Yudel Pen, also known as Yehuda Pen or Yury Pen,[a] (5 June [24 May Old Style] 1854 - 28 February 1937)[1] was a Jewish artist and art teacher active in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. He is best known for founding an influential art school in Vitebsk and teaching notable avant-garde artists like Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, and Ossip Zadkine. Pen was one of the first painters to consistently depict Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement; he is sometimes called "the Sholem Aleichem of painting".[2]
Born in a poor Jewish family in a shtetl, he showed an early talent for drawing and painting. He got an academic training in the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, and several years after graduation he opened an art school in Vitebsk, where he taught many poor, mainly Jewish children, often for free. Pen was murdered in 1937; though officially called a robbery, his students believed that he was killed by NKVD during the Stalin's purges. A lot of his paintings were lost during the World War II. The surviving works are split between the National Art Museum in Minsk and the Vitebsk Regional Museum of Local History.
- ^ a b "Пэн Юдаль (Іегуда) Моўшавіч (Юрый Майсеевіч)". bis.nlb.by. Беларусь у асобах i падзеях. Retrieved 23 June 2024.
- ^ Diment, Galya (1 January 2021). "Yehuda Pen, The Sholem Aleichem of Painting". Ars Judaica the Bar Ilan Journal of Jewish Art. 17 (1): 61–86. doi:10.3828/aj.2021.17.4. ISSN 2516-4252. Retrieved 23 June 2024.
Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).