Moi Ver

Biography

In 1931 a slim book of eighty photographs appeared in Paris, signed with a strange short name: Moï Ver. It was a pseudonym made from the beginnings of his first name and surname: Moses Vorobeichic. Fernand Léger wrote the preface, and the print run was a thousand numbered copies.

Moses Vorobeichic was born on 5 December 1904 in the small town of Lyebyedzyeva, in the Vilna Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Belarus), the eldest in a family of four children. His father, Shlomo, was a timber merchant, and his mother was called Shifra. Other birthplaces are also given, including Zaskavičy and Vilna; I keep to Lyebyedzyeva. Everyone describes him as having grown up in Vilna. There he finished the first Hebrew gymnasium, then studied art and architecture at the university; his university studies date roughly to 1924–1926. In 1927–1928 he studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau under Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers. There, by his own choice, photography became more important to him than painting. At the end of 1928 he moved to Paris and studied at a school of photography and cinematography, and in the evenings he went to Léger at the Académie Moderne.

In March 1929 Vorobeichic returned to Vilna and photographed the city’s Jewish quarter. These pictures were shown at the 16th Zionist Congress in Zurich (29 July to 10 August 1929). In 1931 the publisher Orell Füssli brought them out as a book called “The Jewish Street in Vilna” (in the German edition “A Ghetto in the East. Vilna”), with a preface by Zalman Shneour, in Hebrew with German or English text. The book appeared under his real surname.

In that same year, 1931, he began an album of photomontages, “Ci-contre”. He sent the dummy, made up of 110 prints laid out in facing pairs, to the art historian Franz Roh, who was struck by its unexpected juxtapositions of people, nature and the forms of modernity, such as rails and factory chimneys. No publisher was found, because the Nazis had come to power in Germany. The dummy stayed with Roh, and contact between the two broke off in 1933. In 1968 the German collectors Ann and Jürgen Wilde bought Roh’s archive together with the dummy and tracked down its author. The book came out only in 2004.

In 1932 the Paris weekly La Vie Parisienne and the Globe-Photo agency sent him to Mandatory Palestine as a reporter: he photographed the first Maccabiah Games. In 1934 he moved there for good and took the name Moshe Raviv. Until 1948 he worked as a photographer, made posters, advertising and city emblems, and photographed construction work and daily life on the kibbutzim. In 1939 he had a solo exhibition at the Katz Gallery in Tel Aviv. In 1953 Raviv was among the founders of the artists’ colony in Safed, settled there and later opened a gallery. From the 1950s he worked mainly in graphic art and painting, taking subjects from sacred texts and the world of the Hasidim. He illustrated books, among them “Shivchei ha-Ari”.

He died on 20 January 1995 in Safed.

Interest in him returned late. The exhibition “Ci-contre” was held in Paris in 2012. The retrospective at the Centre Pompidou opened in 2023 (12 April to 28 August) and was then shown in Warsaw and at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2024.