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Adam Muszka

Adam Muszka lived in Paris, where he passed away in January 2005. He dedicated his life to painting his Jewish hometown of Piotrkov in Poland.

Adam Muszka lived in Paris, where he passed away in January 2005. He dedicated his life to painting his Jewish hometown of Piotrkov in Poland.

He was a survivor of WWII and his paintings portray a deep longing to Jewish life in the “shtetel”. He was influenced by the Belarusian painter Marc Chagall and the French painter Paul Cezanne.

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Gallery

Rabbi Elimelech

Oil on canvas - 1965 - 55x71cm

The water carrier

Oil on canvas - 1969 - 80.5x100cm

Children playing

Oil on canvas - 1975 - 38x45cmv

The whole town on my shoulders (big)

Oil on canvas - 1963 - 54x72.5cm

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Exhibitions

Last exhibition took place on September 2008 at the Brodet Museum Of Judaica and Jewish Culture Of Tel-Aviv

  • 1961 – Warsaw
  • 1962 – Warsaw
  • 1963 – Lodz
  • 1971 – London
  • 1972 – Paris
  • 1974 – New York
  • 1974 – BUFFALO, NY
  • 1975 - PARIS
  • 1977 - ISRAEL
  • 1980 - PARIS

Exhibitions

Laureate Award

Laureate Award

In 1947, Adam Muszka was honored with the Laureate Award in the prestigious ‘Concours de L’Affiche Artistique’ competition for his outstanding artistic poster. This recognition highlights Muszka’s talent and artistic prowess in the field of poster design.

Film on Adam Muszka work

In 1955, Adam Muszka authored a monument in memory of the Holocaust in LODZ. His remarkable work was also featured in the film ‘Couleur de memoire’ – Colors of Memory, which
aired on television in the following years:

  • 1972 – TV 1
  • 1973 – TV 2
  • 1973 – Television ISRAEL
  • 1974 – New York
  • 1974 – Montreal
  • 1975 – Television ISRAEL

Film on Adam Muszka work

Collections

  • National Museum - WARSAW
  • Art Museum - LODZ
  • Ben-Url Art Gallery – LONDON
  • Ethnography Museum – LODZ
  • Historic Jewish Museum – WARSAW
  • Klaczkin Gallery – TEL AVIV

Private Collections

Warsaw, Lodz, Paris, London, New York, Oslo, Montreal, Philadelphia, Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Buffalo NY

Adam Muszka – Press

The Muszkat Family, along with Daniel Muszkat, organized an exhibition showcasing the art works of Daniel’s grandfather, Adam Muszka, in September 2008. The exhibition received significant press coverage, highlighting the remarkable talent of Adam Muszka.

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The Muszkat family exhibition, held in September 2008, attracted esteemed guests such as Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the former Chief Rabbi of Israel, and Pini Zahavi, renowned as ‘football’s super agent.’ The exhibition garnered significant press coverage, further highlighting the artistic brilliance of Adam Muszka.

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The exhibition of Adam Muszka’s artwork attracted prominent businessmen who were captivated by his artistic talent. Their presence at the exhibition further emphasized the widespread recognition and appeal of Muszka’s work.

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Adam Muszka – Press

The Daniel Muszkat Gallery own Adam Muszka collection of artworks.

Gallery

Rabbi Elimelech

Oil on canvas - 1965 - 55x71cm

The water carrier

Oil on canvas - 1969 - 80.5x100cm

Children playing

Oil on canvas - 1975 - 38x45cmv

The whole town on my shoulders (big)

Oil on canvas - 1963 - 54x72.5cm

Family prayer

Oil on canvas- 1968 - 53x80cm

Becker preparation to Shabath

Oil on canvas - 1970 - 54X64cm

Under the chuppah (2)

Oil on canvas- 1972 - 50X60cm

Playing children

Oil on canvas - 1971 - 37X45cm

Under the chuppah (black&white)

Illustration- 1972 - 40X51cm

Under the chuppah (1)

Watercolor - 1972 - 35X47cm

Portrait of a Jew

Watercolor- 1975 - 29X40cm

Yeshiva student

Oil on canvas - 1980 - 50X60cm

Preparation for sabbath

Oil on canvas - 1980 - 49X63cm

The Kleizmer

Oil on canvas - 1980 - 80X99cm

A woman praying

Oil on canvas- 1982 - 46X54cm

A girl with braids

Oil on canvas - 1972 - cm

The whole town on my shoulders (1)

