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(Isayevich)

(b Vinnitsa, Ukraine, Dec 22, 1889; d Leningrad [now St Petersburg], Dec 12, 1970).

Russian painter, graphic artist, sculptor and designer of Ukrainian birth. He studied painting at the School of Art in Odessa (1901–7) under Kiriak Kostandi (1852–1921), at the same time attending classes in sculpture. In 1908–9 he made a series of pointillist paintings. He visited Vienna and Munich in 1910 before going to Paris, where he worked at Vasil’yeva’s Free Russian Academy until 1912, producing paintings on Jewish themes and studying Cubism. In 1912 he went to St Petersburg, where he painted a number of Cubist portraits, for example of the poet Anna Akhmatova (1914; St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.). His Cubist work makes much use of faceting and transparent planes. From 1918 to 1921 he taught at the Department of Visual Arts (IZO) of Narkompros in Petrograd, but he was criticized for his attempts to identify Futurism with the art of the proletariat. Al’tman became well known as the designer of post-Revolutionary mass parades and monuments, for example the celebration of the first anniversary of the Revolution on ...

[Shagal, Mark (Zakharovich); Shagal, Moses]

(b Vitebsk [now Viciebsk], Belarus’, July 7, 1887; d Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Alpes-Maritimes, March 28, 1985).

French painter, draughtsman, printmaker, designer, sculptor, ceramicist, and writer of Belarusian birth. A prolific artist, Chagall excelled in the European tradition of subject painting and distinguished himself as an expressive colourist. His work is noted for its consistent use of folkloric imagery and its sweetness of colour, and it is characterized by a style that, although developed in the years before World War I, underwent little progression throughout his long career (see.g. I and the Village, 1911; New York, MOMA). Though he preferred to be known as a Belarusian artist, following his exile from the Soviet Union in 1923 he was recognized as a major figure of the Ecole de Paris, especially in the later 1920s and the 1930s. In his last years he was regarded as a leading artist in stained glass.

Chagall spent his childhood, admirably recorded in his autobiography, in a warm Hassidic family in Vitebsk [now Viciebsk], with frequent visits to his grandfather’s village home. He attended the traditional Jewish school but afterwards succeeded in entering the local Russian high school, where he excelled in geometry and drawing and determined to become an artist. At first he studied locally in the studio of ...

American, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 12 May 1934, in Omaha (Nebraska).

Painter, sculptor, muralist. Figures, abstract, animals, numerology, mysticism.

Figurative Expressionism.

Rhino Horn Group.

Jay Milder was the third of four children born to Leo and Jeannette Milder. His family came to the United States from Bratslav, Ukraine in 1851. They are descendants of the Baal Shem Tov, the patriarch of Hasidic Judaism, and the Hasidic mystic Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav.

At 17 years old, Milder graduated from high school and moved to New York City where he supported himself by working in the garment district. He went to Paris in 1954 to study art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Sorbonne. He studied cubist painting with Andre L’Hote and sculpture with Ossip Zadkine. From Paris, Milder travelled to Morocco and stayed in the Arab section of Tétouan. Milder had a profound experience inside Tétouan’s spiritual district, which led him to a greater aesthetic awareness and influenced his artistic development, most notably his vibrant palette and organic use of materials and forms. Around this time, Milder delved into theosophy and Eastern philosophy and examined his hereditary roots in mysticism....

Russian, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 27 September 1939, in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now St Petersburg, Russia).

Sculptor.

From 1954 until 1957, Alexander Ney studied at the Secondary Art School of the Ilya Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in Leningrad. While he was trained in the official style of Socialist Realism, Ney resisted this restriction, developing alternative artistic practices. When continuing his studies at the Art School of the Surikov Institute in Moscow in ...

[Shlomo Zalman Dov]

(b Vrno, Lithuania ?1866; d Denver, CO, March 22, 1932).

Lithuanian sculptor and painter, active in Palestine. Born into a poor, orthodox Jewish family, he attended rabbinical school in Vilna (now Vilnius; 1882–7). During this period he studied art at the local academy and, affected by the anti-Semitism of the period, developed left-wing political interests and the connections to an emancipated Jewish art form. His personal history generated three distinct artistic periods: the early activities in Paris (until 1895), the Bulgarian period (until 1903) and the later Jewish period in Palestine. His first known oil painting, the Dying Will (c. 1886; priv. col., see 1933 exh. cat., no. M16), was typical of late 19th-century romanticism. In 1888 he moved to Warsaw, working intensely on sculptures, reliefs and lithographs. His concept of art for a Jewish national agenda and propaganda was published that year as an article ‘Craftsmanship’ in the Hebrew newspaper Hazfira, forming the basis for his later works. After his marriage (...