Chana Orloff

Biography

The house on the Villa Seurat in the 14th arrondissement of Paris was built for her by Auguste Perret, to a design of 1926. Orloff lived and worked there until her death, and her heirs have kept the studio almost as she left it.

She was born in 1888 in southern Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. Place and date vary: the sources name Aleksandrovsk in the Yekaterinoslav Governorate, the village of Tsarekonstantinovka (now Kamianka in the Zaporizhzhia region) and even Kamenka; the birth is dated 25 June (13 June, Old Style) or 12 July. She was one of the younger children in a large family, and her father was for a time a teacher and then a merchant. Her elder brothers were born in the Jewish agricultural colony of Trudolyubovka, and one of them, Zvi Nishri, became known as a pioneer of physical education in Palestine. As a girl Chana learned to sew so that she could earn her own living.

In 1905, after the pogroms, the family left for Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Orloff lived in Petah Tikva and Jaffa, sewing European-style clothes for the settlers, and joined the workers’ movement Hapoel Hatzair. After five years she was offered a post teaching cutting and sewing, but in 1910 she went to Paris to study fashion. There she worked at the fashion house of Paquin, attended drawing classes, and then enrolled in sculpture classes at the Académie Russe of Maria Vasilieva in Montparnasse and entered the school of decorative arts. From 1912 she worked on her own, and in 1913 two of her pieces were accepted at the Salon d’Automne.

Her Paris circle consisted of young Jewish artists: Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani, Jules Pascin, Chaïm Soutine and Ossip Zadkine. She was also friendly with Dmitry Tsaplin, who was living in Paris at the time.

In 1916 Orloff married Ary Justman, a poet from Warsaw. Their son Elie was born in 1918, and in 1919 Justman died in the influenza epidemic, leaving her alone in Paris with a small child. From the early 1920s she made portraits of the Parisian elite, and the portrait remained one of her favourite subjects. Among her sitters were Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Perret, Pierre Chareau, Per Krohg, Hayyim Nahman Bialik and Pierre Mac Orlan. She worked in stone, marble and bronze, and most willingly of all in wood. In 1925 she was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour; she obtained French citizenship in 1925 or 1926 (the sources differ). She exhibited in Paris and, between 1929 and 1947, several times in the United States, and she attended the literary evenings of Natalie Barney, for whose garden she made a large owl. The sculpture was lost during the war.

During the occupation Orloff fled to Switzerland with her son and the Czech painter Georges Kars; by one account this was in 1942, after the occupation of the free zone. Her Paris studio was ransacked, and a large part of her work was stolen or destroyed. After the war she returned, and later made the bronze “The Return”; in the view of Israeli writers, it shows a move away from the smooth, rounded forms of her pre-war years. The wooden figure of her son, “The Child Didi”, surfaced in New York in 2008 and was returned to her heirs in 2023.

After the State of Israel was founded, Orloff visited it more and more often. In 1949 the Tel Aviv Museum of Art showed 37 of her sculptures. She spent about a year in the country, making a portrait of David Ben-Gurion, a monument to the defenders of Ein Gev and the Motherhood Monument, in memory of Chana Tuchman, who died in the war of 1947–1949. Her portraits of Levi Eshkol also date from this time. In 1961 a retrospective covering fifty years of her work was held in Israel.

She died on 18 December 1968 in Tel Aviv, where she had come for an exhibition marking her eightieth birthday.