Yudel Pen

He is best known for founding an influential art school in Vitebsk and teaching notable avant-garde artists like Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, and Ossip Zadkine.

Pen was one of the first painters to consistently depict Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement; he is sometimes called "the Sholem Aleichem of painting".

Pen was murdered in 1937; though officially called a robbery, his students believed that he was killed by NKVD during the Stalin's purges.

Pen failed to pass the entry exams from the first attempt, and, as a Jew, he wasn't allowed to live in the capital.

He had to bribe officials to stay illegally, and spent a year studying works in the Hermitage Museum before being admitted to the academy.

[2] In 1897, Pen opened an art school in Vitebsk,[2][3] mainly for Jewish children, many of whom didn't know Russian and spoke only Yiddish.

Where Chagall’s art creates lyrical poetry, Pen’s seemingly just recreates simple and prosaic everyday existence.

Yet to his young and impressionable pupils who were surrounded by all these paintings as they were taking lessons from him, the lack of artistic perfection probably did not register.

...Pen's gift to them was not a particular style of painting but a much-needed assurance that, as Jews, they could still be serious, respected artists who did not have to shy away from Jewish subjects.

In short, he gave them a role model...Pen was a Realist painter, and even though his students became known for avant-garde paintings, he did not approve "Cubism and Futurism".

Pen primarily created realist paintings depicting everyday Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement.

Notable works include "A Letter to America" (1920s), "Children Refugees" (1915), "Get" (Divorce, 1907), "Der Fraynd" (A Friend), and "Haynt" (Today).

According to Chagall, "[t]here was not a single beautiful young woman whom Pen, once she had reached the age of 20, did not invite to pose for him in any way she wished.

[2] After the October Revolution of 1917, Pen briefly taught at the Vitebsk People's Art College by invitation from Chagall.

While he continued to focus on Jewish subjects, some of his works acquired a Soviet veneer, such as "A Komsomol Shoemaker Reading a Newspaper" (1925).

[2] Chagall could not attend the funeral; he wrote a short poem about Pen's murder:[2] My teacher is no more, his beard is no more, his easel is no more.