Meer Akselrod

Meer Moiseevich Akselrod, also Meyer Axelrod (1902–1970) (Russified form of the first name Mark) was a Belarusian painter best known for his watercolor paintings of Jewish life in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

Akselrod was born in Maladzyechna, Russian Empire. As a child, he survived a pogrom and moved to Russia during World War I. In the 1920s, he studied and then taught at the VKhUTEMAS School of Art. He was one of the members of the art association ‘The Four Arts’, which existed in Moscow and Leningrad in 1924-1931. Amongst other things his work focused on Jewish life in the shtetl.^[1] At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem a work of his depicts a vibrant Shtetl market with a mix of residential homes, synagogues, and churches in a flat style, featuring various characters engaged in daily activities. The artist also portrayed figures such as a woman leans against a sack while a vendor weighs goods nearby, and a violinist stands next to two kneeling women, one holding a child.^[1]

His work was barely known outside the former Soviet Union until his daughter, Elena Akselrod, published her father's biography and a representative collection of his works in Israel in 1993.^[2]

• Georgy Fedorov. Meer Akselrod, Moscow, Sovetskij khudozhnik, 1982, 134p.

• A web gallery of Akselrod's paintings

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