The Old Rebbe: Yehuda Pen and the Birth of Jewish Fine Art

Jennifer Stern will talk about the painter Yehuda Pen, who was Marc Chagall’s first art teacher in Vitebsk, Russia.

Pen was not an obviously revolutionary artist: he trained at the art academy in St. Petersburg, and painted in an old-fashioned style. But he was the first Russian artist to combine traditional techniques with openly Jewish subject matter – drawn not from the Hebrew Bible but from the daily lives of ordinary Jews. Pen invented “Jewish fine art” in Russia, and passed on this innovation to the mostly Jewish students at his Vitebsk art school.

Chagall, El Lissitzky, Solomon Yudovin and other Pen students embraced the avant-garde, but in a distinctively Jewish way. Without “the Old Rebbe,” Chagall’s affectionate nickname for Pen, Jewish modern art in Russia (and beyond) might never have existed.

Come learn about Pen himself and about some of his famous students.