Painter, graphic artist and sculptor, Ryback, born in Ukraine at the end of the 19th century, was one of the most important names in Russian avant-garde Jewish art. In the words of French poet Edouard Roditi, “Ryback can be recognized as an artist whose genius can be compared only with that of Marc Chagall.” The painter never forgot his origins - Jewish themes, characters and everyday scenes from the shtetl were a constant in his works.

Critics and the public recognized his talent and creativity since his debut in the world of fine arts in 1815. During his short life, he participated in group and numerous solo exhibitions in Russia, France, Germany, England, Holland and Belgium. The artist died still young, in 1935, at the age of 38, on the eve of his first major retrospective, at the Wildenstein Galleries, in Paris.

First years

Issachar Ber Ryback was born on February 2, 1897, in Elisavetgrad (now Kirovograd), in Central Ukraine. Although his father descended from a prominent Hasidic family, he was a follower of the Haskalah and admirer of Russian culture, and had managed to instill a love for this culture in his children. Issachar was a child with very fragile health; Until he was nine years old he barely spoke. He was ten years old when his father sent him to study at cheder from the village, but stayed there for just over a year. He spent most of his time drawing. He began to secretly attend night drawing classes taught to factory workers in the region. At the time, he already demonstrated the talent with which he would build a successful career.

He enrolled in courses for scenery painters and, upon completing the program, began working at artel1, a cooperative for economic purposes. The money he earned allowed him to continue his artistic studies, despite his father's objections. In 1911 he entered the Kiev Art Academy, from which he graduated in 1916.

During this period, Ryback was part of an informal artistic group of Jewish painters united by a deep sense of nationalist self-identity and a great interest in the various trends in modern art. In addition to him, the group included artists such as Boris Aronson, Alexander Tyshler, Salomon Nikritin, Mark Epstein and Isaac Rabinovich. They would all become famous. Young people were influenced by two schools of thought. On the one hand, due to the ideology of the so-called Kiev Group, Yiddish writers (Kiev Group of Men of Letters in Yiddish) considered the theorists and creators of modern Jewish culture and literature. It was a period of unprecedented growth and development in terms of Yiddish literature and culture. This Kiev Group included David Bergelson – who distinguished himself as one of the best stylists of Yiddish prose –, Nachman Mayzil, Yehezkiel Dobrushin and David Hofstein.

On the other hand, young artists created close ties with painters from avant-garde2 Russian, among them, Alexander Bogomazov and Alexandra Exter, who were then living in Kiev. Ryback studied in the studio of painter Alexandra Exter. It was she who introduced him to cubism3, to theater design and to Boris Aronson, who would later conquer Hollywood with his sets.

Ryback first presented his works to the public at the Spring Exhibition in Kiev in 1915. Most of his canvases, painted in a modernist style, were inspired by Jewish themes. During the European summers of 1915 and 1916, he accompanied El Lissitzky, an important figure in avant-garde, on trips organized by the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society. The two artists traveled throughout Ukraine, visiting the shtetls from Belarus, they copied the paintings that covered the wooden synagogues in Podolia and Volhynia, the tombs in Jewish cemeteries and silver ceremonial objects. This trip awakened Ryback's interest in Jewish folk art and, from then on, he began a collection of objects and reproductions of Jewish life that he had made during his travels.

After the Bolshevik Revolution

During World War I, Ukraine was the scene of bloody battles. Russia's entry into the War accelerated the collapse of the Tsarist Empire. In February 1, the misery and defeats suffered on the battlefields by the Tsar's army led the Russian people to revolt. On March 1917, Tsar Nicholas II was deposed, starting the Russian Revolution and, in November of that same year, the Bolshevik Party overthrew the provisional government then in power and imposed the Soviet socialist government.

After the 1917 Revolution, the Central Committee of Kultur Liege of Kiev invited Ryback to teach drawing classes, and in this role he had the opportunity to visit Jewish farming communities. The experiences he had during his travels inspired his last works, including the lithograph album “On the Jewish Fields of Ukraine”, from 1926.

Still in 1917, he participated in the Exhibition of Jewish Painters and Sculptors in Moscow, and was then acclaimed by critics as one of the most brilliant artists of his time. The following year, he portrayed, in a series of paintings, the carnage that was the Russian civil war.

