Joseph Zaritsky

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Yosef Zaritsky
Born September 1, 1891
Ukraine
Nationality Israeli, Jewish
Field Painting
Training Art Academy, Kiev
Movement Israeli art

Joseph Zaritsky, also known as Yossef, (Hebrew: September 1, 1891 – November 30, 1985 ;יוסף זריצקי ‎) was an Israeli painter.

Biography

Joseph Zaritsky, Arieh Lubin, Yona Zeliuk, Reuven Rubin, Sionah Tagger, Pinchas Liyvionwsky, Yitzhak Katz, and Baruch Agadati; 1925
Might (1958) by Yosef Zaritsky at "The First Decade Exhibition" Jerusalem, 1958. Photo by Werner Braun

Zaritsky was born in 1891 in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. He lived in Amsterdam, Paris and Brussels, but mostly he lived in Jerusalem. He studied at the art academy in Kiev before emigrating to Mandate Palestine in 1923. In 1929, he relocated from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, where he became involved in the city's cultural life while documenting its scenes in his paintings.[1] Between the years 1944–47 lived in Zikhron Ya'akov. In 1948, he was Chairman of the Association of Painters and Sculptors.

For over 20 years he worked in watercolours, which he first exhibited at an exhibition jointly with the sculptor Avraham Milkov, at the Tower of David in Jerusalem in 1923, making a notable impact and evoking great interest.[2]

After his arrival in Palestine in 1923, it did not take long for Yossef Zaritsky to become one of the country's leading artists and critics, earning acclaim for his singular interpretation of the watercolors of Paul Cézanne and the Russian symbolist Vroubel. Between 1932 and 1933 he opened a studio in the cellar of his home in Rehov Mapu, Tel Aviv. Standard bearer of the Universalists in their conflict with the Orientalists, he led the "New Horizons" group which grew out of the confrontation. In this perspective, his watercolors were seen as a milestone on the road to modernism. His watercolor portraits and still lifes of the late 1920s and the 1930s reflect the influence of the French Intimists, and sometimes of Matisse.

From the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s he concentrated on one facet of the urban landscape, exploring the problems of painting in hundreds of watercolors of Tel Aviv rooftops, seen from his own roof and studio window. Gradually flatness and abstraction took over, marking these works as a milestone both in Zaritsky's development and, because of their high quality, in the art of the country. Watercolor, popular among Eretz Israel artists both as the cheapest and the most suitable medium for conveying the transparency and light of the country, was the medium preferred by Zaritsky and many artists he influenced. Among his students were Abramović, Krize, Aroch, and Holzmann.

The Kibbutz Yehiam series of oils and watercolors that Zaritsky created when he was teaching there in 1947–1949 constitute a central chapter in his work. Here, we find the first example in Israel of lyrical abstraction, with its solid and amorphous structure, unity of color, material, and form, its restrained Expressionism, and its light coloration. The high quality of the paintings, and the depth of their expression of human experience, all mark these works as a milestone in Israeli art. In the early 1950s Zaritsky's paintings became more abstract and their subjects harder to decipher.

From 1970 until his death in 1985, he lived in kibbutz Tzova, on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

Joseph Zaritsky
Photographer: Stanley I. Batkin

Gallery

Education

  • 1914 Art Academy, Kiev

Teaching

  • 1932-33 Opened studio in the cellar of his home in Rehov Mapu, Tel Aviv

Awards and prizes

  • 1942 Dizengoff Prize for painting [3]
  • 1959 Israel Prize, in painting.[4]
  • 1967 Sandberg Prize for Israeli Art, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
  • 1982 Yakir Tel Aviv-Jaffa
  • In 2005, he was voted the 196th-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.[5]

See also

References

As of this edit, this article uses content from "Artist List, Information Center for Israeli Art", which is licensed in a way that permits reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, but not under the GFDL. All relevant terms must be followed.

  1. ↑ Bio notes by Smadar Sheffi in Haaretz Guide, July 9, 2010: Review of the artist's show, "Every Part is a Whole," at the Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv.
  2. ↑ Golcondafineart.com.
  3. ↑ "List of Dizengoff Prize laureates" (in Hebrew). Tel Aviv Municipality. 
  4. ↑ "Israel Prize recipients in 1959" (in Hebrew). Israel Prize Official Site. Archived from the original on February 17, 2010 by WebCite. 
  5. ↑ גיא בניוביץ' (June 20, 1995). "הישראלי מספר 1: יצחק רבין – תרבות ובידור". Ynet. Retrieved July 10, 2011. 

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