A richly produced album devoted to the life and, above all, the magnificent work of Chaim Goldberg. The carefully described events of his life help to better understand his art and the themes that changed over the years, with the Jewish shtetl remaining the central motif.

Chaim Goldberg (1917–2004) was born in Kazimierz Dolny, studied under the best Cracovian artists, and eventually graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. This master printmaker, engraver, sculptor, painter, draughtsman, and landscape artist left behind thousands of works: oil paintings, watercolors, prints, engravings, murals, and sculptures. Although raised in an interwar shtetl and a keen observer of life, he may be considered a postmodernist influenced by expressionism.

Kazimierz, as an example of a Jewish town, becomes the setting of a developing spectacle — a kind of universe existing permanently in its ideal form.
In Goldberg’s paintings, the rituals of Jewish daily life, filled with work and prayer, ordinary days and holidays, are saturated with an atmosphere that sacralizes the entire world of Kazimierz. The artist made it his mission to preserve the landscapes, topography of the shtetl, and the customs and holidays practiced by Polish Jews.

Reading the articles devoted to Chaim allows one to grasp how Goldberg restored the imagined shtetl in his work, managing to combine visible and invisible reality — a dimension beyond time and the changes it brought.

Chaim Goldberg left behind a universal and multifaceted legacy, a sample of which can be found in this album: excellent-quality photographs and prints, biographical texts and scholarly articles, as well as excerpts from the artist’s letters.

The album, printed on coated paper, contains a chronology of the artist’s life, collections of information, his personal letters and prints, and of course — a broad selection of works ranging from oil paintings and watercolors to prints, copper engravings, and sculptures. The edition is all the more exceptional because it was prepared under the editorial supervision of Chaim’s son, Shalom Goldberg.