Issachar Ber Ryback

Exhibition at the Galerie Le Minotaure and the Galerie Alain Le Gaillard, Paris, 26 March - 4 June 2022

Issachar Ber Ryback (1897-1935) was a major artist of the Jewish avant-garde of the 1910s and 20s and a pupil of Alexandra Exter. Like a whole generation linked to the burgeoning Yiddish literature and theatre, he sought a specifically Jewish plastic expression that would reconcile tradition and modernity. Between 1917 and 1921, his works were nourished by the stylistic innovations of Cubism and Cubo-futurism, in the service of an iconography marked by Jewish popular art and Hebrew letters; in 1918 he became one of the main animators of the Kultur-Lige, a Kiev association dedicated to the construction and influence of a new Jewish culture, based on the synthesis of national and world cultural traditions.

In 1920, the dream of Jewish cultural autonomy in Russia was shattered with the final victory of the Bolsheviks in Kiev in December 1920. The centre of Jewish life then moved to Moscow for a time, and Ryback left for Berlin in 1921 before settling permanently in Paris in 1926.

This monograph, published on the occasion of exhibitions at the galleries Le Minotaure and Alain La Gaillard, focuses on Ryback's avant-garde period from 1916 until his arrival in Paris. It examines his publishing projects for the Kultur-Lige and his drawings of Jewish folk ornaments made during his trip to Belarus with El Lissitzky in 1916, his illustrations for children's books, the "Shtetl" project, the "Pogroms" series, his pictorial work, and his projects for stage sets and costumes for the Yiddish theatre.