אוסף יוחנן אשכול
Yochanan Eshkol Collection
Charles Ezekiel Polowetski
1884 - 1955
Born in Russia on September 1, 1884, Polowetski studied in Paris with Richard Blum and Leon Bonnat and was a member of American Art Association of Paris. By 1914 he had immigrated to the United States, and lived first in New York City and later in San Fransisco.
During the early 20th century Polowetski exhibited primarily in New York. In July 1910 his work was shown at London's Albert Hall bringing him praise for his "lucid and clear style" in The New Age Review July 28th, (Vol. 7, p. 307).
Polowetski married at least five times, his fifth marriage was “to a distant member of the Swedish royal family.” In the late 1940s or early 1950s, he painted the royal family’s portrait. He was named as a ‘Jew of Prominence’ in the American Jewish year book of 1923. He died in San Francisco on May 20, 1955.
Exhibitions:
Corcoran Gallery, 1914
Society of Independent Artists, 1917-31
Salons of America, 1925, 1934
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1932
His work is held in several galleries in New York, The Tate London, The National Portrait Gallery London, and Israel.
Walk on The Shore. 1949. Oil on Board
Historical Context
Pogroms in the Russian Empire:
The Russian Empire, which previously had very few Jews, acquired territories with large Jewish populations during the military Partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772, 1793, and 1795. These were conducted jointly with the Austrian and Prussian armies, and resulting in Poland's elimination from the geopolitical map of Europe for the next 123 years.
In conquered territories, a new political entity called Pale of Settlement was formed in 1791 by Catherine the Great. Most Jewish people from the former Commonwealth were only allowed to reside within the Pale, including families expelled by royal decree from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other big Russian cities.
The 1821 Odessa pogroms marked the beginning of the 19th century pogroms in Tsarist Russia; there were four more such pogroms in Odessa before the end of the century. Following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 blamed on the Jews by the Russian government, anti-Jewish events turned into a wave of over 200 pogroms which lasted for several years. Jewish self-governing Kehillah were abolished by Tsar Nicholas I in 1844.
The first pogrom in the 20th century Russia, was the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 in which 47 Jews were killed, hundreds wounded, 700 homes destroyed and 600 businesses pillaged. In the same year, pogroms took place in Gomel (Belarus), Smela, Feodosiya and Melitopol (Ukraine). Extreme savagery was demonstrated with mutilations of the wounded.
In three years between 1903 and 1906, about 660 pogroms were recorded in Ukraine and in Bessarabia; half a dozen more in Belorussia, carried out with the Russian government's complicity. There were no anti-Jewish pogroms recorded in Poland. At about that time, the Jewish Labour Bund began organising armed self-defence units ready to shoot, and the pogroms subsided for a number of years. According to Professor Colin Tatz, between 1881 and 1920, there were 1,326 pogroms in Ukraine which took the lives of 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews, leaving half a million homeless.
This forced many Jews to find ways to flee, many were able to find support through Jewish groups in the United States. Over One million had emigrated to the United States by 1914.