A Short Biographical Note

Solomon Yudovin was born in the small shtetl Beshenkovichi of the Vitebsk Gubernia. His father was a Jewish craftsman and mother kept the house in order as the majority of the women of that time did. He started drawing from the very young age, it was his escape to the better world from the sad reality of his hometown. However, luck was on his side. Pen, probably one of the most famous Jewish artist of the time, who was born and worked in Vitebsk noticed young Solomon and took him under his wing. In 1910 Yudovin came to St.-Petersburg and got accepted to the Drawing School of the Committee for Support of the Arts. However, due to the lack of money and the beginning of war he had to leave the school and go to work.

In 1917 in Petrograd he had his first exhibition. It was based on the material collected during his historico-ethnographic expeditions of the Jewish Pale of Settlement, 1912-1914, which he undertook along with and under the leadership of the outstanding Jewish writer and cultural figure An-Sky. In 1920 most of those exponats became a backbone of his first album in the style of lithography called "The Albom of Jewish Ornaments". This theme remained the most important venue of the work for the rest of his career.

Yudovin remained in Petrograd (apart from a short stay in Vitebsk in 1919) were he continued his education with such established artist of the time as M.Bernshtein and M.Druzhinskiy. Here in Petrograd (later Leningrad) he got fascinated by the beauty of the city and dedicated a couple of his theme works to its magisity. During the Leningrad Blockade he stayed in the city and depicted those harsh days in his set of engravings called "Leningrad in the days of the Great Patriotic War".

He did numerous illustrations to the litterary masterpieces of this as well as of the previous century. He illustrated L.Feuchtwanger "Jew Suss" and was personally thanked by the author for the originality and understanding of the text. Also he illustrated "The Travels of Benjamin the Third" by Mendele Moicher-Sforim, and that was probably his greatest contribution to the world of Jewish culture. As no one before and certainly no one after him he was able to grasp and transfer to us the atmosphere of a shtetl, its pain, sadness, joy and craziness. He was witnessing the disappearance of the old Jewish shtetl and his work became the only living contemporary of the great long-gone past. He himself came from there, bringing feelings and dreams of the place, and therefore his work represents better then anything else what we call with nostalgia Der Alter Shtetl.

Wellcome to the First Internet Exposition of S.Yudovin

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