Today's Honorary Subscriber: Show Biography

Chana Orloff (1888 - 1968)

Today's Honorary Subscriber is the figurative sculptor Chana Orloff (1888-1968), who is best known for her many sculpted portraits of famous people, particularly those from the art world of Paris.

Orloff's favorite medium was wood, because of its warmth and friendliness, but she also worked in stone, marble, bronze and cement. Her work was done in the realist tradition, yet showed traces of the cubist movement of her era.

Her list of notable subjects reads like a who's-who of the first half of the twentieth century: painters such as Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, poets Bialik, Fleg, Mac Orlan, architects Chareau, Auguste Perret, and other notable personages such as Ben Gourion, Levy Echkol, and Scholem Asch.

While visiting Israel, she produced public monuments in Ramat Gan and Ein Gev. Among Orloff's other favorite subjects to sculpt were animals, especially birds, ordinary men and women, and women as mothers, shown while pregnant and with their children.

Orloff was born in Ukraine but at age 16 moved with her family to Jaffa, Israel. Her father worked in the fields and she helped out as a seamstress. Six years later, in 1910, she moved to Paris, where she studied sculpture and moved in the circles of avant-garde artists. In 1913 three of her sculptures were accepted by the Salon d'Automne, and after that she exhibited regularly.

In 1916 she married the poet Ary Justman, who died in the post-World War I influenza epidemic, leaving her with a baby son. In the 1920s Orloff gained prominence as a sculptor, and received a steady stream of commissions for portraits. She later had an entire room devoted to her works in the Petit Palais of Paris. She also visited the United States, where she held exhibitions in New York and Boston.

During the Nazi occupation of France she continued to live in Paris until 1942 when, fearing arrest as a Jew, she fled with her son to Switzerland. Her Paris studio was vandalized and much of her work was stolen or destroyed. After the war she returned to Paris and set about to create her work Retour, which was a series of drawings and sculptures depicting her sufferings as a deportee.

For the remaining years of her life Orloff continued to work productively and exhibit on a regular basis, holding many large-scale exhibitions, including a retrospective in the Tel Aviv Museum.