Chana Orloff

Chana Orloff was born on July 12, 1888, in Tsaré-Constantinovska, also called Konstantinovka, a village in Ukraine.[1] The eighth of nine children, she immigrated to Palestine in 1905 with her parents, Raphael and Rachel Orloff, and her siblings; the family settled in Petah Tikvah.[1] She had learned Hebrew at a reformed cheder in Ukraine.[2]

Orloff’s sewing skills helped supplement the family income, and she worked as a cutter and seamstress in Jaffa.[1][2] She joined Hapoel Hatzair, or “The Young Worker,” and helped guide and instruct young women who had recently arrived in Palestine.[2] An offer to teach dressmaking at a Herzliyah high school gave her a reason to seek professional qualifications abroad.[2]

Encouraged by her school director to obtain a diploma in cutting and dressmaking, Orloff arrived in Paris in August 1910.[1] She worked as an apprentice in the ateliers of Paquin while attending evening courses.[1] Although she had intended to return to teach, her discovery of an interest in art changed the direction of her career.[2]

At a teacher’s urging, Orloff took the entrance examination for the École Nationale des Arts décoratifs in 1911 and placed second.[1] She studied drawing with Professor Bruneau, curator of the Louvre, and art history with Paul Vitry.[1] Her training also included sculpture at the Académie Russe, a Montparnasse workshop for young Russian artists established by Marie Vassilieff.[1]

In Montparnasse, Orloff entered an international artistic and literary circle that included Pablo Picasso, Tsuguharu Foujita, Diego Rivera, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, and Max Jacob.[1] She was also friendly with Soutine, Pascin, Zadkine, Lipchitz, and Chagall.[2] In 1912 she met the then-unknown Amedeo Modigliani and introduced him to her friend and classmate Jeanne Hébuterne.[1] Modigliani made a portrait of Orloff that year.[3]

Two wooden busts by Orloff, Tête d’adolescent juif and Madame Z, appeared at the Salon d’Automne at the Grand Palais in an exhibition running from November 15, 1913, to January 5, 1914.[1] Her work of this period was strongly influenced by Cubism.[2] In 1916 she exhibited alongside Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, and Kees Van Dongen at Galerie Bernheim Jeune.[1]

That same year, Orloff married Ary Justman, a Warsaw-born writer and poet whom she had met through Montparnasse’s literary circles.[1][2] They published a book of his poetry accompanied by photographs of her early sculptures.[2] Their son, Elie, was born on January 4, 1918; Justman died of Spanish influenza on January 12, 1919.[1] Orloff continued making art while raising their son, and in 1919 published Bois gravés de Chana Orloff, a collection of eleven woodcuts issued in one hundred copies.[1][2]

Between 1919 and 1923, she worked on Figures d’aujourd’hui, a limited-edition album published in 1923 with forty-one portraits and texts by Jean Pellerin and Gaston Picard.[1] Its subjects included writers, painters, and musicians from her postwar artistic milieu.[1] The album marked a turning point in her work, as discoveries in graphic composition became integrated into her sculpture.[1]

By the 1920s, Orloff was especially known for portraits, and her connections in literary and artistic circles made her an unofficial portraitist of the Parisian elite.[1][2] Wood was her preferred medium, although she also worked in stone, marble, bronze, cement, and terra cotta.[1][2] Her subjects included artists Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani; poets Fleg and Mac Orlan; and architects Pierre Chareau and Auguste Perret.[2] She also portrayed Sholem Asch, Shmarya Levin, actress Hanna Rovina, and painter Reuven Rubin.[3]

Portraiture and animal subjects were among her favored genres, with birds particularly prominent among the latter.[1][2] Ordinary people, mothers, and children also appeared in her sculpture.[2] Her figurative work combined stylization with realistic detail, while her bronzes of the 1950s and 1960s showed a mild movement toward abstraction.[3] She expressed her ambition for her works “to be as alive as life …”[1]

Orloff exhibited in Europe and the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, including exhibitions in Paris, Amsterdam, and New York.[1][2] In 1925 she became a French citizen and was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.[1] Her American visits included trips in 1929 and 1938, and her exhibition venues included New York’s Marie Sterner Gallery and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.[3] Her 1929 one-woman show at New York’s Weyhe Gallery was called a “veritable triumph” in Vanity Fair, which described her as “probably the most important sculptress living today.”[1] In February 1931, her sculpture was exhibited with work by Isamu Noguchi at the Art Gallery of Toronto, as part of the Toronto Chapter of the Ontario Association of Architects’ third Exhibition of Architecture and the Allied Arts.[4] An entire room at the Petit Palais in Paris was devoted to her work in 1937.[2]

