Works
Raban is regarded as a leading member of the Bezalel school art style, in which artists portrayed both Biblical and Zionist themes in a style influenced by the European jugendstil (similar to Art Nouveau) and by traditional Persian and Syrian styles. Exemplars of this style are Rabban's illustrated editions of the of Book of Ruth, Song of Songs, Book of Job, Book of Esther, and the Passover Hagadah.
Like other European art nouveau artists of the period such as Alphonse Mucha Raban combined commercial commissions with uncommissioned paintings. Raban designed the decorative elements of such important Jerusalem buildings as the King David Hotel, the Jerusalem YMCA, and Bikkur-Cholim Hospital. He also designed a wide range of day-to-day objects, including playing cards (in the spade suit, the King is Ahasuerus, the Queen is Esther, and the joker is Haman), commercial packaging for products such as Hanukkah candles and Jaffa oranges, bank notes, tourism posters, jewelry, and insignia for Zionist institutions.
"Raban easily navigated a wealth of artistic sources and mediums, borrowing and combining ideas from East and West, fine arts and crafts from past and present. His works blended European neoclassicism, Symbolist art and Art Nouveau with oriental forms and techniques to form a distinctive visual lexicon. Versatile and productive, he lent this unique style to most artistic mediums, including the fine arts, illustration, sculpture, repousee, jewellery design, and ceramics."
Raban also designed a wide range of Jewish objects, including Hanukkah menorahs, temple windows, and Torah arks. Temple Emanuel (Beaumont, Texas) has a notable set of six windows, each 16-feet high]. The windows were commissioned from Raban in 1922 by Rabbi Samuel Rosinger. Each window depicts an event in the life of one of the principal Hebrew prophets, Jeremiah, Elijah, Elisha, Ezekiel, Moses, and Isaiah.
Raban collaborated with other artists to produce versions of his work as ceramic tiles, a number of which can still be sees on buildings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, including the Bialik House. The 1925 Lederberg house, at the intersection of Rothschild Boulevard and Allenby Street features a series of large ceramic murals designed by Raban. The four murals show a Jewish pioneer sowing and harvesting, a shepherd, and Jerusalem with a verse from Jeremiah 31:4, "Again I will rebuild thee and thous shalt be rebuilt."
Read more about this topic: Ze'ev Raban
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“... no one who has not been an integral part of a slaveholding community, can have any idea of its abominations.... even were slavery no curse to its victims, the exercise of arbitrary power works such fearful ruin upon the hearts of slaveholders, that I should feel impelled to labor and pray for its overthrow with my last energies and latest breath.”
—Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)
“Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)