MAURYCY (i.e, Moses, or Moshe) GOTTLIEB
NOTE: Maurycy Gottlieb is sometimes written as Maurycego Gottlieba.

The majority of the artwork in existence by Maurycy Gottlieb is in an unfinished state. For nearly a century the body of work he produced in his short life was thought to be small. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, lists of Gottlieb artwork began to appear from Eastern Europe, mostly from holdings in Poland, with now a total of some 300 known works world-wide.

One of eleven children to Isaac & Fanya Tigerman Gottlieb, Maurycy was enrolled at the Vienna Art Academy at fifteen. He later followed this with study under Polish painter Jan Matejko in Krakow. Within a half-year he had quit Matejko's studio angrily after repeatedly experiencing anti-semitism from the other art students. Gottlieb returned to Vienna and began a search for his Jewish roots; something vague for him as his parents had attempted to raise him in the then current secular school of "european enlightenment."

At the age of twenty he was awarded a gold medal at a Munich art competition for the painting Shylock and Jessica, taken from Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice (the painting is considered ost, only photographs survive. A color copy painted by another artist is here). The face for Jessica was modeled on Laura Rosenfeld, the unmarried daughter of a prosperous merchant family of Vienna. Gottlieb had proposed marriage to the girl, and was initially accepted, but was rejected shortly after.

It is believed that this rejection played the primary role in Gottlieb's death in 1879. Though he shortly was to arrange a marriage with Lvov native Lola Rosengarten, upon hearing of Laura Rosenfeld's marriage to a banker in Berlin, he apparently committed a form of suicide by exposure to the elements, succumbing to complications of a cold & sore throat. He was buried in Cracow, Poland.

As a Polish-Jewish artist, Gottlieb is unique. As a Polish painter, he is considered to be the best of his generation. Though reared as a secular Jew he steadily looked back toward a heritage he had been raised to be emancipated from. His painting Day of Atonement depicts himself twice as a child and once as we was at the age of painting the image. An inscription on the painting says "donated
in memory of the late honored teacher and rabbi moshe gottlieb of
blessed memory." His painting of Jesus, (Jesus preaching at Capernuam) an unusual subject for a Jewish artist before the 20th Century, depicts Jesus with prayer shawl & earlocks, speaking in synagogue. Gottlieb's many self-portraits usually show a contemporary 19th century urbanite, with an aloof, querying look.

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SOME MAURCY GOTTLIEB LINKS

A review of the exhibit ''The Emergence of Jewish Artists in 19th-Century Europe'' at the Jewish Museum in New York. Review by the New York Times here.

A site about the Drohobycz District where Maurycy Gottlieb was born is here.

Bio with list of works (in Polish) here.

Artzone.com has a brief (and somewhat tangled) English bio of Gottlieb plus a small landscape drawing attributed to him here.

The Tel Aviv Museum has Gottlieb's Day of Atonement with curator notes here.

Page promoting the book Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art By Ezra Mendelsohn here.

Short bio with postcard image of Gottlieb's Uriel D'Acosta and Judith van Straaten here.

ARTNET has a bio from the Grove Dictionary of Artists here.

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A web page ("The Message Center") has information about Gottlieb artwork stolen in Poland by the Nazis during the Second World War here. Some of the artwork is described from a pre-war catalog as:

1. Tulacz studjum ol. - - A portrait of an old man with a long white beard.
2. Scena ëz ìFaustaî, szkic ol. - - A scene of a woman standing nextto an arch while two men look at her taking sacred water.
3. Na balkonie szkic kompozycyjny ol. - - Scene of a woman with ahead dress reading on a balcony.
4. Zygmunt August, studjum ol. - - Portrait of a man with dark hair

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From an email in 2004 I received about Gottlieb's Day of Atonement Picture:

"You may know that the women in this painting were removed from the painting when a reproduction was made for the Diaspora museum."

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This web page is by Erik Weems. erik@eeweems.com
My home page is eeweems.com