Isaac Itkind

Isaac Itkind was a remarkable sculptor, who worked mainly with wood. A Hassidic rabbi’s son, he received religious education and also became a rabbi, but soon abandoned religious service and spent a number of years in search of his calling. In 1897, he came across a book about the sculptor Mark Antokolsky, which inspired him to learn sculpture. In 1910, he joined a drawing school in Vilno and from 1912 to 1913 studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. Itkind’s sculptures caught the attention of the writer Maxim Gorky, who organized a well-received solo exhibition of his works in 1918.

Itkind’s early works mostly explored the history of the Jewish people and human suffering, and only a few have survived. After the revolution, he worked as a teacher in a Jewish work camp and school near Moscow alongside Marc Chagall, and in 1927 he moved to Leningrad, where he created a number of works on historical topics. By this time, he had become famous across the Soviet Union. However, in 1937, after an exhibition at the Hermitage to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Alexander Pushkin’s death, he was arrested as a Japanese spy. Despite torture in detention that left his ribs broken, his teeth smashed, and his eardrums perforated, Itkind did not plead guilty, which saved his life. He was exiled to Siberia and later to Kazakhstan, where he settled in a dugout on the outskirts of Alma-Ata. The art world believed he had died in a prison camp in 1938.

In 1944, the artist Nikolai Mukhin identified the strange elderly man who dragged old tree stumps into his den as the famous Soviet sculptor, but could do little to help him, as Itkind was still considered an enemy of the people. He lived in the dugout for a further twelve years until the Alma-Ata State Theater hired him as a stage designer in 1956. Itkind continued to carve wooden sculptures in his spare time and soon became famous again. A few years before his death, the government of Kazakhstan gave him an apartment. In 1967, two years before Itkind’s death at the age of 98, a documentary film was made about him.

Contemporaries recalled Itkind as a uniquely talented artist and an extremely energetic person, who was also incredibly absent-minded and rather eccentric. The impression he made sometimes obscured his vivid spiritual life, which was reflected in his art. Although Itkind never considered himself an esoteric artist, there is ample evidence that he may have been unconsciously enlightened and worked with the imaginary on the ethereal level, without the need to rationalize his approach. His choice of wood as a material that embodied light was in tune with anthroposophical ideas and practices, as was his focus on the human head. Itkind’s heads captured inner experiences and were not meant to represent real prototypes.