Jacob Wrestling with the Angel

The Galician-born painter Ben-Zion came to the United States in 1920. Dedicated to the revival of the Hebrew language, he published poems and fairy tales in Hebrew under his full name, Ben-Zion Weinman. (He later shortened it, remarking that artists needed only one name.) In the 1930s, depressed by the limited audience in the United States for Hebrew literature, he devoted himself exclusively to painting. He was a member of the avant-garde expressionist group called “The Ten,” which included Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, but he did not follow their path to abstract expressionism and remained loyal to figurative art.