Aryeh Navon

Aryeh (Arieh) Navon was a Russian-Israeli painter, illustrator, set designer, and cartoonist. Navon, whose original name was Aryeh Kligman, was born in Dunaivtsi, in modern-day Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, and immigrated to Ottoman Palestine with his family in 1919. Navon studied art at the studio of Yitzhak Frankel in Tel Aviv from 1928 to 1929 and at the Institute d'Esthetique Contemporain in Paris from 1930 to 1932. He went on to become the first cartoonist in the Yishuv (the Zionist community in British Mandate Palestine), working at the newspaper Davar from 1933 to 1964. Navon also illustrated poetry and children’s books and designed theater sets and costumes. He received numerous awards, including the Dizengoff Prize for painting and sculpture (1938, 1939), the Sokolov Prize for journalism (1958), the Meir Margolis Prize for theater art (1978), and the Israel Prize for painting (1996).