Obj. ID: 49870
Modern Jewish Art  Solomon Yudovin, St. Petersburg, circa 1917

The following description was prepared by William Gross:

Solomon Borisovich Yudovin (1892-1954) was born in the Vitebsk district village of Beshenkovichi to a family of Jewish artisans. His earliest art training was in Vitebsk with Yehuda Pen, the famous teacher with whom Chagall also studied. In 1910 he went to St. Petersburg to attend the Drawing School of the Committee for the Support of the Arts. During 1911-1914, Yudovin participated in the Jewish ethnographic expedition through the rural areas of Volynia and Podolia in the Ukraine. The purpose of this expedition, sponsored by Baron Horace-Guenzburg and led by the famous playwright An-Sky (S. A. Rapoport), the author of The Dybbuk, was to document the rapidly disappearing Jewish cultural life of the shtetl. Yudovin's task was to photograph and copy the many items that were collected and then deposited in the Jewish National Museum in St. Petersburg.

His artistic career was interrupted by the exigencies of World War I, but in 1918 he returned to Vitebsk, soon to become a teeming avant-garde art center, where he resumed his career upon entering the Vitebsk Art Institute. Yudovin was a figurative artist with interest in the cultural past of the Russian Jews and he was only minimally influenced by the modernistic trends then brewing in Vitebsk. However, his interest in Jewish 'folk art' was very influential among such Vitebsk modernists as Alter and Kandinsky. In 1923 he moved to St. Petersburg apparently to become the Jewish National Museum's caretaker, even living in the museum building during 1929 through 1931 in order to guard the collection while that institution was shut down.