Meyer Axelrod, Female Nude, 1968

Signed in Cyrillic and dated at lower left

Inv. no. ab_31522

Meyer (Meer) Axelrod (1902–1970) was born in the small city of Molodechno (present-day Maladzyechna, Belarus). The complex and often harrowing history of the region meant that he and his family were frequently uprooted. Molodechno was located on the frontlines during World War I and the tsarist government evicted all Jews from the area, presumably because of suspicions about their loyalty. When the war ended, Molodechno had become part of Poland. The Axelrods were once again forced to resettle, this time in Minsk in present-day Belarus). This larger city offered the young Axelrod opportunities for work as a graphic designer for both the Red Army and local cinemas – all controlled by the state – and thus introducing him to early Soviet art organizations.

He was able to secure a place in Vladimir Favorsky’s (1886–1964) studio at Moscow’s Vkhutemas (the Higher Art and Technical Workshops), one of the country’s best art schools and a center of Constructivism, Cubo-Futurism, Expressionism, and other modern movements in art and design. After graduation, he went on to teach at the school, by now renamed Vkhutein, and at Moscow’s Textile Institute, where avant-garde artists were developing new Soviet designs for printed cloth. At the same he joined the “Four Arts,” an exhibiting society whose membership also included Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1878–1939) and Vladimir Favorsky. After being criticized for their over-reliance on Formalism in the late 1920s, the group disbanded.

The young artist went on several extended trips throughout the country, recording daily life in Jewish kolkhozes in Crimea. This group of works foreshadowed his later series devoted to Jewish life in Eastern Europe and Russia. Like many Jewish artists criticized for their easel painting, Axelrod turned to designing for Goset, the State Jewish Theater formed from the Moscow Yiddish Theater, both of which were hotbeds of creativity employing such artists as Marc Chagall. There were similar theaters in Belarus and Ukraine and Axelrod was able to find work with all of these groups.

At the outbreak of World War I, Axelrod’s family was evacuated once again. Meyer stayed behind, trying to find some news of his brother, Zelik (1904–1941), a poet who wrote in Yiddish and campaigned for the support of Jewish culture and Yiddish language education and publishing. When the Red Army retreated from Minsk, Zelik Axelrod was arrested by Soviet troops and summarily shot. The family was unable to find any information about his fate until well after the war’s end. Unable to find his brother, he traveled to Almaty in present-day Kazakhstan, a city to which many residents of western Russia were evacuated. There he worked on scene design for Sergei Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible. He also created a cycle entitled “German Occupation” inspired by the horrors of the Holocaust described to him by Jewish evacuees from Poland and Belarus. He returned to the cycle format in the late 1960s to address life in Jewish communities (“Ghetto Series” and “Memories of Old Minsk”). He was largely unknown outside Russia until his daughter Elena Axelrod (b. 1932) published a monograph on his work in 1993 (Elena Akselrod, Meer Akselrod, tr. Amanda Calvert, Jerusalem: Mesilot, 1993).