Andy Warhol’s Martin Buber (1980) comes from Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, a series suggested by his dealer Ronald Feldman. Feldman chose the subjects in consultation with Susan Morgenstein, director of the gallery at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington, where the paintings debuted in March 1980. Warhol fondly called the group his “Jewish Geniuses.”

Buber’s face fills the sheet at a slight tilt, his gaze lowered and his full beard spilling toward the lower edge. Warhol broke the image into overlapping planes of color — sky blue, teal, slate and a flare of orange at upper left — then retraced his brow, eyes and beard in doubled red and black lines that drift free of the photograph beneath.

Buber (1878–1965) was a philosopher and scholar of Hasidism whose I and Thou and retellings of Hasidic tales made him one of the most widely read Jewish thinkers, and his role in the Zionist movement tied him to the founding of the State of Israel. He appears in the series alongside Sarah Bernhardt, Louis Brandeis, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, George Gershwin, Franz Kafka, the Marx Brothers, Golda Meir and Gertrude Stein.

Warhol’s portrait later illustrated The New Yorker’s 2019 review of Paul Mendes-Flohr’s biography of Buber. This impression, number 56 from the edition of 200, is printed on Lenox Museum Board at 40 by 31 ¾ inches.