Paul Zimmerman

Modernist Oil Painting Social Realist Kids and Cat in Red Wagon WPA Style

c.1950s

Large magnificent colorful Ruth Schloss oil painting of a child with a wagon with a doll or a baby in a carriage stroller.. Signed in Hebrew size measures 31x43 with frame , 23x35.25 without the frame. (this is being sold unframed). Ruth Schloss (22 November 1922 – 2013) was an Israeli painter and illustrator who mainly depicted neglected scenes such as Arabs, transition camps, children and women at eye-level as egalitarian, socialist view via social realism style painting and drawing. Schloss became Israeli painting’s sensitive, conscious, remembering eye. Ruth Schloss was born on 22 November 1922, in Nuremberg, Germany, to Ludwig and Dian Schloss, as the second of three daughters of bourgeois assimilationist Jewish family well-integrated into German culture. As the Nazis came into power in 1933, her family immigrated to Israel in 1937, and settled in Kfar Shmaryahu, then an agricultural settlement. Schloss studied at the Department of Schloss graphic design at "Bezalel" from 1938 to 1942 alongside Friedel Stern and Joseph Hirsch. She was a realistic painter who focused on disadvantaged people in the society and social matters as an egalitarian. Her realism was thus an “inevitable realism,” motivated by an inner necessity: the need to observe reality as it is. Her painting repeatedly addressed the door pulled from its frame, employing drawing’s unique ability to stop time and prolong the image’s persistence in the retina, she repeatedly committed to paper - in a matter-of-fact, non-evasive manner devoid of mystery – man’s tendency to generate chaos, suffering and pain. Throughout her life, Schloss remained minimalist. Painting about human fate was the main subject of her artworks. Her natural inclination was to describe the darker aspect of human existence. 1930s The Schloss household was characterized by open, liberal spirit, in keeping with the parents’ progressive views. It deeply influenced Ruth’s mental development, as she learned to tie culture and art with sensitivity towards the weak and underprivileged. In Jerusalem, she joined a commune of Hashomer Hatzair in which she shaped her socialist views, which she maintained throughout her long career. 1940s In this period she mainly depicted landscapes of kibbutz and wretched women living hard life, children in huger, older people, refugees. After completing her art studies, Schloss joined a training group at Kibbutz Merhavia in 1942, and after two years moved to Karkur region, the nucleus established Kibutz Lehavot Habashan in the Upper Galilee. Through this time, she fell in love with the surroundings and drew landscapes. They are simple and direct with fresh, lucid lines. These paintings were selected as the main works of her first exhibition in 1949. In early 1945, Schloss started to draw illustrations in the children’s magazine Mishmar Leyeladim, and designed the logo of Al Hamishmar, the paper’s new name in 1948. In 1948, upon the founding of Mapam (United Workers’ Party), she designed her party’s emblem, which became a well-known icon. She kept working as an illustrator for Mishmar Layeladim until 1949. "Mor the Monkey" project yielded financial profits and this income was used for a study trip to Paris for two years. She was succesfull as illustrator however, she had inner conflicts of her identity as witnessed painter toward neglected class in Israeli society. First Exhibition at Mikra-Studio Gallery, 1949 She presented forty drawings on paper in her first solo exhibition, representing a selection of the themes of kibbutz landscape, its lifestyle. Schloss confidently proposed her direction through simplicity without using colors in her drawings. 1950s Between 1949 and 1951, she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. She began working in oils, with which she continued throughout the 1960s. The exhibition “Back from Paris” opened in November 1951 at Mikra-Studio Gallery . In 1951 she married Benjamin Cohen, who served as chairman of the national leadership of Hashomer Hatzair Workers Party in Tel Aviv. He was a theoretician and a man of principle, highly esteemed by its leaders who became a professor of history at Tel Aviv University. In 1953, following the Mordechai Oren affair and the publication of Moshe Sneh 's followers from Kibbutz Artzi, she and her husband left the kibbutz and moved to the agricultural farm, Kfar Shmaryahu, where she lived until her death. At a certain point in Israeli history, segments of the socialist movement felt that Israel should become part of the Communist bloc, rather than seek the support of the