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Artist or Maker: CHANA ORLOFF 1888 - 1968

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Date: Executed in 1919.

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Description: BRETONNE
inscribed Ch. Orloff (on the base)

Estimated Price: £_________

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Medium: carved wood

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Dimensions: height: 27 3/4 in. 70.5 cm.

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Provenance: Leon Gildesgame
Then by descent to the present owner

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Published: Félix Marcilhac, Chana Orloff: Catalogue de l'Oeuvre sculpté, Paris, 1991, p. 37 and p. 208, no. 33 (illustrations of other examples)
The Open Museum, Chana Orloff/ Line & Substance 1912-1968, Tefen Industrial Park, 1993, p.44, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue

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Notes:

This work is representative of the lyrical style of the Ecole de Paris artist Chana Orloff. Orloff, hailed by critics in the 1920s, at the time of her first visit to America, as one of the world's leading sculptors, was known for blending cubist formalism with a gentle abstraction and a stylized purity of form in her works. A highly successful member of the Parisian art scene, Orloff held the French Legion of Honor. She was a staunch supporter of Israel, where she created a number of important pieces, and where she died in 1968 during a visit on the occasion of a retrospective celebration.

Born in the Ukrain in 1905, Chana Orloff came to Eretz Israel in 1905 at the age of 18 and moved to Paris in 1910 to study at the Ecoles des Arts Decoratifs, were she was exposed to the art of masters such as Maillol and Bourdelle. Orloff quickly became a successful member of the vibrant community of aritsts in Paris which included Picasso, Cocteau, Chagall and especially Modligliani. In this early sculpture, one can see Orloff's preoccupation with geometrical abstraction, an avant-garde issue which fascinated also Archipenko, Lipchitz and Zadkine at the time. "But while Lipchitz and Archipenko addressed themselves to Cubistic treatment of mass and space - dismantling the sculptural area and bringing the material out into the space that envelopes the sculpture - Chana Orloff remained faithful to the human figure. Although her sculptures from this period do reveal a certain abstraction - geometrization, an emphasized contour line, transmission of more essential and inclusive information - the human figure remained complete. The line flow produced by the geometrization evokes in the viewer a sense of archaism and elegance. At this stage the abstraction of limbs stemmed from the search for a formal solution; at a later stage the geometrization would become a means of expression." (Sorin Heller, "Chana Orloff and the Ecole de Paris",Chana Orloff/ Line & Substance 1912-1968, The Open Museum, Tefen Industrial Park (exhibition catalogue), 1993, p. 188).