Reuven Rubin Lithograph "Rest on Flight"

lot/reuven rubin lithograph rest on flight xRw5a6V 633313357 / Price history

lot/reuven rubin lithograph rest on flight xRw5a6V 633313357

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lot/reuven rubin lithograph rest on flight xRw5a6V 633313357

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Reuven Rubin Lithograph "Rest on Flight"

Reuven Rubin (Romanian-born Israeli, 1893-1974). "Rest on Flight" color lithograph, n.d. Artist's proof #28. Hand-signed at lower right and numbered at lower left. A color lithograph by Reuven Rubin showing the Holy Family resting on the Flight into Egypt. Joseph sleeps in the foreground, his heavy, curled-up body built from pooled greens, umbers, and slate blues and caught in a net of loose black line. Behind him, Mary sits on the ground in the pose of the Madonna of Humility, eyes closed, holding the infant Jesus against an ochre background. A gray donkey grazes to her right, and a gnarled olive tree and a thin crescent moon set the scene in a nighttime Galilean landscape. Splashes and drips of color loosen the composition, so the print reads almost like a watercolor. The sheet is hand-signed by the artist in Hebrew and Roman letters at lower right and inscribed "E/A 28" in pencil at lower left. It is matted and framed under glass. Reuven Rubin (1893 to 1974) was born Reuven Zelicovici in Galati, Romania, the eighth of thirteen children in a poor Hasidic family. In 1912 he left for Ottoman Palestine to study at the Bezalel school in Jerusalem. The school's approach disappointed him, and in 1913 he moved on to the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The outbreak of World War I sent him back to Romania. After an exhibition in New York in 1921, he settled in Mandate Palestine in 1923. Rubin was part of the 1920s generation that rebelled against Bezalel's conventions and turned to modern European styles to paint the land and its people. His sunlit landscapes, biblical themes, and portraits of Yemenite Jews, Hasidim, and Arabs helped define the Eretz-Yisrael style, which perhaps owes something to Henri Rousseau. He signed his work with his first name in Hebrew and his surname in Roman letters. In 1924 he held the first solo exhibition at the Tower of David in Jerusalem and was elected chairman of the Association of Painters and Sculptors of Palestine. From the 1930s he designed sets for Habima, Ohel, and other theaters. He served as Israel's first envoy to Romania from 1948 to 1950, published his autobiography, My Life, My Art, in 1969, and received the Israel Prize in 1973. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt is not in the canonical Gospels. It grew out of apocryphal tradition, especially the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, and became a favorite subject in European painting from the late Middle Ages onward. The Madonna of Humility, in which Mary sits on the ground instead of on a throne, was a related devotional type that spread from fourteenth-century Italy. Rubin drops the courtly trappings of these traditions and places the family among the olive trees and grazing animals of his own landscape, in line with his habit of setting biblical scenes in the land where they took place. Item # 205318

Estimate:£529.72

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