Jankel Adler was born in 1895 in Tuszyn, Poland, and developed a modernist practice shaped by his Polish-Jewish background and by the artistic circles he encountered across Europe. Jankel Adler began his artistic training in Belgrade in an engraving workshop before moving to Germany, where he studied drawing and painting with Gustav Wiethchter at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Barmen near Düsseldorf. By 1918, Adler was living in Warsaw and collaborating with the Lódz-based group Jung Idysz, an association of avant-garde Jewish writers and artists whose interests aligned with his early Expressionist work.

In these early years, Jankel Adler created compositions rooted in biblical and Talmudic themes, drawing on Jewish folklore and employi...