Joseph Zaritsky

Joseph Zaritsky was born on September 1, 1891, in Borispol, near Kyiv, in present-day Ukraine.[1][2] He studied at the Academy of Art in Kyiv and subsequently lived for a period in Moscow before making aliyah.[1] Six watercolors he produced in Russia between 1918 and 1920 — including "The Artist's Wife" (1918) and "The Artist's Wife Looking at the Street" (1920) — document his work before his arrival in the land of Israel.[3]

Zaritsky made aliyah in 1923, arriving during a period of cultural ferment driven by successive waves of immigration.[1] That year, his work appeared in an important exhibition at Jerusalem's Tower of David, described as the first important exhibition in the land of Israel organized by the younger generation of Palestine artists.[4] The exhibition, which also included former pupils of the Bezalel Art Academy, signaled a generational challenge to what these younger artists considered the anachronistic style and ideas of their teachers.[4] Among Zaritsky's earliest documented works from his new homeland is "Jerusalem, Gate of the Abyssinians" (1923), a watercolor reflecting his early engagement with the local landscape and architecture.[3]

Zaritsky's public career as an artist in the land of Israel took shape rapidly through the 1920s. He participated in three "Modern Artists" exhibitions held at the Ohel Theater during 1926–28, events that presented the modernist orientation of a younger artistic generation at a time when Tel Aviv was emerging as a cultural alternative to Jerusalem.[4] These exhibitions were embedded in the broader search for a new, distinctly local Hebrew culture — one that sought a balance between national artistic expression and the universal means of modernist practice.[4]

His working method in this period established patterns he would develop throughout his career. He painted urban landscapes of Haifa, Jerusalem, and Tzfat, often working in watercolor, before moving to Tel Aviv to pursue a landscape series that included views of the city's rooftops.[2] His 1928 painting Jerusalem still shows recognizable houses and donkeys, evidence of his starting point in observed reality.[5] Thirty-two watercolors on paper from his 1918–1940 period, offered at prices ranging from $25,000 to $200,000, were exhibited at Gordon Gallery in Tel Aviv and illustrate his early development before the founding of New Horizons.[3]

A particularly celebrated early work is Tel Aviv Pole on Rooftops, a watercolor given by Philip Klutznick and held in the B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum Collection.[2] Painted from either his rooftop or studio windows, the composition fills its lower and middle areas with blurred rooftops while a pole cuts the painting almost in half.[2] The work has been interpreted as conveying Tel Aviv's movement from a historical barren past toward a modern, forward-looking city, with the pole and the ongoing construction it implies as the central compositional device.[2] His artistic language in works of this kind has been characterized as built from "architectural splashes and expressionist daubs."[2]

The pivotal moment in Zaritsky's career came with the founding of the New Horizons group — Ofakim Hadashim — in 1947/48, with Zaritsky and Marcel Janco as its leaders.[4] The group championed what one account describes as "art for art's sake," a Parisian-influenced interpretation of modernism that stood in opposition to artists who advocated "art for society's sake" and preferred a more literal, programmatic approach.[6] Its core members included Marcel Janco, Arieh Aroch, Yehezkel Streichman, Avigdor Stematsky, and Zvi Mairovich, and from its first exhibition the group was regarded as an elite force in Israeli artistic life.[6][7]

Zaritsky's own contribution to the group's direction was distinctive. He followed, in the words of one source, "his own path with some debt to Braque and French 'intimisme,'" and the New Horizons tendency as a whole contributed to what became known as lyrical abstraction — a free abstract style combined with a particular sensitivity to the light and color palette of the local landscape.[4] His trend within the group tended toward an atmospheric lyricism, incorporating identifiable fragments of local landscape and cool color tones; fellow artists Avigdor Stematsky and Yehezkel Streichman were said to have adopted his style.[8]

The group's founding has been described as marking the end of the expressionist phase in Israeli art and opening the way to new ideas.[4] The formation of New Horizons represented not merely a stylistic shift but a statement about what Israeli art could aspire to be: internationally engaged, formally sophisticated, and rooted in the sensory particularity of the local environment rather than in illustrative national narratives.

