Jerzy Malinowski, Grupa ‘Jung ldysz’ i żydowskie frodowisko ‘Nowej Sztuki’ w Polsce

Summary

The Jung ldysz [Young Yiddish] group-founded in 1918 in Łódź was the first and only important Jewish artistic group in the domain of painting and graphic art in Poland before the Second World War and the Holocaust. In his thoughtful and well-researched book, the Polish art historian Jerzy Malinowski succeeds in presenting a novel and on the whole convincing picture of both the internal and the external dynamics of Jewish artistic life in Poland at the beginning of the 1920s. He treats the history of the Jung ldysz group in close conjunction with the history and activities of the Jewish avant-garde between two focal points, Paris and Moscow. There can be no doubt that the flowering of Jewish artistic life in post-Tsarist and early Bolshevik Russia must have exerted in the crucial years 1917-19 a profound influence on the young Jewish artists in Warsaw and Łódź. After all, the Polish capital was an important stepping-stone for many Jewish artists from Russia and the Ukraine on their way to Berlin or Paris. So, for example, in the fall of 1921 the famous El Lissitzky stayed in Warsaw for a couple of weeks, contacted some Jung Idysz artists (most notably Henryk Berlewi), and published there an important theoretical article in Yiddish on ‘Overcoming Art’ ('Des goyner zayn di kunst', Ringen, IO (1921 or 1922)). This article, which has remained unknown goyner zayn to the great array of Lissitzky scholars, has been rediscovered by Malinowski, translated into Polish, and published in the annex to his book (pp. 213-18): perhaps the most important of the many fortunate discoveries in this work.

To the Jung ldysz group belonged the now famous painter Jankel Adler, but also Wincenty (Icchak) Brauner, Marek Szwarc, Henryk (Henoch) Barcinski, the poet Moshe Broderson, and the less well-known female artists Dina Matus, Ida Brauner, Pola Lindenfeld, and Zofia Gutentag. In 1921 Henryk Berlewi, the latter-day abstract painter, loosely adhered to the group. However, in late 1921 the group dissolved itself after most of its members left Poland to pursue their artistic education or careers in Germany.