Chana Cohen Zada
Israel, 1968
Chana Cohen Zada is the mother of seven children who has been working as an artist for twenty years. Zada paints joyful pictures of religious yeshuv life.
Yehuda Broitman
Odessa, Ukraine, 1956
Yehuda Broitman is a painter who works in a multitude of styles from the entirely abstract to carefully calculated realism. Broitman´s works are always deeply symbolic, his colors bright and his brush stroke confident. His work has been exhibited in Paris, New York, St. Petersburg and Tel Aviv.
Yeshayahu Sheinfeld
Kishinev, Ukraine
Yeshayahu Sheinfeld immigrated to Israel in 1928. He began to paint late in life at age 62. His naive and bright works are joyful and spirited. The artist lives and works in Petah Tikvah and he has been featured in many exhibitions at the Petach Tikvah Art Museum.
Sionah Tagger
Jaffa, Israel, 1900 – Safed, Israel, 1988
The first Israeli-born female artist, Sionah Tagger is well known for her affecting portraits and modernist landscapes. She studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and at Lhote in Paris. Her smooth and stylized images are influenced by Fauvism, Cubism and Expressionism. Tagger joined the Modernist Group in Israel when she returned from Paris in 1925. Many artists at that time stopped including figures in their works or used them merely as props but Tagger´s figures are always fundamental to the composition and invigorate her work.
Issachar Ryback
Kirovograd, Ukraine, 1897 – Paris, France, 1935
Issachar Ryback was a painter, a graphic, a sculptor, a scene painter, and an art critic. He was part of a high-born Chassid family but his father was an admirer of the Russian culture, and tried to foster love of this culture in his children. At the age of 11 Ryback entered the Yelisavetgrad courses for scene painters, and a few years later was admitted to the Kiev School of Arts, Faculty of Painting. He presented his paintings for the first time at the Kiev Spring Exhibition. The young painter was mostly inspired by Jewish topics but in a modernistic style. In summer 1916, Ryback was commissioned by the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society to travel all over Ukrainian and Byelorussian small towns and copy the paintings in wooden synagogues and carved gravestones on the Jewish cemeteries. This trip awoke Ryback´s interest in Jewish folk art and from that time on, he started regular collection and copying of the art samples. He also created a series of works dedicated to the Jewish pogroms in Ukraine – in one of such pogroms his father was murdered. Ryback finally relocated to Paris in 1926 where he immediately began to play an outstanding role in the artistic life of the French capital.
Ori Reisman
Kibbutz Tel Yosef, Israel, 1924 – Kibbutz Cabri, Israel, 1991
“I stood on the deck of the ship approaching Haifa and looked at the strong bright light, so different from the grayish light of Paris. I looked and was frightened: it was something I didn’t know how to paint… It was a kind of light I didn’t even know how to define. White, and yet – non-white.”
Ori Reisman grew up on several kibbutzim and has always been very attached to the land of Israel. He studied art at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, attending painter Jean Souverbie’s Monumental Art workshop. He returned to Israel where he lived on Kibbutzim but always struggled to justify his work with the Socialist lifestyles there. Reisman has exhibited all over Israel and in Paris. His early works were mainly landscapes and he began creating portriture later in life.
Shalom Moskowitz (Shalom of Sfad)
Poland, 1895 – Israel, 1980
“I am a serious man. I do not paint out my imagination.”
Shalom Moskowitz, a Safed laborer, became an artist in the years following the 1948 War of Independence. He began painting at the late age of 55 after working in various craft related fields. As the Safed Artists Colony began to develop in the 1950s, Shalom of Safed, as he became to be known, created vibrant and colorful images of biblical scenes whose “filler” was the actual biblical texts of the Biblical accounts of that particular scene. The artist considered himself a “historical writer” rather than an artist, retelling the stories from Genesis and Exodus. Moskowitz´s work tends to be flat with broad areas of strong, evocative color, with figurative elements are subsumed within a powerful graphic composition. He was a primitive artist who created in the last thirty years of his life a large opus of paintings devoted to the Torah and Jewish life.
Moshe Bernstein
Poland, 1920 – Tel Aviv, Israel, 2006
“I once again bring you the experiences and dreams of my longed-for past, because for me it is an enchanted garden which I walk as if intoxicated by its fragrances and its beauty, and from which I draw the inspiration for my work”
Moshe Bernstein studied art at the Art Academy of Vilna in 1939. His family murdered in the Holocaust, but he survived the war and lived in Russia until 1947, when he immigrated to Israel. He often painted and drew images of the Shtetl life that he grew up in. These images emotionally captured in graceful brush strokes allow a window into a world that no longer exists.
Ludwig Meidner
Bernstadt, Silesia, 1884 – Darmstadt, Germany, 1966
“Their catastrophes explode from their windows, stairways silently collapse. People laugh beneath the ruins.” – Ludwig Meidner
Ludwig Meidner is well-known for his expressionist “apocalyptic” series which anticipated the gross destruction of the First World War by several years and his religious Prophets series which he created after the war. Meidner studied art at Royal School of Art in Breslau and Cormon Academies in Paris. He was influenced by the etchings of Hermann Struck and his friendships with Amedeo Modigliani and Robert Delaunay. Meidner fled Germany in 1939 to England and did not return until 1953. Meidner lived through tumultuous times and his worked changed often in his lifetime. His pieces range from Expressionist to Futurist to Realist but his steady meticulous hand and earth tones colors are consistent throughout.
Mordechai Levanon
Transylvania, Romania, 1901 – Israel, 1968
Mordechai Levanon immigrated to Israel in 1921 where he studied at the Bezalel Art Academy. Levanon is considered one of the founding fathers of Israeli art. Like most of the artists in his time, Levanon favored landscape and cityscapes of the spiritual cities of Sfad and Jerusalem where he could express the sentiment that Israel could be a homeland where spiritual and physical revival went hand in hand. Levanon is considered a major pioneer of Israeli art, and has even been called “the Israeli Van Gogh.”
King's Gallery 