This is a painting Rubin produced in Romania in... Lot 20

This is a painting Rubin produced in Romania in the years succeeding World War I. It is an oil painting executed on both sides of a wooden board. On one side he painted two figures a man and a woman sporting fashionable headgear and seated at a table - apparently a café scene. On the other side in entirely differently mood a figure of large dimensions within a bare landscape a kind of "prophet" character exhibiting excision-like brush strokes in black paint on face and hands. In the first painting the two figures are observed from the interior of a room or possibly a coffee shop. In the background there is a plant in a pot emplaced on a tall round table; a square mirror hanging on the wall opposite a window apparently for it reflects blue skies; and the wing of an open window to the left. Alsoisible is the back of the chair on which the female figure is seated and the flat table-top upon which the whiskered man seated behind her leans. But neither this wealth of detail - no mere background decoration - nor the elegant urban clothing of the characters can dispel the enigmatic air about them. Not only do they maintain no eye contact - one stares ahead at the painter possible while the other gazes into space withdrawn within himself - but their expressions testify to loneliness dissociation and discontent characteristics not unusual in Rubin's paintings in the Romania of the war years and subsequently. Common to the human figures in the Symbolist paintings as well as in those derived from the everyday (scenes in cafes or a doctor's waiting room) is a sensation of hopelessness in relation to the future of Jewish existence in Europe. That sensation is also shared by the paintings on both sides of the board even if "The Prophet" is a work in a different mood belonging to a series of post-war paintings concerned with the figures of prophet or ascetic. Rubin's preoccupation with this motif can be understood in the relation to the debate among Jews iniew of prevalent anti-Se