Issachar Ber Ryback

Léo L. Gildesgame, London

Issachar Ber Ryback, Zein Leiben un Schaffen, Paris, 1937, illustrated
Forward, New York, Sunday October 9, 1949, illustrated (illustration appears in Yiddish newspaper in the context of the exhibition Ryback in Retrospect held for this artist at the time in New York)

In good condition. The canvas is lined. Canvas weave visible in areas (figure's faces, darker portions along the right edge). Minor craquelure throughout. UV: a 3 inch area of inpainting at the center left edge.
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Born in the Ukraine in 1897, Ryback is generally regarded as an important contributor to the Jewish Art Movement in Russia. In 1919-1920 he lived in Moscow and worked in close association with the artists of the Russian avant-garde and in particular with El Lissitsky, Pevsner and Gabo. In 1921 he moved to Berlin where he was associated with Der Sturm and in 1925, he was invited back to Soviet Russia to design sets and costumes for the Moscow theater. In 1926, he settled in Paris where he gave up abstract work and sought a new form of expression. He held his first one-man show in Paris in 1928 and later exhibited in Holland (1930) and Belgium (1932). In 1935, on the eve of his first large retrospective at the Wildenstein Galleries in Paris, he suddenly died.

Painted after the artist settled in Paris, in 1926, this work is representative of Ryback's romantic and nostalgic style. In his work, the artist portrays his love of the world he abandoned, his childhood memories of the joy and optimism of the spiritual Jewish ghetto life he left in order to pursue his artistic dream and which were lost  to him forever because of the destruction of the pogroms.

"It is between the lightest fantasy and utter romanticism that Ryback seeks his path. On the restlessness of his race, on its melancholy humour he superimposes a richness of colour and themes, which is not without some excess. The whole is completely harmonised in an obscure but dramatic light. " (P. Fierens, Journal de Débats as quoted in I. Ryback 1897-1935, Bet Ryback, Bat Yam, 1963).