B. 1928 Legendary Israeli artist, Moshe Rosenthalis, was born in Lithuania in 1922 and recently turned eighty-three years of age. As a youth, he was constrained by the social-realism of the post-World War I Soviet Union, and then by his experiences as a soldier and illustrator of propaganda posters for the Red Army during World War II. It was under this authoritarian atmosphere that he developed as an art student at the Academy of Art in Vilna. When Rosenthalis immigrated to Israel in 1958, his view of the world and his own art were forever changed. He was exposed to the bright light and local colors of his adopted country as well as to new styles of Western painting. No longer bound by the constraints of realism, the artist began working in a more expressive and abstracted style and finally achieved artistic freedom. Rosenthalis explains: “To simplify forms one has to work harder, search, use the imagination, and involve one’s intellect and emotions.” A master of color, Rosenthalis transforms shapes and lines into joyful compositions of harmony and rhythm.