Lot Essay
Both Janina Ladnowska of the Sztuki Museum, Lodz and Dr Ulrich Krempel, Dusseldorf agree that Rabbi Ba'al Shem's Blessing was executed in Adler's home town of Lodz between 1918 and 1919. It belongs to an important series of Ba'al Shem Tov paintings which are mostly known from descriptions or contemporary photographs. According to archival information, others included Ba'al Shem Tov and Buddha, True Christianity and the Victim of Pogrom, Ressurection (illustrated in Jung Idysz, Lodz, 1919, p. 16, no. 4-5-6, described as oil on canvas and dated 1918) and The Last Hour of Rabbi Eleazar of 1917-18 until recently housed in the Sztuki Museum, Lodz (see illustration).
The Last Hour of Rabbi Eleazar and the present painting share many characterisitc elements: the beautifully formed curvilinear faces with their sweeping eyebrows and high foreheads, the rich colour contrasts of deep reds and golden yellows and the constant juxtaposition of endless curves with fragmented lines and angles.
In a letter to Adler of 1925 Franz Seifert recalled their meeting in Germany in 1917 and the effect the young artist's paintings had on him: 'I remember large canvases with unreal, peculiar figures, Jews - I could sense their mystery. That shimmering, golden-blue mysticism and the figures endlessly melting away. It all looked like beautiful old metal, gold bronze, enamel' (Exh. cat. Jankel Adler, Cologne, 1985).
The present painting perfectly illustrates this 'metallic' paint effect. It is a achieved by a highly inventive method. The rudimentary canvas is prepared with a thin porous ground onto which Adler has applied thin layers of oil mixed with varying amounts of varnish. Some areas are left very thin to sink into the ground whilst in others, such as the rich scarlet and blue areas, repeated layers of thinned varnish and paint are applied to give an extraordinary lustre and translucency to the deep colours.
Janina Ladnowska also finds many compositional similarities in this and the other known paintings of this period: 'The paintings resemble edifices built upwards from their foundations. The composition of The Final Hour of Rabbi Eleazar is characterized by not only a rising but also a spiralling movement. [Rabbi Ba'al Shem's Blessing] has a rising and clearly zonal composition emphasized by an upwardly swirling movement of the robes. Strong diagonals contribute to this effect - the tilt towards the left of the old man's head, his hand extended towards the woman, the tilt of her head towards the right side of the painting.
A similar, spiraling rising thrust of the composition can be observed in Adler's painting entitled The Ressurrection and known only from reproduction in a 1919 edition of Jung Idysz no. 4-5-6, p. 16. Rabbi Ba'al Shem's Blessing seems to resemble The Resurrection particularly in its contrast between the hard forms of the background and the soft modelling of the figures - particularly so in central ones'.
On 22 December 1918 Adler took part in the Second Exhibition of the Society of Artists and Dilletanti in Lodz. He exhibited several works including The Final Hour of Rabbi Eleazar but it is not recorded whether the present painting was included. Stylistically it certainly fits the description of the works on show as reported by Glos Polski (The Voice of Poland) on 16 January 1919: 'Adler is young and fresh and one of the most individual artists in the exhibition. His power of expression is so strong that no-one can by-pass these mysterious works. The depth of the colour corresponds to the clarity of the composition. The artist's sensitivity dominates the drawing which has some caricaturist faults but for all the inexactitude of the drawing it is evident that Adler can draw. He has a strong sense of colour, form and light and shade. One only needs to look at the expression of the face, the movement of the shape of the hands and the folds and colour of the garments'.
Adler's style of this period is heavily influenced by El Greco, whose work he must have studied from photographs and by German Expressionism, which would have been introduced to him by Professor Gustave Wiethüchter, his tutor at the School of Applied Arts, Barmen (now Wuppertal) from 1916 to 1917. One can also see in his segmentation of composition and stylization of the figures characteristics of many young Jewish artists of this period including El Lissitzky and Chagall. In the Young Yiddish group manifesto of 1919 Adler focussed on the wide range of writers and artists who influenced him: in an endless list he included Byron, Shelley, Phydias, Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Cranach, van Gogh, Cézanne and El Greco.
Born into a family devoted to Hassidic Jewry, Adler would have been very familiar with the legends of Rabbi Ba'al Shem. The present painting is rather indistincly inscribed Rabbi Balshem in Constantinople on the reverse by a previous owner. Janina Ladnowska approaches the title with some caution: 'Assuming that the title of the painting is consistent with the painter's intention, I identify the figure of the old man on the left as the famous founder of the Hassidic movement, known as Izrael Eleazer from Miedzyboze - otherwise known as Baal-szem-Tov (c. 1700-1760)... The elderly scribe standing nearby, evidently a younger man, may be, as legend had it, the true founder of the school of Hassidic thought - the Rabbi Dow Ber, Magid (wandering preacher) of Miedzyrzecze (1710-1772), or perhaps some other pupil of Baal-szem-Tov, who had written down his teachings, but was himself a greater thinker. In order to find a confirmation of Baal-szem-Tow's presence in Constantinople, one would need to search amongst the legends pertaining to his travels and miaraculous displacements.'
