ABOUT
“Works which I have created – the fruit of a life full of suffering and of great effort – can clearly be useful to people. My works will live to see their eternal viewer. I believe this deeply, with my full broken and wounded heart.”
- Yefim Ladyzhensky
So much has already been written about Yefim Ladyzhensky, (1911–1982) but, sadly, apart from a few collectors and admirers, the outside world seems to continue to ignore what possibly could be a significant contribution to Eastern European and Jewish art history.
Nevertheless, with the support of his family, who continue to fight for his recognition as a major creative figure in Odessa, Moscow, and Jerusalem, it appears the only place left to cover original ground is to move inward. In doing so, I again hope to strike a chord in raising awareness of and championing his legacy, so that a new audience can be found and that the images and books showcased here can bring forth fresh ideas and insightful questions about how best to look upon vanished worlds of the 20th Century as we begin to examine the role of figurative and narrative art in the 21st.
Years ago, I vividly remember walking into a suburban home outside of Washington, DC and seeing his “We Were Wrapping Candies” for the first time. Within a minute, I realized that here was an artist in his sixties, working in the 1970s, creating images of the 1920s, from an innocent, almost unrefined child’s perspective. But to pigeonhole Ladyzhensky’s style as folk-like is deceptively simple, betraying a larger sense of storytelling at work. A darker tone is brooding; chairs have gone missing; firewood is scarce; and life for his “characters” is not as rosy as the picture suggests. I saw a mother struggling to keep her family together. Dressed in black, a grandmother mourns. The twenties were not roaring for the Jews of Soviet Odessa. And through the window of “We Were Wrapping Candies,” I was eager to discover a much broader and thoroughly precise body of work.
In Ladyzhensky’s depiction of everyday life lies a spirituality, unseen to most. Whereas Jewish art is full to the brim of its own “iconography” – mezuzot, torah scrolls, the calligraphy of the Hebrew letter – Ladyzhensky creates a Jewish world of bustling marketplaces and private ritual, the day-to-day affairs of ordinary people and little-known corners of sheer dramatic spectacle. When exhibited together, they evoke a wondrous feeling of otherness, a glimpse of an extinct world, and a very heartfelt expression of Jewish community. Like Joyce’s Dublin or Scorsese’s New York, this Odessa is lost, yet familiar, both authentic and abstract. It is the perfect metaphor for a first-generation American trying to connect with his cultural roots, and in a greater sense, to better understand the Jewish experience of the past one hundred years as it relates to intolerance, displacement, migration, and ultimately, survival.
Years later, I learned that the candies they were wrapping were a means of private enterprise – which, especially for Jewish families, was banned. Another subversion is evident in “My First Goose,” where in an act of defiance, a bespectacled Lieutev, (writer Isaac Babel’s alter-ego), wields a blood soaked sword, embedded as a reporter among the soldiers of the Red Army. The juxtaposition here is as striking as it is political and poignant. Babel’s “Red Cavalry” stories served as Ladyzhensky’s inspiration for years to come and the wit, humor, and lighthearted tone often associated with the writer, become the artist’s own. Call it an imagined collaboration.
I am convinced that the artist will take his place among the giants of 20th Century Jewish art. I am also certain that although his works may be tied to a specific time and place, they are universal: never feeling dated, but live and walk on a path from naivety to abstraction. This trajectory is much like the Soviet Union’s own history, though Ladyzhensky never did live to see its collapse. His later works, the ultimate realization of pain and suffering, are rooted deeply in the system that failed him. Had he survived, I like to think he would have been pleased that he is remembered and beloved by a young art enthusiast and now – a professional working artist – whom he inspired. Having never known him, regrettably, it is an imagined memory.
- Mark Kelner