The Day of Atonement

After leaving the Slade, Kramer strove to achieve a spiritual quality in his art without jettisoning his modernist credentials, perhaps driven by a postwar mood of disillusionment. In 1918 a design for a woodcut, entitled The Day of Atonement, appeared in the sole issue of the literary review New Paths, co-edited by Michael Sadleir, son of his patron. Here the procession was simplified to six angular figures; those at the front tilting their mask-like features upwards in poses that anticipate the painting. The text described Kramer as: ‘far more essentially Hebraic in his outlook than Gertler, whose Jewish extraction seems over emphasised. Kramer is a grim bitter realist […] Kramer obtains the effect of Primitivism through a ruthless elimination of all that is unessential’.