The Temple Mount Viewed from the East, a painting by Jacob Steinhardt (1887-1968). 1946.
Oil on canvas. Signed and dated.
Jacob Steinhardt (1887-1968) was born in Zerkow, Prussia. In 1906, with the financial support of his townspeople, he started studying painting in Berlin under Lovis Corinth and etching with Hermann Struck. After a long stay in France and Italy, Steinhardt returned to Germany, where he co-founded with the artists Ludwig Meidner and Richard Janthur the expressionist group "Die Pathetiker". With the outbreak of World War I, Steinhardt enlisted in the German army and was positioned in Lithuania, where he became familiar with the traditional lifestyle of local Jews. His portrait sketches of Lithuanian Jews were exhibited in an exhibition of the Berlin Sezession group in 1917, and due to them, Steinhardt was accepted as a member of the group. After the war, he started making woodcuts inspired by the images of the war and his awakened Jewish identity. In 1933, he was arrested by the Germans for allegedly disturbing the Führer's speeches, yet was released due to his being a well-known artist. Several days later, he immigrated Palestine with his wife and daughter and after several months in Tel Aviv, settled in Jerusalem and opened an art school. In 1949, Steinhardt closed his school and was appointed the director of the graphics department of New Bezalel. Between 1953 and 1957, he headed the school (a position he was promised much earlier but was given first to Joseph Budko). In 1955, he was awarded an international prize in graphic art at the Sau Paulo Biennale in Brazil. Steinhardt, a prominent artist of German Expressionism, was famous mainly for his woodcuts; however, he never abandoned the easel. His work manifests humane protest alongside nostalgia for biblical times and for the Shtetl. He established a generation of students who continued his expressionist style.
84X69 cm. Framed: 88.5X104 cm. Good condition. Minor cracks to paint. Minor blemishes to frame.
Literature: The Woodcuts of Jakob Steinhardt, by Leon Kolb. San Francisco: Genuart Co., 1959.

Two Boys, a painting by Mané Katz (1894-1962).
Gouache on cardboard. Signed.
Emanuel Mané Katz (1894-1962) was born in Kremenchuk, Ukraine. As the son of a synagogue attendant (shamash), he received traditional education; yet at the age of 16, moved to Vilnius to study art. Katz did not find his place in Vilnius, and after a while, moved to Kiev, where during the years 1911-1913, he studied at the school of fine arts. Later, he headed for Paris where he studied at the studio of Fernand Cormon at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. When World War I broke out, he wanted to join the French Foreign Legion, but was rejected due to his short stature and returned to Russia. After the war, he taught at the Kharkiv school of art and was one of the members of the avant-garde "Group of Three". In 1921, he returned to Paris and in the following years, visited Palestine several times, painting its views. At the beginning of World War II, he was drafted and taken prisoner by the Germans then released, escaping immediately to the USA. After the war, he returned to Paris for the third time.
Katz visited Israel several times, while continuing to travel and exhibit around the world. In 1958, he immigrated to Israel and settled in Haifa, where the municipality gave him a house. In an agreement signed by the artist and the city, Katz made a commitment to donate his entire collection to the city in exchange for the establishment of a museum that will preserve his artistic legacy. Katz belonged to the School of Paris; in his early days as an artist, he was influenced by Cubism, then by Fauvism, later turning to the works of Rembrandt, which accounts for the sympathy with which he sees his subjects and his compassion to those on the fringes of society.
31X43.5 cm. Good condition. The signature is partly erased; appearing alongside it is a date, mostly illegible. Framed: 78X63 cm. Blemishes and minor fractures to frame.

Portrait of a Girl, a painting by Chaim Atar (1902-1953).
Oil on panel. Signed.
Chaim Atar (Apteker, 1902-1953) was born in Zlatopol, Ukraine. In his youth he was a member of the "Pirchei Zion" organization in his town and during the 1919 pogroms in Ukraine, joined a Jewish self-defense group. In 1922 he immigrated to Palestine and was one of the founders of Kibbutz Ein Harod. Atar, one of the leading artists of Palestine who was awarded the 1943 Dizengoff Prize, was an autodidact. Over the years, he had spent long periods of time in Paris, where he was influenced by Eastern European artists of the School of Paris, and especially by Chaim Soutine. Atar mostly created portraits and expressionist still-life paintings. He took on himself the care for the artistic aspect of the Kibbutz life. The paintings he created for his kibbutz decorated the dining room during the Jewish holidays for many years. In 1937, he founded the Mishkan Museum of Art in Ein-Harod, which at first was located in a small wooden cabin, and in which he collected works of art by Jewish and Israeli artists alongside reproductions of masterpieces. He also built a collection of Judaica artifacts in order to preserve the traditions of Jewish art. In 1948, the cornerstone of the permanent building of the museum was laid, with Atar serving as its first director until his death (see: website of the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod).
49X39 cm. Good condition. A minor fracture at the edge of the panel. Framed: 71X60 cm. Minor fractures in the frame.
Provenance: The Uzi Agassi Collection.

Chagall, by Raymond Cogniat. [Paris]: Flammarion, [1965?]. French.
Monograph on Marc Chagall, accompanied by dozens of reproductions of his works. On the first page is a large illustration in color pencils, made by Chagall, with an inscription in his handwriting: "Pour Edith et Maurice Schlogel, en souvenir, Marc Chagall" [To Edith and Maurice Schlogel, a souvenir, Marc Chagall]. Dated 1966.
Marc Chagall (1887-1985), a Russian-French artist, is considered by many the greatest Jewish modern painter. Chagall was born to a Hassidic family in Liozna (then in Belarus), the eldest of nine siblings. When his mother asked his first art teacher, the painter Yehuda Pen, whether her son could earn a living from painting, Pen looked at Chagall's sketches and told her: "Yes, he has some ability". At the age of twenty, he was accepted to study art in St. Petersburg (during this period, he painted for the first time the figure of the Fiddler on the Roof, after which the famous musical is named) and in 1914 married the writer Bella Rosenfeld, who became known as one of his greatest sources of inspiration. After the October Revolution, Chagall was appointed commissar of arts for the Vitebsk district, where he established an art school and a museum. Among the teachers of the school were the artist El Lissitzky and the painter Yehuda Pen – Chagall's first teacher.
In 1920, Chagall moved to Western Europe and after a short stay in Berlin settled in Paris. During this period, he created the important series "My Life", which documented the views of the Jewish town, and the series of bible illustrations. In 1941, about two years after the occupation of France by Nazi Germany, Chagall succeeded in escaping to the USA with the assistance of the American journalist Varian Fry. For several years he lived in New York, returning to France after the war, where he remained until his death.
Chagall's works of art, which embrace a wide variety of fields and styles (prints, theater sets and costumes, sculpture and ceramics, tapestry, mosaics, stained glass, and more), are exhibited in leading museums and galleries, in the opera houses of New York and Paris, in the Mainz Cathedral, in the Knesset (in The Chagall Lounge) and elsewhere. The painter Pablo Picasso said of his work: "When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is".
95, [1] pp, approx. 28 cm. With original dust-jacket. Good condition. Minor blemishes. A small tear to edge of dust-jacket.