Rights
Creative Commons (attribution)
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Steve Benson on the Dedication of Bashka Paeff's War Memorial
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Steve Benson on the Dedication of Bashka Paeff's War Memorial Thumbnail
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Hanna Stiebel
Hanna Nosovsky Stiebel used her background in dance to create graceful, dynamic outdoor sculpture installations. Born in Poland and raised in Israel, Stiebel moved to New York to study dance with Martha Graham and learned to understand balance and position in dance through studying with sculptor Manolo Pasqual. She studied at the Cranbook Academy of Art in Michigan, earning degrees there in 1962 and 1963 before traveling to Florence, Italy for a summer to learn the art of bronze casting. She worked to synthesize her interests in dance, mathematics, and physics in her art, creating huge works designed for the specific environments where they would be installed. After teaching for several years at the Roeper City and Country School in Michigan, Stiebel briefly served as director of the school’s art program, and also served as director of music and dance for United Hebrew Schools, but returned to creating art full time. One of her most noted works, 1981’s “Rhythms and Vibrations” at the Meadow Brook Music Festival Grounds in Michigan, is sixty feet long and fifteen feet high and combines curved and angled aluminum pillars in a graceful representation of sound waves.
Sculptor Hanna Stiebel standing beside her piece "Tuning Fork." Photo courtesy of the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan.
Place of Birth
Warsaw
Occupations
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Hanna Stiebel
Rights
JWA use only on jwa.org
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Helena Rubinstein
Rights
Public Domain
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Chloe Wise
Chloe Wise uses her art to comment on consumer culture, most famously through her Bread Bags series, which creates purses made of realistic-looking bakery items, adorned with the straps, logos, and hardware of designer bags. Wise earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Concordia University in 2013, the same year she began working on her Bread Bags series. The series includes urethane bags shaped like pancakes, waffles, and fully-loaded bagels, along with a “Challah Back” backpack. In 2014 Wise came to international attention after the actress India Menuez brought her bag “Bagel No. 5” to a Chanel event. A sculptor, painter, videographer, and collage artist, Wise is also noted for her Star of Larry David installation, featuring a Jewish star formed of cooked bacon. As of 2016, she has had solo exhibitions at the Galerie Division in Montreal, the Division Gallery in Toronto, the Retrospective Gallery in Hudson, NY, and the Galerie Sebastien Bertrand in Geneva.
Place of Birth
Montreal
Occupations
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Katherine M. Cohen
Rights
Public Domain
Institution
Monarch Book Company
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Ziva Amishai-Maisels
As an art historian and curator for Yad Vashem, Ziva Amishai-Maisels became known for her insights into the impact of the Holocaust on modern art. Amishai-Maisels earned a BA in art history from Barnard in 1961 and her MA from Columbia in 1962. That year she made Aliyah and began teaching art history at Hebrew University, where she earned her PhD in 1970. In 1975 she became chair of the department. From 1976–1978 she served on the Ministry of Education and Culture’s art committee, and since 1974 she has been on the editorial board of the Journal of Jewish Art. She also helped create the Society for Jewish Art in 1979. While she wrote important books on Marc Chagall and Jacob Steinhardt, her writing has been heavily influenced by her work since the early 1980s as a member of the art committee of Yad Vashem, selecting work for the Holocaust memorial. After twenty years of research, Amishai-Maisels published The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts in 1993. She argued that while artists who were not survivors used metaphoric imagery to explore the emotional aspects of the Holocaust, survivors tended to use art to document their experiences more literally. She was awarded the Israel Prize in 2004.
Art historian and curator for Yad Vashem, Ziva Amishai-Maisels (b. 1939).
Photographer: Hezi Hojesta.
Institution: Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Photo Archives.
Place of Birth
New York, New York
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Tatjana Barbakoff
The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Russian Jewish father, Tatjana Barbakoff used her mixed heritage as inspiration for stunning and innovative dance performances. Born Cilly Edelberg, Barbakoff began learning ballet and performing Chinese dances at age ten. At nineteen she joined the Berlin literary cabaret Schall und Rauch, changing her name and performing a mix of Russian- and Chinese-inspired dances. She debuted as a soloist in 1925 and toured throughout Germany and France, dancing in costumes inspired by the rich brocades and silks of her mixed background. Her expressive technique entranced critics, while her costumes inspired dozens of painters and sculptors to capture her likeness. In 1927 she began more formal ballet training under the ballerina Catherine Devilliers and expanded her repertoire to include dances like Church Images of Old Russia, Mongolian Flag Bearer, Chatting Women, and By the Waters of Babylon. She fled Germany for Paris in 1933 and continued performing to packed audiences, but was imprisoned after the German invasion in 1940. Freed during the armistice, she fled to Nice, but was captured again in 1944 and sent to Auschwitz. Interest in her work revived in 2005, when an extensive collection of artwork she had inspired was exhibited in Germany.
Born Cilly Edelberg in Latvia in 1899, the dancer who called herself Tatjana Barbakoff (1899-1944) lacked formal dance training, yet created a world of her own through her charming personality, exotic stage costumes and lyrical dance expression. She is shown here in 1931.
Institution: Patrizia Veroli.
