Yitzhak Frenkel Frenel (1899-1981) - Arab Horse Rider, Oil on Canvas.

Signed.

65x54cm. ...

Yitzhak Frenkel Frenel (1899-1981) - Arab Horse Rider, Oil on Canvas.

Signed.

65x54cm.

Yitzhak Frenkel, also known as Isaac Frenkel or Alexandre Frenel, was an Israeli painter and sculptor. He was one of the leading Jewish artists of the LEcole de Paris and its chief practitioner in Israel, gaining international recognition during his lifetime.

He died in Tel Aviv in 1981 and was buried in Safed.

Yitzhak Frenkel was born in Odessa, Russian Empire. He was a great-grandson of Rabbi Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev. In his youth he studied in a yeshiva where he met Chaim Glicksberg. As a child he lived right next to Bialik and Rawnitzkis publishing house Moriah. In 1917, he studied under Aleksandra Ekster, an influential constructivist, cubist and futurist teacher and painter at the Fine Arts Academy in Odessa, one of the leading art schools in the Tsarist Russia. His early years in Odessa were characterized by famine, pogroms, war and factional fighting in the Russian Empire, prompting him to explore Utopian themes, the classics and deepen his studies in the Bible, Talmud and Gemara. These themes were incorporated in his future art.

Frenkel was also influenced by the paintings of the abstract musicalists shown in Odessa in 1917. Their symphonies of blue along with the musical nature of their colourful art were heavily present in Frenkels later works. They took hold in Frenkels attempts to express his deep feelings in his encounter with mystical Safed, their influence expresses itself in the painter's wandering blue strokes. The avant-garde art of Odessa and Russian in general would also manifest itself some of Frenkels works his thought and his early cubist and abstract art.

Frenkel immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1919 with the first wave of settlers of the Third Aliyah, on board the SS. Ruslan.