Vladimir Weisberg (1924-1985)

Jan Rauchwerger (b. 1942, USSR), himself an established Israeli artist working in Tel Aviv today, was a student and close friend of Vladimir Weisberg. During the 1970s, Rauchwerger and Weisberg selected a large group of Weisbergs for Rauchwerger to acquire, thus creating, as per their mutual intention, a museum-standard collection. The Rauchwerger collection is the most comprehensive existing collection of Weisbergs in the world. The current lots marks the first instance in which a work from this collection has been offered for sale.

Works from the collection formed Weisberg's first solo exhibition in Israel which took place at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, curated by Yona Fisher, in 1975. A large exhibition of the collection was subsequently held at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1979 which was curated by Mark Scheps and Nehama Guralnik. In 2006 part of the collection was lent to a Weisberg retrospective at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.