Place of Birth
Libau
Occupations
Date of Birth
August 15, 1899
Date of Death
February 6, 1944
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Steve Benson on the Dedication of Bashka Paeff's War Memorial
Rights
Creative Commons (attribution)
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Steve Benson on the Dedication of Bashka Paeff's War Memorial Thumbnail
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Hanna Stiebel
Hanna Nosovsky Stiebel used her background in dance to create graceful, dynamic outdoor sculpture installations. Born in Poland and raised in Israel, Stiebel moved to New York to study dance with Martha Graham and learned to understand balance and position in dance through studying with sculptor Manolo Pasqual. She studied at the Cranbook Academy of Art in Michigan, earning degrees there in 1962 and 1963 before traveling to Florence, Italy for a summer to learn the art of bronze casting. She worked to synthesize her interests in dance, mathematics, and physics in her art, creating huge works designed for the specific environments where they would be installed. After teaching for several years at the Roeper City and Country School in Michigan, Stiebel briefly served as director of the school’s art program, and also served as director of music and dance for United Hebrew Schools, but returned to creating art full time. One of her most noted works, 1981’s “Rhythms and Vibrations” at the Meadow Brook Music Festival Grounds in Michigan, is sixty feet long and fifteen feet high and combines curved and angled aluminum pillars in a graceful representation of sound waves.
Sculptor Hanna Stiebel standing beside her piece "Tuning Fork." Photo courtesy of the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan.
Place of Birth
Warsaw
Occupations
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Hanna Stiebel
Rights
JWA use only on jwa.org
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Helena Rubinstein
Rights
Public Domain
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Chloe Wise
Chloe Wise uses her art to comment on consumer culture, most famously through her Bread Bags series, which creates purses made of realistic-looking bakery items, adorned with the straps, logos, and hardware of designer bags. Wise earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Concordia University in 2013, the same year she began working on her Bread Bags series. The series includes urethane bags shaped like pancakes, waffles, and fully-loaded bagels, along with a “Challah Back” backpack. In 2014 Wise came to international attention after the actress India Menuez brought her bag “Bagel No. 5” to a Chanel event. A sculptor, painter, videographer, and collage artist, Wise is also noted for her Star of Larry David installation, featuring a Jewish star formed of cooked bacon. As of 2016, she has had solo exhibitions at the Galerie Division in Montreal, the Division Gallery in Toronto, the Retrospective Gallery in Hudson, NY, and the Galerie Sebastien Bertrand in Geneva.
Place of Birth
Montreal
Occupations
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War memorial by Bashka Paeff dedicated in Kittery, Maine
Sculptor Bashka Paeff at work in her studio.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
May 31, 1926
This Week in History: On May 31, 1926, the town of Kittery, Maine dedicated an unusual war memorial by Bashka Paeff. Steve Benson discusses the sculptor and her unconventional choice to create a memorial that acknowledged the horrors of war.
On May 31, 1926, a bas-relief bronze and granite memorial to the sailors and soldiers from Maine who died in World War I was dedicated in the coastal town of Kittery. It depicted a woman fiercely protecting her child, a dramatic departure from most war memorials that feature soldiers and guns. The sculptor was Bashka Paeff, a Jewish woman, whose family had emigrated from Russia to escape the pogroms.
Born in 1893, she grew up in Boston’s crowded North End. She studied at the Massachusetts Normal Art School, the Boston Museum School, and at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. She financed her studies working as a toll collector on the Boston subways.
After a state-sponsored competition, Gov. Percival P. Baxter had commissioned the work. It took one and a half years to create and earned Paeff a $15,000 fee, including the costs of casting and installing the sculpture.
In the years after World War I, when feelings about pacifism and militarism ran high, the work became controversial. When it was almost completed, the man who succeeded Baxter as governor objected to it as “too pacifistic.” Paeff compromised by adding a few soldiers in low relief in the background, as well as military inscriptions. While she called the statue “The Horrors of War,” it was officially named “Sacrifices of War.” Most Mainers know it as the “Sailors and Soldiers Memorial.” See photos of the memorial here.
Bashka Paeff clearly intended the sculpture to be a statement against war. “I have some decided opinions about war memorials,” she said. “I hope most of all that we shall not erect memorials to glorify war… We forget what suffering and horror it brought. We should set up memorials that would make us loathe war instead of admire it.”
Paeff produced another war memorial, this one in the Massachusetts State House honoring Bay State chaplains who died during World War I. She also created a relief sculpture of the Minutemen who fought in the first battle of the American Revolution. Her other works include busts of Martin Luther King, Jane Addams, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Ellen Richards. She made a marble bust of Louis Brandeis.
The home and studio Paeff occupied on the north slope of Beacon Hill still stands. Passersby can see the large windows that brought light into her work space.
Sources
Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimensions, Boston, G.K.Hall, 1990; Jennifer Wingate, “Motherhood, Memorials, and Anti-Militarism: Bashka Paeff’s “Sacrifices of War, Women’s Art Journal, Vol. 29, no. 2, page 31.
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Linda Stein
In crafting sculptures that incorporate concepts of weaponry, armor, and the female form, Linda Stein has found new ways to consider issues of power, violence, and protection. Stein studied at the School for Visual Arts before earning a BA from Queens College. She also earned an MA from the Pratt Institute. In 1972 she founded Have Art, Will Travel, a non-profit which offers exhibitions and education on positive, authentic expression of gender and gender fluidity, combatting the sexism often perpetuated by art. In 1990 Stein created an artistic series called Blades that used machetes, musical instruments, and other materials. After 9/11 she shifted focus, creating a series called Knights of Protection which involved human forms shaped from metal, wood, leather, and stone, a theme that has continued to resurface in her work in series such as The Fluidity of Gender (2007) and I Am the Environment (2006). Other series Stein has developed include collage portraits of female superheroes and of courageous women of the Holocaust.
Photo of artist Linda Stein courtesy of Stein Studios LLC.
Place of Birth
Bronx, New York
Occupations
Date of Birth
September 13, 1943
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Linda Stein
Rights
JWA use only on jwa.org
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"The Three Musicians" Sculpture by Sam Cashwan Main
Rights
JWA use only on jwa.org
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"The Three Musicians" Sculpture by Sam Cashwan
Rights
JWA use only on jwa.org
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