Opera singer Feodor Chaliapin (Фёдор Иванович Шаляпин; 1873-1938), lithograph by Leonid Pasternak.

The lithograph is signed and dated in the plate – 1924, and signed by the artist Leonid Pasternak.(in pencil, on the right margin).

48 cm. Mounted on cardboard. Fair condition. Stains. Large cracks and breaks at the margins. Tape reinforcements on verso (around the perimeter of the cardboard).

Leonid Pasternak (Леонид Осипович Пастернак; 1862-1945), a Russian-Jewish Impressionist painter, father of Boris Pasternak. Born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Odessa, he studied law and medicine before turning to art and training at the Academy of Arts in Munich. He was a friend of Leo Tolstoy, illustrated several of his books, and painted a number of his portraits; in 1905, the was elected to the Imperial Academy of Arts and taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. In 1921, he traveled to Berlin for eye surgery and never returned to live in Russia. He passed away in Oxford, England.

Portrait of theater actor Solomon Mikhoels, by Rachel Kogan. Pencil on paper. Signed. Undated. The portrait depicts actor Solomon Mikhoels in the lead role of King Lear, performed by the State Jewish Theater (ГОСЕТ) in Moscow in 1935.

Plate: 36X48 cm. Good condition. Minor stains. Slight creases at margins.

Actor, Solomon Mikhoels (Соломо́н Миха́йлович Михо́элс; stage name of Solomon Vovsi, 1890-1948), born in Dvinsk, was the director of the State Jewish Theater (ГОСЕТ) in Moscow and head of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. In 1935, he played the role of Shakespeare's King Lear. This performance is considered one of the most important and impressive in Mikhoels' career. In 1948, with the beginning of persecutions against Jewish cultural figures and the dissolution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Mikhoels was murdered by the Soviet secret police. The murder was staged to appear as a traffic accident.

Rachel Kogan (Рахиль Бельяминовна Коган; 1912-1998), was a Jewish artist, graphic designer, and educator born in Odessa. She graduated from the Odessa Art Institute and the Academy of Arts in Leningrad. In 1938, she was accepted into the Artists' Union of the USSR. After World War II, she was appointed professor of painting and drawing at the Leningrad Higher School of Art and Industry. Over the years, her works were exhibited in various exhibitions throughout the Soviet Union. In 1973, she immigrated to Israel and engaged in education. Her works were exhibited in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Collection of approximately 75 original illustrations, sketches, and drafts by Nathan Altman, for a Russian edition of Sholem Aleichem's works. [Russia, ca. late 1940s]. Pencil and ink on paper.

Includes about 25 plates with illustrations titled, dated, and signed at the margins of the plate – "H.A. 48" [Nathan Altman, 1948], as well as a notebook comprising some fifty drafts and preparatory illustrations (drawn in pencil).

The illustrations were originally intended for an edition of Sholem Aleichem's complete works in Yiddish, planned for publication in 1948. However, following the dissolution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the intensification of persecutions against Jewish cultural figures, this edition was never realized. Most of the drafts and illustrations were eventually printed in a Russian edition of Sholem Aleichem's works: С ярмарки – Рассказы [From the Fair – Stories], published in Moscow in 1957, edited by the writer and translator Rivka Rubina (Ривка Рубина).

This edition includes, among others, some of Sholem Aleichem's best-known works, including the autobiography "From the Fair", and stories from his books "Poor and Happy", "Monologues", "Railroad Stories", "Tales for Jewish Children", "Song of Songs", and more (a copy of this Russian edition is enclosed; however, some of the illustrations in the draft notebook do not appear in the enclosed volume).

Enclosed is a certificate signed by Prof. Dmitry Malakhovsky (Дмитрий Брониславович Малаховский; 1932-2010), Nathan Altman's nephew and stepson [his mother Maria and Altman's third wife, Irina, were sisters – both daughters of the Russian clergyman Valentin Ternavtsev (Валентин Александрович Тернавцев; 1866-1940). After the death of both his parents in Stalin's purges in the 1930s and 1940s, Dmitry was adopted by his aunt and uncle, Irina and Nathan Altman].

In the certificate dated February 27, 2002, Prof. Malakhovsky attests that the illustrations were created by Nathan Altman in 1948 and came into his possession after the death of his stepmother Irina Ternavtseva (Ирина Валентиновна Тернавцева; 1906-1993).

A similar certification is also written at the end of the draft notebook (in pencil).

[25] plates + draft notebook. Size and condition vary. Overall good condition. Placed in a folder.

Nathan Altman (Натан Исаевич Альтман; 1889-1970), born in Vinnytsia (present-day Ukraine), an avant-garde artist, painter, graphic designer, sculptor, book illustrator and stage designer. His varied work belongs to various styles – Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, and Suprematism – and reflects the many changes in his world, both artistic and political.

He began his art studies in Odessa; in 1910 he moved to Paris, where he continued his studies and associated with the artists of the "Machmadim" group which advocated Zionist Jugendstil. In 1912, Altman returned to Russia and settled in St. Petersburg. He spent the summer of 1913 sketching reliefs found on Jewish tombstones and developing a Cubist style based on Jewish folk art. At that time, he founded a Jewish Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. Altman was an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik revolution, after which he was appointed a member of the IZO-Narkompros (the Department of Fine Arts of the People's Commissariat for Education). In 1919, he became one of the prominent artists of the "Kom-Fut" group (Communist Futurists). He worked for the Monumental Propaganda plan conceived by Lenin, and created agitprop art.

