Oil on canvas.

Provenance: Dr. Edward Reicher, Paris. Behrmann, (Riga, 1870-Tel Aviv, 1940’s), was a close colleague of Samuel Hirszenberg. Indeed, both taught painting at various times at the Bezalel School of Art, in Jerusalem. The work of both men was profoundly influenced by the social and political events of the period. Inspired by French painters, such as Courbet, Millet and Daumier, whose socially motivated images became a visual chronicle of the grim realities of peasants and the urban poor, both Behrmann and Hirszenberg brought forth art intended to expose the plight of the Jews of the East at the turn of the century. The powerful image of this composition, a huddled mass of people, with staffs in hand and bundles on their back, has become an enduring icon of the Jewish experience in the Diaspora. Behrmann had witnessed the intensified havoc of Eastern European Jewry which suffered through the pogroms in 1881-82, the infamous Kishinev and Homel pogroms of 1903 and the notorious Zhitomir massacre in 1905. The observer’s eye is drawn by two central figures: In the foreground, an elderly man walks with his stick, bent from the burden of his load and with his head downcast in resignation. Behind him, with her face raised to heaven, a woman cries out. Her terrified expression recalls the great painting of Expressionism, The Scream by Eduard Munch, a contemporary of Behrmann’s. The thick application of paint in the foreground suggests that these refugees trudge through mud and mire, herded like sheep by the uniformed horseman. Hirszenberg’s painting “Diaspora” shares many thematic icons with this composition and, as the two artists worked closely, it is more than likely that each inspired the work of the other