Jacob Steinhardt

Israeli painter and woodcut artist Jacob Steinhardt attended the School of Art in Berlin in 1906 and then studied painting with Lovis Corinth and engraving with Hermann Struck in 1907. From 1908 to 1910 he studied in Paris with Henri Matisse and Théophile Steinlen, and in 1911 he studied in Italy.  When World War I broke out, he enlisted in the German Army and served on the Eastern Front in Poland and Lithuania and then in Macedonia.  After the war, he returned to Berlin and married, but because of harassment by the German authorities, he and his wife emigrated to Palestine in 1933.

Steinhardt worked mainly in woodcuts depicting biblical and Jewish subjects.  He participated in the Berlin Secession and founded the Pathetiker Group.  He was a member of the Bezalel School.

In 1934, Steinhardt opened an art school in Jerusalem and in 1948 he became Chairman of the Graphics Department at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.  He served as director of the school in 1954-1957.

Steinhardt has works in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard's Fogg Museum, the Smithsonian, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, numerous museums in Israel, and numerous other museums.

Submitted by Washington Color Gallery