Painting Anne Frank

Date2002

Maker Malcah Zeldis (b. 1931)

MediumOIl on board

DimensionsOverall: 12 × 15in. (30.5 × 38.1cm)

Credit LineMuseum Purchase [This work is copyrighted. Please see Registrar before use.]

Object number2020.101.2,A&B

DescriptionSelf portrait of Malcah Zeldis painting a portrait of Anne Frank. Both woman are shown wearing yellow Stars of David on their chests as a symbol of their shared Jewish faith.Label TextMalcah Zeldis was born Mildred Brightman on Spetember 22, 1931, in the Bronx, New York. Shortly after her birth, her family moved to Detroit, where her father worked as a window washer. In 1948, after graduating from high school, she went to live on a kibbutz in Israel. She met and married Hiram Zeldis, a writer who was also from Detroit and after a wedding in Detroit the couple returned to Israel.

In 1958, the Zeldises left Israel with her family and settled in New York. During the early 1970s, as her children grew older and her marriage floundered, she was admitted to Brooklyn College. She graduated in 1974, worked as a teacher's aide, obtained a divorce, and began to paint seriously.

Zeldis' artworks encompass social themes, celebrations, everyday events, religious events and practices, fairy tales, and portraits of her heroes and heroines. She often rapidly sketched her design and then painted in oil on canvas or board or in gouache or tempera on paper. Her paintings have been widely collected and exhibited, and she has illustrated several children's books.

This painting is a self portrait of Zeldis as she works on a likeness of Anne Frank. The German-born Frank, is a celebrated diarist who recorded her everyday life with her family while hiding from the Nazis in German occupied Amsterdam. Frank was one of the heroines that Zeldis portrayed multiple times throughout her art career.
ProvenanceBefore 2020, purchased directly from the artist by Marcia Weber Art Objects (Wetumpka, Alabama); 2020, purchased by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (Williamsburg, VA)