by Joan Rosenbaum
My home is filled with art. While each work is unique, or part of a limited edition, one I’m especially drawn to that’s neither original, valuable or collectable is a framed exhibition poster. It’s from a 1995 Jewish Museum exhibition, called Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change 1890-1990, and the image is a 1914 painting titled “The Watchmaker” by Yehuda Pen whose life covered a turbulent period of history. Born in Russia’s Pale of Settlement in 1854, he lived under czarist then communist regimes and was murdered in 1937 during the Stalin purges. Trained at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, he founded an art school in Vitebsk where he mentored many notable artists including Marc Chagall. Pen eschewed the emerging avant-garde styles and remained a realist throughout his career, creating paintings of traditional Jewish life that provide a window into a lost world.
In the painting “The Watchmaker,” a man, neither young nor old, with grey beard, cap and rimless glasses, sits at his worktable, surrounded by the accoutrements of his profession and reads a Yiddish newspaper, while smoking a cigarette. He appears religious, yet with his engagement with the world at large through the paper, I imagine him a person inhabiting two worlds. The clocks around him likely refer to the passage of time, but given the date of the painting, they could also reflect a time in Russia on the edge of profound social and political change.
I look at “The Watchmaker” and see someone taking a precious respite from work while savoring the pleasure of smoking. His long fingers reflect the intricacy and precision required of his work yet the nonchalance of his gesture also gives him an air of worldliness. I’ve been drawn to this work for 30 years. I love the way it’s painted, but I also appreciate it as a reminder of my grandfather, known to me as tahti, a diminutive of the Yiddish word for father. A part of my family’s household until he passed away when I was twelve, tahti had a shop for making men’s suits in the attic of our house and like the watchmaker also smoked and read the Yiddish newspaper every morning. As a child I was very attached to him and loved spending time among the objects of his work – huge scissors for cutting fabric, pinking shears that made pointy edges, a mountain of threads and a large tailor’s form. As I gaze at the poster, I imagine that tahti, like the watchmaker was also a person who straddled two worlds. He spoke both Yiddish and English, came as a young man from the “old country”, dressed elegantly, read Spinoza and though he attended synagogue, worked on the Sabbath. But I knew so little about him — about where he had lived before coming to America, if he had parents or siblings that perished, or how he became a tailor. These were things never spoken about.
Art evokes many associations and feelings. Pen’s strength as an artist is that he has poignantly communicated the complexity and dignity of an ordinary person through a painting with the capacity to capture one’s imagination and heart.
I worked in and with museums my whole career including directing The Jewish Museum for 30 years.