New for November 2018

November 9, 2018

New for November 2018

To commemorate the 80th anniversary this month of Kristallnacht, the infamous Night of Broken Glass, when Nazi supporters carried out an officially-sanctioned pogrom against the Jews of Germany, I am presenting three new images from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection of the Prophet Moses and the Ten Commandments by three international Jewish artists working in a variety of styles.  Marc Chagall, the oldest and most renowned of the trio of art-makers, was born into a Hasidic Jewish family in Tsarist Russia and his lyrical  imagery is steeped in the rich, centuries-old East European Jewish culture thoroughly destroyed in World War II. He is represented here by a lithograph of Moses presenting the Tablets of the Law to the Children of Israel from a 1972 series of biblical illustrations. Abraham Rattner was the American-born son of refugees from Eastern Europe, and his art reflects the sensibility of post-war Jews in the diaspora, coming to terms with the horrors of the Holocaust.  His expressionistic image (left) of an an angry (perhaps, terrified) Moses, directing his eyes heavenwards, is part of a portfolio of reproductions Rattner made as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois from 1952-1954. Amram Ebgi comes out of Northern African Sephardic Judaism, emigrating as a child from Morocco to Israel. His highly decorative color lithograph with the gilded Hebrew words, SLAVERY TO FREEDOM, places the Ten Commandments at the center of a Passover tableau with six circles representing the ritual dishes of the traditional Seder meal. The trio of Exodus-themed prints can be found on the Moses and the Ten Commandments page in the Heroes of the Bible gallery in the Bible Stories and Parables section (John Kohan)