Issachar Ber Ryback "Shtetl” 1923, Russian Cubism

Issachar Ber Ryback "Shtetl” 1923, Russian Cubism
Issachar Ber Ryback (1897-1935) "Shtetl Mayn Khoyever Heym - A Gedenknish"
(My little town, my destroyed home; in memory)
Verlag "Schwellen", Berlin-Charlottenburg 1923, (330 x 450 mm). - [2], III-XXXI, [1] leaves. Original hard cover. The lithographs are all dated 1917 and signed in the stone (in the plate). Of the 30 half-tone plates (Title + plates numbered from III-XXXI), four are printed in bistre, and the others in sepia or black.This book is complete but without its original list of plates inserted at rear. Title and captions in Yiddish. Ryback initially experimented with Cubism and then turned to painting Jewish subjects in the 1920s when critics and collectors began to appreciate his analytic Cubism and recognize his importance in the Russian avant-garde movement. He was an important member of the Russian Jewish modernist movement that included Lissitzky, Altman, Aronson and Chagall Ryback's powerful images were created as a memorial to the Jewish villages ("shtetlekh") - including his hometown - that were destroyed in pogroms in the aftermath of the disastrous WWI campaign and the Russian Civil War. They depict the peaceful daily life of a traditional Jewish shtetl before the upcoming destructions and massacres: a city street, the artisans (including a shoemaker, a tailor and a knife-sharpener), musicians, the market, the synagogue, a wedding, a funeral, the Jewish cemetery, the rabbi and the Hasidic rebbe. Condition: Cover rubbed, damaged to lower left corner and at edges, with some abrasion.
Spine frayed, damaged to top and bottom. Front cover detached
First page with 2 tears to lower edge and foxing stains.
Some sporadic small foxing stains to many plates. Issachar Ber Ryback, also Riback (Іссахар-Бер Рибак; born 2 February 1897 in Yelisavetgrad, today Kirowohrad, Ukraine; died 22 December 1935 in Paris) was a Ukrainian-French painter Ryback attended the art school in Kiev until 1916. He joined a progressive group of painters and was influenced by advocates of a modern Jewish literature such as David Bergelson and David Hofstein. The painters Alexander Bogomazov and Alexandra Exter were in Kiev at the time, and they taught him in 1913. In 1916 El Lissitzky and Ryback were given the task to make Jewish art memorials of Schtetls from Ukraine and Belarus. When he participated in an exhibition of Jewish paintings and sculptures in Moscow the spring 1917, his works were especially recommended.
During the October Revolution in 1917, he took part in multiple activities to redefine avantgarde Yiddish culture, and therefore went to Moscow. After his father was killed by Petljura's soldiers in the Pogroms in Ukraine, he fled in April 1921 to Kaunas and in October 1921 he obtained a visa for Germany. He was in Berlin until 1924.
He was member of the Novembergruppe and exhibited his Cubist pictures at both the Berliner Secession and the Juryfreien Kunstausstellung.
He also illustrated three small Yiddish fairy tale books for Miriam Margolin. His Shtetl-litographies was published in 1923 by Schwellen-Verlag. At the time the Jewish education organization World ORT was situated in Berlin and he made the draft for its logo.
In 1924 he tried again to work in the Soviet Union decorating scenes at Yiddish theaters.
In 1926 he emigrated to Paris and did not return to Russia.
In 1928 he had a separate exhibition in the "Galerie aux Quatre Chemins“ and in 1929 in the "Galerie L’Art Contemporain“. His style of painting had turned to the Expressionistic coloring of the School of Paris in the interwar period. Further exhibitions followed at galleries in The Hague, Rotterdam, Brussel and Antwerpen. In 1935 he traveled to the opening of his exhibition in Cambridge. He did not live to see the retrospective exhibition in Paris arranged by Georges Wildenstein.
Rybak was a contemporary of the Jewish-Russian artists Natan Issajewitsch Altman, Boris Aronson and Marc Chagall, who worked with handing down the Jewish tradition in modern art.
Most of the works he left behind are in Museum Ryback in Bat Yam in Israel, a part of the MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam complex