Portrait of Aharon Meskin

The sculptor Ze’ev Ben-Zvi (b. Kujawski) was born in Ryki, Poland, and studied in Warsaw before settling in Mandate Palestine in 1923. There he continued his studies at the Bezalel Academy of Arts. He is best known for his cubist-inspired portrait heads in beaten copper and mounded plaster, which influenced a generation of Israeli sculptors. In the 1940s his work became more abstract, and in 1946 he completed one of the first Holocaust memorials in the world at Kibbutz Mishmar Ha-Emek. (Aharon Meskin was an Israeli actor.)