Albraham Goldberg, whose work is being exhibited by the Menorah Artists and Writers’ Committee at the Jewish Club, 23 West 73d Street, is one of the youngest of the evergrowing group of Jewish intellectuals who are consciously striving dto create a national Jewish art. The work of these artists is mostly reminscent. They live and create in the past. They could be divided roughly into two camps-the artist who paint the proverbial “Wandering Jews”, sentimental “Bar-mitzvabs” and unimaginative Prophets, and the artists who, like the whimsical chagall, recreate and perpetuate on canvass or in stone in a modern idiom each his little hom-town in Lithuania or Poland, His own particular Kasrilovka with its stunted dreamers, aborted genouses and half-wits. The work of these artists is highly imaginative and sensitive and peculiarly Jewish. It is in this class that Goldberg belings.
The exhibition consists of some thirty odd small drawings in wash. Their uniformity in size, theme and approach gives it a sense of competeness seom achieved by more pretentious exhibitions. these drawings, with the exception of a few portau studies, areas their titles-The Visit, Conversation, The Meeting-would indicate interiors people with two or three figures. Though small, they are quite large inscope.
Goldberg possesses a fine sense of space, and extraoridinary sight memory and a princely disregard for details. He is a poet of twilight and deep shadows. he eploys chiaroscuro very cleverly an sometimes uses it as a means to hide faulty drawing. Obviously influenced by Rembrandt, Daumier and Roualt, he is by no means a mere unitator, Unlike his masters he does not individualize his figures. They are not living people in prayer, gossip or work but rather-symbols, spots of light or dark in space arrangements. There is a fine dramatic quality in his work Goldberg’s pictures are almost invariably in good teste; they are never cheap, vulgar or florid, but they lack the lang of life. It is because he keeps out of touch with life. He is abelated poet of a generation almost gone>
It is an important and interesting exhibition. In henoring Mr. Goldberg, the Menorah Society honors itself.
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