Chana Orloff was an Israeli Art deco and figurative art sculptor.
Background
Chana Orloff was born in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine). She immigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1905 and settled in Jaffa, where she found a job as a cutter and seamstress. Zvi Nishri (Orloff), the pioneer in physical education in Israel, was her brother.
Education
Six years later she moved to Paris where she studied sculpture and moved in the circles of avantgarde artists.
Career
During the following years, Orloff received commissions for portraits of many leading Parisians and famous personalities of the art world,
Chana Orloff by Amedeo Modigliani, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. In 1925 she was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor. She also visited the United States, where exhibitions of her work were held in New York and Boston.
During the Nazi occupation of France, she continued to work on what she called her “pocket sculptures” until December 1942. when she was warned that she was due to be arrested and fled with her son to Switzerland. In her absence, her Paris studio was vandalized and much of her work stolen or destroyed. Orloff returned to Paris after the war and her series of drawings and sculptures. Relour, depicted the sufferings of a deportee.
In the following years, many large-scale exhibitions of her work were held, including a retrospective in the Tel Aviv Museum. She visited Israel on a number of occasions and produced public monuments in Ramat Gan and Ein Gev. She died in Tel Aviv while on a visit there.
Orloff sculpted hundreds of portraits; some of famous people such as David Ben-Gurion and Sholcm Asch. others tender sculptures of pregnant women, women with children, ordinary men and women, and birds. Her favored medium was wood. which she found “warm and friendly,” but she worked also in stone, marble, bronze, and cement. Her work was realistic, but influenced by cubism. She said that for her the important thing was “to create a living work of art.”
In Paris, Orloff became friendly with other young Jewish artists, among them Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani, Pascin, Chaim Soutine, and Ossip Zadkine. In 1913, she exhibited in the Salon d'Automne. After the establishment of the State of Israel, Orloff began spending an increasing amount of time there. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art held an exhibition of 37 of her sculptures in 1949. She remained in Israel for about a year in order to complete a sculpture of David Ben-Gurion, The Hero Monument to the defenders of Ein Gev and The Motherhood Monument in memory of Chana Tuckman who died during the Israeli War of Independence. In addition to monuments, Orloff sculpted portraits of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and future Prime Minister Levi Eshkol; the architects Pierre Chareau, and Auguste Perret; painters Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, and Per Krohg; and the poets Hayyim Nahman Bialik, and Pierre Mac Orlan.
Orloff died in Israel on December 16, 1968.
Politics
She joined Hapoel Hatzair workers movement. After five years in the country, she was offered a teaching position in cutting and dressmaking at Gymnasia Herzliya. She went to Paris to study fashion but chose art instead, enrolling in sculpture classes at the Académie Russe in Montparnasse. In 1916, she married Ary Justman, a Warsaw-born writer and poet. The couple had a son, but Ary died of influenza in the epidemic of 1919. When the Nazis invaded Paris, Orloff fled to Switzerland with her son and the Jewish painter Georges Kars. In February 1945, Kars committed suicide in Geneva, after which Orloff returned to Paris, to find that her house had been ransacked and the sculptures in her studio destroyed.