Hirszenberg the Man, The Artist

This chapter recalls the early life of Samuel Hirszenberg and what art meant to him. It looks at the message he wants to convey in his art, his motivation, vision, and the people he truly cared for and saw as his true companions. In pursuing Hirszenberg's artistic development from his early student days in Kraków until his untimely death in Jerusalem, the chapter flashes back to his student sketchbook which provided us with an untapped source. It then discusses his early negotiations with a range of concerns and possible paths that were to persist in his artistic life in the following decades with varying degrees of intensity: his Polish surroundings, traditional east European Jews, historical themes, the Orient, the nature of relationships between men and women, and portraits. The chapter analyses how Hirszenberg's geographical mobility strongly influenced his artistic output. It investigates how his Łódź patrons, who were enthusiastically acquiring both his ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ pieces alongside the works of Polish masters, influence his work.