Wolf Kibel (16 December 1903 – 29 June 1938) was a South African painter and printmaker. He was partly responsible for the introduction of Expressionism to South Africa. His paintings and monotypes have earned him recognition as a sincere and gifted artist.
Early life and education
Wolf Kibel was born in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, a shtetl 32 km from Warsaw, in Russian Poland.
Kibel's father came from a family of singers and was employed by the community in the capacity of hazzan and shochet. He was relatively well paid and able to support a large family, of which Wolf was the third boy and fifth child of six. The family prized artistry; his father not only sang professionally, but carved miniatures, composed cantorial music, wrote verse and did bookbinding. Wolf participated in the choir his father trained and carved grotesques from his father's oil-stones.
At the age of three he was sent to the local school to be educated in Jewish culture. In 1911, when Wolf was eight, his father died, leaving the family bereft of financial support. With the outbreak of the First World War, they decided to move to Warsaw. There Wolf was apprenticed to a bookbinder, but lost this position after an accident. The family moved back to Grodzisk Mazowiecki and Wolf was apprenticed to a maker of shoe uppers. He apparently disliked this enough to run away to the countryside for several days, after which he was allowed to pursue his drawing and painting freely.
A friend of relatives in London, named Appelbaum, looked up the family when he visited Poland to paint a synagogue. It was the first time a professional artist saw Wolf's work. Appelbaum took him to Warsaw, where he met other artists, visited art galleries and read books and periodicals. He was impressed by the paintings of Jozef Israëls and admired the pictures of Jan Matejko.
Early career and travels
Vienna
After the Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, nationalist Poles engaged in a wave of pogroms. This hostility, along with the prospect of conscription, persuaded Wolf to go to Paris in 1923. He crossed Czechoslovakia and arrived in Vienna several months later, having journeyed 524 km on foot. The end of the war was also the end of Austria-Hungary, and Vienna was an impoverished city full of refugees. Accommodation was in short supply and Kibel frequently resorted to sleeping in the Wiener Prater.
An antique dealer introduced him to the portrait painter Edmund Pick-Morino. Pick-Morino found Kibel a patron, a rich banker, and allowed him to draw and paint his models, some of whom were society ladies, wearing masks. He appears to have come into contact with the work of Oskar Kokoschka. However, his impoverished existence soon wore on him and, since he could not travel to Paris without papers, he was persuaded by Pick-Morino to go to Palestine.
Jerusalem
In 1925, Kibel left Vienna for Haifa, then to Jerusalem, contracting malaria along the way. In Jerusalem he went straight to hospital, and was discharged after two days, still very ill. Peripatetic and homeless, his only possession was a letter of introduction to the director of the Bezalel Art School, Boris Shatz, from Pick-Morino. He was disappointed by the patriotic Bezalel school pictures the pupils were expected to paint, and decided to go to Tel Aviv.
Tel Aviv
Still suffering from malaria and penniless, he slept on the beach. His only luck came when he visited a cousin, who worked as an immigration officer, who took him to a private doctor for a course of Salvarsan injections, which cured the malaria.
A friend by the name of Popek, subsisting on a tiny dairy farm on the outskirts of Tel Aviv with his wife, took him in. When Kibel insisted on not imposing on their kindness and made to leave, Popek pressed upon him his saving book, with enough money for him to find a room in the city. Now with some means, he met many painters, becoming friends with influential painter Yitzhak Frenkel, who had spent seven years in Paris. Though they spent much time together, Wolf would never be a pupil of Frenkel's.
It was in Tel Aviv that Wolf would meet his future wife Freda, and by her accounts they were an active part of a group of outspoken, highly critical and ambitious young people who preferred painting, literature, music, drama, even sport over politics. The artists were fanatical in their admiration for Paul Cézanne, to the point of slavish imitation. Kibel found this attitude dangerous and often expressed his beliefs to his friends.