Introduction
Chapter 1: Ukrainian Beginnings, 1888-1905
Chapter 2: Moving to the Promised Land, 1905-1907
Chapter 3: Becoming a New Hebrew Woman, 1907-1910
Chapter 4: Paris: from Haute Couture to Avant-Garde, 1910-1913
Chapter 5: Forging a Career at the Onset of War, 1913-16
Chapter 6: Orloff during Wartime 1916-1919: Amazon, Mother, and
Widow
Chapter 7: Portraitist of Montparnasse: 1919-25
Chapter 8: Villa Seurat: Building a Studio and a Community,
1926-1929
Chapter 9: Transatlantic Travel and Networks, 1929-1930
Chapter 10: From Paris to Tel Aviv: The Jewish Art World in the
Pre-State period of 1930s
Chapter 11: Occupation and Escape, 1938-1942
Chapter 12: Exile and Return, 1942-1948
Chapter 13: “Israeli Artist of the École de Paris,” 1948-1968
Chapter 14: Conclusion: Legacy in Israel & France
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Paula J. Birnbaum is the academic director of the Museum
Studies Master of Arts Program and professor of art history and
museum studies at the University of San Francisco. She is a
specialist in modern and contemporary art. Birnbaum is a former
Fulbright Scholar and fellow at the Institute for Research on Women
and Gender at Stanford University. She is the author of, among
other works, Women Artists in Interwar France.
“Sculpting a Life is a thoroughly researched, scrupulous biography
that will undoubtedly stand as the definitive study of Chana
Orloff. At the end of this admirable biography, we’re left with the
sense that Chana Orloff’s greatest creation was herself. She
mastered the diasporic art world of the interwar era, fashioning a
transnational and uniquely Jewish identity.”
*H-France*
"This is the first biography of Orloff (1888–1968), a
Ukrainian-born Jewish sculptor whose work is part of collections in
Israel, Europe and the United States. Birnbaum. . . traces the
artist’s multiple migrations — from Ukraine to Palestine to Paris
to Switzerland and back to Paris while establishing a second home
in Tel Aviv after World War II — and the impact these migrations
had on her career."
*J. The Jewish News of Northern California*
“Birnbaum has created a truly remarkable and compelling portrait of
the internationally-exhibited multi-national sculptor who worked
across—and fully participated in—the tumultuous decades of
twentieth century Jewish, modernist, and world histories from her
elective home in Paris. Wide ranging-research sustains subtle
insights into the formal, historical, and cultural significance of
Orloff’s compelling portraits of her Jewish intellectual, political
and artistic contemporaries that she created alongside a
modernizing, feminist exploration of women’s subjectivities and
life experiences through sculptural embodiment. A truly vital
monument to Chana Orloff’s extraordinarily fascinating place in our
extended, and fuller understanding of the art of the twentieth
century and its creative communities.”
*Griselda Pollock, Professor Emerita of Social and Critical
Histories of Art, University of Leeds*
"Paula Birnbaum’s well-researched study of Chana Orloff is a
tremendous achievement. In this pathbreaking, first book-length
biography of the unfairly neglected sculptor, Birnbaum places
Orloff securely in the company of her School of Paris
contemporaries. Even more, she illuminates and contextualizes
Orloff’s multiple identities as a cosmopolitan émigré, woman, and
Jew. This wide-ranging book is a major contribution to our
understanding of Jewish art, feminist art, and Israeli art."
*Samantha Baskind, Distinguished Professor of Art History,
Cleveland State University*
"Sculpting A Life offers a fascinating case study of an artist
whose life and work embodies themes of gender, migration,
displacement, and belonging. This first of its kind biography
explains the extraordinary conditions in which Chana Orloff lived
and carried out a long and prolific career in Ukraine, France,
Palestine, and later Israel. By analyzing her hyphenated identities
from an intersectional point of view, Birnbaum captures the
complexities and tensions between cosmopolitanism and national
identity for women artists who live and work in diaspora. This book
is an important contribution to the history of modern art, as well
as Jewish history, while highlighting the many layers of gendered
issues that impact women’s careers in an age of transnationalism.
