.

Minkowski became internationally known in 1907 through an exhibition in Warsaw and an article in “The Studio”. In the 1920s Minkowski had further important exhibitions, including in Berlin, at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1927), at Galerie George Petit in Paris, and in Antwerp. In 1928 his Ghetto Pictures were exhibited at Martin Wasservogel's Kunst-Kammer gallery in Berlin, and in 1929 at Godfrey Phillips in London.

In 1930 Minkowski travelled to Argentina with 200 of his paintings in anticipation of his first overseas exhibition of his works. Buenos Aires was supposed to be the first stop of a comprehensive travelling exhibition visiting Brazil, the USA, Canada, and Palestine. However, Minkowski was killed in a road accident in Buenos Aires, and the planned exhibition there was presented as a posthumous tribute to his work, under the aegis of the Jewish Association of Argentina. In 1931, a committee was established to raise funds for the purchase of his works. In 1942, the majority of the paintings were auctioned and purchased by the Fundación IWO (the Argentine branch of YIVO), which established the Museo Minkowski at the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, and thus became the owner of the largest extant collection of works by the artist. However, paintings by Minkowski are also found in other public collections, including the Jewish Museum in New York and the Tel Aviv and Israel Museums.