8/22/2019 Rare early Soviet-era illustrations of ‘Chad Gadya’ seder song at Magneshttps://www.jweekly.com/2019/08/22/rare-russian-revolution-era-illustrations-of-one-little-goat-seder-song-at-magnes/ 1/7
The Jewish News
of Northern California
A
"Chad Godyo" illusration by El Lissitzky (Courtesy/Ira Fink and Paula Hudis Family Trust)
CULTURE>ART
BY
ROBERT NAGLER MILLER
| AUGUST 22, 2019
n upcoming exhibit at the Magnes museum in Berkeley brings to light afascinating yet little-known slice of modern European Jewish history.“El Lissitzky’s Chad Gadyo at 100” focuses on a recent gift to the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley: a complete set of 11 colorful lithographic images
8/22/2019 Rare early Soviet-era illustrations of ‘Chad Gadya’ seder song at Magneshttps://www.jweekly.com/2019/08/22/rare-russian-revolution-era-illustrations-of-one-little-goat-seder-song-at-magnes/ 2/7
by El Lissitzky, a Russian Jewish avant-garde artist born Eleazar Markovich Lisitskii in1890.The works illustrate the popular Passover seder song that starts off, “One little goat,one little goat, which my father bought for two zuzim.”The exhibit opens Tuesday, Aug. 27 and will be on display through May 29, 2020.A show highlighting the song, perhaps better known in modern times as “ChadGadya,” is significant, says Magnes curator Francesco Spagnolo, if for no other reasonthan that these El Lissitzky illustrations are quite rare. The artist published an editionof just 75 copies a century ago, and only about a dozen of them have made their wayinto public collections worldwide.Also noteworthy, Spagnolo says, are the contributions of the artist in the culturalworld of the early 20
th
century and the context in which he worked.
8/22/2019 Rare early Soviet-era illustrations of ‘Chad Gadya’ seder song at Magneshttps://www.jweekly.com/2019/08/22/rare-russian-revolution-era-illustrations-of-one-little-goat-seder-song-at-magnes/ 3/7
“…the butcher who killed the ox…” (Courtesy/Ira Fink and Paula Hudis Family Trust)
As New York’s Jewish Museum makes clear on its website, El Lissitzky may not havebeen as widely known as Marc Chagall, a contemporary with whom he worked at thePeople’s Art School in Belarus, but he was a leader in the artist movement calledSuprematism, a Russian abstract form that favored geometric shapes and patterns.Before he embraced Suprematism, El Lissitzky was part of a group of Jewish artistswho flourished in the early days following the Russian Revolution, Spagnolo notes.
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