Henryk Berlewi

Henryk Berlewi (October 20, 1894 in Warsaw – August 2, 1967 in Paris) was a Polish Jewish painter, graphic designer and art theorist, who is primarily remembered as an abstract artist who paved the way for optical art, but he was also an important figure in Yiddish book design and typography in the early 1920s. He drew portraits of many Jewish writers and artists, among them Uri Zvi Greenberg.

Berlewi was born in Warsaw to an assimilated Polish Jewish family. He studied art in Antwerp and Paris, and was active in Polish art circles.

Supported by his mother, Berlewi studied fine art in Warsaw (1904–1909), Antwerp (1909–1910), and Paris (1911–1912), returning to Warsaw in 1913 to study at the school of design. During World War I he discovered Futurism and Dada, and in 1918 he met the futurist Aleksander Wat and the formist Anatol Stern, fellow Jews whose Polish language verse he later illustrated. In 1918-1922 Berlewi focused on Jewish themes.

In 1920 Berlewi attended El Lissitzky's lecture in Warsaw, motivating him to move to Berlin, where in 1922–1923 he abandoned figurative art for pure constructivist abstraction. In 1922 he participated in the Novembergruppe exhibition. Along with Jankel Adler he was chosen to represent Jewish artists from Eastern Europe at the Congress of International Progressive Artists, where he met El Lissitzky, Viking Eggeling (to whom Berlewi devoted an article published in 'Albatross' in 1922), László Moholy-Nagy, Theo van Doesburg, Gerhard Richter, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In May-Sep 1923 he presented his first Mechano-Faktura compositions in the Novembergruppe section of the Grosse Berliner Kunstaustellung.

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