western world. Because the Schloss couple support of Moshe Sneh’s left-wing party, they had to leave the kibbutz. She loved to depict ordinary women as figurative on her painting without hiding or making up anything. The poet Natan Zach wrote about her works in 1955: “Her motto remains that which has been all these years: life as it is, without bluffing." Schloss’s “Pietà” (1953) became a universal cry expressing the pain of mothers on either side of the divide. In the late 1950s, she was the mother of two daughters. When she drew her daughters, unlike the universal babies she depicted, naked and with clenched fists, the painting of her children employed babyish sweetness to the full in a quiet, peaceful and heart-stirring filling rather than urgency. She also painted children in the transition camp and Jaffa in the 1950s and 1960s. 1960s-1980s – The period of Studio in Jaffa Schloss painted at a studio in Jaffa from 1962 till 1983. In this time, she turned her interest to people around her more than kibbutz – the children, mothers, and poor workers, the alleys and houses. She opened the space to the street and its dwellings, built interactions around it, and was nurtured by the presence of the outside in her work. 1960s Schloss familiarized to an Arab woman, Nabava, lived in poor. Schloss returned to painting images of old people later, and she called her painting figurative elderly people in the old age homes “waiting”. In the late 1960s, Ruth discovered acrylic paint and never turn back to oil painting. In 1965 Schloss devoted a series “Area 9 (1965)”, dedicated to the demolition of Israeli-Arab houses and the expropriation of the land, and carried a definite socio-political messages. The series was exhibited at Beit Zvi, Ramat Gan, in 1966. She was the only artist who addressed the result of the Six-Day War immediately afterward. In 1968, Schloss and Gansser-Markus presented “Drawing of War” in Zurich gallery. She expressed the war as an ultimate expression of destruction and ruin, regardless of victors and vanquished. 1970s In late 1970s Schloss began printing the selected photograph directly on the canvas, posterior reworking it in acrylic. She decided to print her work at Har-El Printers in Jaffa, and these became the surface of her painting. This technique was mainly adopted in two large series: Anne Frank (1979-1980) and Borders (1982). Through this technique she placed the figure of elder Frank next to that of the famous young Frank, and released it at the exhibition at Bet Ariela Cultural Center, Tel Aviv, in 1981. The series touched upon the Nazi Holocaust. 1980s The Lebanon War raised the question of “The Good Fence” and the effect of the war. She dedicated a large series Boarders, one of the most powerful image linked to the series is the figure of Yemenite woman raising her hand. She was the first to raise the Black Panthers demonstration to the level of a social icon. In the 1980s and again in 2000, the Intifada uprisings also led Schloss to the easel to render a good number of representational and symbolic works that in their way denounced Israel's political and military actions. 1990s – 2000s Ruth Schloss never had an exhibition in a major Israeli museum. Her works were presented in private galleries and small museums. The main museums, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Israel Museum, included her works only in group exhibitions, and only in 1991 was her retrospective exhibited at the Herzliya Museum. In the 2000s, Schloss’s metaphors turned into animal kingdom and Bedouins in the south. A huge rhinoceros, birds of prey, and other "bad animals," as Cohen Evron, daughter of Ruth, calls them and "I connected this to the Nazis," said Schloss. Schloss' work after she didn't find human expression able to transmit the endless cruelty she saw in Israel's political mentality. Schloss also continued to follow and collect documentary photographs of destructions of houses from the war, the Intifada, the sequence of her work about ruin from 1949 to 2005, was a cumulative testimony about the painful history of Israel and Palestine. In 2006, a large retrospective exhibition of her work was presented at the Museum of Art in Ein Harod, curated by Tali Tamir. Education 1938-41 Bezalel Art Academy, Jerusalem, with Mordecai Ardon 1946 painting course for Kibbutz Artzi artists with Yohanan Simon and Marcel Janco 1949-51 Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris Awards and recognition 1965 Silver Medal, International exhibition in Leipzig, Germany 1977 Artist-in-Residence, The Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris Selected solo exhibitions 2004 “Micha...

