Menachem Helholz-or (b.1911)

Fleeing Hitler's Germany, where he had been born in 1911, Menachem Helhoz-or settled in Palestine in 1933 and slowly began to carve a career for himself, strongly rooted in the Expressionist and Bauhaus aesthetics of his native country. His cityscapes of Jerusalem and Jaffa were strongly influenced by the formal patterning in Klee's work, fused with the prism effects found in German Cubism. His fondness for the avant-garde and the lack of traditionalist sentimentality in his work stood his work apart from many of his Israeli contemporaries, and demonstrates his closeness to the central-European movements at the time of his youth.