Sukoth in the Shtetl.

KARCZMAR, SIMON.

20th century

Gouache on paper. Signed lower right. Unexamined out of frame.

“It was the modest and pious life sparked with traditional events which inspired him to paint.” Warsaw-born Karczmar (1903-82) spent much time in his youth with his grandfather in Dzieweniszky, a small Lithuanian shtetl with its “chatas” (dilapidated wooden houses), water carriers and horse-drawn wagons. To pay for his studies at the Warsaw School of Fine Art, Karczmar worked as a furrier. He continued his formal education at the Ecole de Beaux Arts and remained a furrier in Paris for twenty years, before emigrating to Safed, Israel in 1951. By 1955 Karczmar moved to Canada where he again worked in the fur trade until a debilitating eye problem interrupted his career. His wife Nadia encouraged him to return to his painting and the images of his youth in the shtetl then emerged in his art.