PEN, YEHUDAH
Jewish Woman Reading Tseno Ureno on the Sabbath.

Jewish Woman Reading Tseno Ureno on the Sabbath.
Oil on canvas laid onto card. Signed twice by the artist in Cyrillic “Yu. Pen” lower left and lower right. 16.5 x 25.5 inches (43 x 66 cm). Recent gilt frame.

c. 1920

Yehuda (Yuri) Pen (1854-1937) was one of the most significant artists representative of the Jewish Renaissance in Russian and Belarusian art at the beginning of 20th century. Pen established a celebrated school of art in Vitebsk, where his pupils included Chagall, Lissitzky and Ossip Zadkine. The vast majority of Pen’s extant works are currently found in the Vitebsk Museum of Art and the Belarus National Museum of Art, Minsk.
     This moving painting depicts a devout Jewish woman engrossed in reading her “Tse’ena Ure’ena” (or, Woman’s Bible), a Yiddish work beloved by traditional Jewish women in which the weekly Torah passage is spun into a moving religious display of ethics, stories and moral exhortations.
     Another version of this painting is in the Vitebsk Museum of Art. See G. Kasovsky, Masterpieces of Jewish Art: Artists from Vitebsk-Yehuda Pen and his Pupils (Moscow, 1995) plate 6 (unnumbered).
     Available upon request: Further detailed research (in both Russian and English) including on the technical aspects of this painting.
     
Yehudah Pen’s works are rare and seldom come up for auction sale.