Simka Simkhovitch (Russian/American 1893 - 1949) This came with a small grouping from the artist's family, some were hand signed some were not. These were studies for larger paintings. Simka Simkhovitch (Симха Файбусович Симхович) (aka Simka Faibusovich Simkhovich) (Novozybkov, Russia May 21, 1885 O.S./June 2, 1885 N.S.—Greenwich, Connecticut February 25, 1949) was a Ukrainian-Russian Jewish artist and immigrant to the United States. He painted theater scenery in his early career and then had several showings in galleries in New York City. Winning Works Progress Administration (WPA) commissions in the 1930s, he completed murals for the post offices in Jackson, Mississippi and Beaufort, North Carolina. His works are in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Born outside Kyiv (Petrograd Ukraine) into a Jewish family who owned a small department store. During a severe case of measles when he was seven, Simcha Simchovitch sketched the views outside his window and decided to become an artist, over his father's objections. Beginning in 1905, he studied at the Grekov Odessa Art School and upon completion of his studies in 1911 received a recommendation to be admitted to the Imperial Academy of Arts. Though he enrolled to begin classes in architecture, painting, and sculpture at the Imperial Academy, he was dropped from the school roster in December because of the quota on the number of Jewish students and drafted into the army. Simchovitch served as a private in the 175th Infantry Regiment Baturyn [ru] until his demobilization in 1912. Re-enrolling in the Imperial Academy, he audited classes. Simka Simkhovitch exhibited paintings and sculptures in 1918 as part of an exhibition of Jewish artists and in 1919 placed 1st in the competition "The Great Russian Revolution" with a painting called "Russian Revolution" which was hung in the State Museum of Revolution. In 1922, Simkha Simkhovitch exhibited at the International Book Fair in Florence (Italian: Fiera Internazionale del Libro di Firenze). In 1924, Simkhovitch came to the United States to make illustrations for Soviet textbooks and decided to immigrate instead. Initially he supported himself by doing commercial art and a few portrait commissions. In 1927, he was hired to paint a screen for a scene in the play "The Command to Love" by Fritz Gottwald and Rudolph Lothar which was playing at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway. Art dealers began clamoring for the screen and Simkhovitch began a career as a screen painter for the theater. Catching the attention of the screenwriter, Ernest Pascal, he worked as an illustrator for Pascal, who then introduced him to gallery owner, Marie Sterner. Simkhovitch's works appeared at the Marie Sterner Gallery beginning with a 1927 exhibit and were repeated the following year. Simkhovitch had an exhibit in 1929 at Sterner's on circus paintings. In 1931, he held a showing of works at the Helen Hackett Gallery, in New York City and later that same year he was one of the featured artists of a special exhibit in San Francisco at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park. The exhibit was coordinated by Marie Sterner and included four watercolors, including one titled "Nudes". He is of the generation of Russian Soviet artists such as Isaac Pailes, Serge Charchoune, Marc Chagall, Chana Orloff, Isaac Ilyich Levitan, and Ossip Zadkine. In 1936, Simkhovitch was selected to complete the mural for the WPA Post office project in Jackson, Mississippi. The mural was hung in the post office and courthouse in 1938 depicted a plantation theme. Painted on the wall behind the judge’s bench, “Pursuits of Life in Mississippi”, a depiction of black workers engaged in manual labor amid scenes of white professionals and socialites, was eventually covered over in later years during renovations due to its stereotypical African American imagery. The following year, his painting "Holiday" won praise at an exhibition in Lincoln, Nebraska. In 1940, Simkhovitch's second WPA post office project was completed when four murals, "The Cape Lookout Lighthouse and the Orville W. Mail Boat", "The Wreck of the Crissie Wright", "Sand Ponies" and "Canada Geese" were installed in Beaufort, North Carolina. The works were commissioned in 1938 and did not generate the controversy that the Jackson mural had. The main mural is "The Wreck of the Crissie Wright" and depicts a shipwreck which had occurred in Beaufort in 1866. "The Cape Lookout Lighthouse and the Orville W. Mail Boat" depicted the lighthouse built in 1859 and the mail boat that was running mail during the time which Simkhovitch was there. The boat ran mail for the area until 1957. "Sand Ponies" shows the wild horses common to the North Carolina barrier islands and "Canada Geese" showed the importance of hunting and fishing in the area. All four murals were restored in the 1990s by Elisabeth Speight, daughter of two other WPA muralists, Francis Speight...

Artist: Marshall Goodman, American (1916 - 2003) Title: Children Playing Year: circa 1960 Medium: Oil on Canvas, signed l.r. Size: 30 x 25 in. (76.2 x 63.5 cm)

Artist: Carlos Irizarry Title: Child with Doll and Buggy Year: circa 1965 Medium: Oil on Canvas, signed l.r. Size: 30 in. x 24 in. (76.2 cm x 60.96 cm)...