Folk Dance

Issachar Ber Ryback (1897-1935) was born in Elisavetpol, Ukraine, and studied at Kiev Academy. He exhibited for the first time in 1915 at the Kiev Spring Exhibition. In 1915-16, the Jewish Historical and Ethnological Society financed expeditions by Ryback and El Lissitsky to the shtetls of Ukraine to study Jewish folk art. Ryback was appointed drawing teacher by the Central Committee of the Jewish Cultural League in 1917. He was active as a painter, draftsman, sculptor, theater set and costume designer, and book Illustrator. He worked in Germany from 1921 to 1924. In 1926 he left the Soviet Union permanently and settled in Paris, where his expressionist works were well received. Ryback died at the age of thirty-seven on the eve of a major exhibition of his work presented by Georges Wildenstein in Paris in 1935. A large collection of Ryback's work is in the Ryback Museum at Bat Yam in Israel.