Although Orloff does not fit neatly into the discipline of art
history, which is normatively written according to fixed notions of
national style grounded in a stable idea of the nation-state, its
enormous contribution is correcting the canon of modernity and
offering a more inclusive history of art."
*Tal Dekel, author of Transnational Identities: Women, Art and
Migration in Contemporary Israel*
“Paula Birnbaum’s biography of Chana Orloff offers a timely and
much-needed intervention into the narrative of modern art. Orloff’s
life is a perfect model for the study of artistic practice within
the contexts of forced displacement, voluntary immigration,
transnationalism, and the multilinguality so pervasive in the 20th
century.”
*Alla Efimova, Author and Curator*
“Paula Birnbaum’s lucid and engrossing biography of Chana Orloff
(the first of its kind) restores the artist to her rightful place
among the 20th century’s foremost sculptors. More than this,
through meticulous research embedded in a lively, engaging
narrative, a complete portrait emerges of a sublime artist
negotiating the difficult balance of her diverse identities. There
is also a distinctively Jewish story told here, one of a life’s
journey touched, shaped and bruised by late 19th and 20th century
social and political upheavals from Ukraine to Palestine, France
and Israel: a life that incorporated extraordinary highs and lows
including a six-year close friendship with Modigliani and a
courageous last-minute border-crossing escape from Nazi pursuers.
Both art and artist are brightly illuminated in this vivid record
of Chana Orloff’s intense, crowded, and
extraordinarily creative life.”
*Jonathan Wilson, author of Marc Chagall*
“In Sculpting a Life: Chana Orloff between Paris and
Tel-Aviv, Paula J. Birnbaum offers readers a deeply
researched, beautifully illustrated, and engagingly written
biography of a cosmopolitan and once-renowned sculptor who
deliberately resisted categorization. In the world of art,
Orloff (1888-1968) became an outsize figure with a multifaceted
hybrid identity; she was tenacious, resilient, and enterprising,
overcoming multiple historical obstacles (ranging from pogroms to
two world wars and persecution of Jews) that not only disrupted her
professional development as an artist but also threatened her very
survival. Orloff’s strong emphasis on motherhood as central to
her artistic expression is particularly noteworthy, as is her
fascination with the female body. This book also reminds
readers of the relative marginality in Paris of the subsequently
famous circles of émigré artists in which Orloff traveled
(including Picasso, Modigliani, and Chagall, who hailed from Spain,
Italy, Russia, and Palestine) and the difficulties of
'defining' French art during the first half of the twentieth
century. Particularly noteworthy are Birnbaum’s efforts to
ground Orloff’s extraordinary life and ultimately successful career
in historical context and to probe the meanings implied in her
sculptures and drawings.”
*Karen Offen, The Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender
Research, Stanford University; Author of European Feminisms,
1700-1950: A Political History, The Woman Question in France,
1400-1870, and Debating the Woman Question in the French Third
Republic, 1870-1920.*
“Birnbaum’s deeply researched study rescues an extraordinary artist
from obscurity. Triumphing over infinite odds, Chana Orloff, a
Russian Jewish émigré, became an original and compelling artist in
modern Paris during and between the world wars. This book
brilliantly restores her resilient voice and amazing story.”
*Wanda M. Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art
History, Stanford University*
“Birnbaum weaves together pioneering research and analysis into a
compelling narrative of Orloff’s life and work, a story about the
courage, perseverance, and accomplishments of an artist who
overcame the dislocation of multiple migrations and trauma of
forced exiles, facing anti-Semitism and gender bias. This exemplary
biography is a model for analyzing the complexities of an artist
whose multiple migrations, identities, and the tensions between
cosmopolitanism and national identity deeply informed her
work.”
*Ruth E. Iskin, Ben Gurion University*
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