Isaac LICHTENSTEIN (Lodz 1889 - 1981) Lot n° 108

Self-portrait of the artist in his studio Made in 1923 Oil on canvas 76 x 61 cm Signed lower left "Lichtenstein". On the back of the canvas signed and dated "L. Lichtenstein 1923". On the back of the stretcher, the label of the auction house Chayette et Cheval Isaac Lichtenstein was born in 1889 in Łódź, Poland, to a Jewish family. He first studied at the Yuri Pen school in Vitebsk, where Chagall had begun painting the Jewish quarters of the Shtetl. In 1906, he attended the Krakow Academy, then, around 1908-1910, the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem, directed by Boris Schatz and Samuel Hirshenberg. He moved to Paris in 1911, then to Israel in 1912/1913, before settling at La Ruche in Paris in 1914. Here he made friends with Jewish artists from Eastern Europe such as Pinchus Krémègne, Henri Epstein, Marek Szwarc and Léon Indenbaum. He was one of the co-founders of "Machmadim", a Jewish art magazine. Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, Lichtenstein arrived in London with Lazar Berson, who founded the Ben Uri Museum in 1915. Lichtenstein was one of the founding members of the museum. Lichtenstein then moved to New York for the duration of the war, where he contributed to numerous literary and artistic publications. From 1920 onwards, Lichtenstein gravitated between London, Poland, Paris and the United States, where he spent most of his life. He relaunched the Machmadim publishing house, dedicated to the production of Yiddish-language art books. Isaac Lichtenstein painted this self-portrait in a studio in 1923. E.V