Beschreibung
Plates, number 139 of 450, brochured, lightly worn, folio. Text entirely in Yiddish. 32 full page pictures. Issachar Ber Ryback was a painter, a graphic, a sculptor, a scene painter, and an art critic. He was born on Feb 2, 1897 in Yelisavetgrad (now Kirovograd, Ukraine). Though his father came from a prominent Chassidic family, he was a follower of Haskala and an admirer of the Russian culture, and tried to foster love of this culture in his children. Nevertheless, he sent his son to the "heder", though rather late, only at the age of 10, because of delayed development and unhealthiness He studied in the "heder" for slightly more than a year, dedicating most of his time to the evening drawing classes for workers attached to the local factory, which he attended in secret. At the age of 11 he entered the Yelisavetgrad courses for scene painters, and having completed the course, and worked starting 909 in an artel (co-operative unit) that dealt with interior paintings of public and church buildings. The money he earned in the artel enabled him to continue his artistic education, despite his father's resistance. In 1911, Ryback was admitted to the Kiev School of Arts, Faculty of Painting, and graduated in 1916. At that period he became a member of the non-formal group created by the school Jewish painters that included, in particular, Boris Aronson, Alexander Tyshler, Solomon Nikritin, Mark Epstein, and Isaac Rabinovich, who later became the well-known artists. They all had in common a keen national self-identity and interest in various modernistic trends in art. Particular features of their world outlook were influenced, on the one hand, by the ideology of the so-called Kiev Group of Yiddish men of letters: David Bergelson, Nachman Mayzil, Yehezkiel Dobrushin, David Hofstein, etc., who were the theoreticians and the creators of the "modern" Jewish culture and literature. On the other hand, Ryback, similarly to the other, close-spirited young Jewish painters, established close links with Alexander Bogomazov and Alexandra Exter, who lived then in Kiev and were among the leading painters of the Russian avant-garde. In 1913-1914 Ryback attended classes in Exter's private studio. In 1915, at the Kiev Spring Exhibition, he for the first time presented his paintings, most of them being inspired by Jewish topics but in a modernistic style. In summer 1916, Ryback, together with El Lisitzky, was commissioned by the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society to travel all over Ukrainian and Byelorussian small towns (stetln) and copy the paintings in wooden synagogues and carved gravestones on the Jewish cemeteries. This trip awoke Ryback's interest in Jewish folk art and from that time on, he started regular collection and copying of the art samples. In spring 1917, Ryback participated in the Moscow Exhibition of Jewish painters and sculptors, and the critics assessed him as "one of the most brilliant and ingenious artists". The same year, Ryback participated in the launching of the Kiev Branch of the Jewish Society for the Fine Art Encouragement. In spring 1918, he became a founder of the Culture League Artistic Division. It was the organization established at that period in Ukraine for the development of new Jewish culture in Yiddish language. In 1918-1919, Ryback taught drawing and painting at the Kiev Jewish Children's Studio attached to the Artistic Division, designed a number of stamps for Jewish publishing houses and made artistic design of the Eygns, a literary almanac in Yiddish. Besides, he prepared scenery sketches and scale model for the pioneering production of the Culture League Theater Studio that have foreseen some of the Constructivist set design discoveries. In the summer 1919, in the Baginen, the Kiev Yiddish-language magazine, in collaboration with Boris Aronson, Ryback published The Ways of Jewish Painting paper, which served as a peculiar manifesto of Jewish avant-garde art. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 005364
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