Provenance:

Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Berger, New York, until 2005; thence by descent.

Literature:

Illustrated in “S. Freidkin Das Grosse Los,” Ost und West: Illustrierte Monatsschrift für Modernes Judentum, vol. 5, no. 1 (January 1905), col. 31.

Lesser Ury is celebrated for his many paintings, watercolors, and prints of Berlin, his adopted city, and his particular brand of Impressionism had wide resonance among collectors in his own time and after. But throughout his career the artist remained devoted to his Jewish heritage and explored Biblical themes in a variety of media. Writing in 1901, the philosopher Martin Buber extolled Ury’s work as evidence of a “Jewish Renaissance” in German culture, a prediction that later history would tragically prevent.[i]

The present drawing is an early work by the artist, drawn when he was but twenty-two years old. It is vibrantly drawn, an image of an elderly model transformed into an image of one of the most potent of all Biblical figures. The subject’s powerful hands and feet are contrasted with the sagging flesh on his torso and a resigned downward gaze over his long beard. Job sits on a bare stool, a a substitute for the dung-heap of the Bible.  The surface shows evidence of corrections, revisions, and repairs, and is evidence of its life as a working drawing. Whether it was intended as part of a larger project is not known. It was published more than twenty years after it was drawn as an illustration to a story published in the Jewish literary journal Ost und West (Fig. 1).

An obituary at his death in 1931 notes that the artist “was devoted also to his Judaism, and he was constantly painting pictures of Jewish life and Biblical themes. Lesser Ury is a Jewish artist … not only because he sometimes paints Jewish types, scenes, legends, but also because he is a great artist in whom Judaism lives. The Judaism in him makes itself known by the fact that we can read him more clearly in his creations of Jewish characters than in anything else. It is no accident that Ury chose Biblical motives to express his innermost thoughts. He is devoted to the Book of Books and to the breath of God that is in it, as well as to the mighty moving throng that live in that breath.”[ii]

[i] Martin Buber, “Lesser Ury,” Ost und West: Illustrierte Monatsschrift für Modernes Judentum, vol. 2 (1901), cols. 113-128. See: Chana C. Schütz, “Lesser Ury and the Jewish Renaissance,” Jewish Studies Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 4 (2003), pp. 360-376.

[ii] “Lesser Ury Great Jewish Painter Dies Within Few Weeks of His Seventieth Birthday,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, October 20, 1931.