The Irbit Museum of Fine Arts presents an autolithograph titled “Musicians”, created in 1967 by Anatoly Lvovich Kaplan. His work served as a vital bridge between the traditions of Jewish culture and the innovative currents of Soviet art.

Anatoly Kaplan (1903–1980) was born in Rogachev (now Rahachow, Belarus) — a town that would later become an inexhaustible source of inspiration for him. After graduating from the Leningrad Art Institute, he dedicated himself to graphic arts, emerging as one of the few Soviet artists who maintained a connection to Jewish culture during a period of its official suppression. His works from the 1950s and 1960s engage in a profound dialogue with the literary legacy of Sholem Aleichem and Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Mendele Mocher Sforim), as well as with Jewish folk traditions, all reinterpreted through a modernist lens.

During the 1960s — the era of the Khrushchev “Thaw” — Kaplan, while nominally adhering to the socialist realist framework, infused his works with metaphors and symbols intelligible only to those familiar with Jewish heritage. His graphic series became a visual archive of the vanishing world of the shtetls, the Jewish towns of Eastern Europe.

“Musicians” was executed in the technique of autolithography, in which the artist personally draws the image onto a lithographic stone using a crayon or ink. Kaplan masterfully exploited the medium’s potential: soft gradations of gray create a sense of depth, while stark black-and-white contrasts heighten the emotional intensity of the scene. Autolithography also carried a democratic dimension — unlike unique paintings, printed editions allowed Kaplan to share his art with a broad audience.

At the center of the composition stands a musician with a double bass; his silhouette nearly dissolves into the background, generating rhythmic repetition and reinforcing the sense of movement. Around him, young men with a violin, clarinet, and trumpet form a lively ensemble. Their dynamic poses and expressive gestures capture the spirit of improvisation central to klezmer, the traditional instrumental music of Eastern European Jews.

“Musicians” belongs to a larger series Kaplan created in the 1950s and 1960s devoted to Jewish life and memory. In these works, he fused the expressive rawness of woodcut (lubok) aesthetics with the geometric rigor of Constructivism. For example, the folds of the musicians’ garments are stylized into angular, almost architectural forms, reminiscent of Marc Chagall’s stained-glass compositions, while the overall structure of the print echoes the graphic experiments of El Lissitzky, who created illustrations for “Had Gadya”.

Kaplan avoids literal representation: even the title “Musicians” invites allegorical interpretation. Perhaps these figures represent the artist and his contemporaries — “playing” on the strings of history during an era of cultural repression, keeping memory alive through coded visual poetry.