Chana Orloff Exhibition at Zadkine Museum.

1. Chana Orloff Exhibition at Zadkine Museum, Paris
The title of the exhibition is "Sculpting the Epoch" and the cover of the brochure shows
Nadine Vogell, daughter of the publisher Lucien Vogell. Her hairstyle stands out. It's a wooden
sculpture.
Chana Orloff is born in 1888 into a Jewish family in what is now Ukraine. As a young girl,
she begins an apprenticeship as a dressmaker. In 1908 Orloff moves to Tel Aviv where she
works as a dressmaker. En 1910 Orloff comes to Paris to obtain a dressmaker’s diploma.
Orloff studies drawing and sculpture at the School of Decorative Arts in Paris from 1911
to 1914. Her first exhibition is in 1916. In this year, she also meets Polish poet Ary Justman,
who dies in 1918 of Spanish flu. Orloff gives birth to a son, Eli
In 1920 she becomes a popular portraitist. Orloff is granted French nationality in 1926.
Since then she is a resident of Paris. Germany invades France in 1940. As a Jew, she was
forced into exile in Switzerland, where Giacometti and Germaine Richier took her in.
Orloff returns to Paris in 1945 to find her studio ransacked and looted. Her exhibition at
the Tel Aviv museum in 1949, establishes Orloff as one of the most prominent artists in Israel
where she travels and work regularly. Chana Orloff dies in 1968 in Tel Aviv.
The exhibition consists of four parts:
1) Portraits
2) Women on the move
3) Maternity
4) The post-war period
1) PORTRAITS: She made more than 300 portraits. Some in wood, others in bronze or
plaster. Nadine Vogel, Painter Widhopf or Pipe smoker, Jeanne Hebuterne (She is
shown here being painted by Amadeo Modigliani), Woman wearing a turban:
Portrait of Sarah Lipska, painter and decorator and Reuven Rubin who was a
Romanian-born Israeli painter
2) WOMEN ON THE MOVE:
Ida Chagall. Chagall's daughter. She is 7 years old. She is a friend of his son Eli. The
Egyptian hairstyle stands out.
Ruth and Noemi. Bronze sculpture.
Amazone. It symbolises herself, a free and independent woman.
3) MATERNITY.
My son and I. Here she is with Eli or Didi. Didi was 9 at the time.
Nursing mothers.
4) THE POST-WAR PERIOD
Maternity. She saw the birth of Israel, which commissioned several works from
her, after the war. In 1951, Chana Orloff created a work as a tribute to a young
woman from Kibbutz who died in battle during the 1948 war. The sculpture depicts
a young mother carrying her child to heaven.

2. TRIP TO PARIS
It was mainly a cultural trip. Every day I went to a
museum and saw two or three films. Yes, I saw three on
Monday and Tuesday. The exhibitions were about
sculpture (Brancusi, Chana Orloff), photography: Tina
Modotti and Annie Ernaux, and contemporary painting:
Bertille Bak and Bernard Ricochot.
Annie Ernaux's work is very original because she is a
writer (Nobel Prize 1922). However, in one of her works,
"Diary of the Outside", they have chosen paragraphs and
photos by famous photographers. I was able to see it at
the European House of Photography.