Zahara Schatz

Zahara Schatz was born in Jerusalem in 1916.[1][2] Her father, Boris Schatz, founded the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, whose complex became the setting of her childhood.[3][2] She grew up inside the Bezalel complex itself, attending classes there before progressing to high school, and graduated from her father's school in her early teens.[2]

Her mother, Olga Pevsner-Schatz, was an art historian, and the household was one in which art was both profession and daily environment.[2] Her brother Bezalel — known as Lilik — became a prominent artist and designer; the Central Zionist Archives would later identify both siblings as important artists who carried forward their father's legacy.[3]

After Boris Schatz died, Olga took Zahara and her brother to Paris, where Zahara studied art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière for more than four years.[2] In 1938 she joined her brother in California, beginning what would become a recurring pattern of movement between Europe, the United States, and Israel.[2]

Zahara and her brother returned to Jerusalem in 1951, and she established herself as a working artist and applied-art designer.[2] Within a few years of her return she was appointed design consultant to Israel's Ministry of Trade, a role that reflected her commitment to bringing good design into everyday Israeli life.[2] Her stated artistic mission was devoted to enhancing the lives of ordinary people, and she continued designing, producing artifacts, and exhibiting throughout this period.[2]

Her output ranged widely: paintings, panels, jewelry, minimalist sculptures, mobiles, and balanced sculptures all featured in her body of work.[2] A distinctive technique associated with her practice involved sealing leaves or wires between two sheets of laminated perspex, producing translucent, layered objects that included artifacts, panels, and bracelets.[2] She also produced variations on the hamsa.[2] Because early Israel offered limited raw materials, she adapted readily to working with inexpensive sheet metal and cheap rods — constraints that shaped rather than diminished her output.[2]

She created abstract sculpture using plastics and wire, working in a modernist idiom that drew on international influences.[1] A retrospective account identified the American modernist watercolorist John Marin as an apparent influence on Zahara and her brother, and two of her early works were minimalist abstract watercolors.[2] Many of her applied-art projects were made for Zim passenger ships, and a National Library of Israel archival catalog identifies artworks on the Shalom ship by Zahara and Bezalel Schatz.[4][2]

In the late 1960s Zahara married a Californian artist-architect and spent nearly two decades with him in the United States, returning to Israel after his death in 1978.[2] In later life she lived in the apartment at the rear of the Bezalel complex where she had grown up, and was active at the Jerusalem Artists' House, helping members of the Artists Association.[2] She also cared for her sister-in-law, Louise McClure Schatz, following the death of her brother.[2]

Sources agree that Schatz received the Israel Prize for painting and sculpture but disagree on the year. Encyclopedia.com gives 1954.[1] One Jewish Virtual Library PDF lists 1955,[5] while its online winners page and a 2017 PDF list 1956.[6][7] A Jerusalem Post retrospective gives 1955.[2] Further Israeli and American prizes and awards followed, though the retrospective did not name them.[2]

Her work is represented in the Central Zionist Archives' presentation of the Schatz family's artistic legacy, and works by Zahara and other members of the family were displayed in changing exhibitions at the former Bezalel family complex in Jerusalem.[8][9] A 2006 memorial exhibition of her paintings, sculptures, and designs — organized by curator-historian Gideon Ofrat — was held at the Jerusalem Artists' House and formed the third part of a trilogy devoted to the Schatz family; it covered work from approximately the 1930s through the early 1960s.[2] The account characterized the show as an incomplete retrospective that omitted much of her later work.[2]

One account attributes to Zahara the design of a six-branch menorah sculpture adapted as the Yad Vashem logo, with the arrangement of six branches said to combine the legacy of the destruction of the Second Temple with the memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.[10] Zahara Schatz died in 1999.[11]

Other biographical details also vary across the available accounts. Her return to Jerusalem is dated to 1951 in the retrospective and to 1952 in a later Jerusalem Post article.[2][11] Her name appears as both Zahara and Zohara Schatz.[2] The attribution of the six-branch menorah adapted as the Yad Vashem logo comes from a Jerusalem Post opinion column rather than an official Yad Vashem source in the material reviewed.[10]