Beloosesky Gallery is interested in purchasing paintings and drawings by Issachar Ber Ryback.
Please call (917) 749-4557 or email us at info@beloosesky.com
Issachar Ber Ryback was born February 2nd, 1897, in Yelisavetgrad, Ukraine.
Ryback was a painter and studied at the Kiev Academy in Moscow from 1911 to 1916. The painters Alexander Bogomazov and Alexandra Exter were in Kiev at the time, and they taught him in 1913. In 1915, at the Kiev Spring Exhibition, he for the first time presented his paintings, most of them being inspired by Jewish topics but in a modernistic style. In 1916 the historically significant artist El Lissitzky and Ryback were given the task to make Jewish art memorials of Schtetls from the Ukraine and Belarus. During the October Revolution in 1917, he took part in multiple activities to redefine avant-garde Yiddish culture, and therefore went to Moscow.
In the spring of 1918, he became a founder of the Culture League Artistic Division which was an organization established in the Ukraine for the development of new Jewish culture in Yiddish language. In 1918-1919, Issachar Ber Ryback taught drawing and painting at the Kiev Jewish Children's Studio attached to the Artistic Division, designed a number of stamps for Jewish publishing houses and made artistic design of the Eygns, a literary almanac in Yiddish. After his father was killed by Petliura's soldiers in the Pogroms in Ukraine, he fled in April 1921 to Kaunas, Lithuania.
In 1921 Issachar Ber Ryback moved to Berlin, Germany, where he participated with the "Der Sturm" group. He also became a member of the November Group and exhibited his Cubist pictures at both the Berlin Secession and the Juryfreien Kunstausstellung. From December 1923 until January 1924 he had a solo exhibition in Berlin, which revealed Ryback's achievements as one of the original interpreters of Cubism. He returned to Moscow in 1925 to design costumes for the Moscow Theatre, but moved to Paris in 1926.
In Paris, he immediately, he began to play an outstanding role in the artistic life of the French capital. He initially experimented with Cubism and afterwards began painting Russian Jewish life subject matter, at a time when critics and collectors began to appreciate his analytical Cubist style and recognized his importance in the Russian avant-garde movement. Ryback became an important member of the Russian Jewish modernist movement that included Lissitsky, Altman, Aronson and Chagall. In 1928 he had an exhibition at the "Galerie aux Quatre Chemins“ and in 1929 in the "Galerie L’Art Contemporain“. His style of painting had turned to the Expressionistic coloring of the School of Paris. Further exhibitions followed at galleries in The Hague, Rotterdam, Brüssels and Antwerpen.
Issachar Ber Ryback died suddenly in Paris on December 22, 1935, a few days after the opening of a retrospective exhibition of his work organized by the Wildenstein Gallery.
Most of the works he left behind are now in the Museum of Bat Yam in Israel.