Zeev Raban ( artsandmusicnow )

Zeev Raban

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Ze’ev Raban (1890-1970) was a leading painter, decorative artist, and industrial designer of the Bezalel school style, and was one of the founders of the Israeli art world.

Life

Raban was born Wolf Rawicki in Łódź, Congress Poland, and began his studies there. He continued his studies in sculpture and architectural ornamentation at a number of European art academies. These included the School of Applied Art in Munich at the height of the Jugendstil movement, the neo-classical studio of Marius-Jean-Antonin Mercié at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and the Royal Academy of Art, Brussels, then a center of Art Nouveau, under symbolist and idealist artists Victor Rosseau and Constant Montald.

Under the influence of Boris Schatz, the founder of the Bezalel Academy, Raban moved to the land of Israel in 1912 during the the wave of immigration known as the Second Aliyah. He joined the faculty of the Bezalel school, and soon took on a central role there as a teacher of repoussé, painting, and sculpture. He also directed the academy's Graphics Press and the Industrial Art Studio. By 1914, most of the works produced in the school's workshops were of his design. He continued teaching until 1929.

In 1921, he participated in the historic art exhibition at the Tower of David, the first exhibit of Hebrew artists in Palestine, which became the first of a yearly series of such exhibits.

Works

Raban is regarded as a leading member of the Bezalel art style, in which artists portrayed both Biblical and Zionist themes in a style influenced by the European jugendstil (similar to Art Nouveau) and by traditional Persian and Syrian styles. Exemplars of this style are Rabban's illustrated editions of the of Book of Ruth, Song of Songs, Book of Job, Book of Esther, and the Passover Hagadah.

Like other European art nouveau artists of the period such as Alphonse Mucha Raban combined commercial commissions with uncommissioned paintings. Raban designed the decorative elements of such important Jerusalem buildings as the King David Hotel, the Jerusalem YMCA ^[2], and Bikkur-Cholim Hospital. He also designed a wide range of day-to-day objects, including playing cards (in the spade suit, the King is Ahasuerus, the Queen is Esther, and the joker is Haman), commercial packaging for products such as Hanukkah candles and Jaffa oranges, bank notes, tourism posters, jewelry, and insignia for Zionist institutions.

Raban also designed a wide range of Jewish objects, including Hanukkah menorahs, temple windows, and Torah arks.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ze'ev_Raban

More about Raban:

Born and initially trained in Lodz, Poland, Ze'ev Raban (1890-1970) studied in a variety of academies around Europe - the School of Applied Art in Munich, the Beaux-Arts Academy in Paris, and the Royal Academy of Art in Brussels. In 1911 he met Boris Schatz, the founder of the Bezalel Academy, a Zionist inspired school begun in 1903 to encourage a new Jewish cultural/art/craft tradition in the Jewish homeland.

In the latter half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries a number of centers were established in order to develop "new" decorative arts. Among the more famous were the firms of William Morris and Christopher Dresser in England, the Faberge's in Russia, the Wiener Werkstette in Austria, and the Tiffany Studios in the United States. These and similar workshops, frequently based on a political or sociological ideology, profoundly influenced the arts, crafts, architecture and industrial design of the societies within which they functioned.

Schatz's goal for the Bezalel Academy and Workshops, in which Raban participated starting in 1912, was to establish a Jewish arts and crafts tradition that combined the best of European and indigenous Middle-Eastern cultures. Raban soon became a major influence at the Bezalel. He played a central role at the Academy teaching repoussי work, painting, and sculpture and then directing the Graphics Press and the Industrial Art Studio of the Bezalel Academy. By 1914 the majority of works produced in the Bezalel workshops were designed by Raban.

Raban was also an influential industrial designer in Palestine and later Israel. He designed posters, consumer goods packaging (the most reproduced of which must have been the "classic" 44 Chanukah candle box), and architectural elements for many of the important buildings of Palestine such as the YMCA building, the King David Hotel, the Bezalel building, and the Bikur-Cholim Hospital. He also designed many of the ceramic tiles that still decorate Tel-Aviv buildings. But arguably his most important contributions were the illustrations he made for the various books he published - the Song of Songs, the Book of Ruth, the Book of Esther, the Book of Job, and the Passover Haggadah. These illustrations represent the pinnacle of the "Bezalel Style" - a fusion of ‘oriental' art and Jugendstil. However, with the emergence of "modernism", the influence of the Bezalel Academy, as well of the many other design schools of that period waned. Recently, the work that came from these design movements as well as the designs of Raban have garnered new attention, and Bezalel pieces are now sought after.

Source: http://www.artatthecenter.com/HTML/Artists.cfm?ID=35

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