Lea Nikel (born Nikelsberg) was a Ukrainian-born artist who emigrated with her parents to Palestine in 1920, and grew up in Tel Aviv. Nikel began to study painting in her mid-teens with several influential avant-garde Israeli artists. She continued her education in Paris, where she lived and worked from 1950 to 1961. Nikel drew inspiration from the artistic atmosphere of Paris, consistently exploring a vibrant aesthetic. She also lived in New York and Rome. In 1977, she returned to Israel. Nikel’s lyrical abstract paintings were exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1964 and at a career retrospective at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1995. That same year, Nikel received the Israel Prize for painting, and in 1997, she was named a Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture.
Fanny Hensel (1805–1847), the granddaughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and financier Daniel Itzig, and sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, was born in Hamburg into a wealthy…
Pages from Mark Podwal’s A Book of Hebrew Letters, an exploration of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet through drawings and words representing each letter.
Before he became known as a color field painter, Mark Rothko worked in other styles. During the 1940s, under the influence of surrealist artists who had fled Europe for the United States, he began to…