page_title: Abel Pann
section_title: Art career
hierarchical_section_title: Abel Pann / Art career
caption_attribution_description: English: Bezalel, the drawing department under the direction of painter Abel Pann
context_page_description: Abel Pann was a European Jewish painter who settled in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem in the early twentieth century and taught at the Bezalel Academy of Art under Boris Schatz.
context_section_description: Pann studied the fundamentals of drawing for three months with the painter Yehuda Pen of Vitebsk, who also taught Marc Chagall. In his youth, he traveled in Russia and Poland, earning a living mainly as an apprentice in sign workshops. In 1898 he went south to Odessa, where he was accepted into the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1903, he was in Kishinev, where he  documented the Kishinev pogrom with drawings; an effort that is thought to have contributed to his self-definition as an artist who chronicles Jewish history. Still in 1903, he moved to Paris, where he rented rooms in La Ruche, a Parisian building (which still exists) where Modigliani, Chagall, Chaim Soutine and other Jewish artists also lived. Pann studied at the French Academy under William-Adolphe Bouguereau.   He earned his living primarily by drawing pictures for the popular illustrated newspapers of the era.  In 1912, Boris Schatz, founder and director of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design visited Pann in Paris and invited him to come work in Jerusalem.
  In 1913, after traveling in Southern Europe and Egypt, Pann arrived in Jerusalem, where he had decided to settle for life. Pann went to see Schatz and it was decided that he would head the painting department at the Bezalel Academy for several months while Schatz embarked on an extensive overseas fund-raising trip.  According to Haaretz art critic Smadar Sheffi, a work form this period with the simple title "Jerusalem" shows a cluster of buildings at sunset "with a sky in blazing orange."  The painting is "more expressive and abstract that is typical of his work," and Sheffi speculates that "the encounter with the city" of Jerusalem was a "strong emotional experience" for the artist.
  Pann returned to Europe to arrange his affairs before moving permanently to the British Mandate of Palestine, but was caught on the continent by World War I.  Pann's wartime paintings would prove to be among "the most important" of his career.  He made many posters to support the French war effort.  He also made a series of fifty drawings showing the extreme suffering of Jewish communities caught in the fighting between Germany, Poland and Russia.  Art critic Smadar Sheffi regards them as "the most important part of his oeuvre."   These "shocking" drawings put modern viewers in mind of depictions of the Holocaust. Pann's drawings were intended as journalistic documentation of the fighting and were successfully exhibited in the United States during the War.  According to Pann's autobiography, the Russians, who were allied with the French, refused to allow a wartime exhibition of the drawings in France.  According to The New York Times, the drawings were published in Paris during the war, but the government intervened to  block their distribution on the grounds that they "reflected damagingly upon an ally" (Russia).
caption: Bezalel drawing class under direction of Pann, 1912
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