Oil on canvas - 1963 - 34X41cm

A girl in red

Oil on canvas- 1983 - 25X32cm

King David

Watercolor- 1983 - 27X36cm

Learning Gemara

Oil on canvas - 1970 - 45X53cm

Succoth Lulav & Etrog

Oil on canvas - 1971 - 45X55cm

Succoth Arava

Oil on canvas - 1971 - 50X60cm

Kapporos

Oil on canvas - 1971 - 32X40cm

Simchat Torah

Watercolor - 1973 - 24X34cm

Lamp

Illustration - 1963 - 29X42cm

Purim

Illustration - 1974 - 23X30cm

Yidel and Berel

Watercolor - 1962 - 24X31cm

To the chuppah

1972 - 30X40cm

Portrait of a Rabbi

Carbon - 1982 - 23X28cm

Young ones

Watercolor - 1983 - 24X30cm

Chulnt

Oil on canvas - 1970 - 37X45cm

Dance with kleizmers

Watercolor - 1973 - 25X29cm

The first shoes

Oil on canvas - 1970 - 95x130cm

Adam Muszka - Biography 1914 - 2005

Adam Muszka – Biography 1914 – 2005
Biography by LILY BERGER

Adam Muszka paints the vanished smalltown as he sees it, as it lives in his imagination and conception. And that is deeply engraved in his memory with its former romanticism, its Sabbath-holiday image. The grey, poverty-stricken life is illumined and enriched by dreams.
When Adam Muszka stands at this easel and depicts that Jewish life in his canvasses, he breaks off from time to time, sits down at the piano opposite the varicoloured wall and floats off into the upper world of melody. This too he acquired from his birthplace Piotrokow, direct from his orthodox home steeped in song from generation to generation.

Piotrokow-Muszka can talk for hours about the fame of this Jewish town: her rabbis and judges, public figures, the Hebrew gymnasium, the large, old synagogue built in 1791.
One celebrity of Jewish Piotrokow was the famous cantor Akiva Muszka-Ofter, the painter’s grandfather. Reb Akiva was famous not only for this voice, but also for his musical compositions. Self-taught, he composed and himself wrote the notes which amazed professional musicians.He created a distinctive liturgical music. The manuscripts of his compositions are said to be zealously preserved by his former chorus members, pupils and friends.
All Akiva’s four sons inherited his musical gifts. They were all cantors in various cities and towns. One of them, Adam Muszka’s father, became cantor at Piotrokow.
At his home assembled from time to time all the brothers, members of their choirs and simply music lovers.The poor home then reverberated with rich tones. These were real cantorial concerts.
Adam Muszka came into the world in such a home on the fourth of March 1914.
To the age of 10 he was the prototype of Cheder pupils seen on his canvasses.He afterwards studied in a Polish public school. It’s then that the gifted boy lived through the drama of his musical father who lost his voice and his position as cantor.
In search of bread, his parents were compelled to leave their hometown and settle in Warsaw. Here Adam, the youngest of the nine children, finished commercial school and became a clerk in order to contribute to the meager family income.He at the same time studied at the City School of Decorative Arts.

He was at first drawn to the landscape to shich he ofter returns. For his first steps in painting he took off to Kazimierz, where artists used to gather more often before the war than they do now in the plaine air.
After the war Muszka returned from distant Tashkent with his life saved and a cycle of landscape-acquarelles. He found his home in ruins. His hometown, Piotrokow, was destined to have the first ghetto, while the large, beautiful synagogue where his father was cantor and where his grandfather’s – Reb Akiva’s – tunes could move a stone, was transformed into a German extermination point. The most gruesome scenes were enacted here.
Here the Germans drove the Piotrokow Jews like into a slaughter house. From here the survivors were transported to the ultimate extermination centers, until the entire community of 18 000 Jew were anihilated. These terrible events left their powerful stamp upon the artist.

Recently the cultural department of the Piotrokow City Council requested Muszka to paint the ceiling of the ruined synagogue which is to be rebuilt into a House of Culture.
The artist hesitated for a long time. It’s indeed a difficult experience to paint where his Grandfather and father sang, where every nook and corner was so close to him, where the hitlerite wild beasts perpetrated their unrestrained brutalities.
He nevertheless decided to undertake the project.
And remarkable-the former smalltown came to life, Jewish life returned: in its greyness and colourfullness; but over it hovers a symbolic bird with broken wings.
Like a tree every artist draws nourishment from his own soil. And even if he be torn away from it he will continue partly, if not wholly, to sustain himself on the first living juices.
But art is a complex of multiform phenomena. The artist forges is art not in one mould, dependent on the Godly spark called talent and a measure of innovation. From his inner flame and also from the external winds he internally digests the nourishment he drew with his sprouting roots. His overall creativeness is compounded of an endless variety of external influences, but in the first place of his own inner impulses.

