A retrospective exhibition of paintings by Mark S. Joffe is in progress at the Academy of Allied Arts, 389 West 86th St. It has been arranged by a committee of friends and admirers of the artist in celebration of the seventieth anniversary of his birth. Mark S. Joffe was born in Dvinsk, Russia, in 1864. He received his early training in the Warsaw Art School. In 1891 he graduated from the Petrograd (now Leningrad) Academy of Art, a recipient of gold and silver medals galore.
In 1897 he exhibited the “Day of Atonement” which made him famous. Cheaply colored reproductions of this painting found places on the walls of countless Jewish homes. It hung in the place of honor, surrounded by age brown photographs of his children in America, in the home of my grandfather. I admired it tremendously as a child. It was beautiful and awe-inspiring.
Well, to tell the truth, I do not like it much now. It is rather poorly painted, weakly drawn and oversweet in sentiment. It is utterly and hopelessly dated.
For almost fifty years Mark Joffe has been painting “Eternal Travellers,” “Hamans and Esthers,” “Rabbi Akivas” and other similar sentimental Jewish pictures, unruffled and unperturbed by any of the artistic movements of the past decades. Which may explain the lack of life in his figure paintings.
But there are two Mark S. Joffes. There is the Mark Joffe, the renowned one, the perpetrator of artistic crimes such as the aforementioned “Day of Atonement,” and there is another Joffe, an unknown one, an able sympathetic painter of delicate little landscapes and intimate interiors. The exhibition abounds in them. They are painted simply and directly. “A Road,” “In Fron of the Mirror,” “Cliffs,” “Street Scene” are delightful. Some of the best pictures are painted but recently, which shows that the aged artist is in full possession of his powers and is constantly progressing. Of the two Mark Joffes I much prefer the lesser known one.
An exhibition, entitled “Jewish Life” by Saul Raskin is being held at the Jewish Club. It is arranged by the Hechalutz Music Society.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
