File talk:Rabbi Paris 1968 www copy 30.jpg

Rabbi was painted almost simultaneously with Biafran Madonna and, although a self-portrait in effigy, fits this background of these paintings from 1968 through to Escape into the Desert and Resurrection of early 1969:

Certainly, Rouault, who must have influenced the Cobra School in such works as The King at the Carnegie Museum, has a special place in his imagination the year before coming to Paris. But mostly it is Picasso of the thirties merging in his mind with the terrible wrath of Romanesque pietas that in that autumn of 1968 touches such a formidable chord of weary fatalism in his own grief-stricken Madonnas as the wars in Biafra and Vietnam continue unstoppable.

-Richard Rappaport,"Portraits & Passages", Chapter4, www.richard-rappaport.net.