Throughout the interwar years, Orloff maintained connections with Palestine.[2] Her Paris home received Palestinian artists, Zionist leaders, students, and art lovers during the 1920s and 1930s.[2] Her first exhibition in Palestine took place in spring 1935 at the Tel Aviv Museum, then housed in Dizengoff’s house.[2] It included portraits of Hava Chabor, Reuven Rubin, Shalom Asch, and Bialik; her work was also shown that year at Jerusalem’s Steimatsky Gallery.[2] A sculpture of Bialik remained in Palestine, escaping the destruction that later befell works in her Paris studio.[2]

Orloff lived in occupied Paris from 1940 to 1942, continuing to work under dangerous conditions and making small pieces that she called “sculpture de poche,” or “pocket sculpture.”[1] Friends warned her about the July 16, 1942, roundup of Jews in Paris, enabling her to escape.[1] With help from the painter Georges Kars, she eventually reached Switzerland, where she remained with her son until the war ended.[1] She made more than fifty sculptures in Geneva, exhibited by Gallery Georges Moos in 1945.[1]

The Nazis emptied Orloff’s Paris studio in 1943, and 146 works disappeared.[5] When she returned to Paris in 1945, she found her house ransacked and sculptures in her studio destroyed.[2] In 1946 she made Retour, or The Return, depicting a deportee; the sculpture and a series of drawings were exhibited at Galerie de France in Paris.[1] She subsequently worked and exhibited in the United States before returning to Paris in 1948.[2]

After Israel’s independence, Orloff spent increasing amounts of time there.[2] The Tel Aviv Museum exhibited thirty-seven of her sculptures in 1949, and she stayed to complete a portrait of David Ben-Gurion.[2] Her portrait subjects also included Levi Eshkol, a future Israeli prime minister.[2]

Orloff’s public commissions in Israel included Maternité (Motherhood), also known as Mother and Child, a 1952 memorial at Ein Gev commemorating Chana Tuchman Adlerstein, a kibbutz member killed in the War of Independence.[1][6] She also made a bronze monument in Ramat Gan depicting the struggle of the Jewish underground.[3]

In 1955 she received a commission for a monument to the Hebrew Working Woman outside the Histadrut building in Tel Aviv.[2] She prepared several versions, including The Bearer, The Sower, The Gatherer, and The Mower, before the committee selected Woman with a Basket.[2]

In 1961, museums in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and En-Harod presented a retrospective honoring fifty years of Orloff’s artistic production.[3] The Hebrew- and French-language catalogue, Chana Orloff, Sculptures 1911–1961, was published in Tel Aviv by the Association of Museums in Israel and records that the exhibition was shown at several Israeli museums in spring 1961.[7]

Orloff returned to Israel in 1968 for an exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum planned to mark her eightieth birthday.[1] She became ill on arrival and died at Tel Hashomer Hospital that December.[1][2] She was buried at Kiryat Shaul cemetery in Israel.[2]

Orloff’s body of work includes more than three hundred portraits, and her sculptures are held in collections in Israel, Europe, and the United States.[1] A small museum in Paris houses her work, while her Bialik sculpture is on permanent display at Bialik House in Tel Aviv.[8][2]

Her Ein Gev memorial has remained a site of artistic engagement: in an installation by Ariane Littman, two bereaved mothers wrapped Mother and Child in gauze bandages.[9] Her sculptures also continue to figure in efforts to recover Jewish property looted during the Nazi period.[5]

One of the works missing from her studio was a wooden sculpture known as The Child Didi, depicting the father of her grandson Éric Justman.[5] It resurfaced at a New York auction in 2008 and was returned to the family in 2023.[5] The family lent the recovered sculpture for display at the Jewish Museum to raise awareness of the looting of Jewish property.[5]

A separate Orloff sculpture became the subject of an ownership dispute when it was offered for auction in Israel.[5] After her granddaughter Ariane Tamir was asked to authenticate it, the sale was canceled.[5] The owner maintained that she had bought the sculpture in good faith and returned with it to Britain.[5]