The Museum of Warsaw is inviting visitors to the exhibition Moi Ver, which explores the figure and work of Moshe Vorobeichic, a photographer, graphic artist, and painter who belonged to the leading European avant-garde of the 1920s. He graduated from the Bauhaus, worked in Paris and there adopted the pseudonym Moi Ver. He repeatedly returned to Vilnius and to Poland, where he photographed the Jewish world, which was about to cease its existence.

Organised by the Pompidou Centre in collaboration with the Museum of Warsaw and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the exhibition will feature more than 300 objects including photographs, posters, publications, book projects, paintings, and documents. Thanks to many years of work in the artist’s archive, it will be possible to see for the first time the extremely rich and diverse work of Vorobeichic, considered in France to be one of the most prominent representatives of avant-garde photography.

Moshe Vorobeichic, (Moi Ver, Moshe Vorobeichic, Moshe Raviv) was a Central European Jew, a Zionist, born in 1904 in present-day Belarus, raised in Vilnius, studying in the Weimar Republic and Paris. His work combined innovation of form with social sensitivity and political commitment. He used the language of the avant-garde in his photography and graphics, and his visionary and uncompromising projects about the Jewish quarter in Vilnius, Paris or the kibbutzim in Poland and Palestine are at the same time world-view manifestos.

Between 1929 and 1937, Moi Ver took more than 1,500 photographs of traditional Jewish communities in large cities and suburban towns. The artist was also interested in the Polish countryside, its folklore, and its inhabitants – Poles and Jews – and their mutual relations. He photographed markets and genre scenes, and made tightly framed, unposed, street portraits of bearded Jews, Polish peasant women and peasants. Hitherto scattered and unpublished, this is the first time they will be displayed in such a wide selection at the Museum of Warsaw.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński