Abraham Cohen

Resting at Evening, Israeli Modernist Painting

1963

Mid-century Israeli Modernist painting by Israeli artist Abraham Cohen

Jichak Pressburger, Painter. b. 1933, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. A concentration camp survivior. Came to Israel aboard the ship, "The Exodus". 1964 Went to Paris. In 1979 Returned as new immigrant. Education Tel Aviv University, B.A. in art, with Marcel Janco and Isidor Ascheim at Avni art school. Beaux Arts, Paris with Professor Coutaud. Itzchak Pressburger Stays in Paris from 1963 – 1979, Resident of the “Cité des Arts” 1969-1972. Lives and works in Jerusalem since 1979. One-Man Exhibitions 1963 Gallery Dugit, Tel-Aviv 1968 Cultural Center Enkhuizen, Netherlands 1968 Gallery Zunini, Paris (chosen by the art critic of « Opus : Jean-Jacques Lévèque) 1970 Gallery Zunini, Paris 1973 Gallery Maitre Albert, Paris. Cultural Center Verfeil sur Seye, France 1974 Gallery Maitre Albert, Paris 1976 Gallery Mundo, Barcelone 1980 Artists’ House, Jerusalem 1981 Gallery Alain Gerard, Paris Group Exhibitions 1966 Rathaus Charlottenburg, Berlin. (The first show of Israeli painters in Germany Artists Center of Silvarouvres, Nantes, Ffance XXXth Salon of Finances at “l’Hotel des Monnaies”, Paris 1969 Maison de Culture, Le Havre, France 1968 Gallery Zunini, Paris (chosen by the art critic of « Opus : Jean-Jacques Lévèque) Salon « Grands et Jeunes d’Aujourd’hui », Paris Museum of Fine Arts, Nantes, France Cultural Center Vitry, France Gallery Il Giorno, Milan Cité des Arts, Paris 1972 Salon “Grands et Jeunes d’Aujourd’hui”, Paris Salon de Mai, Paris 1973 Städtische Galerie, Siegen, Germany 1974 Jewish Cultural Center, Paris Publicis, Paris 1975 Réalitiés Nouvelles, Paris 1976 Salon de Mai, Paris 1977 “Perspectives Israeliennes”, Grand Palais, Paris 1981 Salon Alain Gerard, Paris 1984 Artists’ House, Jerusalem Publication 1990 Haggadah Yom Kippour (Hebrew/French) Abraham Bliah (private edition), Paris Acquisitions 1968 The City of Paris 1972 The State of France The Yitzchak Pressburger artist was born in Bratislava – known for centuries by its German name of Pressburg – but the outbreak of World War II found him and his family in Prague. His father realized they had to escape from the Nazi occupiers and tried to get the family across the border into Hungary. However, they were caught near the crossing point, arrested and incarcerated overnight at the nearby railway station. The Czechs put them on a train to Hungary early the next morning. That was their first miracle in their quest for survival. They survived with relative ease until late 1943, when the father was taken away to a forced labor camp. He subsequently died in a death march. Things became even more precarious in early 1944, when the Holocaust made its full-blown presence felt in Hungary. “It wasn’t the Germans, it was the Hungarian Nazis who did the dirty work,” Pressburger points out. The family lived in so-called “safe houses” that were protected by Switzerland, Finland and Sweden. The havens were dismantled in late 1944, and the Pressburgers moved into one of the two Jewish ghettos in Budapest. The Nazis had found two houses with Jews, including the one where we had been, and took them all out and shot them next to the Danube. Today there is a monument by the river [called Shoes on the Danube Bank]. We should have been with the Jews who were killed by the river,” he says. After the war, Pressburger and his siblings were farmed out to various orphanages run by the Jewish Agency, and things took a decidedly better turn. “We finally had food to eat,” he recalls. “After a while we were put on trains that were protected by the Jewish Brigade [of the British Army], and we were sent to Austria, and then to Germany.” “My uncle was a famous artist, and I learned a lot from him,” he says. While in Germany, Pressburger also took some lessons with a local artist. His mother managed to get him and two of his siblings berths on the Exodus, which set sail from Marseilles for Palestine in July 1947. Pressburger was 13 at the time and clearly recalls the aborted attempt to get to the Promised Land. “It was so crowded on the boat. This was a ship that was made to ply rivers in the United States, with a few hundred people on board, and we had over 4,500 passengers crammed in.” As we know, the British prevented the Exodus from docking in Palestine, and the passengers were shipped – in three far more seaworthy vessels – back to France. After the French government refused to cooperate with the British, Pressburger and the others found themselves back in Germany. The teenager eventually made it here in 1948, just one month before the Declaration of Independence. After a short furlough in Tel Aviv, during the first lull in the fighting in the War of Independence, he moved to Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin, where he worked in the cowshed. All the while he continued feverishly drawing and honing his artistic skills, which he says came in handy when he joined the IDF. After completing his military service, which included a spell as one of the founding members of the Flotilla 13 naval commando unit, he worked in Sdom for a while at the Dead Sea Works before starting his formal arts training in earnest. I was in the first group of students at the Avni Institute [in Tel Aviv],” he says. “There was quite a famous bunch of students and teachers like Moshe Mokadi and Isidore Ascheim and Aaron Giladi.” In such illustrious company, one might have thought Pressburger was set to unleash his burgeoning talents on art connoisseurs across the globe, but it was a while before that happened. Pressburger arrived in the French capital in 1964 and spent close to 15 years there, with a short interlude in Germany, before returning to Israel. His time in Paris was a professionally rewarding period of his life, and he also found love. “[Avni Institute teacher] Yochanan Simon gave me the name and address of a French-Israeli family in Paris, but when I got to the house, a young woman opened the door and told me the family was on vacation in Israel,” he explains. Despite missing his expected hosts’ welcome, he and the German-born young lady who greeted him soon fell for each other, and romance quickly led to wedding bells. By all accounts, Pressburger did well in Europe. He secured a rare three-year berth at Cité Internationale des Arts, where artists are normally provided with accommodation and studio space for between two months and a year. He was also accepted to the prestigious Beaux Arts academy of fine arts, mounted solo exhibitions, and took part in group shows all over Europe. One of these last was a group exhibition at Rathaus Charlottenburg in Berlin in 1966 – the first exhibition of Israeli artists in Germany after the Holocaust. When he arrived in Berlin, the lineup for the Israeli show was already signed and sealed, but somehow his work came to the attention of the German culture minister, who arranged for him to join. The Pressburgers’ year-long sojourn came to an abrupt end following an encounter he had one day while walking through the crowded Berlin streets...

Framed 27 X 24 inches Sight 18 X 15 inches Walter Spitzer (Polish/French, 1927 - ) born in Cieszyn, Poland. A Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor, he made his first drawings in a concentration camp. Walter Spitzer has lived and worked since WWII in France, where he studied at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. Walter Spitzer has achieved great renown as a painter and printmaker. Whether in his paintings of Biblical subjects or in lithographs of Shtetl scenes, His humanity was inspired by the writings of Sartre, Montherlant and Kazantzakis, Walter Spitzer is occupied with two great, interlinked themes: man’s inhumanity to man, and the humanity of man. He will surely be recognized in the future as one of the great witnesses to the twentieth-century experience. Walter Spitzer was born in Chieszyn, Poland, the son of a Jewish liqueur producer, and attended the German school there. He began to draw and paint at an early age. In 1939 the Spitzer family was forcibly removed by the Germans to the town of Strzemieszyce, which was turned into a ghetto in 1942. When the ghetto was liquidated in June 1943 Spitzer’s mother was shot, and the sixteen-year-old Walter was deported to Blechhammer, a subcamp of Auschwitz. There he painted portraits of Wehrmacht soldiers and fellow inmates in exchange for food. He was one of the few to survive the evacuation march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, where to begin with, in late February 1945, he was held in the Little Camp. To enable him to make drawings documenting life in the camp, the Communists organized his transfer to the main camp. While on a death march in early April he made his escape in the vicinity of Jena and was soon in the hands of the Americans. Spitzer served as an interpreter with an American army unit, and at the same time executed numerous drawings depicting the world of the camps. In June 1945 the Americans took him to Paris, where – following the advice of his father, who had died in 1940 – he began to study art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Par the following year. After completing his training as an artist he produced paintings expressing a critical view of the society of his day. In 1955, in commemoration of the camps and the death marches, he executed a cycle of nine etchings in an edition of thirty, which he gave to various museums in Israel and in France. In the 1960s he established himself as an illustrator of exclusive editions of works by such authors as André Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, Joseph Kessel and Nikos Kazantzakis. The Six-Day War prompted him to begin painting subjects from Jewish and Biblical history; At age 19, he was asked to make the scenery for the Edouard VII Theater in Paris, which was showing The Dibbuk of Ansky. In 1947 the same theater asked him to make the scenery for the Hill of Life ( Max Zveig). Spitzer has been a member of the Salon d'Automne since 1952. He was the last remaining survivor of the Montparnasse Ecole de Paris. A group of Jewish expats that included Issachar Ber Ryback, Abel Pann, Abraham Mintchine, Isaac Antcher, Alexandre Altmann, Henri Epstein, Mane Katz, Marcel Janco, Gregoire Michonze...

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Herbert Katzman 1923-2004 (American artist active in New york, Illinois and Italy) Oil Painting Dated 1946. Signed. Dimensions; Sight-16" x 20", Frame-23.5" x 27". Provenance: this bears an old stamp verso from Christie's auction house. Herbert Katzman was born in Chicago on Jan. 8, 1923, His father believing that discipline was a good teacher, sent Herbert and Bob to St. John's military academy for their elementary education but it wasn't long before Herbert found his way to the Art Institute of Chicago where he wanted to study sculpting. His Father vehemently objected and refused to finance his studies, but that wasn't enough to discourage the young artist. He put himself through school working as a student janitor and a few other odd jobs. At 17 he entered the Advanced School of the Art Institute, his interest having turned to painting. His study there was briefly interrupted by a short stint in the navy (1942-44). After receiving a medical discharge, he returned to Chicago to work with Boris Anisfeld, who introduced him to German and French Expressionism...

similar in style to David Azuz a new Expressionist Israeli market scene possibly by Roz Rice.

Original oil on canvas painting. Hand signed on front; signed and titled on verso by the artist. Canvas is stretched. Artwork is in excellent condition. Stretched. Certificate of au...

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