Lazar Wolf, the Butcher 1957 - 1961

Anatoli Lvovich Kaplan made Lazar Wolf, the Butcher as a lithograph, meaning it was made with a stone and some grease. The way Kaplan builds up the image is so interesting, it’s almost like he’s not drawing but building with granular marks and textures. Look at the background, it’s a field of tiny marks that create a sense of atmosphere around the figure. Then your eye is drawn to the deep, dark mass of the beard, built up with these tiny marks clustered tightly together. It’s a tour de force of mark-making. I find the way that those vertical marks that describe his shirt make me think of Chaim Soutine and his portraits of chefs. But unlike Soutine, Kaplan isn’t interested in smearing or dissolving the figure but building it up, bit by bit. The result is a quiet, powerful image of a working man.