Chana ORLOFF 1888 — 1968Хана ОРЛОВА • Хана ОРЛОВАChana Orloff was born in Ukraine in 1888. She was a Jewish figurative sculptor.
The artist and her family immigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1905. Orloff found a job as a cutter and seamstress in Jaffa, where she joined Hapoel Hatzair (The Young Worker), and assisted other recent immigrants. After five years in Israel, she was offered a job teaching cutting and dressmaking at a Herzliyah High School and was helped by her brother to go to Paris to study fashion. Soon after arriving in Paris, she decided to study art instead, and enrolled in sculpture classes at the Académie Russe in Montparnasse. She became friendly with other young Jewish artists including Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani, Pascin, Chaim Soutine, and Ossip Zadkine, and in 1913, Orloff exhibited in the Salon d`Automne.
In 1916, Orloff married Ary Justman, a Warsaw-born writer and poet. When the Nazis invaded Paris, Orloff fled to Switzerland with her son and the Jewish painter Georges Kars. In 1945, Kars committed suicide, and Orloff returned to Paris with her son, to find that her house had been ransacked and the sculptures in her studio destroyed. Following Israel’s independence, 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. Chana Orloff died in Israel in 1968.
|
