Arieh Navon (né Kligman) (May 22, 1909 – November 29, 1996) was a Russian-Israeli painter and illustrator, the first cartoonist in the Yishuv. He was also a set designer, comic artist and book illustrator. Winner of the Israel Prize for Performing Arts in 1996.
Biography
Navon was born as Arieh Kligman in 1909 in the town of Dunaivtsi (now modern-day Ukraine), the son of Malka, daughter of Rabbi Yitzhak Meir of Ostburg, and Moshe HaCohen son of Yitzhak Kligman. He immigrated to Israel with his family in 1919 (age 10) on the ship "Ruslan". Studied art in Yitzhak Frenkel's studio in Tel Aviv in the late 1920s.
He has hundreds of paintings, mostly drawings in ink or charcoal, and dozens of portraits of public figures, writers, actors and artists. A selection of them appears in his book "Records". A film based on his drawings called "The Way of a Singer in the Desert" was created in 1956, in collaboration between him and Yaakov Agam and Aryeh Mambush. He taught drawing at the Avni Institute and the Oranim Kibbutz Seminary. Navon participated in many exhibitions in Israel and around the world. A solo exhibition was held for him at the Israel Museum in 1978. For his paintings, he won the Dizengoff prize for painting (1939) and twice the Jerusalem prize for painting (1941, 1944).