Alfred Aberdam Art

Alfred Aberdam (1894–1963) painter and graphic artist was a painter of School of Paris, born in Lvov, capital of Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire. Born in Lviv, Krystonopol, East Galicia (now Chervonograd, Ukraine) and received a traditional Jewish education in a Heder while studying Hebrew with private teachers. In 1905–12 he lived in Lvov, where he finished high school. He decided to become an artist at the age of 14. At this time he came into contact with young Yiddish Judaic writers (Melech Ravitch, Abraham Moshe Fuks, and others) and with Zionist youth groups in Lvov. He attended their meetings and their lectures on Jewish Judaica artists. After graduating high school, he organized several conferences in his hometown on Italian and Flemish masters and on the first Jewish painters, including Josef Israels (1824-1911). In 1911 he started to study art at the Munich Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Akademie der Bildenden Künste München. Lemberg/Lwów (today Lviv), studies under Gabriel von Hackl (1843-1926). During World War I he was imprisoned by the Russians and stayed in the camp for prisoners of war in Siberia where he became acquainted with David Burliuk and other Russian futurists. In 1917, Aberdam was appointed People’s Commissar of the Department of Fine Arts by the local soviet, which assigned him the task of reorganizing artistic teaching. A year later, in Moscow, he befriended the poet Vladimir Mayakovski. In 1921 in Poland, he began his studies at Kraków's Academy of Fine Arts under Professor Teodora Axentowicz, then lived in Paris. There he participated in numerous exhibitions, and in a Poland exhibition in the Gallery of Modern Art Editions in 1929. In the latter he organized the exhibition in 1931. In 1932 he exhibited in Warsaw and Lviv. From 1933 he belonged to a group of visual artists known as "Nowocześni". In 1923, while he was staying in Berlin, he met Menkes and Weingart in sculptor Alexander Archipenko’s studio. In 1924, he settled in Paris in the Montparnasse area. In the end of 1925, Jan Sliwinski held an exhibition in his gallery Au Sacre du Printemps, at 5 rue du Cherche-Midi, Paris. His work was exhibited alongside paintings by his Galician friends Leon Weissberg, Sigmund Menkes and Joachim Weingart. The Group of Four was born. In 1935 he took part in the exhibition of Polish artists in the Paris Galerie des Beaux-Arts. He maintained connections with Poland, showed his works in Polish exhibitions, and was a member of the Plastycy Nowocześni ("Contemporary Plastic Artists") group. In 1944, he participated in the creation of the Jewish Artists Society in Paris, whose president was sculptor Léon Indenbaum. Aberdam became secretary of this association and Marc Sterling...