During the early 1920s, Altman worked as a stage designer for HaBimah Theater and the Jewish State Theater Goset. His Constructivist costume design for the play "The Dybbuk", staged by HaBimah Theater in 1922, incorporated elements taken from Jewish folk and religious art; and his stage design for the Goset production of "Uriel da Costa" was his most advanced Constructivist work at the time. In 1922, his works were exhibited at the "First Russian Art Exhibition" in Berlin and alongside works by Chagall and Sternberg in the "Exhibition of the Three" of the Kultur Lige group. In the early 1920s, Altman was a prominent artist whose works expressed the spirit of the party and the revolution – the rebellion against the old degenerate order – and in this capacity he created a series of sketches and a bust of Lenin. In 1928, Altman went on a tour with the Goset theater and remained in Paris until 1935. While there, the Party's attitude towards art went through a transformation. Already in the mid-1920s the party began furthering socialist realism and restricting the activity of avant-garde groups, claiming art should serve defined goals, be simple and understood by everyone and portray the beauty of communist reality. In 1932, with Altman still out of the country, the central committee of the communist party banned any union of independent artists. From then on, the party imposed its new and preferred style, socialist realism, and avant-garde was pushed to the new status of "bourgeois" art, enemy of the revolution. Returning to Russia in 1936, Altman settled in Leningrad, and as an undesirable artist worked mainly as a graphic designer, book illustrator and stage designer, trying to adhere to the party's new line.

Literature: Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change 1890-1990, edited by Susan Tomarkin Goodman. Prestel Publishing, Munich / New York, 1995. p. 146.

Искусство Марка Шагала [The Art of Marc Chagall], by Yakov Tugendhold (Тугендхольд) and Abram Markovich Efros (Эфрос). Moscow: Геликон, 1918. First edition. Russian. Two copies.

The first monograph on Marc Chagall. Includes reproductions of his works on separate pages and within the text. Copy nos. 170 and 198, from an edition of 850 copies. The publishing house logo was designed by El Lissitzky.

Marc Chagall (Марк Заха́рович Шага́л; 1887-1985), a Russian-French artist, is considered by many the greatest Jewish modern painter. Chagall was born to a Hassidic family in Liozna (then in Belarus), the eldest of nine siblings. When his mother asked his first art teacher, the painter Yehuda Pen, whether her son could earn a living from painting, Pen looked at Chagall's sketches and told her: "Yes, he has some ability". At the age of twenty, he was accepted to study art in St. Petersburg (during this period, he painted for the first time the figure of the Fiddler on the Roof, after which the famous musical is named) and in 1914 married the writer Bella Rosenfeld, who became known as one of his greatest sources of inspiration. After the October Revolution, Chagall was appointed commissar of arts for the Vitebsk district, where he established an art school and a museum. Among the teachers of the school were the artist El Lissitzky and the painter Yehuda Pen – Chagall's first teacher. In 1920, Chagall moved to Western Europe and after a short stay in Berlin settled in Paris. During this period, he created the important series "My Life", which documented the views of the Jewish town, and the series of bible illustrations. In 1941, about two years after the occupation of France by Nazi Germany, Chagall succeeded in escaping to the USA with the assistance of the American journalist Varian Fry. For several years he lived in New York, returning to France after the war, where he remained until his death. Chagall's works of art, which embrace a wide variety of fields and styles (prints, theater sets and costumes, sculpture and ceramics, tapestry, mosaics, stained glass, and more), are exhibited in leading museums and galleries, in the opera houses of New York and Paris, in the Mainz Cathedral, in the Knesset (in The Chagall Lounge) and elsewhere. The painter Pablo Picasso said of his work: "When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is".

Искусство в производстве, Issue number 1. Moscow: Отдел ИЗО Наркомпроса, 1921. Russian.

Two copies – variants with different cover colors, one in orange and the other in purple, with additional minor differences; one booklet (in the purple cover) was specially printed for the art historian and critic David Arkin (Дави́д Ефи́мович А́ркин; 1899-1957), who contributed to its creation – printed on the verso of the title page: "Copy of David Efimovich Arkin" (Russian).

The booklet comprises a collection of articles dedicated to the role of art in industrial production, emphasizing the need for artistic thinking in production and development processes, according to the principles of the Constructivist art movement. Contributors include David Shterenberg, David Arkin, Osip Brik, Aleksei Toporkov, Vasily Voronov, and others.

The lithographic covers were likely designed by David Shterenberg (1881-1948), a Russian-Jewish painter and graphic artist, one of the prominent representatives of the Russian avant-garde movement, and head of the Fine Arts Department of the People's Commissariat for Education – "Narkompros" (who published this booklet).

Two copies: 42, [1] pages. Approx. 22-22.5 cm. Overall good to good-fair condition. Stains, creases and minor wear. Inscriptions. Wear and blemishes to the orange-toned cover, with tape to spine.

MoMA 356.