Praying Jews

It is only superficially that the title of Leopold Gottlieb’s painting, created shortly before his death, alludes to his brother Maurycy’s work Jews Praying in a Synagogue on Yom Kippur, painted over half a century earlier and considered an epitaph of the prematurely deceased artist. Leopold often had to face comparisons with his famous brother who had found his way into the canon of Jewish art. Leopold’s biographers stress that Maurycy's friends at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków expressed similar expectations when the younger brother decided to follow in his footsteps and enrolled at the Academy.

Leopold refused to be “saddled with epigonedom.” Although both brothers addressed Jewish themes in their work, the formal solutions they adopted and the spiritual aura of their paintings were fundamentally different. In this case, Maurycy created an elaborate multi-stranded composition, saturated with cultural, historical and personal references. Leopold’s piece, on the other hand, offers a synthetic approach to a scene of pious immersion in prayer. Three figures shown in a cascade-like composition are in an empty dark interior. The shimmering patches of white light playing on the tallaisim draped around them render the scene dynamic.

The group of anonymous men represents a quiet and private scene which – due to a monochromatic palette of greys interspaced with umbras – alludes on the one hand to the perseverance with the study of Law, typical of Jewish culture, and on the other points to the natural need for a short rest before reimmersing oneself in the Scriptures.