Charity concert for the benefit of the disabled and widows of Jewish legionnaires

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Abel Pann, Concert de charité donné au bénéfice des mutilés et des veuves des légionnaires juifs, Paris, 1916

© Christophe Fouin, mahJ

Born into a family of rabbis in Lithuania, Abel Pann studied drawing and etching in Vitebsk under Yuri Pen (who also taught Marc Chagall and Ossip Zadkine) then pursued his training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Odessa, where he joined the Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) party. After a brief stay in Kishinev (now Chisinau, capital of Moldavia) where he documented the pogrom, he arrived in Paris in 1903 and, like many other foreign Jewish artists, lived and worked in La Ruche. Invited by Boris Schatz to teach at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, he went to Palestine for the first time in 1913 before returning to Paris to prepare his definitive emigration.

Forced to remain in France by the outbreak of the First World War, Abel Pann produced posters and illustrations intended to arouse patriotic feeling and boost the morale of the population. These included a series of drawings showing allied powers and the atrocities inflicted on civilians in Belgium and France. Pann was also concerned by events on the eastern front. From December 1915 to late 1916, he produced an impressive series of fifty drawings depicting the pogroms against Polish and Russian Jews, intended for publication.

In 1917 Pann left France for the United States, where his work was hugely popular, then in 1920 settled in Jerusalem, where he devoted himself to biblical subjects.