Gouache on etching, paper.
Dimensions: 38.5 x 49 cm, 55 x 65 cm
Signature, p.d.: Jankiel Adler
Provenance: Private collection (Israel)
Unframed work.
Certificate of authenticity
Jankiel Adler (1895-1949) was a Polish-Jewish painter and printmaker associated with the École de Paris and the European avant-garde. He was born in Tuszyn near Lodz to an Orthodox Jewish family. He studied art in Warsaw and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Barmen. After World War I, he returned to Lodz, where he co-founded the "Jung Idysz" group, and his works began to gain recognition in Poland and abroad.
In the 1920s Adler settled in Germany, where he became associated with the Berlin group Der Sturm. His work, inspired by Jewish tradition, Cubism and Expressionism, quickly gained international recognition. In 1933, after the Nazis came to power, his work was considered "degenerate art" and the artist himself had to flee Germany. He settled in Paris, where he worked with Leopold Zborowski, and then in Britain.
Adler created portraits, still lifes and abstract compositions, combining simplicity of forms with deep religious and emotional symbolism. During World War II he served in the Polish army in the West, and after the war he remained in Great Britain, where he died in 1949. His works, considered an expression of the synthesis of tradition and modernity, are today exhibited in prestigious museums around the world.
