Herzl Emanuel

Art Brokerage: Herzl Emanuel American Artist:. As a teenager, Herzl Emanuel studied art at the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York. Emanuel quithigh school in 1931, and, with the assistance of several patrons who recognized his talent, went to Paris, hoping to study with Emile-Antoine Bourdelle. Although the French master died with Charles Despiau and Fernand Léger and attended lectures given by André Lhote. He was soon joined by Hananiah Harari, then a student at Syracuse University, with whom he shared a studio and later accompanied to Palestine. In Paris, the two young men were intrigued by contemporary art. They felt its validity and power without fully understanding why Picasso, Matisse, and others could so successfully do such violence to the figure. Throughout his career, Emanuel’s art has been centered in a deeply felt humanism. Art for him offers a way to come to terms with the human condition. Though he still finds inspiration in Romanesque and Italian Renaissance art, it was Picasso’s Guernica that had the most dramatic impact in his life. Calling it the most significant work of art of the twentieth century, Emanuel has sought to achieve in his own work a fusion of abstracted form with tragic content that parallels Picasso’s powerful statement. Since the 1930s, his sculpture has evolved from an Analytical Cubist format to an Expressionism in which the human form is distorted to convey the human condition. Yet by intertwining limbs and connecting gazes in multifiguralcompositions, he offers up human relationships as notes of hope that temper the effects of a tragic existence. Emanuel participated in exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists for only a few years during the late 1930s. His fascination with Cubist formal structure, apparent in Head of the Prophet (1935) and Lower Manhattan from Apartment in Brooklyn (1937), later yielded to an expressionistic outlook. The growing domination of purist geometric abstraction within the group’s program conflicted with Emanuel’s evolving aims for his own sculpture, and he let his membership lapse. Listings wanted.