Lot 362
Ruth Schloss (1922-2013) – Portraits – Six Sketches
Ruth Schloss (1922-2013), portraits – six sketches.
Ink and marker pen on paper. Four of them are signed.
Approx. 27X20.5 cm to 36.5X29 cm. Condition varies. Stains.
Provenance: The Uzi Agassi Collection.
-------------------------
Ruth Schloss (1922-2013) was born in Nuremberg and immigrated to Palestine with her family in 1935. When she was only sixteen she started her studies at Bezalel, then joined the group of founders of Kibbutz Lehavot HaBashan. Schloss devoted her talents to the art and printing enterprises of the kibbutz movement, working as an illustrator for the "Mishmar Liyeladim" newspaper and as a book cover designer for "Sifriyat Poalim". From ca. 1950 to 1952 she studied art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, and after returning to Israel, due to the rift in the Kibbutz Movement, she left her kibbutz. Schloss was a member of the Communist Party and her paintings, in the style of Social Realism, often conveyed a socialist message of exposing social differences and class distinctions. She painted the weaker members of society – downtrodden women, hungry children, workers and residents of transit camps. Later, she turned to the lives of women, to the helplessness of birth and the decline of old age – all of which she painted with the sensitivity of a woman seeing human-beings rooted in their surroundings, as the poet Nathan Zach wrote of her – "her motto remained the same over the years. Life itself. Without embellishment".
Literature: Wider Horizons, 120 Years of Israeli Art, from the Ofrat Collection to the Levin Collection. Selected Works, Part II (Hebrew), by Gideon Ofrat. Jerusalem: Vienna-Jerusalem Foundation for Israeli Art, 2013.