His artistic activities multiplied. He went on to teach drawing and painting at the Kiev Jewish Children's Studio and participated in the launch of the Kiev branch of the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. In the Russian spring of 1918, together with El Lissitzky and Iosif Chaikov, he formally founded the Russian Art Department. Kultur Liege, an institution that aimed to develop modern Jewish culture in Yiddish in Ukraine.

He created several stamps for Jewish book publishers and also produced sketches of sets and scale models for the pioneering productions of the Liga Cultural do Estúdio Teatral that anticipated constructivist set design. He was responsible for the models for the sets of the first show mounted at the Kultur Liege.

In mid-1919, he published, in the Kiev Yiddish magazine, in collaboration with Boris Aronson, an important article on Jewish art, entitled “Di vegn fun der yidisher maleray” (“Ways of Jewish Art”), published in 1919. The essay served as a manifesto of Jewish avant-garde art. The central theme was the difficulties faced in defining and establishing a “Jewish national style”. According to the authors, Jewish art should represent a synthesis of the Jewish artistic tradition with the modernist movement. They believed it was necessary to establish a Jewish iconography based on Jewish folk art, mainly from the representation of Hebrew letters and the copying of Jewish folk artifacts. The stylizations used by Jewish artists, such as columns, deer, lions and candelabra, became the standard for modern Jewish art. Ryback himself painted a series of works in which Jewish symbols and folk art motifs appeared intertwined with Jewish imaging techniques. avant-garde.

Still in 1919, the artist spent a year in Moscow, where he was very active in the Circle of Jewish Writers and Painters, as well as being a frequent contributor to the city's Jewish Theater Chamber. The following year he returns to Kiev, where he chairs the committee charged with organizing the first major group exhibition of Jewish artists. He was also one of the organizers and participants in the exhibition organized by the Artistic Division of the Cultural League in Kiev. Shortly after the exhibition closes in April, Ryback returns to Moscow.

In the spring of 1921, his father was killed during a pogrom in Elisavetgrad. The anti-Semitic pogroms had begun in October 1917 and spread throughout Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union, and only ended in May 1921. In that During this period, 530 Jewish communities were attacked, and after 887 pogroms, more than 156 Jews were brutally murdered. His father's murder deeply disturbed him, and he created a series of works dedicated to the Jewish pogroms in Ukraine.

After his father's death, Ryback left Russia and, for several months, while awaiting his entry visa to Berlin, he resided in Kovno (today, Kaunas). There he designed some books in Yiddish and worked in institutions of the Lithuanian Culture League. In October he arrived in Berlin where he actively participated in international and Jewish cultural life. He became a member of the so-called novembergruppe (November Group), formed by German artists shortly after the First World War, which aimed to revitalize the country's art. With them, Ryback participated in several important exhibitions, as well as showing his art in exhibitions held at the Berlin Sezession and the Juryfreie Kunstshau.

In 1922, together with Yankel Adler and Henryck Berlevi, Ryback (as a representative of the Jewish painters of Eastern Europe) participated in the preparation and conduct of the congress of the Union of International Progressive Artists held in Dusseldorf. Influenced by Ivan Bilibin, icon of stylized Russian nationalism, he created his own elements based on the Hebrew alphabet, such as fences and houses in wooden relief. He also cooperated with German-Jewish publishers and accepted artistic work from certain Jewish organizations, specifically the ORT. In 1923, the German-Jewish publishing house Shvelln, from Berlin, published his graphic album entitled Stetl. A year later, his lithographic album “Jewish Types of Ukraine” was also published. These two graphic series were based on Ryback's impressions and recollections of his 1916 trip through the shtetls from Ukraine and Belarus. From December 1923 until January 1924 he had a solo exhibition in Berlin.

Back in Moscow, in 1924, he was invited by the Jewish Studio of the Belarusian Theater to create the scenery for a show in Yiddish and, at the beginning of the following year, he created sets for another play, also in Yiddish, at the Jewish Theater in Kharkov. . Soon after, he began a long journey through the collective farms Jews (cooperative farms) from Ukraine and Crimea.