The creative road of Adam Muszka was apparently far from being easy or straight.
But a review of his work of the last decade decidedly indicates the constant deepening of his painting and, most important, the artistic quests and probing – the indispensable preconditions for living art.

Muszka is a realist. But that doesn’t say everyting. A variety of roads and bypaths lead from the classical, conventional to the contemporary realism. In realism Muszka seeks a new mode of expression. Although there is visible here and there the strong influence of Chagal, Muszka has his own painting individuality. He creates with his painting idiom his own genre, as is to be seen in the great cycle of oil paintings, which Polish critics have crowned with the title, “Juidica”

This is a distinct plastic world – full of feeling, lyrical, delicate, dreamy, non-dynamic and romantic in content. And it is all enveloped in a hushed and deep solitude, in Jewish sadness and contemplation.
As if the foreboding of their later tragic fate already lay over the people and their milieu. Both the manner of painting and the colour scheme create this atmosphere.

Muszka applies paint flatly, at times in broad planes. His colouristic is placid, subdued. Evel the illuminated sunny colours are as if extimguished. Only individual pictures are painted expressively, sharp with dark, cold colours, like the two boys on the way home from Cheder at night. It seems that the atmosphere and solouristic are in this case really dictated by the theme: the tragically crippled life. Since the leitmotif of the artist’s creation is the psychic state, the impulses, there gradually emerges an appropriate style, a method.

It doesn’t seem that Muszka intends to limit himself to one genre. He has tried his hand at sculpture. It fell to him to create the memorial to the exterminated Jews of Lodz. He has recently occupied himself with etching in both black on white and in his distinct colour scheme. Here too he clings to his theme.

At present Muszka’s pictures are to be found at the Warsaw National Gallery, the Lodz Museum of Art, the collections of the Ministry of Culture, the Jewish Historical Institute and other Jewish institutions in Poland as well as in private collections abroad.

Rabbi Elimelech

Oil on canvas - 1965 - 55x71cm

The water carrier

Oil on canvas - 1969 - 80.5x100cm

Children playing

Oil on canvas - 1975 - 38x45cmv

The whole town on my shoulders (big)

Oil on canvas - 1963 - 54x72.5cm

Family prayer

Oil on canvas- 1968 - 53x80cm

Becker preparation to Shabath

Oil on canvas - 1970 - 54X64cm

Under the chuppah (2)

Oil on canvas- 1972 - 50X60cm

Playing children

Oil on canvas - 1971 - 37X45cm

Under the chuppah (black&white)

Illustration- 1972 - 40X51cm

Under the chuppah (1)

Watercolor - 1972 - 35X47cm

Portrait of a Jew

Watercolor- 1975 - 29X40cm

Yeshiva student

Oil on canvas - 1980 - 50X60cm

Preparation for sabbath

Oil on canvas - 1980 - 49X63cm

The Kleizmer

Oil on canvas - 1980 - 80X99cm

A woman praying

Oil on canvas- 1982 - 46X54cm

A girl with braids

Oil on canvas - 1972 - cm

The whole town on my shoulders (1)

Oil on canvas - 1963 - 34X41cm

A girl in red

Oil on canvas- 1983 - 25X32cm

King David

Watercolor- 1983 - 27X36cm

Learning Gemara

Oil on canvas - 1970 - 45X53cm

Succoth Lulav & Etrog

Oil on canvas - 1971 - 45X55cm

Succoth Arava

Oil on canvas - 1971 - 50X60cm

Kapporos

Oil on canvas - 1971 - 32X40cm

Simchat Torah

Watercolor - 1973 - 24X34cm

Lamp

Illustration - 1963 - 29X42cm

Purim

Illustration - 1974 - 23X30cm

Yidel and Berel

Watercolor - 1962 - 24X31cm

To the chuppah

1972 - 30X40cm

Portrait of a Rabbi

Carbon - 1982 - 23X28cm

Young ones

Watercolor - 1983 - 24X30cm

Chulnt

Oil on canvas - 1970 - 37X45cm

Dance with kleizmers

Watercolor - 1973 - 25X29cm

The first shoes

Oil on canvas - 1970 - 95x130cm