Issachar Ber Ryback

«Bouquet of Flowers», watercolour on paper, 48 x 31 cm.

Issachar Ber Ryback's watercolour «Bouquet of Flowers» is executed in his unmistakable style, in which the traditions of European modernism intertwine with an intense, almost mystical Jewish poetics of everyday life. The bouquet is not merely a floral depiction, but an expressive image rich in inner life, created through a spontaneous technique and a brilliant chromatic palette.

The work is signed at lower right.

Issachar Ber Ryback (1897-1935) was one of the most important Jewish avant-garde artists. Born in Elisavetgrad, now Kropyvnytskyi (Ukraine), into a Hasidic family, he trained at the Kyiv Art School under the influence of Alexandra Exter and became associated with Cubism. Between 1915 and 1916 he joined El Lissitzky on ethnographic expeditions to Jewish villages in Ukraine, copying synagogue decorations and reliefs from gravestones. This experience profoundly marked his work, which was devoted to the life and tragedy of the Jewish shtetl. He was among the founders of the art section of Kyiv's Kultur-Lige, but emigrated to Berlin in 1921 and settled permanently in Paris in 1926, becoming part of the European avant-garde. His best-known work is the album of lithographs «Shtetl. My Destroyed Home. Memories» (1923), an intense requiem for a vanished world in which Cubism, Expressionism and the naive aesthetic of children's drawing converge. He died in Paris at the age of 38. The Bat Yam Museum of Art preserves the principal and most complete collection of his work.