Issachar Ber Ryback

Like an entire generation linked to the burgeoning Yiddish theater and literature, Ryback sought a specifically Jewish form of artistic expression, reconciling tradition and modernity. Between 1917 and 1921, his works drew on the stylistic innovations of cubism and cubo-futurism, in the service of an iconography marked by Jewish folk art and Hebrew letters.

In Kiev, in 1918, he helped set up the artistic section of Kultur-Lige, a secular Jewish organization promoting Yiddish culture. The following year, in the magazine Oyfgang, he published with Boris Aronson the text-manifesto of avant-garde Jewish art "The Voices of Jewish Painting", in which he defended an art combining European pictorial innovations and Jewish traditions, to express a true Jewish vision of the world.

The dream of Jewish cultural autonomy in Russia was shattered by the Bolsheviks' final victory in Kiev in December 1920. The center of Jewish life shifted to Moscow for a time, before Ryback left for Berlin in 1921. At the end of 1925, he settled permanently in Paris.

The exhibition is divided into two areas: 2 paintings are presented in the permanent collection room devoted to the Middle Ages; 6 other works are displayed at the end of the tour, accompanied by documents in display cases.