Boris Schatz

Boris Schatz ( born December 23, 1866 in Vorna at Kovno, † March 23, 1932 in Denver, Colorado) was a Jewish sculptor, painter and teacher, and became the founder of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem.

Life

Boris Schatz studied after he had broken at a yeshiva in Vilna with his religious tradition, in Warsaw and Paris ( there 1889-1894 ), where he Herzl - at that time Paris correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse - came influence and the idea an art school in Palestine to the emergence of a specifically Jewish art developed.

From 1895 to 1905 was the court sculptor Boris Schatz at Prince Ferdinand in Sofia, where the founders of the Bulgarian Academy of Art, a museum and the industrial carpet manufacturing.

At the Zionist Congress of 1905 he proposed an art school for the Yishuv, since 1906 he lived in Palestine, where he was able to establish the Bezalel Academy in the same year.

Boris Schatz was a visionary with a messianic zeal spun who walked in Bedouin clothes through Jerusalem and wanted to redeem the Jewish people and the entire world. He forged even plans to open the Golden Gate, which is prevailing opinion is solely reserved for the Messiah. Everything became his art, which, although the Academy initially brought forward ( in 1911 there were 32 departments of the Bezalel School of Art ), but the debt into increasing the height. 1929 had to be closed, the Bezalel Academy. Boris Schatz, it took some attempt abroad art of the Academy sell high, so as to allow the reopening of Bezalel. During a trip through the USA, he died on Purim 1932 in Denver, Colorado.

Soon, however, the Academy of Arts was able to continue their work, today it is the largest art and design college in the Middle East.

Works

Among his sculptural works are busts of Antokolski, Herzl, Rubinstein and Pasteur and the sculptures Jeremiah, Moses' mother and Schofarbläser.

Family

His children Bezalel (born 1911), Louise (born 1913) and Zoharah (born 1916) became famous painters in Israel.