Renata Piątkowska

Artists and Art Lovers: Women in the Jewish Artistic Life of Interwar Warsaw. In the Circle of The Jewish Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts

Research on Jewish artistic life in interwar Warsaw, especially in the context of the activities of the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts  (Żydowskie Towarzystwo Krzewienia Sztuk Pięknych), reveals active and numerousparticipation of women, both artists and art lovers (by and large a group of professionals, bourgeois, political and social activists, Jewish art collectors). In the article, special attention is paid to Tea Arciszewska and Diana Eigerowa, a collector and philanthropist, the founder of the Samuel Hirszenberg scholarship for students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. The author, using selected examples, discusses the role of artists in the artistic community, their individual exhibitions in the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts (Stanisława Centnerszwerowa, Regina Mundlak), a group of young artists living in Paris (Alicja Hohermann, Zofia Bornstein, Pola Lindenfeld, Estera Karp), as well as a circle of art lovers and patrons, some of whom—such as Tea Arciszewska and Paulina Apenszlak—also dealt with art criticism.

Before World War II three Jewish museums existed in Poland: Mathias Bersohn Museum of Jewish Antiquities, opened in 1910 in Warsaw; the Museum of the Jewish Kehilla in Lviv, opened in May 1934; the Museum of Jewish Art opened in 1935 at the YIVO Institute in Vilnius. The outbreak of the war interrupted the activities of Jewish museums in Poland. The Third Reich and the Soviet Union, for obviously different ideological reasons, were not interested in preserving such institutions. The Germans confiscated the collection of the Bersohn Museum; in spring of 1940 it was carried off and pillaged. Its fate remains unknown. The Soviet occupational authorities closed down the museum in Lviv. In the years 1939–1941 the Art Museum in Vilnius continued, albeit with difficulties, its activities, first under the Lithuanian regime and then under the Soviet occupation. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union the most valuable items from the collection of the YIVO Museum were carried off to Frankfurt. The last attempt of those long-lasting efforts to preserve the national Jewish heritage was the idea of the Jewish Museum proposed after World War II by the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts but it was not implemented.