The Jewish Museum Milwaukee will set a precedent with its next exhibit, scheduled to open on March 14.
As Molly Dubin, the JMM curator, explained in an interview on Feb. 22, artworks by Felix Lembersky (1913-1970) previously have been displayed at some university-affiliated museums in the United States, like that at the University of Richmond in late 2012.
But the JMM this month will become the first U.S. public museum to showcase works by this courageous and visionary Russian Jewish artist, she said.
Titled “Felix Lembersky: Soviet Form, Jewish Context,” and running through July 14, the exhibit will present 27 Lembersky paintings and drawings.
They are provided by the artist’s granddaughter, Yelena Lembersky; and the exhibit is being co-curated by Dubin and Prof. Joel Berkowitz, director of the Sam & Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
It is co-sponsored by UWM’s art history and history departments, and it constitutes one event in UWM’s Peck School of the Arts 2013 Year of the Arts celebration.
Several events are scheduled in conjunction with the exhibit:
• On Friday, March 15, 8:30 a.m., Yelena Lembersky will give a Russian-language lecture about her grandfather and his work. Admission of $5 includes museum admission.
• On the day of the official public opening of the exhibit, Sunday, March 17, co-curators Dubin and Berkowitz will speak at 2 p.m.
• On Thursday, April 11, 7 p.m., the Fine Arts Quartet, UWM’s resident string quartet, will present a concert of Russian music that will honor Marianne Lubar, philanthropist and the JMM’s founding president.
• On Wednesday, May 29, 11:30 a.m., Christine Evans, assistant professor of history at UWM, will speak about “Soviet Art and Culture After Stalin.”
Lembersky was born in Lublin, Poland, and his family fled to Russia in the wake of anti-Jewish rioting there.
He grew up in Berdichev in what is now northern Ukraine. This city was famous in Yiddish literature as a locus of clashing Jewish cultural trends, being a center of Hasidism and the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment). A Ukrainian army pogrom occurred there during the Russian civil war in 1919.
According to an essay by his daughter, Galina Lembersky, that was published in the catalogue for the University of Richmond exhibit, Lembersky showed artistic talent at an early age. At 17, he became set designer at the Jewish Theater in Kiev.
During the 1930s, the period of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s terror campaigns, Lembersky studied at the Kiev Art Institute and the Leningrad Academy of Art, becoming one of the top students at the latter.
According to biographical information provided to JMM by his granddaughter, Lembersky defended his degree thesis during the Nazi German siege of Leningrad; his daughter’s essay adds that he was seriously wounded in the city’s defense. Moreover, the Nazis murdered his family during the occupation of Berdichev.
As with all Soviet artists, Lembersky was trained in the style and esthetic of “Socialist Realism,” the official art doctrine that underlay the creating of propaganda extolling the Russian Revolution and the communist regime.
His daughter wrote that after the war, “my father was offered fame, wealth, position, and endless opportunities to paint, exhibit his work, and to become, perhaps, the greatest artist that the Soviet Union had ever and would ever produce.”
Lembersky rejected the offer. “For him, honesty and integrity meant more than anything else,” his daughter wrote. “He refused to pay the heavy price of creating dictated art.”
After the war and especially during the relative cultural “thaw” that followed Stalin’s death in 1953, Lembersky’s art displayed influences from Western art movements that Soviet officials rejected, including Cubism, Expressionism, and Fauvism, said Dubin.
But he never “becomes fully abstract” in style, said Berkowitz in a telephone interview on Feb. 25. “He plays with elements of Cubism and geometric shapes,” but often a human figure is suggested. And in all his styles, Lembersky is “a really striking colorist,” said Berkowitz.
In addition, according to the description of the University of Richmond exhibit, Lembersky’s paintings “approached many subjects forbidden in his day, such as Christianity, Judaism, the Holocaust, and totalitarianism.”
In his 1960 autobiography, Lembersky described his artistic approach:
“In my work, I strive not only to show the formal beauty of surrounding objects, but to express my feeling for them, my admiration. I attempt to uncover hidden spirituality in nature and to present subject matter metaphorically.”
While Lembersky seldom treated Jewish subjects directly in his work, Dubin said his paintings often contain “hidden visual symbolism” — for example, shapes that suggest such objects as Torah scrolls.
After his death, family members were able to move to the United States and bring much of his work out of Russia. Dubin said that his granddaughter created the Uniterra Foundation, based in Cambridge, Mass., one of whose purposes is to promote interest in her grandfather’s artistic legacy.
Dubin said that Berkowitz met Yelena Lembersky about two years ago at an American Jewish studies conference, learned about the artist and the foundation, and suggested the creation of an exhibit to bring to Milwaukee.
JMM director is Kathie Bernstein, and its president is Penny Deshur. For more information about the exhibit and its associated events, contact the museum, 414-390-5730, or visit www.jewishmuseummilwaukee.org.
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