EXHIBITIONS CYCLE

Portrait of The Jew Not Painted

This series comprises around 100 prints depicting prominent Jewish personalities, active in the 19th-century Warsaw and in other cities of the Polish Kingdom. Though their biographies are found in many encyclopedias, not many people today remember their achievements. In this exhibition we recall their lives with portraits of Jewish actors, businessmen, social activists, philanthropists, publishers, doctors, painters, musicians, writers, politicians, university professors, rabbis, chess players, scholars, and great inventors. People whose impact on Polish Jewish and non-Jewish life cannot and should not be underestimated, and who made a significant cultural, social, economic, and political contribution to the country. Their fame often reached even beyond the borders of the Polish Kingdom, and their portraits ran not only in most renowned Polish illustrated journals, but also in various periodicals abroad. Thus, as part of this exhibition series, we present original prints published as illustrations in the 19th-century Polish, German, French, British, and American press. This is because we firmly believe that their legacy should not be forgotten or overshadowed by the tragic events that brought an end to their world. Thus far the exhibition has been presented three times, in Włodawa (2012, in the Pojezierz Włodawsko-Łęczyński Museum, fifty prints), Warsaw (2013, The Jewish Theatre, sixty prints) and again in Warsaw (2014, The National Ethnographic Museum, eighty prints).