Szyk, Arthur

(1894–1951)

   Illustrator. Szyk became one of the foremost modern book illustrators, with an elaborate and fanciful style derived from medieval illuminated manuscripts. Though his reputation was general, much of his work was intensely Jewish in spirit and design. It found its finest expression in the illuminated Passover Haggadah on which he worked from 1932 to 1938, the years that marked the rise of Hitler. With the Nazi occupation of his native Poland, he escaped to Britain and then to the United States, where in 1941 he published The New Order, a collection of savage cartoons of the Nazi leaders, In 1948, Szyk was commissioned to design the calligraphy for the scroll of Israel’s Declaration of Independence,