The group's internal life was not without conflict. Zaritsky and Janco split sharply over the choice of entries for Israel's first participation in the Venice Biennale, with one account characterizing the reactions to the dispute as "so violent" that Janco left New Horizons after the group's first exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum in 1949.[4] With Janco's departure, Zaritsky inherited sole leadership of the group, whose exhibitions continued until 1963.[4] A Globes report interprets the movement's lasting legacy as a subsequent emphasis, across generations, on ideas over technique — though that reading is the article's own evaluative perspective on the group's influence.[7]

Zaritsky's painting followed a consistent trajectory from observed landscape toward increasing abstraction, with landscape dissolved into fields of color while remaining connected to actual visual experience.[5] His working practice illustrates this: he made small watercolors in the field and then used them as the basis for large oil paintings executed in the studio, keeping the finished abstractions anchored in direct observation even as they moved far from representation.[5]

Kibbutz Yehiam became a recurring subject in his mature work. He was given a place to work on the kibbutz, and many of his canvases captured the light and color of its landscape.[9] One 1951 work from this body, captioned Yehiam and held by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, was purchased through a contribution from Joseph and Rebeca Meyerhoff.[9] It has been described as fully abstract, with vibrating patches of color in which recognizable forms have been dissolved.[5] The contrast with his 1928 Jerusalem is striking and encapsulates the transformation his work underwent across those two decades.[5]

In the 1970s and into his final years, Zaritsky repeatedly visited Kibbutz Tzuba and painted views of the ruins of Tsooba, an Arab village near Jerusalem whose residents had fled during the 1948 War of Independence; Kibbutz Tzuba was founded nearby shortly after the war.[10] Zaritsky is described as seeing the scene "simply as a beautiful Israeli landscape," and his late abstract-expressionist oil Tsuba (1970) was identified at a 2005 Hammersite auction as one of his major late works, ultimately selling for $184,000 — above its top estimate.[10][11] He painted a watercolor series at Tzuba throughout the 1970s, demonstrating that into his eighties he remained committed to working directly in the landscape.[12]

The range of works documented across his career — from early figurative watercolors to monumental abstract oils — speaks to a sustained and evolving engagement with the Israeli environment. Gallery owner Yeshayahu Yariv, who curated the 2010 Gordon Gallery exhibition of Zaritsky watercolors, observed of the early works: "Every detail in a Zaritsky watercolor is a painting in itself."[3]

Zaritsky received the Israel Prize in painting in 1959.[13] His influence extended well beyond his own canvases: as the dominant figure of New Horizons, he set the tone for Israeli art for many years, and younger artists including Stematsky and Streichman absorbed and extended his approach.[8][9] A later generation of artists also reckoned seriously with his legacy: Larry Abramson described him as a "father figure" from whom he could both learn and with whom he could productively grapple.[12]

His standing as a local modern art pioneer was recognized in institutional settings beyond the Israel Prize. His work was included in the Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art exhibition "Be'eretz Ahavati," drawn from the Phoenix Insurance Group collection of over 1,400 works.[14] He was described by one report as the "dean" of the New Horizons movement, while Calcalist characterized him as one of the most important painters in the history of Israeli painting.[11][3]

The market for Zaritsky's work has reflected that assessment with increasing force since his death. Having almost no estate at the time of his death in 1985, his prices rose sharply immediately afterward.[15] A different 1951 work titled Yehiam, from the Gabi and Ami Brown collection, sold for $354,000; at the 2014 sale of the IDB art collection, a Zaritsky work estimated at $50,000 sold for $140,000.[16] These results, alongside the $184,000 reported for Tsuba in 2005, demonstrate the high market standing of his modernist paintings.[11]

Abramson's description of Zaritsky as a father figure captures his importance to later Israeli artists. He was a central figure around whom a generation organized its ambitions and debates, even as later artists developed their own departures from his example. New Horizons exhibitions ran until 1963, and accounts of the movement's legacy have emphasized its lasting effect on Israeli approaches to abstraction, lyricism, and the relationship between ideas and technique.[4][7]

A major episode in Zaritsky's public life involves his monumental painting Otzma (Power or Might), which he made specifically for Israel's first major national exhibition, held on Yom Ha'atzmaut in 1958 to mark the tenth anniversary of independence.[6] The government-organized event, titled "The First Decade," presented state achievements across agriculture, industry, military affairs, and health services, and abstract works by New Horizons artists were given prominent placement.[6] Two accounts of what happened next differ in emphasis: one records that David Ben-Gurion had Zaritsky's monumental abstraction removed from the pavilion entrance, characterizing the episode as governmental interference in artistic expression;[6] another says Ben-Gurion previewed the works, objected to Zaritsky's painting, and that Zaritsky "backed down."[17] The Center for Israel Education adds that Teddy Kollek, then head of the Prime Minister's Office, moved the painting to a less prominent location after understanding Ben-Gurion's displeasure, and that Ben-Gurion was heard to remark: "One can live with modern art, or without."[1][9] CIE presents the episode as a reported anecdote rather than fully corroborated history.

CIE records that Zaritsky was greatly insulted and later destroyed the painting.[9] It connects the episode to continuing debates in Israel about politicians' roles in artistic expression, an explicitly interpretive framing.[9] Because the work was destroyed, no direct assessment of the painting is now possible; the episode instead survives through the differing accounts of its removal and aftermath.