We are grateful to Dr Ulrich Krempel and to Janina Ladnowska of the Sztuki Museum for their extensive help in cataloguing this work and to Professor Ziva Amishai-Maisels of the Department of Art History at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem for first suggesting that this work was likely to be one of the early lost Ba'al Shem Tov paintings.
The Last Hour of Rabbi Eleazar and the present painting share many characterisitc elements: the beautifully formed curvilinear faces with their sweeping eyebrows and high foreheads, the rich colour contrasts of deep reds and golden yellows and the constant juxtaposition of endless curves with fragmented lines and angles.
In a letter to Adler of 1925 Franz Seifert recalled their meeting in Germany in 1917 and the effect the young artist's paintings had on him: 'I remember large canvases with unreal, peculiar figures, Jews - I could sense their mystery. That shimmering, golden-blue mysticism and the figures endlessly melting away. It all looked like beautiful old metal, gold bronze, enamel' (Exh. cat. Jankel Adler, Cologne, 1985).
The present painting perfectly illustrates this 'metallic' paint effect. It is a achieved by a highly inventive method. The rudimentary canvas is prepared with a thin porous ground onto which Adler has applied thin layers of oil mixed with varying amounts of varnish. Some areas are left very thin to sink into the ground whilst in others, such as the rich scarlet and blue areas, repeated layers of thinned varnish and paint are applied to give an extraordinary lustre and translucency to the deep colours.
Janina Ladnowska also finds many compositional similarities in this and the other known paintings of this period: 'The paintings resemble edifices built upwards from their foundations. The composition of The Final Hour of Rabbi Eleazar is characterized by not only a rising but also a spiralling movement. [Rabbi Ba'al Shem's Blessing] has a rising and clearly zonal composition emphasized by an upwardly swirling movement of the robes. Strong diagonals contribute to this effect - the tilt towards the left of the old man's head, his hand extended towards the woman, the tilt of her head towards the right side of the painting.
A similar, spiraling rising thrust of the composition can be observed in Adler's painting entitled The Ressurrection and known only from reproduction in a 1919 edition of Jung Idysz no. 4-5-6, p. 16. Rabbi Ba'al Shem's Blessing seems to resemble The Resurrection particularly in its contrast between the hard forms of the background and the soft modelling of the figures - particularly so in central ones'.
On 22 December 1918 Adler took part in the Second Exhibition of the Society of Artists and Dilletanti in Lodz. He exhibited several works including The Final Hour of Rabbi Eleazar but it is not recorded whether the present painting was included. Stylistically it certainly fits the description of the works on show as reported by Glos Polski (The Voice of Poland) on 16 January 1919: 'Adler is young and fresh and one of the most individual artists in the exhibition. His power of expression is so strong that no-one can by-pass these mysterious works. The depth of the colour corresponds to the clarity of the composition. The artist's sensitivity dominates the drawing which has some caricaturist faults but for all the inexactitude of the drawing it is evident that Adler can draw. He has a strong sense of colour, form and light and shade. One only needs to look at the expression of the face, the movement of the shape of the hands and the folds and colour of the garments'.
Adler's style of this period is heavily influenced by El Greco, whose work he must have studied from photographs and by German Expressionism, which would have been introduced to him by Professor Gustave Wiethüchter, his tutor at the School of Applied Arts, Barmen (now Wuppertal) from 1916 to 1917. One can also see in his segmentation of composition and stylization of the figures characteristics of many young Jewish artists of this period including El Lissitzky and Chagall. In the Young Yiddish group manifesto of 1919 Adler focussed on the wide range of writers and artists who influenced him: in an endless list he included Byron, Shelley, Phydias, Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Cranach, van Gogh, Cézanne and El Greco.
Born into a family devoted to Hassidic Jewry, Adler would have been very familiar with the legends of Rabbi Ba'al Shem. The present painting is rather indistincly inscribed Rabbi Balshem in Constantinople on the reverse by a previous owner. Janina Ladnowska approaches the title with some caution: 'Assuming that the title of the painting is consistent with the painter's intention, I identify the figure of the old man on the left as the famous founder of the Hassidic movement, known as Izrael Eleazer from Miedzyboze - otherwise known as Baal-szem-Tov (c. 1700-1760)... The elderly scribe standing nearby, evidently a younger man, may be, as legend had it, the true founder of the school of Hassidic thought - the Rabbi Dow Ber, Magid (wandering preacher) of Miedzyrzecze (1710-1772), or perhaps some other pupil of Baal-szem-Tov, who had written down his teachings, but was himself a greater thinker. In order to find a confirmation of Baal-szem-Tow's presence in Constantinople, one would need to search amongst the legends pertaining to his travels and miaraculous displacements.'
We are grateful to Dr Ulrich Krempel and to Janina Ladnowska of the Sztuki Museum for their extensive help in cataloguing this work and to Professor Ziva Amishai-Maisels of the Department of Art History at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem for first suggesting that this work was likely to be one of the early lost Ba'al Shem Tov paintings.