Polish-born Jewish artist Arthur Szyk (Łódź, 1894—New Canaan, CT 1951) was a great advocate for humanity and for the global Jewish community. Szyk (pronounced Shik) achieved world-wide recognition in the 1920s and 1930s in Poland, France, and England before immigrating to the U.S. in 1940 where he went on to become the leading anti-Nazi artist during World War II. Szyk is also famous for his illuminated Passover Haggadah, and his iconic towering Holy Ark for the Forest Hills Jewish Center. Szyk’s work fought injustice and intolerance, bigotry and racism as a “soldier in art.”
This four-part lecture series by Szyk scholar Irvin Ungar will explore how and why Szyk is the artist of and for the Jewish people, and the ways his art and spirit remain eternal in the service of mankind.
As early as 1934, Arthur Szyk told the American press: "An artist, and especially a Jewish artist, cannot be neutral in these times... Our life is involved in a terrible tragedy, and I am resolved to serve my people with all my art, with all my talent, with all my knowledge." Szyk went on to become the most important anti-Nazi artist in America during World War II and the leading artist for the rescue of European Jewry. No one created more activist art to motivate America's fight against the Nazis than the "soldier in art" himself, and his Holocaust art was more widely reproduced than that of any artist. The Museum's exhibition The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do has several of these drawings and cartoons on display. Szyk's 1943 masterpiece De profundis: Cain, where is Abel thy brother? may well be the single most significant contemporary Holocaust work of art on paper. Szyk devoted himself to the dignity of every Jewish soul.