Job

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Lövith Marc Egon

Job

Oil, plywood lined with canvas, 100 x 72.5 cm

The Jewish artist Egon Marc Lövith is one of the survivors of the Dachau camp. The tragic experience becomes definite in the artist's work, through subjects extracted from the Old Testament, as in the case of the painting titled Job.

The biblical character is deprived of his wealth, family, and health in order to test his faith. Despite the terrible torments he is subjected to - a fact illustrated in Lövith's work by the crouched position of the character and the choice of a composition that makes the edges of the picture seem to constrain the character, as a burden - Job managed to keep his faith.

Job's tragic destiny is marked by the conflict between faith and peace, namely resignation and resentment, symbolized by the "bet" between God and the devil as a result of which everything is taken from Job, in order to reveal the true part to which he belongs. In this work, the two forms of the human body, the blue one, well-contoured, turned upwards, as well as the faceless yellow one, lost in the background and with hands raised in despair, can be seen as the symbolic hypostases of that inner conflict.

In several of his works, Lövith uses clear and clean contours and fairly flattened surfaces of color, but in the work of Job, one can observe an uneven, oppressive, but more expressive touch, especially in the case of the purple lines of the drapery, created by spilled color on the painting. That portion could be a reference to the blue-purple striped uniforms that concentration camp inmates were required to wear.

The painting is one of the reference pieces of the artist's pictorial work. Job's theme returns in several works, the present work being the most extensive, in which the artist, survivor of the Holocaust, contemplates life through the biblical character. Through the dense, melancholic atmosphere, the deeply human character, and a sense of sharing, the artist managed to achieve with this work one of the most beautiful expressions of post-war Hebrew-themed art.

Lövith Marc Egon

Job

Oil, plywood lined with canvas, 100 x 72.5 cm

  • Signed at the bottom right with red on white background:

    Lövith

  • on the back:

    1. Label no. recording gallery Quadro Gallery: 2046

    2. Label the exhibition Naked Naked-Egon Marc Lövith

    3. No. of inventory of the Lövith collection: Inv. L. 1080

  • Condition of the work:

    good

  • Documents:

    - Certificate of sale from Quadro Gallery, the cultural good appearing at no. 2046 from 06/06/2014

    - Expert report prepared by Sebestyén Székely, from 13.03.2017

  • Exhibition:

    Lövith. Unveiled body A meztelen test | The Naked Body. Quadro Gallery, Cluj, 2014

  • Reproduction:

    Lövith. Unveiled body A meztelen test | The Naked Body (exhibition catalog), Quadro Gallery, Cluj, 2014. Nr. repr. 72.

Marc Egon Lövith

Lövith Marc Egon

Cluj-Napoca, 1923 - Cluj-Napoca, 2009

Marc Egon Lövith grew up with a solid sense of what a united family really meant.

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Work

Adam and Eve

pastel, paper, 49.8 x 40.1 cm

Job

King David playing the lyre

Pastel, paper, 59.2 x 29.8 cm

King David playing the lyre

Saul and David, 1989

pastel, chalk, paper, 32 x 24 cm

Saul and David, 1989