Museum gift:
Magnes gains huge Jewish art collection with Taube donation
Taube Philanthropies funds a major acquisition for Magnes Collection.
The Magnes Collection at UC Berkeley has made a major acquisition of works by Polish emigre Arthur Szyk, a book illustrator and political artist who addressed the traumatic events of Jewish life before, during and after World War II. The museum is announcing the largest acquisition in its 60-year history on Monday.
The acquisition by what is formally called the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life comes thanks to a $10.1 million donation by Taube Philanthropies, making it the largest single monetary gift to acquire art in the long history of UC Berkeley.
The holding to be known as the Taube Family Arthur Szyk Collection was purchased from collector Rabbi Irvin Ungar of Burlingame. It consists of 450 paintings, drawings and sketches from all stages of Szyk’s career, including the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. Most of the work has never before been pub-
licly displayed.
“It will now be exposed globally through various traveling exhibitions,” said real estate investor and philanthropist Tad Taube, 86, from his office in Belmont. “I’m convinced that once it is exposed globally it will be known as one of the great collections of the 20th century.”
Born in 1894, Szyk (pronounced “shick” ) was drafted into the Russian army and served on the German front in World War I. It was then, as a foot soldier, that he began illustrating the suffering of war, his comrades in fur hats and greatcoats, bandaged up and limping home through the snow.
After the war, Szyk moved to Paris where he had his first solo show in 1922. At the outbreak of World War II, Szyk, who was Jewish, fled to New York where he published “The New Order,” one of the first books to satirize fascists, according to the website of the Arthur Szyk Society.
It was in New York that Szyk met Taube’s parents, Zygmunt (Zyg) Salo Taube and Lola Popper Taube, who had also fled Poland. Five years ago, Taube happened to be in Warsaw during a Szyk exhibit.
“It brought back a lot of memories because he was a person much discussed in my family,” Taube says. “Not so much as an artist but as a Polish Jew who was able to escape the ravages of the Holocaust.”
Taube began studying the intricacies of Szyk’s work. “I was interested in the thematic nature of his art which is heavily oriented toward antiNazi depictions,” Taube says. “He captured all of the important figures of his time in a cartoon format.”
One of these was Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who made the cover of Time magazine just two weeks after Pearl Harbor. After the war, Szyk worked on issues of Judaica and put his spin on important moments in American history.
He was still going full bore when he suffered a fatal heart attack in 1951. He was 57.
“He had an ability to present detail in a form that I’ve never seen anybody else do,” says Taube who has a long history with the Magnes. A Taube Philanthropies donation in 2010 helped the museum convert from a private nonprofit to an asset of UC Berkeley. With that transfer came 15,000 items, making it the third-largest Jewish museum collection in the United States, before the arrival of the Szyk work.
“This is the single largest contribution in the 60-year history of the Magnes,” says Francesco Spagnolo, curator of the Magnes Collection. “It expands the collection exponentially because of the global reach and contemporary relevance of Arthur Szyk’s work.”
Spagnolo predicts the first major exhibition of the collection at the Magnes will be next year, but in the meantime, pieces of the collection will be at the New York Historical Society in September.