Anatoli Lvovich Kaplan

Biography

Before any training, Kaplan’s first occupation was teaching drawing at a school in his native Rogachov. He became a teacher before he became an artist. He also painted shop signs for money at the time.

He was born in Rogachov, in Mogilev Governorate, in a family of six children. The sources disagree on the date of birth: 10 January 1903 or 28 December 1902 (Old Style). His father was a ritual slaughterer and kept a small butcher’s shop, and later had to work at the slaughterhouse to feed the family. The town lay within the Pale of Settlement, the area of the Russian Empire where Jews were permitted to live. As a boy he first attended a religious elementary school, where he studied Hebrew and the Talmud, and from the age of twelve a state Russian school. At home he was called Tanchum. In 1921 Kaplan came to Petrograd and until 1927 studied at Vkhutein, the Higher Art and Technical Institute, under Georgy Vereisky and Alexander Rylov. He stayed in Leningrad for the rest of his life, though he went back more than once to the places of his childhood. His training in painting was thorough, but painting could not feed him, and he took whatever was offered: posters, interior decoration, book graphics. His command of lettering, ornament and different techniques dates from that time.

He mastered lithography late. In 1937–1940 Kaplan worked in the experimental lithography workshop of the Leningrad branch of the Artists’ Union, which Vereisky headed. The occasion was a commission for a series of lithographs for the Jewish section of an ethnographic museum, and in the 1930s he also took part in the work of a group of artists on the theme of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, the Soviet-designated Jewish region in the Far East. His first cycle, “Kasrilevka” (1937–1940), is named after the small town invented by Sholem Aleichem. It was here that he began to develop his own printing methods.

He was in Leningrad when the war began, and was then evacuated to the Urals, where he worked in hard conditions and again gave drawing lessons. In 1944 he returned and at once began lithographs of the besieged city. The album “Leningrad in the Days of the Blockade” appeared in 1946, and Kaplan continued the series until the end of the 1950s, adding the rebuilding of the city. Eighteen state museums are said to have bought the cycle; I could not verify this.

In 1950–1951 he was chief artist at the Leningrad Glass Factory. Supervising the designs there awakened his interest in three-dimensional form; he would return to it a decade and a half later.

From the early 1950s Kaplan worked almost only on Jewish subjects and constantly met with the disapproval of the Soviet cultural authorities. He illustrated “Tevye the Milkman” (three series, 1957–1966), “The Enchanted Tailor” and “Song of Songs”, designed the cover and drew the illustrations for Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Jewish Folk Songs” (1977), and made colour lithographs for the Passover song “Chad Gadya” (“One Kid Goat”), commissioned by the Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1961. He kept on painting, but because of their subjects the paintings hardly reached exhibitions. The shops in his pictures “The Butcher’s Shop” (1972) and “Tailor’s Shops” (1975) are directly autobiographical, and a comparison with Marc Chagall, who had a similar childhood, suggests itself.

From 1967 ceramics and sculpture appeared, among them a set of characters from Gogol’s “Dead Souls” and “The Gamblers”.

Kaplan died on 3 July 1980 in Leningrad and is buried at the Cemetery of the Victims of 9 January. A large retrospective at the Russian Museum took place only in 1995; before that there had been exhibitions in New York (1992), London, Amsterdam and Jerusalem.