Visual history of Israel.

£500 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

signed Colour lithograph signed by Arthur Szyk, printed in New York in 1948. Arthur Szyk (1894-1951), a Polish-Jewish artist, produced works characterised in their material content by social and political commitment, and in their formal aspect by the rejection of modernism and drawing on the traditions of medieval and renaissance painting, especially illuminated manuscripts from those periods. Szyk worked primarily as a book illustrator and political artist throughout his career and always showed great attention to the colour effects and details in his works. Szyk's drawings and paintings became even more politically engaged when Hitler took power in Germany in 1933. Szyk started drawing Führer's caricatures as early as 1933; probably, the first work of the artist directed against the leader of the Third Reich was a drawing of Hitler, made in pencil, in which he was shown as a new pharaoh. These drawings anticipated the present great series of Szyk's arts – Haggadah, his magnum opus. Szyk illustrated it in 48 drawings in the years 1932-1938, moving to London in 1937 to supervise its publication. In July 1940 Szyk moved to North America, with the support of the British government and the Polish government-in-exile, on assignment to popularise the struggle of the British and Polish nations against Nazism. He ended up settling in New Canaan, Connecticut, and in subsequent years illustrated a number of works on Jewish themes, such as 'Pathways through the Bible' by Mortimer J. Co

• Binding: Hardcover

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