From the Pages of Yedies

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

The August-October 1937 issue of Yedies reports on a visit by the artist Emmanuel Mane-Katz. He had stopped off on his way back to Paris from a trip to the Baltic countries and to view an exhibition of his work in Vilna. The article reports on his donation of five of his paintings to YIVO’s art museum and his promise to collect more artworks from Jewish artists in Paris for YIVO.

It is not clear what became of the paintings donated to YIVO by Mane-Katz. YIVO has two Mane-Katz paintings in its collection today but neither seems to correspond to any of the works named in the Yedies article. It can be assumed that those artworks disappeared during the war, along with the other artwork mentioned by the article as having been donated to YIVO, a self portrait by Lodz Jewish artist Adolf Berman. The paintings were either looted by the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, destroyed, or hidden and possibly still extant somewhere.