Zygmunt Menkes (1896 Lviv - 1986 Riverdale), Naked Girl with a Mirror

ink, watercolor, gouache, paper,
41.5 × 34 cm in light passe-partout
Signature and description. p. d.: "S.Menkes/(illegible)"

"He painted primarily paintings devoid of symbolic content - portraits and figural compositions and still lifes. The artist's statements about his own work are well-known: "I concentrate on the problems of structure and color in a painting. Hence, before I start painting, I make a sketch with charcoal on paper, in which I get used to the problem. Although I always have a model or arrangement in front of me, I start in the composition from an abstract arrangement with actual forms imagining a more or less general solution. These synthetically treated paintings were characterized by expressive line, sometimes independent of the contours of figures and objects, rich and dense texture, expressive contour and intense color in tones of reds, acorns, whites and blues. In his still lifes, ordinary objects - furniture and studio objects, as well as flowers - provided the artist with inexhaustible opportunities to study form and color."
J. Malinowski, B. Brus-Malinowska, "In the Circle of École de Paris. Jewish Painters from Poland," Warsaw 2007, pp. 141-142.