Objects

The small but expressive oil sketch "Expulsion" by Wojciech Weiss is an important complement to another work by the artist from the POLIN Museum collection, entitled "Pogrom" (ca. 1918; MPOLIN-M171). Both refer to the events of the Great War, the times of destruction, expulsions and death. For Jews, these were also times of cruel pogroms, the disintegration of entire communities, ruining of their houses, synagogues, and cemeteries; lastly, panic-escapes from their persecutors.

Weiss portrayed precisely such a group of refugees: two men, a woman and children looking back with horror. The men are weighed down by heavy bundles, the woman – by the baby she is carrying in her arms. A compact, frightened group of fugitives is outlined with violent brushstrokes; a narrow palette of colours – black, grey, and white – intensifies and emphasises human emotions and the expressive power of the entire work. We do not know whether this is a sketch for an (un)painted painting or a scene witnessed by the artist. "From the Polish painter’s brush emerged an inconspicuous (only in terms of size) figure of the Jewish exile, an ideogram of escape, a symbol of mass migrations of a people losing their shtetl forever due to the turmoil of war of an unknown scale" (Artur Tanikowski, unpublished text). The scene, full of expression and dynamics, depicting the desperate escape and drama of the pogroms of Jews during World War I, is a high-class artistic reflection of historical events, seen from the perspective of a compassionate observer.

Renata Piątkowska