It was in Moscow that he painted another famous painting, “Still Life with Jewish Objects”, in which he uses the cubist division at the center of the work as a modernist approach to portraying the festival of Sukkot. 

Even today, the collection of lithographs “Shtetl, Mayn Chorever Heym, the Gedekniss” (“Shtetl, my destroyed home, a Memorial”) from 1923, according to many critics, is considered his most representative work. Evokes the shtetl in dark tones, mixing cubist and expressionist styles, asymmetrical lines and exaggerating facial expressions and planes that penetrate each other. The style of this work, which immortalized his hometown completely destroyed by pogroms, superimposes images of various moments of Jewish life in the synagogue, at school, at parties and in ceremonies and rituals, such as weddings and funerals. In the images it is possible to identify the residents' professions through the symbols introduced, such as shoemakers, knife sharpeners, butchers and the rabbi.

Ryback produced two more albums that remember the people, life and places where he was born and raised and which were completely destroyed: “In the Jewish Fields of Ukraine”, from 1926, and “Shadows of the Past”, from 1932.

Ryback in Paris

In 1926 he decided to leave to start his life again in Paris. The city of lights, a world center for the arts, welcomed Ryback with open arms. His arrival, preceded by the fame he had achieved in recent years, guaranteed him a special place in the artistic life of the French capital. There he held two solo exhibitions – one at the Galerie aux Quatre Chemins, in 1928, and another a year later, at the Galerie L'Art Contemporain. In his constant search for innovation, his painting style changed. He abandoned cubism and adopted the expressionism of the Paris School, also gaining recognition from French critics. Individual exhibitions became part of his agenda and, in 1930, he mounted an exhibition in The Hague, in 1931 in Rotterdam and, in 1932, in Brussels and Antwerp.

In these creations his unique style incorporated the concepts of Cubism with popular art, in particular the characteristics of luboks, a very common form of printing in Russia created from engravings, woodcuts and, later, lithography. O lubok It gained popularity in Russia from the end of the 17th century, being generally used in narratives of historical events, literature or religious tales.

The work "La Fiancée” (The Bride) was produced after his move to Paris. This work portrays the artist's love for the world he left behind, his childhood memories, the joy and optimism of the Jewish spiritual life he left in pursuit of his artistic dream, a world that was destroyed forever by pogroms. His romantic and nostalgic style is very clearly present in this work. According to a quote about the work, published in Journal of debates, “it is precisely between the lightest fantasy and total romanticism that Ryback treads his path. In the restlessness of his people, in their melancholic mood, he superimposes a wealth of colors and themes, which is not without excess. The whole is totally harmonious with a dark, yet dramatic light.”

A consummate artist, Ryback included sculpture in his art, particularly in his later years. At the beginning of 1935, the Musée National de Céramique de Sèvres organized an exhibition of his work, later acquiring some of his works. In the same year he went to England for the opening of an exhibition at the invitation of the Cambridge University Art Society. 

He returned to Paris full of ideas for new projects, which he ended up not carrying out, as he was hospitalized due to a drastic worsening of his chronic illness. In the hospital he spent the last months of his life. The painter's friends had enough time to hold an exhibition of his works in a Parisian gallery. Ryback participated in the preparations even though he was hospitalized, but was unable to attend the opening. He died shortly after the exhibition closed, on December 22, 1935.

In 1962, his widow donated his entire personal art collection, including the small sculptures of characters from the shtetl made in clay, for the Ryback Museum in Bat-Yam, Israel.

1 A small voluntary society made up of people whose common objective was to carry out an economic activity. Members of an artel donated their labor, tools, and eventually money, dividing the profits according to the value and quality of the work they contributed.

2 Historically, the term “Russian avant-garde” refers to art from all countries that were part of the USSR/Russia at the beginning of the 20th century.

3 One of the main founders was Pablo Picasso. The cubist painter tries to represent objects in three dimensions, on a flat surface, in geometric shapes, with a predominance of straight lines. It does not represent, but suggests the structure of bodies or objects.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Voolen, van Edward, 50 Jewish Artists
You should know, Prestel
Regenbogen, Lucien, Dictionary of
Jewish Painters, Editora Tehnica
Frankel, Ellen, The Jewish Spirit
– A Celebration in Stories
and Art Russian Jewish Artists, Prestel