Yehuda Pen was a well-known Belarusian painter, teacher and an outstanding figure of the Jewish Renaissance in Russian and Belarusian art at the beginning of the twentieth century. Also, he was known as a teacher of Marc Chagall and a founder of the "Vitebsk school".
Background
Yehuda Pen was born on June 5, 1854, in the shtetl of Novoalexandrovsk, Kovno Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Zarasai, Panevėžys County, Lithuania) into a poor family, which had many children. Being a four-year-old boy, he was left without father.
Education
At an early age, Yehuda showed his ability in drawing: when he had free time, he painted letters in books, drew title pages of local religious publications, as well as portraits of inhabitants, but his passion for drawing was not supported by his family.
When, Pen was a child, his mother sent him to a cheder, a school for Jewish children, in which Hebrew and religious knowledge are taught. He attended a local cheder, but did not show much interest in his studies. Instead, Yehuda devoted most of his time to drawing, for which he showed great talent.
According to Pen himself, his talent found its application in the sphere of traditional Jewish art. He decorated Purim Groggers (noisemakers) and created mizraḥ (Eastern wall) plaques. This activity brought Yehuda a great satisfaction, but made his mother very angry.
At the end of 1867, when a gifted boy found out a distant relative, Yehuda left for Dinaburg (present-day Daugavpils, Lithuania) to study signs of the artist and spent there eleven years. In Daugavpils, he met Pumpjanska family, in which often stayed outstanding artists of the city. One student of the Russian Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, a frequent guest in the Pumpjanska family, encouraged Yehuda to join the Academy of Arts.
In the summer of 1879, Pen left for Saint Petersburg in order to take the entrance exam at the Imperial Academy of Arts, but failed due to his lack of fluency in Russian. In 1881, he received permission to audit classes. His mentors there included Pavel Chistyakov, Valentin Serov and Mikhail Vrubel. Soon, Yehuda was admitted to the Academy as a full-time student and graduated in 1886.
Career
In 1886, after completing his studies at the Imperial Academy of Arts, Pen returned to Novoalexandrovsk, but soon moved to Dinaburg (present-day Daugavpils) and then to Riga. In 1891, he was appointed a painter and teacher of drawing on the estate of Baron Nikolai Korf in Kreitsburg (present-day Krustpils). The estate was often visited by such outstanding artists, as Ilya Repin, Julius von Klever and others. After living there for five years, Pen moved to Vitebsk, where, in November 1897, he opened the School of Drawing and Painting, which was a private academy.
Pen's school existed for more than twenty years and educated several hundred young men and women from Vitebsk and nearby communities. The vast majority of the pupils at Pen’s school were Jews, many of whom, like Pen himself, observed the religious precepts of Judaism and attended synagogue. The school was closed on the Sabbath. Pen’s leadership endowed the institution with a Jewish character and influenced the formation of the creative identities of its pupils. An exceptional teacher, Yehuda was able to develop the gifts of even the most modestly talented of his pupils. Many of them later achieved worldwide fame. His pupils included Marc Chagall, Osip Tsadkin and El Lissitzky, all of whom remembered their first teacher with gratitude and maintained contact with him until the end of his life.
The atmosphere of Pen’s school and its Jewish nationalist orientation were to a large extent a product of Pen’s personality and the specific character of his own art, which was infused with national pathos. A large part of his work consisted of paintings, based upon the everyday life of common Jewish people and psychological portraits of various types, found in Russian Jewish society. Thanks to these works, Pen acquired a well-deserved reputation in his lifetime as a "portrayer of the Jewish way of life".
At the same time, in his best work, Pen surmounted the sentimentality and literariness characteristic of Jewish genre painting. He painted a gallery of portraits of Jewish artisans, engaging in various trades, which created a canon of images of Jewish toilers, countering contemporary prejudices, that accused the Jews of being "unproductive" and leading a "parasitical" existence at the expense of their non-Jewish neighbors. Pen endowed the characters in a number of his genre works, for example, "Divorce" (1907) and "The Watchmaker" (1914), with a symbolic dimension, that expressed the artist’s certainty about the eternity and unity of the Jewish people and his faith in the spirituality, that constituted the basis of Jewish life. The rich symbolic content, the iconography and the motifs of Pen’s genre paintings, as well as certain compositional techniques of his landscape paintings, were continued in the works of his pupils and became the distinguishing traits of the "Vitebsk school".
Yehuda continued his pedagogical activity even after his school was closed in 1919. During the period from 1918 till 1923, he headed one of the workshops at the People’s School of Art, organized by Marc Chagall. He finally retired on a state pension in 1923.
During the Soviet period, Pen tried to depict aspects of contemporary Soviet reality. The most vivid examples of such works include "Jewish Shoemaker", "Young Communist Leaguer", "Reading a Newspaper". Yet, even in this period, the artist maintained his devotion to traditional Jewish subject matter, for which he was criticized in the Soviet press. His reputation as a socially significant Russian artist, nevertheless, remained secure. In 1927, the thirtieth anniversary of Pen’s creative activity was celebrated at a festival, held in Vitebsk, where he was awarded the Honorary Title of Jewish Art Worker.
On March 1, 1937, the artist was killed at night at his home in Vitebsk. Circumstances of the death up to this time have not been found out.
After the artist’s death, the Yehudah Pen Art Gallery was created in Vitebsk. Its collection consisted of an assortment of works by Pen himself and his pupils. Although the collection was evacuated to Saratov during World War II, part of it was lost.
Views
Throughout his career, Pen remained an artist of the Realist movement, a follower of academic traditions. He believed observation and work from nature to be the basis for creativity. As a consistent supporter of the academic school, the artist was honing his skills for many years. He brought to perfection the ability to dispose of all the academic rules, methods and techniques.
Personality
Pen was a highly educated man. He knew classical literature perfectly and endlessly admired portrait painting of the old masters. Also, Yehuda was fond of classical music and often attended musical evenings. He listened to romances by Brahms, Schumann, Schubert and to piano music. His favorite composers were Chopin and Beethoven. Moreover, Pen loved going to concerts of opera and symphonic music, that were often held in Vitebsk in the Grand Choral Synagogue. Pen had his personal seat of honor in the city theater, personal seats in the cinemas, where the artist, according to the recollections of his students, went to see American films.
Yehuda was familiar and friendly with almost all well-known local and touring actors and painted portraits of many of them.
However, the main love and goal of all his life was always art. According to a number of his students, he worked from early morning until late at night, coming from the studio for five minutes to pace up and down Gogolevskaya street and returning immediately back to work — either to the easel in his room, or to the students.
Quotes from others about the person
"When we studied with him, six boys, he treated us like his beloved own sons. Pen was everything for us — and art, and school and even home. His endless openness, simplicity and at the same time high culture delighted us. I never heard him swear. All the instructions he gave gently, without shouting, without raising his voice. Without asking whether we are hungry or not, Pen treated us with tea, cooked potatoes, treated us with lump sugar, butter, cottage cheese. And also herring, called "Scotch"." — Petr Maksovich Javić, an artist from Vitebsk
"Pen was destined not only to initiate the artistic life in a provincial town of the Russian Pale of Settlement, but also to contribute to the history of European and world art of our century...Understanding of what he has done for the artistic education of the region and art in general arouses deep respect for the humble man, who so honorably fulfilled his mission on earth." — A. S. Shatskikh, art historian