Beloosesky Gallery is interested in purchasing paintings by Menachem Shemi.
Please call (917) 749-4557 or email us at info@beloosesky.com
Menachem Shemi was born in 1897 in Bobruisk, Russia, and was one of the pioneers of Israeli painting and art. Shemi studied at the Odessa Academy of Art in 1913. He then emigrated to Palestine to study at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem also in 1913. After seven years of poverty and wanderings he settled in Tiberias in 1920. That same year Shemi founded the Association of painters and sculptors in Israel, an organizer of the ''Migdal David'' exhibition and a founder of "Artists'' Colony, Safed. Shemi was also one of the designers of the sets for Habimah and Ohel Theatres. From 1920-22 he taught at Tiberias. In 1922 he moved to Haifa.
During the World War II he served in the British Army (1942-1945) being posted in Egypt, Libya and Italy finding time to continue painting even when in uniform. In 1947 Shemi began painting in Safed, the mountaintop town located in Israel's Upper Galilee where he settled in 1948. It was in Safed that Shemi reached the summit of his creativity in a process that involved heart-breaking grief due to the death of his son Aharon-Jimmy towards the end of Israel's War of Independence in 1948.
Menachem Shemi belongs to the group of painters who were active in Eretz Israel during the first half of the 20th century, those pioneers who laid the foundations of Israeli painting as we know it today. Throughout the three decades of his artistic activity, Shemi tasked himself with the ongoing challenge of experiencing contemporary painting styles but always through deep self-examination and never by self-disparagement and resignation. His oeuvre over the years testifies in its style, range of colors and qualities to the very personal process he underwent.
Menachem Shemi was an important painter, who attained a central status in the art world in Israel. From the 1920s to the early 1950s, and even posthumously he was recognized as a great colorist.
Menachem Shemi died in 1951.
AWARDS AND PRIZES
1938
The Dizengoff Prize for Painting and Sculpture, Municipality of Tel Aviv Jaffa, Tel Aviv
1942
The Dizengoff Prize for Painting and Sculpture, Municipality of Tel Aviv Jaffa, Tel Aviv
1950 -1951
The Dizengoff Prize for Painting and Sculpture, Municipality of Tel Aviv Jaffa, Tel Aviv
1951
The Dizengoff Prize for Painting and Sculpture, Municipality of Tel Aviv Jaffa, Tel Aviv
ONE MAN SHOWS
1937
Galerie Billiet, Paris
1944
Galerie Goldenberg, Cairo
NAAFI Exhibition Hall, Naples
1945
Jewish Soldiers' Club, Rome
1946
Tel Aviv Museum
1952
Tel Aviv Museum
1953
Museum of Modern Art, Haifa
1958
Glitzenstein Museum, Safed
1959
Museum of Art, Ein Harod
1961
Museum of Modern Art, Haifa
1966
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
1967
Museum of Modern Art, Haifa
1978
Museum of Modern Art, Haifa
1982
Yad Labanim House, Tel Aviv
1999
Museum of Modern Art, Haifa
2009
Tel Aviv Museum of Art
2010
Haifa Museum of Art
Museum of Art, Ein Harod