The Return Home: On the Fantastical and the Biographical in the Works of Maurycy Gottlieb and Bruno Schulz (in Hebrew)

An encounter with Noa Rosenberg, Curator of Modern Art and 16th–19th Century European Art

The painter Maurycy Gottlieb was born in Drohobycz in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Ukraine). Ten years after his death at the age of 23, the painter and author Bruno Schulz was born in the same town. One dreamed of departing his city without return, the other never wanted to leave it.

We will look at Gottlieb's works in the Museum’s galleries of European Art in the 16th-19th centuries and read from Schulz's stories, as well as excerpts from letters exchanged between the two artists and their families, friends, and the women in their lives. In addition, we will discuss the chapter dedicated to Schulz by the author David Grossman in his novel See Under: LOVE. But most of all, we will talk about the power of art to create a different ending than the one determined by reality.

* The Return Home is the title of a short story that Bruno Schulz sent to his friend the writer Thomas Mann. The story was lost and was never published.