Amazing Rumanian Prodigy Expresses Self As Prophet

Add to the list of “wunder-kinder” the name of Moses Barasch, fourteen-year-old, artist of Cernauti, Rumania.

And if you need references beyond the mere statement of a reporter, may we turn you to any or all of the following: F. B. May, a retired dealer in fine arts; James N. Rosenberg, lawyer, philanthropist and amateur artist, and Mrs. Stephen S. Wise, wife of the rabbi social service worker and an artist in her own right.

Or if you are one to make judgments yourself, visit the synagogue house of the Free Synagogue, 40 West Sixty-eighth street, where is placed an exhibit of the paintings and sketches of this youthful genius.

LIVES IN POVERTY

Living in the abject poverty of the typical East European Jew, young Barasch, a disciple of Hassidism, has painted and sketched works of a highly religious and ethical concept. He has also done a few items—at least only a few on exhibit in this country—on the pitiful people he lives among. The Joint Distribution Committee, or some other relief organization, should they be in need of one, need look no further than these samples of young Barasch’s art for a harrowing and pitiful campaign poster.

It is the idea of Mrs. Wise and others to take the youngster from his squalid surroundings and transplant him to Palestine where his genius will have a chance to flourish. The proceeds from the sale of his paintings and contributions received from persons interested in his art will, it is hoped, prove adequate.

PROFESSOR IMPRESSED

Testimony from a disinterested critic on the art of the youngster is to be noted in an article written by Dr. Vladimir von Zaleoziecki, professor of history of art at the University of Cernauti. The authority, a Gentile, viewed the works of young Barasch. Impressed as he was, he nevertheless tried to turn the youngster to a more normal life, not believing in prodigies as such.

In his article he tells of the reaction of the youngster when he took him to his country home to play with his own children. He writes:

PAINTS SCENE

“The third Sunday I took him again to the place in order to exterminate the gnats and ants which his environment had pumped into his heart and brain; and I pointed out to little Moses (at the time he was twelve) a pine tree standing before my house; he began to draw that pine tree, and he drew in it the red dead branch which it held in its boughs since the winter, and with which it will not part, may the wind shake ever so hard; and thus it became a ‘Pieta’ of the pine trees. And the sun, who would have made green the branch like the most hopeful son, and the sun who, later, after the heaviest of snowfalls, caused the snow to melt into watery snow and who on that day so rapidly retired into the coldest of nights, so that the heavily inburdened and now iced son had to collapse and die,—that very sun Moses painted as a dusky murderer, standing above the tragedy soaked with blood—the guilty criminal.

“In view of this picture I capitulated. Should anybody, even when only twelve years of age, be compelled to laugh and carouse jump to lightheartedness, whilst his soul is afraid of all that and pushes it away and alone feels free when meditating, when reading Konstantin Brunner, when contemplating the Michelangelo portfolio? No Cecina Mountain any longer and since that time complete freedom.”

INTERPRETS BAPTISM

Or listen to the youngster himself. Asked to interpret his conception of a canvas: “The Baptism of Christ,” the child wrote:

“In the evangels I have given much attention to the following dictum: ‘I baptize you with water, but He will baptize you with the Holy Ghost. This uttering of John holds a leading place in my picture. John is a wild ascetic who feels best in the desert, because the desert is just as large and just as cruel and, at the same time, just as sublime as he is himself. There is a discrepancy arising between John and Christ. I feel it. As a matter of fact, John who has something external in him, has compelled Christ, who is only something internal, and who needs no confirmation of the body for such purpose, to this baptism, to this bodily evidence of ideas. Hence my “Baptism” is a conjunction of two men in a fight. John and Christ are like day and night, who, in my canvas, are connected by the baptism, by the dusk.”

NOTES ON ‘HOSEA’

Young Moses notes on some of his other paintings on exhibition are equally interesting and revealing. Of “The Prophet Hosea,” he writes:

“The angry prophet who always punished, who always announced perdition and who never ceased to accuse the people, the wrathful great man at one time asked himself whether all his ‘wrath’ had cause and reason. This constitutes a big moment on the life and in the work of that true genius.

“But still more interest is the dawning of such question, the moment when his innermost becomes disquieted and when he, with wrath and curse on his lips, listens to his innervoice that finally, leads him to a new road, to the “Road of the Consolation.”

“It is this moment of the soul’s dawn which I have depicted.”

HIGHLY IMAGINATIVE

The ardent fervor and vitality of young Barasch’s choice of subjects, the high degree of imaginative imagery and the great but unschooled technique shown by Barasch in his canvases indicate him to be something more than a child possessed of the power to draw pretty things. A flame surges within him; it is apparent even to the untutored in art.

In a canvas, “Melody,” young Barasch attempts to tell the whole story of Chasidism. To him, the sect was born because “melody” in the Jewish faith had been lost.

“Since the time Jewish independence was lost,” he writes of this picture, “when the sages of the Talmud became the leaders, the melody has been neglected. It went into oblivion because the dry teachers of the Talmud prohibited it and sometimes condemned it as fetishism.

FORGOTTEN MELODY

“Many centuries of hostility to melodies had passed, and the Jewish character, which is so closely allied to melody, deteriorated and degenerated. Already melody was forgotten, but in the unfathomed depth of the Jewish gleamed a spark, a remainder of the Godly fire called melody.

“Nothing falls into emptiness and this is no exception—Chassidim arrived and the spark which glimmered in the unknown bottom of the Jewish soul flamed up brightly and became a mighty fire of the soul. There it was where the Jewish melody found its reincarnation.”

Continuing with a description of what melody means to Chassidism, Borasch says that “in the moment of most exalted ecstasy the Chassidim talk to God in the language of the melody. The melody is a world of its own. It gushes from all devout souls, it comes forth from the many sad and glad hearts, that melody, the only real language of the devotee. And whereto strives the melody, to its original source: the Godliness of the soul, its splendor and its secret.

“My canvas represents a man in whom the melody longs for return to its original source. It is a man in whom the great process of melody-redemption is taking place.”

Such religious fervor, such articulateness both on canvas and on paper is rare in an adult. In a child it is amazing. His sponsors think Moses Barasch a true genius, a possible successor to Boris Schatz. Not to send him to Palestine, they feel, would be criminal. All of which is the reason for the exhibit which, it is hoped, will bring him to the attention of someone willing to subsidize a child of fury, a little child who thinks in terms of the Prophets.